Immediately following the Civil War, and for many years thereafter, southerners proclaimed a "New" South, implying not only the end of slavery but also the beginning of a new era of growth, industrialization, and prosperity. Time has shown that those declarations--at least in terms of progress and prosperity--were premature by several decades. In fact, the South remained primarily a land of poor farming folks until the 1940s. Only then, and after World War II, did the real New South of industrial growth and urban development begin to emerge. Jack Temple Kirby's massive and engaging study...
Immediately following the Civil War, and for many years thereafter, southerners proclaimed a "New" South, implying not only the end of slavery but als...
Jack Temple Kirby charts the history of the low country between the James River in Virginia and Albemarle Sound in North Carolina. The Algonquian word for this country, which means 'swamp-on-a-hill, ' was transliterated as 'poquosin' by seventeenth-century English settlers. Interweaving social, political, economic, and military history with the story of the landscape, Kirby shows how Native American, African, and European peoples have adapted to and modified this Tidewater area in the nearly four hundred years since the arrival of Europeans. Kirby argues that European settlement created a...
Jack Temple Kirby charts the history of the low country between the James River in Virginia and Albemarle Sound in North Carolina. The Algonquian word...
At once upholding and refuting the South's conservative image, "The Countercultural South" explores the politically divergent cultures of resistance created by poor white and working-class black southern men. With humor and insight, Jack Temple Kirby traces these racially and politically opposed cultures back to the antebellum encounter between the anti-capitalistic South and the capitalist individualism identified with the North.
In a wide-ranging discussion encompassing the blues, sharecropping, and contemporary black intellectuals, Kirby shows how the needful practice of black labor...
At once upholding and refuting the South's conservative image, "The Countercultural South" explores the politically divergent cultures of resistanc...
In "Media-Made Dixie" Jack Kirby shows how the American public s perceptions of the South have been influenced, even controlled, by the mass communications media. In this newly updated edition, Kirby surveys major movies, radio and television shows, plays, popular histories, and music from the turn of the century through the 1980s. He documents a progression in the national image of the South from the cracker wasteland of Erskine Caldwell s "God s Little Acre" to the antebellum wonderland of Hollywood s Shirley Temple- Bojangles Robinson musicals; from William Styron s searching account of...
In "Media-Made Dixie" Jack Kirby shows how the American public s perceptions of the South have been influenced, even controlled, by the mass communica...
History remembers Edmund Ruffin, the Virginia native believed to have fired the first shot against Fort Sumter in 1861, as one of the South's most aggressive "fire-eaters." This volume of Ruffin's work offers us his less known but equally intense passion for agricultural study. In carefully edited selections from Ruffin's writings, Jack Temple Kirby presents an innovative, progressive agronomist and pioneering conservationist. Arranged in sections discussing southern agricultural history, Ruffin's observations of nature, his ideas about land reform, and his plans for soil rejuvenation,...
History remembers Edmund Ruffin, the Virginia native believed to have fired the first shot against Fort Sumter in 1861, as one of the South's most ...
The American South is generally warmer, wetter, weedier, snakier, and more insect infested and disease prone than other regions of the country. It is alluring to the scientifically and poetically minded alike. With Mockingbird Song, Jack Temple Kirby offers a personal and passionate recounting of the centuries-old human-nature relationship in the South. Exhibiting violent cycles of growth, abandonment, dereliction, resettlement, and reconfiguration, this relationship, Kirby suggests, has the sometimes melodious, sometimes cacophonous vocalizations of the region's emblematic avian, the...
The American South is generally warmer, wetter, weedier, snakier, and more insect infested and disease prone than other regions of the country. It is ...
