A new history of the American South

A new history of the American South

Book - 2023

"For at least two centuries, the South's economy, politics, religion, race relations, fiction, music, foodways and more have figured prominently in nearly all facets of American life. In A New History of the American South , W. Fitzhugh Brundage joins a stellar group of accomplished historians in gracefully weaving a new narrative of Southern history from its ancient past to the present."--

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Subjects
HISTORY / United States / State & Local / South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV)
Southern States > History.
Southern States
History
Genres
History
Published
Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press [2023]
Language
English
Item Description
"A Ferris and Ferris book"
Physical Description
xxvi, 584 pages : illustrations (black and white), maps ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9781469626659
  • Introduction / W. Fitzhugh Brundage
  • Part I: Procontact to the American Revolution. The American South to 1600: the ancient native South / Robbie Ethridge
  • Contact, conflict, and captivity in the seventeenth-century South / James Rice
  • Indians, Africans, and Europeans in the early South / Jon Sensbach
  • The Revolutionary era / Michael A. McDonnell
  • Part II: The long neneteenth century. The South and the new nation, 1783-1820 / Laura F. Edwards
  • The age of emancipation / Martha S. Jones
  • The South and the nation, 1840-1860 / Kate Masur
  • The southern nations, 1860-1880 / Gregory P. Downs
  • The Bourbon South / Scott Reynolds Nelson
  • Party III: The twentieth century. Bearing the burden of separate but equal in the Jim Crow South / Blair L.M. Kelley
  • The paradox of reforms in the early twentieth-century South / Natalie J. Ring
  • The South and the state in the twentieth century / Kari Frederickson
  • Southern religion and southern culture in the twentieth century / Paul Harvey
  • The southern economy in the long twentieth century / Peter A. Coclanis
  • The post-World War II Black freedom struggle / Kenneth R. Janken.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Scholars of Southern history come together to create a fresh narrative of the region. As editor Brundage writes in the introduction, this is the 21st century's "first, collaborative effort to tell the history of the American South." More significantly, it serves as an example of how the story of Southern, as well as American, history has been transformed over the last 50 years. Previously, Southern history was the tale, beginning in the early 1600s, of sharply differentiated Black and White races, chattel slavery, distinctive race-based, all-male politics, and a kind of unchanging continuity of the region's life--a portrait permeated with gauzy camellias and nonsense about enslaved people content with their status. In this largely seamless presentation of the South's past as historians now see it, those subjects and emphases are greatly diminished in coverage. Assuming larger roles in the story are Native Americans, women, and social, cultural, and economic trends. Racism is still front and center, of course, but the contributors also highlight multiethnic and other relevant, previously omitted elements. Most of the book's contributors brilliantly integrate the contents of their separate chapters, each on a distinct era, into a taut, analytical narrative. Throughout, their voices and styles cohere in striking fashion. It's only when the narrative reaches the 20th century that it briefly stumbles, with two contributors focusing on select individuals rather than the South as a whole. The result is to make these people somehow representative of an entire region, while the rest of the book argues against the existence of an undifferentiated part of the country known as "The South." Nevertheless, to learn of the South's past as it is viewed today by leading historians, this is the book to read. Contributors include Martha S. Jones, Kate Masur, James Rice, and a host of other distinguished scholars. An important book for anyone interested in Southern history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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