New Books in the American South

The “ownership” of Southern food is a divisive cultural issue, reflective of the ongoing struggle for racial justice in America. Michael Twitty shares with us that struggle in The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South (Harper Collins: Amistad 2017). He brings to life the unsung heroes of American food history, the black cooks in slavery and freedom who created an innovative and syncretic cuisine. Like them, he builds upon the South’s diverse botanical ecosystems, a continent of indigenous nations, and the long roots of memory, extending back across the middle passage to West Africa. For Twitty, this is also a tale of family. He shares his ancestors experiences through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents. He travels from abandoned cotton plantations to black-owned organic farms, from synagogues in Georgia to vodun rituals in New Orleans. As Twitty takes us on this journey, he shows how food and memory together can heal. He reminds that as uncomfortable as honest conversation about racism’s legacy can be, its the only path to rejuvenating body, soul, and American community. Jeremy Wood is a Seattle appellate attorney. Much of his scholarly work has concerned Native American interests. He also serves as Co-Chair for the Seattle City Human Rights Commission and as a Jewish educator. You can learn more about his work by visiting https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyfwood. He can be reach at jeremywood10@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

The Hidden South–Come Home (Beaver’s Pond Press, 2016) is the result of an ongoing project that documents intimate stories of people who are often overlooked in society. Photographer and author Brent Walker traveled around the southern United States meeting and interacting with people of different backgrounds and experiences. Many of his subjects live with addiction and struggle daily with their survival. Started in September 2014, The Hidden South Come Home soon developed a large online presence and subsequent following, and in 2015, the project followers supported the funding the book. After almost a year in production, the book was published in early 2016. Since the release of the book, Brent spends his time speaking, teaching, and working on a second book, which he considers a second phase of the project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Long viewed conventionally through the lens of inter-European/colonist conflict, warfare in colonial era North America is currently experiencing a resurgence as a new generation of military historians employ a variety of tools and methods borrowed from other fields and disciplines. Our latest guest, Daniel Tortora, does so in his book Carolina in Crisis: Cherokees, Colonists, and Slaves in the American Southwest, 1756-1763. By focusing on the French and Indian War's Southern theater, particularly in the two Carolinas and Virginia, Tortora crafts a unique account of an area generally overlooked in the face of the larger body of scholarship focused on events in the Northern Colonies and Canada. Carolina in Crisis employs a conceptual narrative and analytical framework often associated with Borderlands theory to craft an intricate account of conflict and how it was viewed across three different cultural boundaries: white European, native American, and enslaved Africans. The end product is a rich and rewarding addition to the historiography of early American warfare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Julie M. Weise‘s new book Corazon de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South Since 1910 (UNC Press, 2015) is the first book to comprehensively document Mexicans’ and Mexican Americans’ long history of migration to the U.S. South. It recounts the untold histories of Mexicanos’ migrations to New Orleans, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina as far back as 1910. In the heart of Dixie, Mexicanos navigated the Jim Crow system, cultivated community in the cotton fields, purposefully appealed for help to the Mexican government, shaped the southern conservative imagination in the wake of the civil rights movement, and embraced their own version of suburban living at the turn of the twenty-first century. Rooted in U.S. and Mexican archival research, oral history interviews, and family photographs, Corazon de Dixie unearths not just the facts of Mexicanos’ long-standing presence in the U.S. South but also their own expectations, strategies, and dreams. Also, check out the book’s companion website here or primary sources, teaching materials, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

In Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights (The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, a writer and former journalist, introduces us to the larger-than-life personality Harry Golden. A writer, publisher, and humorist, as well as activist, Golden used his popularity and incredibly wide network for a variety of causes, most notably the civil rights movement. Hartnett explores the ways Golden utilized his talents (he was, at his core, a salesman) to make America more equal and free. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Glenn Feldman is the editor of Nation within a Nation: The American South and the Federal Government (University Press of Florida, 2014). Feldman is professor of history at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Painting Dixie Red: When, Where, Why, and How the South Became Republican and Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South. Some of political scientists included in the volume are: Thomas Schaller, Allan McBride, and Natalie Motise Davis. In the introduction, Feldman writes “No other region has been more important than the South in determining the course of U.S. politics and history. This was so in 1776, and 1865, and is still true today, although in vastly different ways.” Nation within a Nation sets out to explore this history. The book is an interesting read for those concerned with the history of the South, but also for those interested in how newer issues such as the US-Mexican border and criminal justice policies fit within the region’s history. The chapters by Allan McBride and Natalie Motise Davis, in particular, provide new information on the relationship between the South and the Tea Party. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Glenn Feldman is the author of The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865-1944 (Alabama UP 2013). He is professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the author of eight other books. Feldman’s book is a deeply provocative analysis of southern politics and political history. He explains the recurring themes in southern politics as an outgrowth of “Reconstruction Syndrome”. Themes of anti-government, anti-taxation, and deep suspicion of outsiders (African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants), run throughout the history of southern politics, and remain today. Feldman focuses much of his book on showing that the Democratic Party lost the south long before the passage of the civil rights laws in the 1960s. He tracks the shift in political allegiances back to the 1930s and even earlier. The book challenges conventional notions and is likely to stimulate debate and controversy. It is a worthwhile read for historians of the time period and political scientists, alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

It’s getting harder and harder to trailblaze in the field of American Studies. More and more, writers have to follow paths created by others, imposing new interpretations on old ones in never-ending cycles of revision. But Jonathan Daniel Wells did find something new: Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge UP, 2011; paperback, 2013) is the first to focus in on women journalists, both black and white, in the nineteenth-century American South. The South had a vital periodical marketplace where curious women could engage with politics, belles lettres, science, diplomacy, and other allegedly unfeminine subjects. Examining evidence from both writers and readers, Wells’s book asks questions about literary culture, celebrity, the limits of dissent, and North-South differences that readers will find refreshing and engaging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

The story of the rise of Jim Crow in Jacksonville, Florida is in many ways illustrative of the challenges facing newly emancipated African Americans throughout the South with local officials erecting barriers to black participation; blacks building institutions to overcome those obstacles; then Southern bigots using the reaction of blacks as justification for both the initial barriers and further draconian measures. This usually involved labeling black political action as in some way primitive, corrupt or unfairly self-interested. For example, many in the white establishment in Jacksonville resented that blacks voted for Republicans out of loyalty, yet they also attacked blacks for voting for ‘reform Democrats’ out of self -interest. So, the solution? Political education of some kind? Outreach perhaps? No, instead they implemented what was called the ‘Australian ballot’: a subway map style list of candidates with intersecting names and titles intended to either confuse or disqualify many black voters. This hostility to black political agency extended to all aspects of public life in Jacksonville, with each reaction forcing blacks further from power and from view. Robert Cassanello’s To Render Invisible: Jim Crow and Public Life in New South Jacksonville (University Press of Florida, 2013) explores this dynamic in rich detail, helping further our understanding of the post Civil War but pre- Civil Rights era in the South. Robert was kind enough to speak with me. I hope you enjoy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Most historians have understood Native American history through the use of the “middle ground” metaphor. Notably, historian Richard White used this metaphor to explain the social relationships between Native American with European Americans in the Great Lakes region in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries. Increasingly, more studies have also emerged to explain such encounters between Native Americans and African Americans, particularly in the Southeast. Angela Pulley Hudson, Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M, is firmly engaged within this wide body of literature in her first published monograph, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). She vividly describes the history of Creeks and their ideas about encounters with outsiders of their land along the geographic borders of Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee from the early national era to the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Her work not only contributes to the analysis of contested borderlands in American history, but also complicates our understanding about the intersections of racial, gender and kinship boundaries in an eloquent way that makes for a great read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south