New Books in the American South

In April 1968, following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., a wave of uprisings swept across America. None was more visible—or resulted in more property damage, arrests, or federal troop involvement—than in Washington, DC, where thousands took to the streets in protest against racial inequality, looting and burning businesses in the process. The nation’s capital was shaken to its foundations.When the Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellion and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation's Capital (The New Press, 2023) tells the story of the Washingtonians who seized the moment to rebuild a more just society, one that would protect and foster Black political and economic power. A riveting account of activism, urban reimagination, and political transformation, Kyla Sommers’s revealing and deeply researched narrative is ultimately a tale of blowback, as the Nixon administration and its allies in Congress thwarted the ambitions of DC’s reformers, opposing civil rights reforms and self-governance. And nationwide, conservative politicians used the specter of crime in the capital to roll back the civil rights movement and create the modern carceral state.A vital chapter in the struggle for racial equality, When the Smoke Cleared is an account of open wounds, paths not taken, and their unforeseen consequences—revealed here in all of their contemporary significance.Dr Kyla Sommers earned her PhD in history at George Washington University. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Washington History journal, and Demand the Impossible: Essays in History as Activism (Westphalia Books, 2018). She is former editor-in-chief of the History News Network, and works as Digital Engagement Editor at American Oversight.Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email, Mastodon or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, employers, government officials, journalists, and powerful individuals deployed a variety of violent tactics to control ordinary people and workers who sought to secure power in and out of workplaces. In the face of worker resistance, employers and their allies collaborated to use a variety of extralegal repressive techniques, including whippings, kidnappings, drive-out campaigns, incarcerations, arsons, hangings, and shootings, as well as less overtly illegal tactics such as shutting down meetings, barring speakers from lecturing through blacklists, and book burning. Drawing together the various groups who engaged in this violence, Chad E. Pearson's book Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2022) shows how the original Ku Klux Klan, various Law and Order Leagues, Stockgrowers' organizations, and Citizens' Alliances engaged in violence and were driven by unambiguous economic and managerial interests. While often discussed separately, all of these groups employed similar language to smear ordinary people, including former slaves, populists, political radicals, and striking workers, as menacing an violent villains who threatened polite society - justifying their actions by insisting that they were upholding "law and order." This book thus suggests that law and order politics emerged in the campaigns of organized terror against an assortment of ordinary people across racial lines conducted by Klansmen, lawmen, vigilantes, and union busters during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Douglas Bell is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in the Netherlands. His research interests center on American military history, American foreign policy, German history, and European Studies. Tweet him @douglasibell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

How does one begin to understand the idea of a distinctive southern way of life--a concept as enduring as it is disputed? In this examination of the American South in national and global contexts, celebrated historian Charles Reagan Wilson assesses how diverse communities of southerners have sought to define the region's identity. Surveying three centuries of southern regional consciousness across many genres, disciplines, and cultural strains, Wilson considers and challenges prior presentations of the region, advancing a vision of southern culture that has always been plural, dynamic, and complicated by race and class.Structured in three parts, The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South (UNC Press, 2023) takes readers on a journey from the colonial era to the present, from when complex ideas of "southern civilization" rooted in slaveholding and agrarianism dominated to the twenty-first-century rise of a modern, multicultural "southern living." As Wilson shows, there is no singular or essential South but rather a rich tapestry woven with contestations, contingencies, and change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

In To Tell a Black Story of Miami (UP of Florida, 2022), Tatiana McInnis examines literary and cultural representations of Miami alongside the city's material realities to challenge the image of South Florida as a diverse cosmopolitan paradise. McInnis discusses how this favorable "melting pot" narrative depends on the obfuscation of racialized violence against people of African descent.Analyzing novels, short stories, and memoirs by Edwidge Danticat, M.J. Fievre, Carlos Moore, Carlos Eire, Patricia Stephens Due, and Tananarive Due, as well as films such as Dawg Fight and Moonlight, McInnis demonstrates how these creations push back against erasure by representing the experiences of Black Americans and immigrants from Caribbean nations. McInnis considers portrayals of state-sanctioned oppression, residential segregation, violent detention of emigres, and increasing wealth gaps and concludes that celebrations of Miami's diversity disguise the pervasive, adaptive nature of white supremacy and anti-Blackness.To Tell a Black Story of Miami offers a model of how to use literature as a primary archive in urban studies. It draws attention to the similarities and divergences between Miami's Black diasporic communities, a historically underrepresented demographic in popular and scholarly awareness of the city. Increasing understanding of Miami's political, social, and economic inequities, this book brings greater nuance to traditional narratives of exceptionalism in cities and regions.Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

In this episode, Thomas Aiello joins E. James West to discuss Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration: The Cultural Geography of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate (University of Georgia Press, 2023). Building on his earlier book The Grapevine of the Black South, which focused on the rise and fall of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate through its flagship publication the Atlanta Daily World, this book further reshapes the place of southern newspapers in the historiography of Black journalism. Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration traces the development and trajectory of the individual newspapers of the Syndicate, evaluating those with surviving issues, and presenting them as they existed in proximity to their Atlanta hub. In so doing, he emphasizes the thread of practical radicalism that ran through Syndicate editorial policy, providing a fuller picture of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate and the Black press in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.James West is a historian of race, media and business in the modern United States and Black diaspora. Author of "Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America" (Illinois, 2020), "A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago" (Illinois, 2022), "Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (Massachusetts, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Memphis Hoops: Race and Basketball in the Bluff City, 1968-1997 (U Tennessee Press, 2021) tells the story of basketball in Tennessee’s southwestern-most metropolis following the 1968 assassination of Marin Luther King Jr. Keith Brian Wood examines the city through the lens of the Memphis State University basketball team and its star player turned-coach Larry Finch. Finch, a Memphis native and the first highly recruited black player signed by Memphis State, helped the team make the 1973 NCAA championship game in his senior year. In an era when colleges in the south began to integrate their basketball programs, the city of Memphis embraced its flagship university’s shift toward including black players. Wood interjects the forgotten narrative of LeMoyne-Owen’s (the city’s HBCU) 1975 NCAA Division III National Championship team as a critical piece to understanding this era. Finch was drafted by the Lakers following the 1973 NCAA championship but instead signed with the American Basketball Association’s Memphis Tams. After two years of playing professionally, Finch returned to the sidelines as a coach and would eventually become the head coach of the Memphis State Tigers.Wood deftly weaves together basketball and Memphis’s fraught race relations during the post–civil rights era. While many Memphians viewed the 1973 Tigers’ championship run as representative of racial progress, Memphis as a whole continued to be deeply divided on other issues of race and civil rights. And while Finch was championed as a symbol of the healing power of basketball that helped counteract the city’s turbulence, many black players and coaches would discover that even its sports mirrored Memphis’s racial divide. Today, as another native son of Memphis, Penny Hardaway, has taken the reigns of the University of Memphis’s basketball program, Wood reflects on the question of progress in the city that saw King’s assassination little more than forty years ago.In this important examination of sports and civil rights history, Wood summons social memory from an all-too-recent past to present the untold—and unfinished—story of basketball in the Bluff City.Keith B. Wood teaches history at Christian Brothers High School in Memphis.Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB, MT. The ideas expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, or the Department of Defense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

In My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching (Yale UP, 2023), Mari N. Crabtree traces the long afterlife of lynching in the South through the traumatic memories it left in its wake. She unearths how African American victims and survivors found ways to live through and beyond the horrors of lynching, offering a theory of African American collective trauma and memory rooted in the ironic spirit of the blues sensibility--a spirit of misdirection and cunning that blends joy and pain. Black southerners often shielded their loved ones from the most painful memories of local lynchings with strategic silences but also told lynching stories about vengeful ghosts or a wrathful God or the deathbed confessions of a lyncher tormented by his past. They protested lynching and its legacies through art and activism, and they mourned those lost to a mob's fury. They infused a blues element into their lynching narratives to confront traumatic memories and keep the blues at bay, even if just for a spell. Telling their stories troubles the simplistic binary of resistance or submission that has tended to dominate narratives of Black life and reminds us that amid the utter devastation of lynching were glimmers of hope and an affirmation of life.Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

From the New York Times bestselling author of Washington’s Spies, the thrilling story of the Confederate spy who came to Britain to turn the tide of the Civil War—and the Union agent resolved to stop him.In 1861, soon after the outbreak of the Civil War, two secret agents—one a Confederate, the other his Union rival—were dispatched to neutral Britain, each entrusted with a vital mission.The South’s James Bulloch, charming and devious, was to acquire a cutting-edge clandestine fleet intended to break President Lincoln’s blockade of Confederate ports, sink Northern merchant vessels, and drown the U.S. Navy’s mightiest ships at sea. The profits from gunrunning and smuggling cotton—Dixie’s notorious “white gold”—would finance the scheme. Opposing him was Thomas Dudley, a resolute Quaker lawyer and abolitionist. He was determined to stop Bulloch by any means necessary in a spy-versus-spy game of move and countermove, gambit and sacrifice, intrigue and betrayal. If Dudley failed, Britain would ally with the South and imperil a Northern victory. The battleground was the Dickensian port of Liverpool, whose dockyards built more ships each year than the rest of the world combined, whose warehouses stored more cotton than anywhere else on earth, and whose merchant princes, said one observer, were “addicted to Southern proclivities, foreign slave trade, and domestic bribery.”From master of historical espionage Alexander Rose, The Lion and the Fox: Two Rival Spies and the Secret Plot to Build a Confederate Navy (Mariner Books, 2022) is the astonishing, untold tale of two implacable foes and their twilight struggle for the highest stakes.AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

The history and practices of African American Catholics has been vastly understudied, and Black Catholics are often written off as a fringe sector of the religious population. Yet, Catholics of African descent have been a part of Catholicism since the early days of European exploration into the New World.In the Shadow of Ebenezer: A Black Catholic Parish in the Age of Civil Rights and Vatican II (NYU Press, 2022) examines how the Civil Rights Movement and the Second Vatican Council affected African American Catholics in Atlanta, Georgia, focusing on the historic Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in the Old Fourth Ward. Our Lady of Lourdes is a neighbor of major historic Black Protestant churches in the city, including Ebenezer Baptist Church, a block away, which during the Civil Rights era was the pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. Featuring archival and oral history sources, the book examines the religious and cultural life of the parishioners of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, showing how this Black Catholic congregation fit into the overall religious ecology of the neighborhood. Examining Our Lady of Lourdes in relation to these larger Black Protestant congregations helps to illuminate whether and how they were shaped by their place at a center of the civil rights struggle, and how religious change and social change intersect.Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World (Oxford UP, 2022) interrogates how people with an interest in African slavery manufactured and publicly disseminated a baseless rhetoric about climate, race, and labor that they knew, privately, to contradict their lived experiences.In the late eighteenth century, plantation owners and slaveholders in the Caribbean and the American South publicly argued that physiological and biological differences made African people more capable of withstanding the heat and labor required to work on plantations. This climatic defense of slavery allowed planters to deny their own culpability in enslaving human beings while also framing the issue of racial slavery. The Nature of Slavery challenges this framing of labor, environment, and the development of racial ideologies. Using extensive personal and professional correspondence and colonial records, Dr. Katherine Johnston demonstrates that privately planters did not observe any health differences between Black and white bodies. White slaveholders publicly defended racial slavery constructed on a climatic rhetoric and biological theory of race they knew to be false. The ideology linking race and climate supported the economic motives of these enslavers and this defense of racial slavery in the late 18th century became a retroactive explanation for its establishment in the colonies. This climatic dichotomy to justify slavery and their economic livelihood contributed to historical myths about enslaved bodies and a groundless theory of race which was used to perpetuate the institution of slavery. Nature of Slavery powerfully argues that a “rhetoric of bodily difference gained strength and power as slaveholders and others imbued it with a language of nature.”Dr. Katherine Johnston is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History & Philosophy at Montana State University. Her work focuses on slavery, race, the body, and the environment in Atlantic plantation societies.Daniela Lavergne served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south