Surveying the South
Every essay or feature in each issue of Southern Cultures contributes to understanding aspects of the South, but the content we've collected here looks more broadly at the region and/or at the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of Southerners. Much of what follows is the seminal work of former editors John Shelton Reed (whose scholarship and career were the focus of a special issue in 2001) and Larry J. Griffin (for instance, see Enough About the Disappearing South: What About the Disappearing Southerner?, Southerners All? , and The American South and the Self). We also include here the work of some of the many scholars who've followed the leads of Reed and Griffin in defining and redefining our region, as well as the work of others who've used different approaches to revealing the South and its people. You can follow the direct links below to read this material at the Project Muse digital archive.
Rethinking the Boundaries of the South
by Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts
"We can place the South into three categories: ‘southern to the core,' ‘pretty darn southern,' and ‘sorta southern.'"
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Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 4, Winter 2010
Southerners All?: New Northern Neighbors and the Changing Sense of Place
by William W. Falk and Susan Webb
"I tell the students: 'Act like you've moved to a foreign country. Things, at times, will seem that odd to you. But in time you will learn to think of them as normal.'"
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Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2010
Food for Thought: Race, Region, Identity, and Foodways in the American South
by Beth A. Latshaw
"'I've eaten it all my life, and I'm not dead yet.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I
Sundown Towns and Counties: Racial Exclusion in the South
by James W. Loewen
"In 1987, Oprah Winfrey broadcast her television show from Forsyth County, Georgia, which had expelled its back population seventy-five years earlier."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2009
When Heritage Is Hip
by Larry J. Griffin
"Not all 'cool' identities are equally cool. If the socially constructed identity of American Indian is cool, for most people it is cooler to have Indian ancestry than to be Indian."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2008: First Peoples
Still Distinctive After All These Years: Trends in Racial Attitudes in and out of the South
by Larry J. Griffin and Peggy G. Hargis
"Fanny Lou Hamer, one of the genuine heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, once said, 'So this ain't just Mississippi's problem. It's America's problem.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2008: Civil Rights
New People in the New South:
An Overview of Southern Immigration
by Carl L. Bankston III
“The making of a global South is a relatively new phenomenon, yet these dynamics that drive recent immigration to the region have deep historical roots. ”
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 4, Winter 2007: Global South
The Institute and the Factory:
Business Leadership and Change in the Global South
by John Russell
"We can't lead in this world for long by making people afraid. It simply is impossible to succeed while being afraid."
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 4, Winter 2007: Global South
"In My Heart, I'm an American": Regional Attitudes and American Identity
by Larry J. Griffin and Katherine McFarland
"No other country has become home to so many immigrants and to so many different kinds of immigrants."
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 4, Winter 2007: Global South
Selling Which South?:
Economic Change in Rural and Small-Town North Carolina in an Era of Globalization, 1940–2007
by Peter A. Coclanis and Louis M. Kyriakoudes
“If national planners and the federal government first became interested in rural manufacturing as a development strategy in the 1930s and 1940s, the South had by that time been poursuing such a strategy for generations, albeit with mixed success.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 4, Winter 2007: Global South
Seniors and the Sunbelt
by John Shelton Reed
"Brother Dave Gardner once cracked that 'the only reason people live in the North is because they have jobs there.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2007
Sheldon Hackney
Magnolias without Moonlight: The American South from Regional Confederacy to National Integration (review)
reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2007
Give Me That Old-Time Music . . . or Not
by Larry J. Griffin
"American popular culture would be unimaginable without the music created by the South's disfranchised, impoverished, and forgotten peoples."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 4, Winter 2006: Music I
The American South and the Self
by Larry J. Griffin
"Just as the history of the South is contradictory and contested, so, too, is the identity of southerners."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2006
The South, the Nation, and Tobacco
by Larry J. Griffin
"My firmly devout Church of Christ grandmother from the hills of East Mississippi dipped snuff for most of her eighty-five years. She wasn't proud of her habit—tried to hide it, in fact."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2006: Tobacco
Reimagining the South
by William F. Winter
"Now it is time to talk about what we are called on to do in this latter day South. Now it is time for us to have an accounting of just where we are."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 3, Fall 2005
Southerners All?
by Larry J. Griffin, Ranae J. Evenson, and Ashley B. Thompson
"Exactly who is a southerner, exactly who wishes to be a southerner, and who is thought to have the right to claim southern identity are now highly uncertain."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2008
Enough About the Disappearing South: What About the Disappearing Southerner?
by Larry J. Griffin and Ashley B. Thompson
"Are southerners a dying breed?"
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 3, Fall 2003
Birds of a Feather
by John Shelton Reed
"Do southerners prefer one another's company?"
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 2, Summer 2003
The Contradictory South
by Sheldon Hackney
"The tension between individualism and organization is a central theme of American history, a running argument between Clint Eastwood and Bill Gates. It occurs in the South with a regional flavor."
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 4, Winter 2001
Lay My Burden of Southern History Down
by John Shelton Reed
"Southerners are at least as likely to agree as to disagree that 'it's important to remember our history, but the Civil War doesn't mean that much to me personally.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 4, Winter 2001
Forty Defining Moments of the Twentieth-century South
by John Shelton Reed
"It will surprise no one to see that the two big stories of the twentieth-century South are the transition from an agricultural to an urban society and the transformation effected by the civil rights movement."
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 2, Summer 2001
The Twenty Most Influential Southerners of the Twentieth Century
by John Shelton Reed
"Unknown saints will have to get their reward in heaven, as usual."
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2001: Reed
If I'd Just Waked Up from a Thirty-six-year Sleep
by John Shelton Reed
"Welcome to the South—now leave your daughter and go home."
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2001: Reed
Rethinking Southern History
by David L. Carlton
"Reed burst on the southern scene in 1972 as a contrarian, and, as we know, he has remained very much a contrarian to this day."
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2001: Reed
The Promise of a Sociology of the South
by Larry J. Griffin
"Even as he turned to a form of largely conservative cultural commentary on all sorts of things, Reed retained a keen sociological consciousness."
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2001: Reed
Surveying the South: A Conversation with John Shelton Reed
by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese
"I don't have much patience with folks who say the Civil War was not about slavery."
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2001: Reed
Tracking the Economic Divergence of North and South
by Peter A. Coclanis
"Plantations dominated the southern economy by the 1770s, and those who controlled them had decisively shaped the region's economic course, and, perhaps, destiny."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 4, Winter 2000