Author: Charles Reagan Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780820317533
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Wilson appraises the influence of religion on various aspects of Southern culture.

Author: Darren E. Grem
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496820509
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
Contributions by Ryan L. Fletcher, Darren E. Grem, Paul Harvey, Alicia Jackson, Ted Ownby, Otis W. Pickett, Arthur Remillard, Chad Seales, and Randall J. Stephens Over more than three decades of teaching at the University of Mississippi, Charles Reagan Wilson's research and writing transformed southern studies in key ways. This volume pays tribute to and extends Wilson's seminal work on southern religion and culture. Using certain episodes and moments in southern religious history, the essays examine the place and power of religion in southern communities and society. It emulates Wilson's model, featuring both majority and minority voices from archives and applying a variety of methods to explain the South's religious diversity and how religion mattered in many arenas of private and public life, often with life-or-death stakes. The volume first concentrates on churches and ministers, and then considers religious and cultural constructions outside formal religious bodies and institutions. It examines the faiths expressed via the region's fields, streets, homes, public squares, recreational venues, roadsides, and stages. In doing so, this book shows that Wilson's groundbreaking work on religion is an essential part of southern studies and crucial for fostering deeper understanding of the South's complicated history and culture.

Author: Walter Conser
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813129281
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
The South has always been one of the most distinctive regions of the United States, with its own set of traditions and a turbulent history. Although often associated with cotton, hearty food, and rich dialects, the South is also noted for its strong sense of religion, which has significantly shaped its history. Dramatic political, social, and economic events have often shaped the development of southern religion, making the nuanced dissection of the religious history of the region a difficult undertaking. For instance, segregation and the subsequent civil rights movement profoundly affected churches in the South as they sought to mesh the tenets of their faith with the prevailing culture. Editors Walter H. Conser and Rodger M. Payne and the book’s contributors place their work firmly in the trend of modern studies of southern religion that analyze cultural changes to gain a better understanding of religion’s place in southern culture now and in the future. Southern Crossroads: Perspectives on Religion and Culture takes a broad, interdisciplinary approach that explores the intersection of religion and various aspects of southern life. The volume is organized into three sections, such as “Religious Aspects of Southern Culture,” that deal with a variety of topics, including food, art, literature, violence, ritual, shrines, music, and interactions among religious groups. The authors survey many combinations of religion and culture, with discussions ranging from the effect of Elvis Presley’s music on southern spirituality to yard shrines in Miami to the archaeological record of African American slave religion. The book explores the experiences of immigrant religious groups in the South, also dealing with the reactions of native southerners to the groups arriving in the region. The authors discuss the emergence of religious and cultural acceptance, as well as some of the apparent resistance to this development, as they explore the experiences of Buddhist Americans in the South and Jewish foodways. Southern Crossroads also looks at distinct markers of religious identity and the role they play in gender, politics, ritual, and violence. The authors address issues such as the role of women in Southern Baptist churches and the religious overtones of lynching, with its themes of blood sacrifice and atonement. Southern Crossroads offers valuable insights into how southern religion is studied and how people and congregations evolve and adapt in an age of constant cultural change.

Author: Brannon Costello
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1628467975
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
Comics and the U.S. South offers a wide-ranging and long overdue assessment of how life and culture in the United States South is represented in serial comics, graphic novels, newspaper comic strips, and webcomics. Diverting the lens of comics studies from the skyscrapers of Superman's Metropolis or Chris Ware's Chicago to the swamps, backroads, small towns, and cities of the U.S. South, this collection critically examines the pulp genres associated with mainstream comic books alongside independent and alternative comics. Some essays seek to discover what Captain America can reveal about southern regionalism and how slave narratives can help us reread Swamp Thing; others examine how creators such as Walt Kelly (Pogo), Howard Cruse (Stuck Rubber Baby), Kyle Baker (Nat Turner), and Josh Neufeld (A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge) draw upon the unique formal properties of the comics to question and revise familiar narratives of race, class, and sexuality; and another considers how southern writer Randall Kenan adapted elements of comics form to prose fiction. With essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, Comics and the U.S. South contributes to and also productively reorients the most significant and compelling conversations in both comics scholarship and in southern studies.

Author: Kathaleen E. Amende
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807150401
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking study, Kathaleen E. Amende explores the works and lives of late-twentieth-century southern women writers to show how conservative Christian ideals of femininity shaped notions of religion, sexuality, and power in the South. Drawing from the work of authors such as Rosemary Daniell and Connie May Fowler, whose characters -- like the authors themselves -- grow up believing that Jesus should be a girl's first "boyfriend," Amende demonstrates many ways in which these writers commingled the sexual and the sacred. Amende also looks at the writings of Lee Smith, Sheri Reynolds, Dorothy Allison, and Valerie Martin to discuss how southern women authors and their characters grappled with opposing cultural expectations. Often in their work, characters mingle spiritual devotion and carnal love, allowing for salvation despite rejecting traditional roles or behaviors. In Martin's A Recent Martyr, novitiate Claire disavows southern norms of femininity -- courtship, marriage, and motherhood -- but submits to Jesus as she would to a husband. Teenage protagonist Ninah Huff in Reynolds's Rapture of Canaan imagines that her out-of-wedlock child is the offspring of Christ because of her conviction that Jesus was present during conception. Grounded in cultural and gender studies and informed by historical, religious, and devotional literature, Amende's timely and accessible book demonstrates the tenuous divide between feminine sexuality and Christianity in a southern context.

Author: Raymond R. Sommerville
Publisher: Mercer University Press
ISBN: 9780865549036
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church was an important part of the historic freedom struggles of African Americans from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights movement. This fight for equality and freedom can be seen clearly in the denomination's evolving social and ecumenical consciousness. The denomination's very name changed from "Colored" to "Christian" in 1954, but the denomination did not join the struggle late. Rather, the CME was a critical participant from the days following the Civil War. At times, the Church was at odds with their white Methodist counterparts and in solidarity with other African-American denominations on issues of racial desegregation and the role of social protest in religion.Raymond Sommerville's important book discusses the relationship between Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the CME. While King and others received most of the headlines during the Civil Rights Era, the CME proved to be involved at all levels and equally important in all they did. With its strategic location in the South and its long history of ecumenical involvement, the CME Church emerged as a leading advocate of ecumenical civil rights activism. Previous interpretations asserted that the CME was apolitical and accomodationist or that it was more progressive than it was. Sommerville presents a more nuanced account of how a church of largely former slaves emancipated itself from the constraints of white Methodist paternalism and Jim Crow racism to emerge as a progressive force of racial justice and ecumenism in the South and beyond. Sommerville examines major centers of the CME -- Nashville, Birmingham, Memphis, Atlanta -- and selected leaders inthe South in charting the gradual metamorphosis of the former CME as a largely nonpolitical body of former slaves in 1870 to a more politically active denomination at the apex of the modern Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.

Author: Steven P. Miller
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812206142
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
While spreading the gospel around the world through his signature crusades, internationally renowned evangelist Billy Graham maintained a visible and controversial presence in his native South, a region that underwent substantial political and economic change in the latter half of the twentieth century. In this period Graham was alternately a desegregating crusader in Alabama, Sunbelt booster in Atlanta, regional apologist in the national press, and southern strategist in the Nixon administration. Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South considers the critical but underappreciated role of the noted evangelist in the creation of the modern American South. The region experienced two significant related shifts away from its status as what observers and critics called the "Solid South": the end of legalized Jim Crow and the end of Democratic Party dominance. Author Steven P. Miller treats Graham as a serious actor and a powerful symbol in this transition—an evangelist first and foremost, but also a profoundly political figure. In his roles as the nation's most visible evangelist, adviser to political leaders, and a regional spokesperson, Graham influenced many of the developments that drove celebrants and detractors alike to place the South at the vanguard of political, religious, and cultural trends. He forged a path on which white southern moderates could retreat from Jim Crow, while his evangelical critique of white supremacy portended the emergence of "color blind" rhetoric within mainstream conservatism. Through his involvement in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations, as well as his deep social ties in the South, the evangelist influenced the decades-long process of political realignment. Graham's public life sheds new light on recent southern history in all of its ambiguities, and his social and political ethics complicate conventional understandings of evangelical Christianity in postwar America. Miller's book seeks to reintroduce a familiar figure to the narrative of southern history and, in the process, examine the political and social transitions constitutive of the modern South.

Author: John Shelton Reed
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807170011
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Too often depicted as a region with a single, dominant history and a static culture, the American South actually comprises a wide range of unique places and cultures, each with its own history and evolving identity. John Shelton Reed’s Mixing It Up is a medley of writings that examine how ideas of the South, and what it means to be southern, have changed over the last century. Through essays, op-eds, speeches, statistical reports, elegies, panegyrics, feuilletons, rants, and more, Reed’s penetrating observations, wry humor, and expansive knowledge help him to examine the South’s past, survey its present, and venture a few modest predictions about its future. Touching on an array of topics from the region’s speech, manners, and food, to politics, religion, and race relations, Reed also assesses the work of other pundits, scholars, and South-watchers. From Appalachia to New Orleans, Mixing it Up: A South-Watcher’s Miscellany offers a collection of lively prose and provocative observations about this ever-changing region and its people.

Author: Shira Birnbaum
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 9781566398701
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
"It was hard in the beginning; I didn't think I was going to like it."-student"This ain't even a real school, man. This is for discipline."-student"I want to go to college and become a paramedic."-student"Know what you learn in this program? You learn to suck up."-student"The school district would not like what I'm doing here, but I think these kids need it."-history teacher"This is my real ministry."-community liaisonThese are only some of the voices in Law and Order and School, Shira Birnbaum's riveting study of an education and rehabilitation program for troubled teenagers in a Southern city. Locally acclaimed as one of the better programs of its kind in the region, "Academy" exemplifies a new kind of institution, providing transitional school services under contract with both educational and juvenile justice agencies.Birnbaum's narrative focuses on curriculum, teaching, behavior management, and the social organization and culture of the program, offering a close-up view of the everyday classroom interactions that frame student achievement and, ultimately, program outcomes. What do students learn? What do teachers teach? What educational and rehabilitative goals are embedded in official and unofficial policy? What processes inside and outside the building help or hinder the attainment of those goals?As educational and justice agencies look increasingly to private subcontractors to deliver an array of services and growing numbers of young people are channeled into non-traditional educational settings and correctional institutions, it is imperative that educators and the general public understand how these institutions work and what problems their students and staffs encounter. This on-the-ground examination of education within the juvenile justice system will open your eyes to how we educate some of our neediest children. Author note: Shira Birnbaum is an educational consultant working in New York and New Jersey.

Author: Robert E. Bonner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069111949X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
As rancorous debates over Confederate symbols continue, Robert Bonner explores how the rebel flag gained its enormous power to inspire and repel. In the process, he shows how the Confederacy sustained itself for as long as it did by cultivating the allegiances of countless ordinary citizens. Bonner also comments more broadly on flag passions--those intense emotional reactions to waving pieces of cloth that inflame patriots to kill and die. Colors and Blood depicts a pervasive flag culture that set the emotional tone of the Civil War in the Union as well as the Confederacy. Northerners and southerners alike devoted incredible energy to flags, but the Confederate project was unique in creating a set of national symbols from scratch. In describing the activities of white southerners who designed, sewed, celebrated, sang about, and bled for their new country's most visible symbols, the book charts the emergence of Confederate nationalism. Theatrical flag performances that cast secession in a melodramatic mode both amplified and contained patriotic emotions, contributing to a flag-centered popular patriotism that motivated true believers to defy and sacrifice. This wartime flag culture nourished Confederate nationalism for four years, but flags' martial associations ultimately eclipsed their expression of political independence. After 1865, conquered banners evoked valor and heroism while obscuring the ideology of a slaveholders' rebellion, and white southerners recast the totems of Confederate nationalism as relics of the Lost Cause. At the heart of this story is the tremendous capacity of bloodshed to infuse symbols with emotional power. Confederate flag culture, black southerners' charged relationship to the Stars and Stripes, contemporary efforts to banish the Southern Cross, and arguments over burning the Star Spangled Banner have this in common: all demonstrate Americans' passionate relationship with symbols that have been imaginatively soaked in blood.