Minding the South
- ISBN-10
- 0826264530
- ISBN-13
- 9780826264534
- Series
- Minding the South
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 291
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2003
- Publisher
- University of Missouri Press
- Author
- John Shelton Reed
Description
You're in the American South now, a proud region with a distinctive history and culture. A place that echoes with names like Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee, Scarlett O'Hara and Uncle Remus, Martin Luther King and William Faulkner, Billy Graham, Mahalia Jackson, Muhammad Ali, Elvis Presley. Home of the country blues and country music, bluegrass and Dixieland jazz, gospel music and rock and roll. Where menus offer both down-home biscuits and gravy and uptown shrimp and grits. Where churches preach against "cigarettes, whiskey, and wild, wild women" (all Southern products) and where American football is a religion. For more than thirty years John Shelton Reed has been "minding" the South--watching over it, providing commentary upon it. He is the author or editor of thirteen books about the South, and despite his disclaimer regarding formal study of Southern history, Reed has read widely and in depth about the South. His primary focus is upon Southerners' present-day culture and consciousness, but he knows that one must approach the South historically in order to understand the place and its people. Why is the South so different from the rest of the country? Rupert Vance, Reed's predecessor in sociology at Chapel Hill, once observed that the very existence of the South is a triumph of history over geography and economics. The South has resisted being assimilated by the larger United States and has kept a personality that is distinctly its own.That is why Reed celebrates the South. His essays cover everything from great thinkers about the South--Eugene D. Genovese, C. Vann Woodward, M. E. Bradford--to the uniqueness of a region that was once a hotbed of racism, but has recently attracted hundreds of thousands of blacks transplanted from the North. There are even a few chapters about Southerners who have devoted their talents to different subjects altogether, from politics or soft drinks to rock and roll or the design of silver jewelry. Reed writes with wit and Southern charm, never afraid to speak his mind, even when it comes to taking his beloved South to task. While readers may not share all his opinions, most will agree that John Shelton Reed is one of the best "South watchers" there is.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
The Mind of the South
By W. J. CashThis fiftieth-anniversary edition of The Mind of the South includes an incisive analysis of Cash himself and of his crucial place in the history of modern Southern letters.
-
The Mind of the Old South
By Clement EatonThe Mind of the Old South
-
Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South
By James Charles Cobb198 ; Michael Oreskes , " Texas in Black and White , " New York T1mes Book Review , 16 December 1990 , p . ... 122 ; Reed , Whistling Dixie : Dispatches from the South ( Columbia , Mo. , 1990 ) , 67 ; Wilson and Ferris , Encyclopedia of ...
-
The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960-1980
By Zachary J. Lechner"This interdisciplinary work is driven by the question, 'What can imaginings of the South reveal about the recent American past?
-
The Southern State of Mind
By Jan Nordby Gretlundformed overnight on racial issues simply because of the changes the federal government mandated as a result of the pressures of their fellow black Southerners , but white Southerners would have to adapt their public culture .
-
The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960–1980
By Zachary J. LechnerThe South of the Mind tells this story of how many Americans looked to the country’s most maligned region to save them during the 1960s and 1970s.
-
The Mind of the South: Fifty Years Later
By Charles W. EaglesSouthern Thought : A Study of Southern Historical Consciousness , 1846–1861 ( Ph.D. diss . , University of North ... and in Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners ( Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press , 1985 ) , esp . p .
-
Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-era South
By Diane Miller SommervilleThis book studies the meaning of suicide in the nineteenth-century South and how that meaning changed, if at all, as a result of the Civil War and its aftermath.
-
The Mind of the South: Fifty Years Later
By Bruce ClaytonScholarly debate about one of the most influential books ever written about the American South
-
Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920
By Henry D. ShapiroShearin, Hubert Gibson, and Combs, Josiah H. A Syllabus of Kentucky FolkSongs. Transylvania University Studies ... 1912 Dawley, Thomas R. The Child That Toileth Not: The Story of a Government Investigation. New York: Gracia Publishing ...