HOW SOUTHERN IS THAT? brings southern ways of cool evenings, hot days. Fast-paced stories, poetry, snappy quotes make you want to kick off your shoes, sit back, and enjoy. Reading about scandal, sensational leaders, words forming pictures make readers feel they are part of each story, rather than merely reading them. Want to go to tea? You're here. Want to go to the movies about the south? Pick one, and feel that you are on a vacation for sure. Y'all ready? Hold steady. Enjoy what the South has--and all that jazz.
From the New York Times bestselling authors at Garden & Gun comes a lively compendium of Southern tradition and contemporary culture. The American South is a diverse region with its own vocabulary, peculiarities, and complexities. Tennessee whiskey may technically be bourbon, but don’t let anyone in Kentucky hear you call it that. And while boiling blue crabs may be the norm across the Lowcountry in South Carolina and Georgia, try that in front of Marylanders and they’re likely to put you in the pot. Now, from the editors of Garden & Gun comes this illustrated encyclopedia covering age-old traditions and current culture. S Is for Southern contains nearly five hundred entries spanning every letter of the alphabet, with essays from notable Southern writers including: Roy Blount, Jr., on humidity Frances Mayes on the magnolia Jessica B. Harris on field peas Rick Bragg on Harper Lee Jon Meacham on the Civil War Allison Glock on Dolly Parton Randall Kenan on Edna Lewis The Lee Brothers on boiled peanuts Jonathan Miles on Larry Brown Julia Reed on the Delta
Extending his investigation into the ethical life of the white American South beyond what he wrote in Southern Honor (1982), Bertram Wyatt-Brown explores three major themes in southern history: the political aspects of the South's code of honor, th
The American South has experienced remarkable change over the past half century. Black voter registration has increased, the region's politics have shifted from one-party Democratic to the near-domination of the Republican Party, and in-migration has increased its population manyfold. At the same time, many outward signs of regional distinctiveness have faded--chain restaurants have replaced mom-and-pop diners, and the interstate highway system connects the region to the rest of the country. Given all of these changes, many have argued that southern identity is fading. But here, Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts show how these changes have allowed for new types of southern identity to emerge. For some, identification with the South has become more about a connection to the region's folkways or to place than about policy or ideology. For others, the contemporary South is all of those things at once--a place where many modern-day southerners navigate the region's confusing and omnipresent history. Regardless of how individuals see the South, this study argues that the region's drastic political, racial, and cultural changes have not lessened the importance of southern identity but have played a key role in keeping regional identification relevant in the twenty-first century.
This tongue-in-cheek dictionary of Southern words and phrases offers a hilarious spoof of the Southern accent. This book is dedicated to all Yankees* in the hope that it will teach them how to talk right. *Yankee: Anyone who is not from Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and possibly Oklahoma and West-by-God-Virginia. A Yankee may become an honorary Southerner, but a Southerner cannot become a Yankee, assuming any Southerner wanted to.
"There's nothing very different about Southerners. . .except for the way they think, act, and feel." Southerners can be perplexing to outsiders and amusing to themselves. North Carolina native Mary Norton Kratt deftly and simply delights the reader with images of the Southern state of mind and being. A warm and whimsical book that will be bought and enjoyed on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.
The appearance in 1920 of H. L. Mencken's scathing essay about the intellectual and cultural impoverishment of the South, "The Sahara of the Bozart, " set off a firestorm of reaction in the region that continued unabated for much of the next decade. In Serpent in Eden, Mencken scholar Fred Hobson examines Mencken's love-hate relationship with the South. He explores not only Mencken's savage criticism of the region but also his efforts to encourage southern writers and the bold "little magazines, " such as the Reviewer and the Double Dealer, that started up in the South during the 1920s.
The location of "the South" is hardly a settled or static geographic concept. Culturally speaking, are Florida and Arkansas really part of the same region? Is Texas considered part of the South or the West? This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture grapples with the contestable issue of where the cultural South is located, both on maps and in the minds of Americans. Richard Pillsbury's introductory essay explores the evolution of geographic patterns of life within the region--agricultural practices, urban patterns, residential buildings, religious preferences, foodways, and language. The entries that follow address general topics of cultural geographic interest, such as Appalachia, exiles and expatriates, Latino and Jewish populations, migration patterns, and the profound Disneyfication of central Florida. Entries with a more concentrated focus examine major cities, such as Atlanta, New Orleans, and Memphis; the influence of black and white southern migrants on northern cities; and individual subregions, such as the Piedmont, Piney Woods, Tidewater, and Delta. Putting together the disparate pieces that make up the place called "the South," this volume sets the scene for the discussions in all the other volumes of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
