Sustaining Southern Identity

Sustaining Southern Identity PDF Author: Keith D. Dickson
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807140058
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Get Book Here

Book Description
Keith D. Dickson's Sustaining Southern Identity offers a masterful intellectual biography of Douglas Southall Freeman as well as a comprehensive analysis of how twentieth-century southerners came to remember the Civil War, fashion their values and ideals, and identify themselves as citizens of the South.

Sustaining Southern Identity

Sustaining Southern Identity PDF Author: Keith D. Dickson
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080714004X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
Pulitzer Prize--winning historian Douglas Southall Freeman, perhaps more than any other writer in the first half of the twentieth century, helped shape and sustain a collective identity for white southerners. A journalist, lecturer, radio broadcaster, and teacher of renown, Freeman wrote and spoke on themes related to southern memory throughout his life. Keith D. Dickson's Sustaining Southern Identity offers a masterful intellectual biography of Freeman as well as a comprehensive analysis of how twentieth-century southerners came to remember the Civil War, fashion their values and ideals, and identify themselves as citizens of the South. Dickson's work underscores Freeman's contributions to the enduring memory of Confederate courage and sacrifice in southern culture. The longtime editor of the Richmond News Leader, Freeman wrote several authoritative and extraordinarily influential multivolume historical narratives about both Confederate general Robert E. Lee and the high command of the Army of Northern Virginia. His contributions to the enduring southern memory framework -- with its grand narrative of Confederate courage and sacrifice, and its attachment to symbols and rituals -- still serve as a touchstone for the memory-truths that define a distinct identity in the South.

Sustaining Identity, Recapturing Heritage

Sustaining Identity, Recapturing Heritage PDF Author: Ann E. Denkler
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739119923
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 138

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sustaining Identity, Recapturing Heritage examines the complex web of public history, race, cultural identity, and tourism in Luray, Virginia, a rural Southern town. The 'texts' associated with this town's public history_tourist brochures, promotional narratives, historic homes, memorials, and monuments_are devoted to the founding eighteenth-century families and Confederate soldiers in Luray's past, but they also marginalize the history and heritage of African Americans and American Indians, and nearly obliterate the history of women in this region. Thus, the public history does not reflect the actual history of this town. A close look at one town helps to debunk the ideas and ideologies of the existence of a monolithic 'South', since the term could mean Mississippi, North Carolina, or somewhere-in-between. Luray and the Shenandoah Valley, with their distinctive geographical, economical, architectural, and cultural history can boast of its own discrete 'southern' identity. The book reveals how African-American texts and history reveal contributions to the town of Luray and the Shenandoah Valley region. The book studies the 'Ol' Slave Auction Block', a controversial public history site that subverts the white, hegemonic heritage of the town. Sustaining Identity, Recapturing Heritage is groundbreaking in its study of African-American tourism.

The Resilience of Southern Identity

The Resilience of Southern Identity PDF Author: Christopher A. Cooper
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469631067
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 149

Get Book Here

Book Description
The American South has experienced remarkable change over the past half century. Black voter registration has increased, the region's politics have shifted from one-party Democratic to the near-domination of the Republican Party, and in-migration has increased its population manyfold. At the same time, many outward signs of regional distinctiveness have faded--chain restaurants have replaced mom-and-pop diners, and the interstate highway system connects the region to the rest of the country. Given all of these changes, many have argued that southern identity is fading. But here, Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts show how these changes have allowed for new types of southern identity to emerge. For some, identification with the South has become more about a connection to the region's folkways or to place than about policy or ideology. For others, the contemporary South is all of those things at once--a place where many modern-day southerners navigate the region's confusing and omnipresent history. Regardless of how individuals see the South, this study argues that the region's drastic political, racial, and cultural changes have not lessened the importance of southern identity but have played a key role in keeping regional identification relevant in the twenty-first century.

Laying Claim

Laying Claim PDF Author: Patricia G. Davis
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817319212
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Get Book Here

Book Description
Laying Claim: African American Cultural Memory and Southern Identity explores the practices and cultural institutions that define and sustain African American "southernness," demonstrating that southern identity is more expansive than traditional narratives that center on white culture.

Redefining Southern Culture

Redefining Southern Culture PDF Author: James Charles Cobb
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820321394
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cobb, "surveys the remarkable story of southern identity and its persistence in the face of sweeping changes in the South's economy, society and political structure."--dust jacket.

Away Down South

Away Down South PDF Author: James Charles Cobb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195315812
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this unique synthesis of political, cultural, and intellectual history, James C. Cobb spans more than two centuries in tracing the origins and development of the South as not just an exception to the national rule, but as an internal 'other' against which American nationhood was defined.

The Ongoing Burden of Southern History

The Ongoing Burden of Southern History PDF Author: Angie Maxwell
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807147567
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
More than fifty years after its initial publication, C. Vann Woodward's landmark work, The Burden of Southern History, remains an essential text on the southern past. Today, a "southern burden" still exists, but its shape and impact on southerners and the world varies dramatically from the one envisioned by Woodward. Recasting Woodward's ideas on the contemporary South, the contributors to The Ongoing Burden of Southern History highlight the relevance of his scholarship for the twenty-first-century reader and student. This interdisciplinary retrospective tackles questions of equality, white southern identity, the political legacy of Reconstruction, the heritage of Populism, and the place of the South within the nation, along with many others. From Woodward's essays on populism and irony, historians find new insight into the burgeoning Tea Party, while they also shed light on the contemporary legacy of the redeemer Democrats. Using up-to-date election data, scholars locate a "shrinking" southern identity and point to the accomplishments of the recent influx of African American voters and political candidates. This penetrating analysis reinterprets Woodward's classic for a new generation of readers interested in the modern South. Contributors: Josephine A. V. Allen, Charles S. Bullock III, James C. Cobb, Donald R. Deskins Jr., Leigh Anne Duck, Angie Maxwell, Robert C. McMath, Wayne Parent, Sherman C. Puckett, Todd Shields, Hanes Walton Jr., Jeannie Whayne, Patrick G. Williams.

Contemporary Southern Identity

Contemporary Southern Identity PDF Author: Rebecca Bridges Wats
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 160473308X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Contemporary Southern Identity, Rebecca Bridges Watts explores the implications of four public controversies about southern identity—debates about the Confederate flag in South Carolina, the gender integration of the Virginia Military Institute, the display of public art in Richmond, and Trent Lott's controversial comments regarding Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential bid. While such debates may serve as evidence of the South's “battle over the past,” they can alternatively be seen as harbingers of a changing South. These controversies highlight the diversity of voices in the conversation of what it means to be a southerner. The participants in these conflicts may disagree about what southern identity should be, but they all agree that such discussions are a crucial part of being southern. Recent debates as to the place of Old South symbols and institutions in the South of the new millennium are evidence of a changing order. But a changing South is no less distinctive. If southerners can find unity and distinctiveness in their identification, they may even be able to serve as a model for the increasingly divided United States. The very debates portrayed in the mass media as evidence of an “unfinished Civil War” can instead be interpreted as proof that the South has progressed and is having a common dialogue as to what its diverse members want it to be.

Stories of the South

Stories of the South PDF Author: K. Stephen Prince
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469614189
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the North assumed significant power to redefine the South, imagining a region rebuilt and modeled on northern society. The white South actively resisted these efforts, battling the legal strictures of Reconstruction on the ground. Meanwhile, white southern storytellers worked to recast the South's image, romanticizing the Lost Cause and heralding the birth of a New South. Prince argues that this cultural production was as important as political competition and economic striving in turning the South and the nation away from the egalitarian promises of Reconstruction and toward Jim Crow.

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture PDF Author: Charles Reagan Wilson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146961670X
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture addresses the cultural, social, and intellectual terrain of myth, manners, and historical memory in the American South. Evaluating how a distinct southern identity has been created, recreated, and performed through memories that blur the line between fact and fiction, this volume paints a broad, multihued picture of the region seen through the lenses of belief and cultural practice. The 95 entries here represent a substantial revision and expansion of the material on historical memory and manners in the original edition. They address such matters as myths and memories surrounding the Old South and the Civil War; stereotypes and traditions related to the body, sexuality, gender, and family (such as debutante balls and beauty pageants); institutions and places associated with historical memory (such as cemeteries, monuments, and museums); and specific subjects and objects of myths, including the Confederate flag and Graceland. Together, they offer a compelling portrait of the "southern way of life" as it has been imagined, lived, and contested.