Episode 327: American South

For more than two centuries, the American South has fascinated Americans–and increasingly those outside North America. Its economy, politics, religion, race relations, literature, and food have influenced all the commensurate parts of national life. Now A New History of the American South draws together the talents of several historians to create a new narrative of southern history, from the distant past of prehistory to the present. Drawing on old and new scholarship, the New History considers all the experiences of all the peoples of the South: indigenous, black, and white; male and female; poor, elite, and middling. 

W. Fitzhugh Brundage is the editor of A New History of the American South, which means is the impresario and manager of the troupe of actors involved in the creation of an edited volume. Otherwise he is the William Umstead Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written on lynching, utopian socialism in the New South, white and black historical memory in the South since the Civil War, and the history of torture in the United States from the time of European contact to the twenty-first century; and he is currently working on a study of Civil War prisoner of war camps.

For Further Investigation

I've previously talked about the New New South with Zachary Lechner, author of The South of the Mind, way back in Episode 81, in a rare face-to-face, recorded in his office conversation
C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913
James Cobb, C. Vann Woodward: American's Historican
W.J. Cash, Mind of the South
John Shelton Reed, The Enduring South
And I've talked with John Reed twice, once about Bohemian New Orleans, and another time about North Carolina barbecue. Both of them extremely important subjects. I mean it.