Other Souths: Diversity and Difference in the U.S. South, Reconstruction to Present
Other Souths collects fifteen innovative essays that place issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality at the center of the narrative of southern history. Using a range of methodologies and approaches, contributing historians provide a fresh perspective to key events and move long-overlooked episodes into prominence.
Pippa Holloway edited the volume using a chronological and event-driven framework with which many students and teachers will be familiar. The book covers well-recognized topics in American history: wars, reform efforts, social movements, and political milestones. Cultural topics are considered as well, including the development of consumer capitalism, the history of rock and roll, and the history of sport. The focus and organization of the essays underscore the value of southern history to the larger national narrative.
Other Souths reveals the history of what may strike some as a surprisingly dynamic and nuanced region―a region better understood by paying closer and more careful attention to its diversity.
Danielle McGuire was a contributor to Other Souths: Diversity and Difference in the U.S. South, Reconstruction to Present.
Praise for Other Souths: Diversity and Difference in the U.S. South, Reconstruction to Present …
Other Souths is an insightful exploration of southern history that serves as both an incredibly helpful companion to existing scholarship and an innovative collection of essays that ask us to reconsider the southern past from new and alternative perspectives. By employing emerging areas of study like environmental policy and urban planning and uncovering obscured histories of the southern past, this collection demonstrates the exciting potential of what lies ahead for the study of the U.S. South.
A useful teaching text and important intellectual piece. . . . From the public political acts of lowcountry freedwomen to the discovery of the real John Henry, the interrogation of suspected lesbian educators, and the Latinization of the southern landscape, Other Souths uncovers the multiple layers of southern politics, rendering obsolete the divide between public and private or between grassroots politics and more formal electoral politics. In the process, the collection offers the possibilities of comparing big questions across time and place.
This splendid collection captures the South's complex history from Reconstruction to the present. Incorporating race, class, and gender; sexuality, morality, and popular culture; immigration, environmentalism, and peace politics, Other Souths illuminates traditional issues from new and compelling perspectives.
This is one of the most creative and provocative southern history anthologies ever published. By bringing together the stories of former slaves, Syrian immigrants, World War I draft resisters, environmentalists, opponents of university football, civil rights activists, and New South conservatives (among others), Other Souths challenges almost every accepted truism about postbellum southern society. This book is appropriate for both scholarly and general audiences and will be an indispensable addition to courses in southern history, culture, and social change. Other Souths will set the standard in this field for years to come.
The volume prompts a rethinking of the place of the modern South in the nation in a way that the individual articles, when they first appeared, did not. . . . As a whole, the collection confirms that the South has been and remains distinctive in its reactions to federal law but also that southerners have found themselves deeply and inextricably bound to national issues of economic development, social change, and demographic shifts.
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