In Media-Made Dixie Jack Kirby shows how the American public’s perceptions of the South have been influenced, even controlled, by the mass communications media. In this newly updated edition, Kirby surveys major movies, radio and television shows, plays, popular histories, and music from the turn of the century through the 1980s. He documents a progression in the national image of the South from the cracker wasteland of Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre to the antebellum wonderland of Hollywood’s Shirley Temple-“Bojangles” Robinson musicals; from William Styron’s searching account of the Old South in Confessions of Nat Turner to the New South ingenuity of Jimmy Carter and Ted Turner; and from the regressive back-roads of television’s The Dukes of Hazzard to the complex reconciliation found in Alice Walker’s and Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple.
Wall Street Journal’s Five Best Books on the Confederates’ Lost Cause Southern Association for Women Historians Julia Cherry Spruill Prize Even without the right to vote, members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy proved to have enormous social and political influence throughout the South—all in the name of preserving Confederate culture. Karen Cox traces the history of the UDC, an organization founded in 1894 to vindicate the Confederate generation and honor the Lost Cause. In this edition, with a new preface, Cox acknowledges the deadly riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, showing why myths surrounding the Confederacy continue to endure. The Daughters, as UDC members were popularly known, were daughters of the Confederate generation. While southern women had long been leaders in efforts to memorialize the Confederacy, UDC members made the Lost Cause a movement about vindication as well as memorialization. They erected monuments, monitored history for "truthfulness," and sought to educate coming generations of white southerners about an idyllic past and a just cause—states' rights. Soldiers' and widows' homes, perpetuation of the mythology of the antebellum South, and pro-southern textbooks in the region's white public schools were all integral to their mission of creating the New South in the image of the Old. UDC members aspired to transform military defeat into a political and cultural victory, in which states' rights and white supremacy remained intact. To the extent they were successful, the Daughters helped to preserve and perpetuate an agenda for the New South that included maintaining the social status quo. Placing the organization's activities in the context of the postwar and Progressive-Era South, Cox describes in detail the UDC's origins and early development, its efforts to collect and preserve manuscripts and artifacts and to build monuments, and its later role in the peace movement and World War I. This remarkable history of the organization presents a portrait of two generations of southern women whose efforts helped shape the social and political culture of the New South. It also offers a new historical perspective on the subject of Confederate memory and the role southern women played in its development.
Often defined as a mostly southern phenomenon, racist violence existed everywhere. Brent M. S. Campney explodes the notion of the Midwest as a so-called land of freedom with an in-depth study of assaults both active and threatened faced by African Americans in post–Civil War Kansas. Campney's capacious definition of white-on-black violence encompasses not only sensational demonstrations of white power like lynchings and race riots, but acts of threatened violence and the varied forms of pervasive routine violence--property damage, rape, forcible ejection from towns--used to intimidate African Americans. As he shows, such methods were a cornerstone of efforts to impose and maintain white supremacy. Yet Campney's broad consideration of racist violence also lends new insights into the ways people resisted threats. African Americans spontaneously hid fugitives and defused lynch mobs while also using newspapers and civil rights groups to lay the groundwork for forms of institutionalized opposition that could fight racist violence through the courts and via public opinion. Ambitious and provocative, This Is Not Dixie rewrites fundamental narratives on mob action, race relations, African American resistance, and racism's grim past in the heartland.
The ten essays in this collection focus on how southerners have marketed themselves to outsiders and identify spaces, services, and products that construct various Souths that exaggerate, refute, or self-consciously safeguard elements of southernness. Simultaneous.
A No Depression Most Memorable Music Book of 2022 The forceful music that rolled out of Muscle Shoals in the 1960s and 1970s shaped hits by everyone from Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones and Paul Simon. Christopher M. Reali's in-depth look at the fabled musical hotbed examines the events and factors that gave the Muscle Shoals sound such a potent cultural power. Many artists trekked to FAME Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound in search of the sound of authentic southern Black music—and at times expressed shock at the mostly white studio musicians waiting to play it for them. Others hoped to draw on the hitmaking production process that defined the scene. Reali also chronicles the overlooked history of Muscle Shoals's impact on country music and describes the region's recent transformation into a tourism destination. Multifaceted and informed, Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals reveals the people, place, and events behind one of the most legendary recording scenes in American history.
The Southern journalist was more likely to be a Romantic and an intellectual. The region's journalism was personal, colorful, and steeped in the classics. This title suggests that the South's journalism struck a literary pose closer to the older English press than to the democratic penny press or bourgeois magazines of the urban North.
The representation of Southerners on film has been a topic of enduring interest and debate among scholars of both film and Southern studies. These 15 essays examine the problem of Southern identity in film since the civil rights era. Fresh insights are provided on such familiar topics as the redneck image, transitions to modernity and the prevalence of the Southern gothic. Other essays reflect the reinvigorated and expanding field of new Southern studies and topics include the transnational South, the intersection of ethnicity and environment and the cultural significance of Southern identity outside the South.
In Look Away, Dixieland Vermont-native James Twitchell sets out from his home in Florida on the inauguration day of America's first black president to find the "real" South and to try to figure out the truth about his illustrious ancestor, Marshall Harvey Twitchell -- a carpetbagger and a victim of the Coushatta Massacre (having both his arms shot off), which made the front page of the New York Times in 1873. Twitchell travels from Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp across Alabama and Mississippi to Coushatta, Louisiana in a RV. As he drives through the heart of Dixie, Twitchell sorts through the prejudices he learned from his northern rearing. Ultimately, he uncovers facts about his great-grandfather and his family's past while revealing some of the differences and similarities between the North and South that ultimately define us as nation.
More than a century after Appomattox, the Civil War and the idea of the "Lost Cause" remain at the center of the southern mind. God and General Longstreet traces the persistence and the transformation of the Lost Cause from the first generation of former Confederates to more recent times, when the Lost Cause has continued to endure in the commitment of southerners to their regional culture. Southern writers from the Confederate period through the southern renascence and into the 1970s fostered the Lost Cause, creating an image of the South that was at once romantic and tragic. By examining the work of these writers, Thomas Connelly and Barbara Bellows explain why the nation embraced this image and outline the evolution of the Lost Cause mentality from its origins in the South's surrender to its role in a centurylong national expression of defeat that extended from 1865 through the Vietnam War. As Connelly and Bellows demonstrate, the Lost Cause was a realization of mortality in an American world striving for perfection, an admission of failure juxtaposed against a national faith in success.
