New Books in the American South

From the earliest stirrings of southern nationalism to the defeat of the Confederacy, analysis of European nationalist movements played a critical role in how southerners thought about their new southern nation. Southerners argued that because the Confederate nation was cast in the same mold as its European counterparts, it deserved independence. In Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy (UVA Press, 2020), Ann Tucker utilizes print sources such as newspapers and magazines to reveal how elite white southerners developed an international perspective on nationhood that helped them clarify their own national values, conceive of the South as distinct from the North, and ultimately define and legitimize the Confederacy.While popular at home, claims to equivalency with European nations failed to resonate with Europeans and northerners, who viewed slavery as incompatible with liberal nationalism. Forced to reevaluate their claims about the international place of southern nationalism, some southerners redoubled their attempts to place the Confederacy within the broader trends of nineteenth-century nationalism. More conservative southerners took a different tack, emphasizing the distinctiveness of their nationalism, claiming that the Confederacy actually purified nationalism through slavery. Southern Unionists likewise internationalized their case for national unity. By examining the evolution of and variation within these international perspectives, Tucker reveals the making of a southern nationhood to be a complex, contested process.Dr. Ann Tucker is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Georgia. Her research focuses on the U.S. South from an international perspective.Chris Babits is an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He researches the intersecting histories of medicine, religion, and gender and sexuality and is currently working on his book about the history of conversion therapy in the United States. 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 this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Emily Wallace, author and illustrator of the new book Road Sides: An Illustrated Companion to Dining and Driving in the American South (University of Texas Press, 2019).Road Sides pays homage to popular travel guides with its short chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet containing a brief contextualizing essay followed by a feature of a specific location, business, or product. “A” is for Architecture, a tribute to buildings in the shape of foods one might find on the highway; “B” is for Billboards, their ubiquity and creativity and sometimes, as in the case of the “South of the Border” billboards, racial insensitivity.Road Sides is clearly aimed at a general audience of readers with its journalistic style of participant observation and whimsical illustrations, but Wallace makes use of her folklore training and scholarly connections in both the historical contextualizing of automobile culture and the critical lens with which she points out the good, the bad, and the ugly of Southern history and practice.While Road Sides is certainly a celebration of Southern foodways, it is not without criticism. A thread runs throughout the book that there is not a single story of Southern road travel. Wallace is careful to remind readers that before the civil rights era, there are two very distinct experiences for black and white Southerners, and after the ostensible end of racial segregation in public spaces, a third story emerges that changes the experience for all travelers.Wallace addresses these disparate narratives most directly in “D” for Directions, focusing on the Negro Motorist Green-Book that ran counter to the Official Automobile Blue Book for white travelers, and in V for Vacancy, about the black-owned hotels that catered to black travelers.Similarly, in a chapter about the crossroads general store, Wallace reminds readers that Emmett Till was murdered after an encounter with white people in such a store. What emerges from this wide-ranging investigation is an story of innovation, both technological and entrepreneurial, about the creative minds who came up with a new product or process or marketing strategy to adapt to a world that is changed irrevocably by car travel.Emily Wallace is a writer and illustrator with a masters in folklore who serves as art director & deputy editor of Southern Cultures Quarterly at UNC-Chapel Hill, and has written and illustrated work for other publications including The Washington Post, Southern Living, The Oxford American, and GOOD. In 2015, Wallace was nominated for a James Beard Award in humor writing.Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

James West speaks with Jerry Gershenhorn, Julius L. Chambers Professor of History at North Carolina Central University, about Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), ahead of the book's paperback release.Gershenhorn's award-winning study recovers the life and activism of Louis Austin and the influence of his newspaper, the Carolina Times, the preeminent Black newspaper in the state. Spanning much of the twentieth century, this absorbing account explores the long Black freedom struggle in North Carolina from a fresh vantage point, shedding new light on the role of the Black press in the twentieth century.James West is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in American History at Northumbria University, Newcastle. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (Illinois, 2020)  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

In her nuanced case study of postemanciaption Virginia, Nicole Myers Turner, (Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University) challenges assumptions regarding the intersection between black religion and politics in this “signal moment of political and cultural transformation in the African-American experience.” Using traditional archival records from churches, political institutions and personal documents -- as well as ArcGIS to create layered maps of black religious and political participation -- Turner interrogates the integral role black churches played in postbellum Virginia politics. Black political engagement is an understudied facet of the postemancipation period but Turner explores developing relationships between two realms of life and how politics were shaped by the racial positioning of the denominations and of black people within those denominations.In her new book Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia (UNC Press, 2020), Turner argues that the relationship between black religious institutions and political institutions drastically shifted as the Reconstruction amendments established rights for black citizens. That shift, and the myriad challenges black citizens encountered in their newfound citizenship, necessitated that they pursue a means for education and political power. Soul Liberty focuses on the political involvement and bargaining through which black communities achieved these goals. The term “soul liberty” captures the “combination of religious freedom, righteousness, equity and justice” that fueled remarkable institution building in the period. For example, she highlights the interracial coalitions forged with the Republican and Readjuster parties and political magnates, such as William Mahone: one of the first white politicians to recognize the political power of black churches. Turner trenchantly investigates how women in the church were pushed away from ministerial positions, and thus, often ignored as religious and political leaders. She identifies several aspects of churches and their political connections in which women demonstrated agency, such as voting on ministerial positions and tenure, leading discussions, and fundraising. She also diagnoses theological education and its male focus as the main reason that women were held out of leadership positions in the ministry. She provides a nuanced account of the election of John Mercer Langston, the first African-American congressman elected in 1890.Soul Liberty uses the powerful tools of archival research and GIS to illustrate the transformation of black churches, explicitly and implicitly, into centers of political organization. It is currently available in three forms: print book, verbatim open access e-book, and enhanced open-access e-book, which allows the reader to manipulate some of the layered maps that Turner created with her research. A website based on her research is available at mappingblackreligion.com.Benjamin Warren assisted with this podcast.Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

In a time of contentious debate over Confederate monuments, Nicole Maurantonio (Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communication studies and American Studies at the University of Richmond) provides an intriguing look into how revisionist ideas of the Confederacy have seeped into mainstream culture. Based in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, she is well-positioned to comment on the neo-Confederate groups in the South and around the country. Their goal, she recognizes, is to separate the legacy of slavery and racism that is so deeply intertwined with Confederate symbols and isolate an idyllic portrayal of “the South.” These groups proudly wave Confederate battle flags, put up monuments to Confederate generals, and even sell Confederate cookbooks. Together, these attempts to embrace and revise the history of the Confederacy create Confederate Exceptionalism.Maurantonio’s interdisciplinary book treats the state of Virginia as a confederate museum to be analyzed. The book combines carefully selected language and wide-ranging case studies of Confederate Exceptionalism including the infamous Monument Avenue in Richmond, songs and anthems, cookbooks, the exhibit of Stonewall Jackson’s stuffed horse, the myth of Black confederate soldiers, and the manipulation of social media to trivialize counter-protesters in the #Tarpwars after Charlottesville. The podcast allows Maurantonio to connect the thesis to protesters toppling the statue of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy on Monument Row in June 2020 -- and offer a fascinating analysis of the decision not to clean graffiti and how this empowers members of the community to use the monuments to oppose white supremacy,Maurantonio defines Confederate Exceptionalism as a mix of Lost Cause ideology and American Exceptionalism, two ideas with deep roots in the South and the broader United States. The former constitutes the attempts of Southerners to twist the narrative of the Civil War, painting the Confederates as noble heroes, fighting for the protection of states’ rights and their way of life. This line of thinking also blames the North and abolitionists for sectional tensions before the war, and perhaps most dangerously, perpetuates the “loyal slave” cliché, representing enslaved people as willing participants in their own bondage. American exceptionalism, present at the founding of the United States, presents the United States as superior to any other nation or civilization. Gaining steam as the U.S. became a global superpower in the early 20th century, the concept ignores the negative aspects of the nation, pointing to liberalism, diversity, and freedom, as well as military might, to illustrate greatness. When the two concepts are merged by neo-Confederate groups, the amalgamation of Southern superiority and rewritten history undergird Confederate Exceptionalism.Confederate Exceptionalism: Civil War Myth and Memory in the Twenty-First Century (University Press of Kansas, 2019) explores the impacts and motivations of its namesake through conversations with neo-Confederates and investigations into the institutions that allow Confederate exceptionalism to exist and prosper in a world where its roots are so widely denounced.Benjamin Warren assisted with this podcast.Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

The golden key to understanding the last 75 years of American political development, the eminent labor relations scholar Michael Goldfield argues, lies in the contests between labor and capital in the American South during the 1930s and 1940s. Labor agitation and unionization efforts in the South in the New Deal era were extensive and bitterly fought, and ranged across all of the major industries of the region.In The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Oxford UP, 2020), Goldfield charts the rise of labor activism in each and then examines how and why labor organizers struggled so mightily in the region. Drawing from meticulous and unprecedented archival material and detailed data on four core industries-textiles, timber, coal mining, and steel-he argues that much of what is important in American politics and society today was largely shaped by the successes and failures of the labor movements of the 1930s and 1940s. Most notably, Goldfield shows how the broad-based failure to organize the South during this period made it what it is today. He contends that this early defeat for labor unions not only contributed to the exploitation of race and right-wing demagoguery in the South, but has also led to a decline in unionization, growing economic inequality, and an inability to confront and dismantle white supremacy throughout the US.A sweeping account of Southern political economy in the New Deal era, The Southern Key challenges the established historiography to tell a tale of race, radicalism, and betrayal that will reshape our understanding of why America developed so differently from other advanced industrial nations over the course of the last century.Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute’s Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Almost a year ago, on my second interview for this podcast, I talked to Howard Philips Smith about Unveiling the Muse: The Lost History of Gay Carnival in New Orleans. I invited him back to tell us about his follow up book: Southern Decadence in New Orleans. Co-written with Frank Perez (the president of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana) and published by the Louisiana State University Press in 2018, Southern Decadence in New Orleans provides the first comprehensive historical look at another important event in the Crescent City’s LGBTQ+ calendar.Commonly referred to as “Gay Mardi Gras,” the Southern Decadence festival began in 1972 as a spontaneous end-of-the-summer celebration of a group of friends who felt like outcasts because of their political views, sexual orientation, and/or racial identity. Over the last four decades, it has transformed into a gay extravaganza lasting almost a full week and culminating on a grand parade on the Sunday before Labor Day. It attracts hundreds of thousands of revellers from all over the world and is one of the city’s largest (and most lucrative) annual events. Smith and Frank combined interviews, participant observation, and archival materials to do document the trajectory of this fascinating phenomenon.Dr Isabel Machado is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Department of History of the University of Memphis. Her forthcoming book uses Carnival as a vehicle to understand social and cultural changes in Mobile, Alabama (USA) in the second half of the 20th century. Her new research project is an investigation of different generations of artists and performers who challenge gender normativity in Monterrey, Nuevo León (Mexico). She also works as an Assistant Producer for the Sexing History podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. 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 this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Elizabeth Engelhardt, co-editor of the new collection The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell: Contemporary Appalachian Tables (Ohio University Press, 2019), also edited by Lora Smith and published by Ohio University Press. We are also joined by Courtney Balestier who is a contributor to the collection.Though the collection is diverse in genre – including academic essays alongside poetry, memoir, and illustration – the contents are united around challenging and complicating a notion of a single Appalachia. The editors and many of the contributors are connected to the Appalachian Food Summit, a symposium of foodways scholars, professionals, and enthusiasts who meet for dinners, dialogues, and annual conferences. Engelhardt describes the popular and scholarly attention to Appalachian stereotypes as “a dead end conversation” that the collection tries to avoid and undo by highlighting the creativity and diversity of the region, its people, and its food. As Engelhardt explains in the introduction, the collection’s eclectic mix of genres, topics, and contributors reflects the complexities of the contemporary region by generating cognitive dissonance through the structure of the book.The collection features the voices of people living in and out of the region from a wide variety of experiences and ethnicities, Like many of the contributors in the collection, Balestier describes her own path toward Appalachian identity through living outside the region. Her essay on the “Hillbilly Highway” and the Kentucky social club of Detroit asks if perhaps a coherent Appalachian identity is most meaningful to people who have left the geographic region of the mountains. The topics of the essays run the gamut from the idealized and organic home-canned chow-chow to the mass produced and capitalized Banquet frozen fried chicken and factory-packed pickle spears. Many of the objects that come to represent Appalachia are a compromise, a negotiation between the local and the global: repurposed Cool Whip containers of leftovers, a mass-marketed cookbook with a life story inside, Blue Ridge tacos and kimchi in soup beans, a store-bought dinner that approximates home-made just closely enough to keep a family’s matriarch as the cultural heart of the family. Engelhardt explains in the interview that these stories are not intended to be a definitive representation of Appalachia; rather, she hopes they will be an invitation to a conversation about the relationships of people to place.Elizabeth Engelhardt is John Shelton Reed Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies in the department of American studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. .Lora Smith directs the Appalachian Impact Fund, a social impact investment fund focused on economic transition and opportunity in Eastern Kentucky. Courtney Balestier is a writer whose work focuses on the intersection of place and identity, particularly in her native Appalachia. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

As a novelist, short story author, screenwriter, and Nobel laureate, William Faulkner looms large in modern American literature. Yet the very range of his work and the sources for his rich literary worlds often defy easy assessment. In The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934 (University of Virginia Press, 2020), Carl Rollyson uses both an extensive range of archival collections and Faulkner’s wide-ranging literary output to assess the author’s life and the development of his many famous works. Growing up in Mississippi, young William absorbed his family’s tales and the larger history of the region to which it was tied. Yet it took Faulkner’s journeys outside of his community – first to Canada to train as a pilot for the Royal Air Force, then his extended visits to New York and Europe – to gain the perspective necessary to best use them in his writing. After an early foray into poetry Faulkner focused on writing prose, emerging by the end of the 1920s as an acclaimed author of novels and short stories. As Rollyson shows, this fame brought Faulkner to Hollywood, where he demonstrated quickly his ability to write as well for the rapidly emerging medium of talking pictures.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south