Wilson appraises the influence of religion on various aspects of Southern culture.

Wilson appraises the influence of religion on various aspects of Southern culture.

Contributions by Ryan L. Fletcher, Darren E. Grem, Paul Harvey, Alicia Jackson, Ted Ownby, Otis W. Pickett, Arthur Remillard, Chad Seales, and Randall J. Stephens Over more than three decades of teaching at the University of Mississippi, Charles Reagan Wilson’s research and writing transformed southern studies in key ways. This volume pays tribute to and extends Wilson’s seminal work on southern religion and culture. Using certain episodes and moments in southern religious history, the essays examine the place and power of religion in southern communities and society. It emulates Wilson’s model, featuring both majority and minority voices from archives and applying a variety of methods to explain the South’s religious diversity and how religion mattered in many arenas of private and public life, often with life-or-death stakes. The volume first concentrates on churches and ministers, and then considers religious and cultural constructions outside formal religious bodies and institutions. It examines the faiths expressed via the region’s fields, streets, homes, public squares, recreational venues, roadsides, and stages. In doing so, this book shows that Wilson’s groundbreaking work on religion is an essential part of southern studies and crucial for fostering deeper understanding of the South’s complicated history and culture.

Comics and the U.S. South offers a wide-ranging and long overdue assessment of how life and culture in the United States South is represented in serial comics, graphic novels, newspaper comic strips, and webcomics. Diverting the lens of comics studies from the skyscrapers of Superman's Metropolis or Chris Ware's Chicago to the swamps, backroads, small towns, and cities of the U.S. South, this collection critically examines the pulp genres associated with mainstream comic books alongside independent and alternative comics. Some essays seek to discover what Captain America can reveal about southern regionalism and how slave narratives can help us reread Swamp Thing; others examine how creators such as Walt Kelly (Pogo), Howard Cruse (Stuck Rubber Baby), Kyle Baker (Nat Turner), and Josh Neufeld (A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge) draw upon the unique formal properties of the comics to question and revise familiar narratives of race, class, and sexuality; and another considers how southern writer Randall Kenan adapted elements of comics form to prose fiction. With essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, Comics and the U.S. South contributes to and also productively reorients the most significant and compelling conversations in both comics scholarship and in southern studies.

The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church was an important part of the historic freedom struggles of African Americans from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights movement. This fight for equality and freedom can be seen clearly in the denomination's evolving social and ecumenical consciousness. The denomination's very name changed from "Colored" to "Christian" in 1954, but the denomination did not join the struggle late. Rather, the CME was a critical participant from the days following the Civil War. At times, the Church was at odds with their white Methodist counterparts and in solidarity with other African-American denominations on issues of racial desegregation and the role of social protest in religion.Raymond Sommerville's important book discusses the relationship between Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the CME. While King and others received most of the headlines during the Civil Rights Era, the CME proved to be involved at all levels and equally important in all they did. With its strategic location in the South and its long history of ecumenical involvement, the CME Church emerged as a leading advocate of ecumenical civil rights activism. Previous interpretations asserted that the CME was apolitical and accomodationist or that it was more progressive than it was. Sommerville presents a more nuanced account of how a church of largely former slaves emancipated itself from the constraints of white Methodist paternalism and Jim Crow racism to emerge as a progressive force of racial justice and ecumenism in the South and beyond. Sommerville examines major centers of the CME -- Nashville, Birmingham, Memphis, Atlanta -- and selected leaders inthe South in charting the gradual metamorphosis of the former CME as a largely nonpolitical body of former slaves in 1870 to a more politically active denomination at the apex of the modern Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.

While spreading the gospel around the world through his signature crusades, internationally renowned evangelist Billy Graham maintained a visible and controversial presence in his native South, a region that underwent substantial political and economic change in the latter half of the twentieth century. In this period Graham was alternately a desegregating crusader in Alabama, Sunbelt booster in Atlanta, regional apologist in the national press, and southern strategist in the Nixon administration. Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South considers the critical but underappreciated role of the noted evangelist in the creation of the modern American South. The region experienced two significant related shifts away from its status as what observers and critics called the "Solid South": the end of legalized Jim Crow and the end of Democratic Party dominance. Author Steven P. Miller treats Graham as a serious actor and a powerful symbol in this transition—an evangelist first and foremost, but also a profoundly political figure. In his roles as the nation's most visible evangelist, adviser to political leaders, and a regional spokesperson, Graham influenced many of the developments that drove celebrants and detractors alike to place the South at the vanguard of political, religious, and cultural trends. He forged a path on which white southern moderates could retreat from Jim Crow, while his evangelical critique of white supremacy portended the emergence of "color blind" rhetoric within mainstream conservatism. Through his involvement in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations, as well as his deep social ties in the South, the evangelist influenced the decades-long process of political realignment. Graham's public life sheds new light on recent southern history in all of its ambiguities, and his social and political ethics complicate conventional understandings of evangelical Christianity in postwar America. Miller's book seeks to reintroduce a familiar figure to the narrative of southern history and, in the process, examine the political and social transitions constitutive of the modern South.

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.