Southern Cultures: The Fifteenth Anniversary Reader

From the very beginning the South was different. The source and significance of this difference has been debated and discussed for over 200 years. In recent decades, the demise of the South as a regional culture has frequently been predicted, although now some scholars and journalists are maintaining that it is proving to be remarkably resilient and is actually having an ever greater influence on the broader American culture. Southern Culture examines the origins and evolution of the region's culture and focuses on six key patterns that have defined it: agrarianism, class relations, race relations, gender and family traditions, evangelical Christianity, and political traditions. Southern Culture also explores the products of the culture with major sections on dialect, painting, architecture, pottery, music, literature, and icons and myths. It concludes with essays by each of the authors in which they reflect on where Southern culture is headed. Professors, to see an annotated list of helpful links to accompany Southern Culture, click here "Three community college instructors combine their long experience in teaching English, history, and sociology in North Carolina (Vance-Granville Community College) to provide an interdisciplinary introductory text well worth adoption. Beck, Frandsen, and Randall meet well the challenge of merging humanities and social science approaches to regional studies by examining six focal areas: race, class, politics, family, religion, and agrarianism. ... Highly recommended." - Choice Magazine ". . . a scholarly resource that also is fun to read." -- Durham Herald Sun

New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 1: Religion

Still the South.

The Winter 2014 Issue brings us duels and Dashboard Poets, eels and faux villages, a beloved television icon, interviews with liberal hero Walter Mondale and conservative activist Jack Kershaw, Civil War battlefi eld monuments, and more. From familiar faces and famous legends to humble commemorations and invented histories, we explore the tensions between preservation and progress that have forged the region as we know it.

There is no denying that race is a critical issue in understanding the South. However, this concluding volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture challenges previous understandings, revealing the region's rich, ever-expanding diversity and providing new explorations of race relations. In 36 thematic and 29 topical essays, contributors examine such subjects as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Japanese American incarceration in the South, relations between African Americans and Native Americans, Chinese men adopting Mexican identities, Latino religious practices, and Vietnamese life in the region. Together the essays paint a nuanced portrait of how concepts of race in the South have influenced its history, art, politics, and culture beyond the familiar binary of black and white.

Tobacco and Slaves is a major reinterpretation of the economic and political transformation of Chesapeake society from 1680 to 1800. Building upon massive archival research in Maryland and Virginia, Allan Kulikoff provides the most comprehensive study to date of changing social relations--among both blacks and whites--in the eighteenth-century South. He links his arguments about class, gender, and race to the later social history of the South and to larger patterns of American development. Allan Kulikoff is professor of history at Northern Illinois University and author of The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism.