Chronicles the wonderful and wacky history of the popular tourist spots that filled this area before Walt Disney built his mammoth theme park. 15 color photos. 220 b&w photos. 235 illustrations.

An illustrated glovebox essential, Road Sides explores the fundamentals of a well-fed road trip through the American South, from A to Z. There are detours and destinations, accompanied by detailed histories and more than one hundred original illustrations that document how we get where we’re going and what to eat and do along the way. Learn the backstory of food-shaped buildings, including the folks behind Hills of Snow, a giant snow cone stand in Smithfield, North Carolina, that resembles the icy treats it sells. Find out how kudzu was used to support a burgeoning highway system, and get to know Edith Edwards—the self-proclaimed Kudzu Queen—who turns the obnoxious vine into delicious teas and jellies. Discover the roots of kitschy roadside attractions, and have lunch with the state-employed mermaids of Weeki Wachee Springs in Florida. Road Sides is for everyone—the driver in search of supper or superlatives (the biggest, best, and even worst), the person who cannot resist a local plaque or snack and pulls over for every historical marker and road stand, and the kid who just wants to gawk at a peach-shaped water tower.

From slave narratives to the Civil War, and from country music to Southern sport, this Companion is the definitive guide to the literature and culture of the American South. Includes discussion of the visual arts, music, society, history, and politics in the region Combines treatment of major literary works and historical events with a survey of broader themes, movements and issues Explores the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Huston, Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, as well as those - black and white, male and female - who are writing now Co-edited by the esteemed scholar Richard Gray, author of the acclaimed volume, A History of American Literature (Blackwell, 2003)

Too often depicted as a region with a single, dominant history and a static culture, the American South actually comprises a wide range of unique places and cultures, each with its own history and evolving identity. John Shelton Reed’s Mixing It Up is a medley of writings that examine how ideas of the South, and what it means to be southern, have changed over the last century. Through essays, op-eds, speeches, statistical reports, elegies, panegyrics, feuilletons, rants, and more, Reed’s penetrating observations, wry humor, and expansive knowledge help him to examine the South’s past, survey its present, and venture a few modest predictions about its future. Touching on an array of topics from the region’s speech, manners, and food, to politics, religion, and race relations, Reed also assesses the work of other pundits, scholars, and South-watchers. From Appalachia to New Orleans, Mixing it Up: A South-Watcher’s Miscellany offers a collection of lively prose and provocative observations about this ever-changing region and its people.

Florida is a story of astonishing growth, a state swelling from 500,000 residents at the outset of the 20th century to some 16 million at the end. As recently as mid-century, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, Florida was the smallest state in the South. At the dawn of the millennium, it is the fourth largest in the country, a megastate that was among those introducing new words into the American vernacular: space coast, climate control, growth management, retirement community, theme park, edge cities, shopping mall, boomburbs, beach renourishment, Interstate, and Internet. Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams attempts to understand the firestorm of change that erupted into modern Florida by examining the great social, cultural, and economic forces driving its transformation. Gary Mormino ranges far and wide across the landscape and boundaries of a place that is at once America's southernmost state and the northernmost outpost of the Caribbean. From the capital, Tallahassee--a day's walk from the Georgia border--to Miami--a city distant but tantalizingly close to Cuba and Haiti--Mormino traces the themes of Florida's transformation: the echoes of old Dixie and a vanishing Florida; land booms and tourist empires; revolutions in agriculture, technology, and demographics; the seductions of the beach and the dynamics of a graying population; and the enduring but changing meanings of a dreamstate. Beneath the iconography of popular culture is revealed a complex and complicated social framework that reflects a dizzying passage from New Spain to Old South, New South to Sunbelt.