



The Southern Way of Life
Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
University of Mississippi historian Wilson (Flashes of Southern Spirit) delivers a sweeping and scholarly examination of the American South's "regional consciousness." Spanning the arrival of the first European settlers in the 16th century to the 21st-century emergence—in the pages of glossy magazines like Garden and Gun—of "the southern living concept as one rooted in conspicuous consumption but also in issues of craft and aesthetic values," Wilson sheds light on the South's multifaceted identity and major historical developments. Topics include the exploitation of African American labor through slavery, sharecropping, domestic work, and, most recently, low-wage service jobs; how the region's fraught civil rights history influences its portrayal as the "gothic South of menace and danger" in popular culture; the "key role" University of Alabama football coach Bear Bryant played in fostering racial integration in the Deep South in the 1970s; and the recent emergence of suburban megachurches as discreet, all-encompassing "sanctuaries from the larger world." Throughout, Wilson counters notions of the region's "backwardness," revealing how Southern identity is in a constant state of reinvention, and proves equally adept at analyzing colonial archives and lyrics by the rock group Drive-By Truckers. The result is an impressive and elucidating work of cultural history. Illus.