University of North Carolina Press, 1993

“The South is feminine,” a northern Jungian psychologist remarked to me recently, endowing her statement with the authority of a discipline that defines archetypes. What Silber’s chronicle would inform her, and many of us, is that this sort of categorization is the product of decades of cultural construction fueled by the media. The Romance of Reunion reveals how images that many of us take for granted were constructed in response to psychologies, sociologies, and economies following the Civil War.