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The South Moves into Its Future: Studies in the Analysis and Prediction of Social Change (Review)

by Dwight B. Billings

University of Alabama Press, 1991. The year 1986 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Southern Sociological Society. More than just a professional association of sociologists in the South, the society was originally established to encourage the sociological study of the South and thus to contribute to regionwide processes of social evaluation, planning, and improvement. This »

Southern Baptists Observed: Multiple Perspectives on a Changing Denomination (Review)

by Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp

University of Tennessee Press, 1993. Sociologists of religion have expended considerable effort in recent years trying to explain the rise of conservative evangelicalism in America since the late 1970s. Perhaps the only people not surprised by the political and social resurgence of right-wing Protestant believers are the conservatives themselves. Others, including scholars, secular bystanders, and »

Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, and: Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama (Review)

by Steven F. Lawson

University of North Carolina Press, 1992. University of North Carolina Press, 1993. The struggles of Black southerners during the early 1960s aroused concerned people across America to leave the relative comfort and safety of their homes and risk their lives in the struggle for freedom. Northerners Danny Lyon and Jon Daniels ventured southward in the »

For God, Country and Coca-Cola: The Unauthorized History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It (review)

by Annette C. Wright

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993. 556 pp. Cloth, $27.50; paper, $14.00. When asked by Southern Cultures to review this book on Coca-Cola, I was tempted to concentrate on the southern penchant for soft drinks. According to marketing experts, striking regional differences still exist in the consumption of drinks such as colas, imported beers, and “new age »

Daughters of Time: Creating Woman’s Voice in Southern Story (Review)

by Sarah Gordon

University of Georgia Press, 1990. At least since the publication of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic in 1979, feminist literary critics have acknowledged the temerity of a woman’s decision to seize the pen—with its obvious associations with phallocentric power—for her own use. Lucinda MacKethan adds her voice by asserting that »

The Letters of a Victorian Madwoman (Review)

by Anastatia Sims

University of South Carolina Press, 1993. It sounds like the plot of a Victorian melodrama. A woman with the improbable name of Andrew becomes addicted to narcotics and has an affair with the doctor who supplies her drugs. He persuades her to set fire to the home of one of his enemies. She is caught »

Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction (review)

by Wayne K. Durrill

Oxford University Press, 1993. Between 1865 and 1876 at least 1,465 Black men held public office in the former Confederate states. They were a varied lot. Some such as U.S. Congressmen Blanche K. Bruce were well educated, articulate, wealthy, and politically well connected. Bruce and others like him are well known to American historians. Others »

Vietnam and the Southern Imagination (Review)

by Melton A. McLaurin

University Press of Mississippi, 1992. The southern imagination, Owen Gilman contends, is alive and well and busily contemplating the tragic experience of Vietnam. Gilman limits his definition of imagination to creative writers, essentially novelists, although he examines several short stories and devotes a chapter to “the southern poet’s Vietnam.” His thesis is straightforward: Southerners have »

The Color of Their Skin: Education and Race in Richmond, Virginia, 1954-89 (review)

by George W. Noblit

University Press of Virginia, 1992. Almost twenty years ago, I started studying school desegregation. In Memphis, doing an ethnography of a high school caught up in the civil rights revolution, I watched the struggles of the students, faculty, and parents as they tried to sort out what desegregation would mean for their schools. Some resisted, »