Reassessing The 1930s South

Author : Karen Cox
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807169226
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reassessing the 1930s South written by Karen Cox and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2018-05-18 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of American popular culture depicts the 1930s South either as home to a population that was intellectually, morally, and physically stunted, or as a romantic, sentimentalized haven untouched by the nation’s financial troubles. Though these images stand as polar opposites, each casts the South as an exceptional region that stood separate from American norms. Reassessing the 1930s South brings together historians, art critics, and literary scholars to provide a new social and cultural history of the Great Depression South that moves beyond common stereotypes of the region. Essays by Steven Knepper, Anthony J. Stanonis, and Bryan A. Giemza delve into the literary culture of the 1930s South and the multiple ways authors such as Sterling Brown, Tennessee Williams, and E. P. O’Donnell represented the region to outsiders. Lisa Dorrill and Robert W. Haynes explore connections between artists and the South in essays on New Deal murals and southern dramatists on Broadway. Rejecting traditional views of southern resistance to modernization, Douglas E. Thompson and Ted Atkinson survey the cultural impacts of technological advancement and industrialization. Emily Senefeld, Scott L. Matthews, Rebecca Sharpless, and Melissa Walker compare public representations of the South in the 1930s to the circumstances of everyday life. Finally, Ella Howard, Nicholas Roland, and Robert Hunt Ferguson examine the ways southern governments and activists shaped racial perceptions and realities in Georgia, Texas, and Tennessee. Reassessing the 1930s South provides an interpretation that focuses on the region’s embrace of technological innovation, promotion of government-sponsored programs of modernization, rejection of the plantation legend of the late nineteenth century, and experimentation with unionism and interracialism. Taken collectively, these essays provide a better understanding of the region’s identity, both real and perceived, as well as how southerners grappled with modernity during a decade of uncertainty and economic hardship.

Author : Colin Bundy
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000261417
Total Pages : 347 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reassessing Mandela written by Colin Bundy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seven years since his death (2013), Nelson Mandela still occupies an extraordinary place in the global imagination. Internationally, Mandela’s renown seems intact and invulnerable. In South Africa, however, his legacy and his place in the country’s history have become matters of contention and dispute, especially amongst younger black South Africans. The essays in this book analyse aspects of Mandela’s life in the context of South Africa’s national history, and make an important contribution to the historiography of the anti-apartheid political struggle. They reassess: the political context of Mandela’s youth; his changing political beliefs and connections with the Left; his role in the African National Congress and the turn to armed struggle; his marriage to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and their political relationship. By providing new context, they explore Mandela as an actor in broader social processes such as the rise of the ANC and the making of South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution. The detailed essays are linked in a substantial introduction by Colin Bundy and current debates are addressed in a concluding essay by Elleke Boehmer. This book provides a scholarly counterweight both to uncritical celebration of Mandela and also to a simplistic attribution of post-apartheid shortcomings to the person of Mandela. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies.

Author : Scott L. Matthews
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469646463
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Capturing the South written by Scott L. Matthews and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-10-26 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his expansive history of documentary work in the South during the twentieth century, Scott L. Matthews examines the motivations and methodologies of several pivotal documentarians, including sociologist Howard Odum, photographers Jack Delano and Danny Lyon, and music ethnographer John Cohen. Their work salvaged and celebrated folk cultures threatened by modernization or strived to reveal and reform problems linked to the region's racial caste system and exploitative agricultural economy. Images of alluring primitivism and troubling pathology often blurred together, neutralizing the aims of documentary work carried out in the name of reform during the Progressive era, New Deal, and civil rights movement. Black and white southerners in turn often resisted documentarians' attempts to turn their private lives into public symbols. The accumulation of these influential and, occasionally, controversial documentary images created an enduring, complex, and sometimes self-defeating mythology about the South that persists into the twenty-first century.

Author : Charles Reagan Wilson
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469664992
Total Pages : 615 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Southern Way of Life written by Charles Reagan Wilson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2022-11-30 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does one begin to understand the idea of a distinctive southern way of life—a concept as enduring as it is disputed? In this examination of the American South in national and global contexts, celebrated historian Charles Reagan Wilson assesses how diverse communities of southerners have sought to define the region's identity. Surveying three centuries of southern regional consciousness across many genres, disciplines, and cultural strains, Wilson considers and challenges prior presentations of the region, advancing a vision of southern culture that has always been plural, dynamic, and complicated by race and class. Structured in three parts, The Southern Way of Life takes readers on a journey from the colonial era to the present, from when complex ideas of "southern civilization" rooted in slaveholding and agrarianism dominated to the twenty-first-century rise of a modern, multicultural "southern living." As Wilson shows, there is no singular or essential South but rather a rich tapestry woven with contestations, contingencies, and change.

Author : Paul Harvey
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820355925
Total Pages : 120 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Southern Religion in the World written by Paul Harvey and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion in the American South emerged as part of a globalized, transnational movement of peoples from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Ironically, it then came to be seen as the most localized, provincial kind of religion in America, one famously hostile to outside ideas, influences, and agitators. Yet southern religious expressions, particularly in music, have exercised enormous intellectual and cultural influence. Despite southern religion's provincialism during the era of evangelical dominance and racial proscriptions, the kinds of expressions coming from the American South have been influential across the globe. With this book Paul Harvey takes up the theme of southern religion in global contexts through a series of biographical vignettes that illustrate its outreach. In the first segment he focuses on Frank Price, the Presbyterian missionary to China and advisor to Chiang Kai-Shek. In the second he focuses on Howard Thurman, the mystic, cosmopolitan, preacher, intellectual, poet, hymnist, and mentor for the American civil rights movement. In the third he looks to the musical figures of Rosetta Tharpe, Johnny Cash, and Levon Helm, whose backbeat, harmonies, and religious enthusiasms contributed to much of the soundtrack of the world through the second half of the twentieth century.

Author : Carrie Tipton
Publisher : Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN 13 : 0826506410
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book From Dixie to Rocky Top written by Carrie Tipton and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Listen as you read! From Dixie to Rocky Top: Book Playlist, now on Spotify. The first book to explore the history of college fight songs as a culturally important phenomenon, From Dixie to Rocky Top zeroes in on the US South, where college football has forged a powerful, quasi-religious sense of meaning and identity throughout the region. Tracing the story of Southeastern Conference (SEC) fight songs from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, author Carrie Tipton places this popular repertory within the broader commercial music industry and uses fight songs to explore themes of authorship and copyright; the commodification of school spirit; and the construction of race, gender, and regional identity in Southern football culture. This book unearths the history embedded in SEC football’s music traditions, drawing from the archives of the seventeen universities currently or formerly in the conference. Alongside rich primary sources, Tipton incorporates approaches and literature from sports history, Southern and American history, Southern and American studies, and musicology. Chronicling iconic Southern fight songs’ origins, dissemination, meanings, and cultural reception over a turbulent century, From Dixie to Rocky Top weaves a compelling narrative around a virtually unstudied body of popular music.

Author : Kathleen Diffley
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009178555
Total Pages : 638 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction written by Kathleen Diffley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-18 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction remain a central part of American life a century and a half later. Drawing together leading scholars in literary studies and history, this volume offers accessible treatments of major authors and genres of this period, including Walt Whitman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Rebecca Harding Davis, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Chesnutt, as well as fiction, poetry, drama, and life-writing. Although focused on literature, this Companion also canvases battlefields, homefronts, and hospitals, and discusses a range of topics, including constitutional reform and presidential impeachment; emancipation and Africa; material culture and monuments; education, civil rights, and reenactment. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction speaks powerfully to literature's ability to help readers come to terms with a violent, oppressive history while also imagining a different future.

Author : Jay Watson
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1496822552
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Faulkner and Money written by Jay Watson and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Ted Atkinson, Gloria J. Burgess, David A. Davis, Sarah E. Gardner, Richard Godden, Ryan Heryford, Robert Jackson, Gavin Jones, Mary A. Knighton, Peter Lurie, John T. Matthews, Myka Tucker-Abramson, Michael Wainwright, Jay Watson, and Michael Zeitlin The matter of money touches a writer's life at every point—in the need to make ends meet; in dealings with agents, editors, publishers, and bookstores; and in the choice of subject matter and the minutiae of imagined worlds. William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha was no exception. The people and communities he wrote about stayed deeply entangled in personal, national, and even global networks of industry, commerce, and finance, as did the author himself. Faulkner's economic biography often followed, but occasionally bucked, the tumultuous economic trends of the twentieth century. The Faulkner met within these pages is among modern literature's most incisive and encyclopedic critics of what one contemporary theorist calls the madness of economic reason. Faulkner and Money brings together a distinguished group of scholars to explore the economic contexts of Faulkner's life and work, to follow the proverbial money toward new insights into the Nobel Laureate and new questions about his art. Essays in this collection address economies of debt and gift giving in Intruder in the Dust; the legacies of commodity fetishism in Sanctuary and of twentieth-century capitalism's financial turn in The Town; the pegging of self-esteem to financial acumen in the career of The Sound and the Fury's Jason Compson; the representational challenges posed by poverty and failure in Faulkner's Frenchman's Bend tales; the economics of regional readership and the Depression-era literary market; the aesthetic, monetary, and psychological rewards of writing for Hollywood; and the author's role as benefactor to an aspiring African American college student in the 1950s.

Author : Jay Watson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192668188
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fossil-Fuel Faulkner written by Jay Watson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-06 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fossil-Fuel Faulkner is the first book-length study of a single writer in the emerging field of the energy humanities. As we try to imagine our way beyond a deeply problematic fossil energy regime that depletes and degrades the planet and sharpens the gap between Global North and Global South and move toward as more just and sustainable energy future, there is much to learn from how previous generations imagined the modern transition into a hydrocarbon-fueled world from the solar- and muscle-powered order that preceded it, and from how they imagined the consequences of that transition, including the new cultural forms it elicited and the new social problems it created. Jay Watson turns to the life and writings of William Faulkner, creator of one of the richest imaginative landscapes in American literary history, for new insights into the deep-reaching connections linking the extraction, production, and use of energy resources in his native US South to its histories of slavery and Jim Crow, its ecologies of disruption and despoilation, the logic of its cultural practices, and the nuances of literary form. Surveying the author's personal and imaginative engagements with coal and oil, with modern automobility and the road narrative, and with the profligate energies of the sun and the human animal, Fossil-Fuel Faulkner explores nearly all of Faulkner's novels and over a dozen of his short stories, and reveals the author to be one of petromodernity's keenest chroniclers and critics.

Author : Steven Conn
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226826910
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Lies of the Land written by Steven Conn and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "piercing, unsentimental" (New Yorker) history that boldly challenges the idea of a rural American crisis. It seems everyone has an opinion about rural America. Is it gripped in a tragic decline? Or is it on the cusp of a glorious revival? Is it the key to understanding America today? Steven Conn argues that we’re missing the real question: Is rural America even a thing? No, says Conn, who believes we see only what we want to see in the lands beyond the suburbs—fantasies about moral (or backward) communities, simpler (or repressive) living, and what it means to be authentically (or wrongheadedly) American. If we want to build a better future, Conn argues, we must accept that these visions don’t exist and never did. In The Lies of the Land, Conn shows that rural America—so often characterized as in crisis or in danger of being left behind—has actually been at the center of modern American history, shaped by the same forces as everywhere else in the country: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and suburbanization. Examining each of these forces in turn, Conn invites us to dispense with the lies and half-truths we’ve believed about rural America and to pursue better solutions to the very real challenges shared all across our nation.