Since 1950, the South has undergone the most dramatic political transformation of any region in the United States. The once Solid-meaning Democratic-South is now overwhelmingly Republican, and long-disenfranchised African Americans vote at levels comparable to those of whites. In The Rational Southerner, M.V. Hood III, Quentin Kidd, and Irwin L. Morris argue that local strategic dynamics played a decisive and underappreciated role in both the development of the Southern Republican Party and the mobilization of the region's black electorate. Mobilized blacks who supported the Democratic Party...