Written by the country's leading scholars of Southern politics and designed to be adopted for courses on Southern politics (but accessible to any interested reader), this book traces the shifting trends of the Southern electorate and explains its growing influence on the course of national politics.

The last presidential election showed without a doubt the prominence of the Southern states in the national political landscape. When it first appeared in 1998, The New Politics of the Old South broke new ground by examining Southern political trends at the end of the twentieth century. Now in its third edition, with all chapters extensively revised and updated to cover events up through the 2004 elections, the authors continue their unique state-by-state analysis of political behavior. Written by the country's leading scholars of Southern politics, and designed to be adopted for courses on Southern politics (but accessible to any interested reader), this book traces the shifting trends of the Southern electorate and explains its growing influence on the course of national politics.

This book is a systematic interpretation of the most important national and state tendencies in southern politics since 1920. The authors contend that, notable improvements in race relations aside, the central tendencies in southern politics are primarily established by the values, beliefs, and objectives of the expanding white urban middle class.

The definitive primer on Southern nationalism. The South has a right to nationhood, separate from the rest of the United States.This book explores how to preserve the social, religious, political, and cultural traditions of the Southern people.

For most historians, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the hostilities of the Civil War and the dashed hopes of Reconstruction give way to the nationalizing forces of cultural reunion, a process that is said to have downplayed sectional grievances and celebrated racial and industrial harmony. In truth, says Natalie J. Ring, this buoyant mythology competed with an equally powerful and far-reaching set of representations of the backward Problem South—one that shaped and reflected attempts by northern philanthropists, southern liberals, and federal experts to rehabilitate and reform the country’s benighted region. Ring rewrites the history of sectional reconciliation and demonstrates how this group used the persuasive language of social science and regionalism to reconcile the paradox of poverty and progress by suggesting that the region was moving through an evolutionary period of “readjustment” toward a more perfect state of civilization. In addition, The Problem South contends that the transformation of the region into a mission field and laboratory for social change took place in a transnational moment of reform. Ambitious efforts to improve the economic welfare of the southern farmer, eradicate such diseases as malaria and hookworm, educate the southern populace, “uplift” poor whites, and solve the brewing “race problem” mirrored the colonial problems vexing the architects of empire around the globe. It was no coincidence, Ring argues, that the regulatory state's efforts to solve the “southern problem” and reformers’ increasing reliance on social scientific methodology occurred during the height of U.S. imperial expansion.