Creating the Modern South

Creating the Modern South PDF Author: Douglas Flamming
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807861464
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468

Book Description
In Creating the Modern South, Douglas Flamming examines one hundred years in the life of the mill and the town of Dalton, Georgia, providing a uniquely perceptive view of Dixie's social and economic transformation. "Beautifully written, it combines the rich specificity of a case study with broadly applicable synthetic conclusions.--Technology and Culture "A detailed and nuanced study of community development. . . . Creating the Modern South is an important book and will be of interest to anyone in the field of labor history.--Journal of Economic History "A rich and provocative study. . . . Its major contribution to our knowledge of the South is its careful account of the evolution and collapse of mill culture.--Journal of Southern History "Ambitious, and at times provocative, Creating the Modern South is a well-researched, highly readable, and engaging book.--Journal of American History

Sustaining Southern Identity

Sustaining Southern Identity PDF Author: Keith D. Dickson
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807140066
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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.

White Masculinity in the Recent South

White Masculinity in the Recent South PDF Author: Trent Watts
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807148687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Book Description
From antebellum readers avidly consuming stories featuring white southern men as benevolent patriarchs, hell-raising frontiersmen, and callous plantation owners to post--Civil War southern writers seeking to advance a model of southern manhood and male authority as honorable, dignified, and admirable, the idea of a distinctly southern masculinity has reflected the broad regional differences between North and South. In the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, the media have helped to shape modern models of white manhood, not only for southerners but for the rest of the nation and the world. In White Masculinity in the Recent South, thirteen scholars of history, literature, film, and environmental studies examine modern white masculinity, including such stereotypes as the good old boy, the redneck, and the southern gentleman. With topics ranging from southern Protestant churches to the music of Lynyrd Skynyrd, this cutting-edge volume seeks to do what no other single work has done: to explore the ways in which white southern manhood has been experienced and represented since World War II. Using a variety of approaches -- cultural and social history, close readings of literature and music, interviews, and personal stories -- the contributors explore some of the ways in which white men have acted in response to their own and their culture's conceptions of white manhood. Topics include neo-Confederates, the novels of William Faulkner, gay southern men, football coaching, deer hunting, church camps, college fraternities, and white men's responses to the civil rights movement. Taken together, these engaging pieces show how white southern men are shaped by regional as well as broader American ideas of what they ought to do and be. White men themselves, the contributors explain, view the idea of southern manhood in two seemingly contradictory ways -- as something natural and as something learned through rites of initiation and passage -- and believe it must be lived and displayed to one's peers and others in order to be fully realized. While economic and social conditions of the South changed dramatically in the twentieth century, white manhood as it is expressed in the contemporary South is still a complex, contingent, historicized matter, and broadly shared -- or at least broadly recognized -- notions of white southern manhood continue to be central to southern culture. Representing some of the best recent scholarship in southern gender studies, this bold collection invites further explorations into twenty-first-century white southern masculinity.

Dixie Highway

Dixie Highway PDF Author: Tammy Ingram
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469612984
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
Dixie Highway: Road Building and the Making of the Modern South, 1900-1930

Music and the Making of a New South

Music and the Making of a New South PDF Author: Gavin James Campbell
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807863351
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
Startled by rapid social changes at the turn of the twentieth century, citizens of Atlanta wrestled with fears about the future of race relations, the shape of gender roles, the impact of social class, and the meaning of regional identity in a New South. Gavin James Campbell demonstrates how these anxieties were played out in Atlanta's popular musical entertainment. Examining the period from 1890 to 1925, Campbell focuses on three popular musical institutions: the New York Metropolitan Opera (which visited Atlanta each year), the Colored Music Festival, and the Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers' Convention. White and black audiences charged these events with deep significance, Campbell argues, turning an evening's entertainment into a struggle between rival claimants for the New South's soul. Opera, spirituals, and fiddling became popular not just because they were entertaining, but also because audiences found them flexible enough to accommodate a variety of competing responses to the challenges of making a New South. Campbell shows how attempts to inscribe music with a single, public, fixed meaning were connected to much larger struggles over the distribution of social, political, cultural, and economic power. Attitudes about music extended beyond the concert hall to simultaneously enrich and impoverish both the region and the nation that these New Southerners struggled to create.

Gendered Politics in the Modern South

Gendered Politics in the Modern South PDF Author: Keira V. Williams
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807147680
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
In the fall of 1994 Susan Smith, a young mother from Union, South Carolina, reported that an African American male carjacker had kidnapped her two children. The news sparked a multi-state investigation and evoked nationwide sympathy. Nine days later, she confessed to drowning the boys in a nearby lake, and that sympathy quickly turned to outrage. Smith became the topic of thousands of articles, news segments, and media broadcasts -- overshadowing the coverage of midterm elections and the O. J. Simpson trial. The notoriety of her case was more than tabloid fare, however; her story tapped into a cultural debate about gender and politics at a crucial moment in American history. In Gendered Politics in the Modern South Keira V. Williams uses the Susan Smith case to analyze the "new sexism" found in the agenda of the budding neoconservatism movement of the 1990s. She notes that in the weeks after Smith's confession, soon-to-be Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich made statements linking Smith's behavior to the 1960s counterculture movement and to Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" social welfare programs. At the same time, various magazines declared the "death of feminism" and a "crisis in masculinity" as the assault on liberal social causes gained momentum. In response to this perceived crisis, Williams argues, a distinct code of gender discrimination developed that sought to reassert a traditional form of white male power. In addition to consulting a wide variety of sources, including letters from Smith written since her incarceration, Williams contextualizes the infamous case within the history of gender politics over the last quarter of the twentieth century. She reveals how the rhetoric, imagery, and legal treatment of infanticidal mothers changed and asserts that the latest shift reflects the evolution of a neoconservative politics.

Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern America

Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern America PDF Author: Michele K. Gillespie
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807136638
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Thomas Dixon, Jr. is best remembered as the author of the racist novels that served as the basis for D. W. Griffith's controversial 1915 classic film The Birth of a Nation. He also enjoyed great renown during his lifetime as a minister, lecturer, lawyer, and actor. In Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern America, distinguished scholars of religion, film, literature, music history and gender studies offer a provocative examination of Dixon's ideas, personal life and career and, in the process, illuminate the evolution of white racist ideas in the early twentieth century, and their legacy.

The Making of the Modern Mediterranean

The Making of the Modern Mediterranean PDF Author:
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520304594
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
Studies of the pivotal historic place of the Mediterranean have long been dominated by specialists of its northern shores, that is, by European historians. The seven leading authors in this groundbreaking volume challenge views of Mediterranean space as shaped by European trajectories, and in doing so, they challenge our comfortable notions. Drawing perspectives from the Mediterranean’s eastern and southern shores, they ask anew: What is the Mediterranean? What are its borders, its defining characteristics? What forces of nature, politics, culture, or economics have made the Mediterranean, and how long have they or will they endure? Covering the sixteenth century to the twentieth, this timely volume brings the early modern world into conversation with the modern world in new ways, demonstrating that only recently can we differentiate the north and south into separate cultural and political zones. The Making of the Modern Mediterranean: Views from the South offers a blueprint for a new generation of readers to rethink the world we thought we knew.

The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia

The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia PDF Author: Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231138474
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
Asian history.

Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern South Asia

Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern South Asia PDF Author: Elizabeth Lhost
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469668130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Book Description
Beginning in the late eighteenth century, British rule transformed the relationship between law, society, and the state in South Asia. But qazis and muftis, alongside ordinary people without formal training in law, fought back as the colonial system in India sidelined Islamic legal experts. They petitioned the East India Company for employment, lobbied imperial legislators for recognition, and built robust institutions to serve their communities. By bringing legal debates into the public sphere, they resisted the colonial state's authority over personal law and rejected legal codification by embracing flexibility and possibility. With postcards, letters, and telegrams, they made everyday Islamic law vibrant and resilient and challenged the hegemony of the Anglo-Indian legal system. Following these developments from the beginning of the Raj through independence, Elizabeth Lhost rejects narratives of stagnation and decline to show how an unexpected coterie of scholars, practitioners, and ordinary individuals negotiated the contests and challenges of colonial legal change. The rich archive of unpublished fatwa files, qazi notebooks, and legal documents they left behind chronicles their efforts to make Islamic law relevant for everyday life, even beyond colonial courtrooms and the confines of family law. Lhost shows how ordinary Muslims shaped colonial legal life and how their diversity and difference have contributed to contemporary debates about religion, law, pluralism, and democracy in South Asia and beyond.