archive

The persistence of Southern history

Joseph Fishkin (Texas): The Dignity of the South. From Southern Spaces, an excerpt from Finding Purple America: The South and the Future of American Cultural Studies by Jon Smith; and Steve Suitts on voting rights, the Supreme Court, and the persistence of Southern history. Allen Mendenhall reviews Superfluous Southerners: Cultural Conservatism and the South, 1920–1990 by John J. Langdale. Kareem Crayton reviews The New Mind of the South by Tracy Thompson. As the North rests on its laurels, the South is rising fast. Wayne Urban reviews The New Southern University: Academic Freedom and Liberalism at UNC by Charles Holden. Louis Menand on voting rights and the Southern way of life. Is the South dragging the rest of the nation down? Allen Barra on why poor white Southerners keep voting for policies that screw them and how this hurts the rest of the nation. John Jeremiah Sullivan follows James Agee into the Southern interior. Prisons are never welcoming places, but there’s something particularly lurid about the idea of southern prisons, at least historically. Joseph Goulden reviews The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South by Bruce Levine. Fortress White America: Republicans long ago embraced a whites-only political strategy and continue to reap their rewards in Southern states. In the South, the GOP is A-OK with being the white people party.