Louis Mazzari brings to the fore one of the most important figures of the southern regionalist movement in the New Deal era. His is the first biography of Arthur Raper, a progressive sociologist, writer, and public intellectual who advocated racial and social justice in the South when such views were not only unpopular but dangerous, effectively laying a foundation for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Raper was one of the first white southern scholars to speak out against lynching, sharecropping, and tenant farming in his pioneering and highly influential books The...
Louis Mazzari brings to the fore one of the most important figures of the southern regionalist movement in the New Deal era. His is the first biogr...
From antebellum readers avidly consuming stories featuring white southern men as benevolent patriarchs, hell-raising frontiersmen, and callous plantation owners to post--Civil War southern writers seeking to advance a model of southern manhood and male authority as honorable, dignified, and admirable, the idea of a distinctly southern masculinity has reflected the broad regional differences between North and South. In the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, the media have helped to shape modern models of white manhood, not only for southerners but for the rest of the nation...
From antebellum readers avidly consuming stories featuring white southern men as benevolent patriarchs, hell-raising frontiersmen, and callous plan...
Established in 1964, the federal Legal Services Program (later, Corporation) served a vast group of Americans desperately in need of legal counsel: the poor. In Rationing Justice, Kris Shepard looks at this pioneering program's effect on the Deep South, as the poor made tangible gains in cases involving federal, state, and local social programs, low-income housing, consumer rights, domestic relations, and civil rights.
While poverty lawyers, Shepard reveals, did not by themselves create a legal revolution in the South, they did force southern politicians, policy makers, businessmen, and...
Established in 1964, the federal Legal Services Program (later, Corporation) served a vast group of Americans desperately in need of legal counsel:...
"A sweeping yet rigorous analysis of Dixon and his work. The collection approaches the southern intellectual through multiple methodologies -- from literary theory and film studies to social history and religious studies. We get an exhaustive yet diverse perspective on Dixon's influence and legacy." -- Journal of American History
Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864--1946), best remembered today as the author of the racist novels that served as the basis for D. W. Griffith's controversial 1915 classic film The Birth of a Nation, also enjoyed great renown in his lifetime as a minister, lecturer,...
"A sweeping yet rigorous analysis of Dixon and his work. The collection approaches the southern intellectual through multiple methodologies -- from...
Few historical events lend themselves to such a sharp delineation between right and wrong as does the civil rights struggle. Consequently, many historical accounts of white resistance to civil rights legislation emphasize the ferocity of the opposition, from the Ole Miss riots to the depredations of Eugene "Bull" Conner's Birmingham police force to George Wallace's stand on the schoolhouse steps. While such hostile episodes frequently occurred in the Jim Crow South, civil rights adversaries also employed other, less confrontational but remarkably successful, tactics to deny equal rights to...
Few historical events lend themselves to such a sharp delineation between right and wrong as does the civil rights struggle. Consequently, many his...
More than fifty years after its initial publication, C. Vann Woodward's landmark work, The Burden of Southern History, remains an essential text on the southern past. Today, a "southern burden" still exists, but its shape and impact on southerners and the world varies dramatically from the one envisioned by Woodward. Recasting Woodward's ideas on the contemporary South, the contributors to The Ongoing Burden of Southern History highlight the relevance of his scholarship for the twenty-first-century reader and student.
This interdisciplinary retrospective tackles questions of equality,...
More than fifty years after its initial publication, C. Vann Woodward's landmark work, The Burden of Southern History, remains an essential text on...
In the fall of 1994 Susan Smith, a young mother from Union, South Carolina, reported that an African American male carjacker had kidnapped her two children. The news sparked a multi-state investigation and evoked nationwide sympathy. Nine days later, she confessed to drowning the boys in a nearby lake, and that sympathy quickly turned to outrage. Smith became the topic of thousands of articles, news segments, and media broadcasts -- overshadowing the coverage of midterm elections and the O. J. Simpson trial. The notoriety of her case was more than tabloid fare, however; her story tapped...
In the fall of 1994 Susan Smith, a young mother from Union, South Carolina, reported that an African American male carjacker had kidnapped her two ...
The separation of white and black schools remained largely unquestioned and unchallenged in North Carolina for the first half of the twentieth century, yet by the end of the 1970s, the Tar Heel State operated the most thoroughly desegregated school system in the nation. In Race and Education in North Carolina, John E. Batchelor, a former North Carolina school superintendent, offers a robust analysis of this sea change and the initiatives that comprised the gradual, and often reluctant, desegregation of the state's public schools.
In a state known for relative racial moderation, North...
The separation of white and black schools remained largely unquestioned and unchallenged in North Carolina for the first half of the twentieth cent...
In Delta Empire: Lee Wilson and the Transformation of Agriculture in the New South Jeannie Whayne employs the fascinating history of a powerful plantation owner in the Arkansas delta to recount the evolution of southern agriculture from the late nineteenth century through World War II. After his father's death in 1870, Robert E. "Lee" Wilson inherited 400 acres of land in Mississippi County, Arkansas. Over his lifetime, he transformed that inheritance into a 50,000-acre lumber operation and cotton plantation. Early on, Wilson saw an opportunity in the swampy local terrain, which sold for as...
In Delta Empire: Lee Wilson and the Transformation of Agriculture in the New South Jeannie Whayne employs the fascinating history of a powerful planta...
During the Civil War, approximately 56,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died in enemy military prison camps. Even in the midst of the war's shocking violence, the intensity of the prisoners' suffering and the brutal manner of their deaths provoked outrage, and both the Lincoln and Davis administrations manipulated the prison controversy to serve the exigencies of war. As both sides distributed propaganda designed to convince citizens of the relative virtue of their own prison system-in contrast to the cruel inhumanity of the opponent-they etched hardened and divisive memories of the prison...
During the Civil War, approximately 56,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died in enemy military prison camps. Even in the midst of the war's shocking...
