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The New Southern Studies and Rethinking the Question, “Is There Still a South?”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2015

TED OWNBY
TED OWNBY*
Affiliation:
Southern Studies and History, University of Mississippi.
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Extract

Thinking about the approach and scholarship called the New Southern Studies takes me back to the first years in my position in southern studies and history at the University of Mississippi. When I started that job in 1988, I had a great deal to learn, especially about the recent and contemporary South. So I turned to the best scholarly books I could find, especially those by my fellow historians and also by social scientists, literary scholars, music scholars, and folklorists.

Type
Responses to New Southern Studies Forum
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 49 , Special Issue 4: Fictions of Speculation , November 2015 , pp. 871 - 878
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2015 

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References

1 I thought about these questions in a short article in 1998. Ownby, Ted, “‘Does a South Still Exist?’ A Historian's Critique of the Question,” Crossroads, 5, 2 (Spring 1998), 3–12Google Scholar.

2 Two of the main works from this period by John Shelton Reed are The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974); and Reed, One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).

3 W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage, 1941), 439–40.

4 Twelve Southerners, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977; first published 1930).

5 V. O. Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Knopf, 1949).

6 Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-education of the Negro (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990; first published 1933); Woodson, The Negro in Our History (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1931).

7 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951); Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957).

8 See Howard Odum, Southern Regions of the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936); Odum, Race and Rumors of Race: Challenge to American Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943).

9 Samuel S. Hill, Southern Churches in Crisis (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967).

10 Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1910 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970).

11 W. E. B. Du Bois published numerous works of southern sociology while teaching at Atlanta University. Twelve of the books are collected and republished in W. E. B. Du Bois, The Atlanta University Publications, nos. 1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968).

12 Some of the most important works by Odum's students and colleagues connected to the University of North Carolina were Arthur F. Raper, Preface to Peasantry: A Tale of Two Black Belt Counties (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936); Arthur F. Raper and Ira deA. Reid, Sharecroppers All (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941); Margaret Jarman Hagood, Mothers of the South: Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939); Gerald Johnson, The Wasted Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938); Rupert B. Vance, Human Geography of the South: A Study of Regional Resources and Human Adequacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1935); Vance, All These People: The Nation's Human Resources in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1945). Some of Charles S. Johnson's most important works include Shadow of the Plantation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1934); Johnson, The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy: Summary of Field Studies and Statistical Surveys, 1933–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935); Johnson, Growing up in the Black Belt: Negro Youth in the Rural South (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1941).

13 John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012).

14 James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941); Hagood.