Oxford University Press, 1994 When Nancy MacLean unmasks the Ku Klux Klan, the results are predictably bad for the KKK. But the results are even worse for good people, solid citizens, the progressive middle class, all of us who can say, as did the late writer Truman Capote, “My parents and my neighbors were racists, »
New York University Press, 1994 In the hundred years since the Industrial Revolution, a market revolution has transformed the American economy and in the process drastically reshaped all aspects of daily life. Once a nation of relatively isolated farmsteads and insular villages where families produced much of what they needed themselves, the United States has »
University of Georgia Press, 1995 If the Montgomery-to-Selma paradigm dominates civil rights history, it is easy to understand why. The Montgomery bus boycott that opened the era thrust the mantle of leadership on Martin Luther King Jr., whose prophetic charisma still defines the period. Ten years later the Selma march, which spurred passage of the »
University of North Carolina Press, 1994 William Marvel begins his award-winning study of Andersonville Prison by observing, “Some 41,000 men shuffled into the prison stockade at Anderson Station, Georgia, between February of 1864 and April of 1865. Of those, perhaps 26,000 lived long enough to reach home. Theirs was undoubtedly the most unpleasant experience of »
University Press of Virginia, 1993 An Evening When Alone brings together the journals of four southern women. At first glance, these women will seem familiar to students of southern culture.
“We were part of its community life. But we were Jewish, and not from the old families that had fought in the Confederate War.” The earliest dream I can remember is of gateposts. A pathway in Hampton Park leads along an open area to a line of low trees and thickets. Next to and beyond »
“The revolution is quiet, but its impact is resounding.” The revolution is quiet, but its impact is resounding. Access to the southern historical record has been expanding dramatically not only for graduate students and their professors but also for historic site interpreters, journalists, novelists, local and family historians, Civil War buffs, and others. If you’re »
“For as long as some people have thought of themselves as southerners, they have believed that their manners were better than (or at least different from) those of other Americans—who have, by and large, been willing to grant them that.” For as long as some people have thought of themselves as southerners, they have believed »
Essay
The American South has always been a mythic land of contrast and juxtaposition—Black and white, rich and poor, mountaineer and planter, hospitality and violence, unregulated development and a sense of place, greed and grace, illiteracy and great writing—and it remains so today. One of the more intriguing paradoxes is the image of the South as »
“On the surface the story is about growing up in a small southern town.” During his speech to the jury at the climactic trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch presents a fundamental distinction between the two forces in conflict during the rape trial—the law and the code. Tom »
“My approach was simply to tell them exactly what I was trying to do, stating that I was helping with a study of the South and that I needed their help to show how Southerners really lived.” In the late 1940s, with support from the Rosenwald Fund and the University of North Carolina’s Institute for »
“There’s plenty of cultural diversity in the American South, and you can always get a friendly argument started by trying to pronounce on who or what lies at the center of the southern cultural experience.” There’s plenty of cultural diversity in the American South, and you can always get a friendly argument started by trying »