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The American South Series
This series is devoted to publishing innovative work on the American South. Its goal is to reach across conventional boundaries of discipline, geography, and chronology to foster fresh perspectives on the region. The series welcomes historians, literary scholars, anthropologists, geographers, photographers, folklorists, journalists, and others whose work focuses on the southeastern United States during any period of the past or present. The Press encourages interdisciplinary and comparative studies as well as those that examine the place of the region in national or international contexts.
Series Editors: Elizabeth R. Varon & Orville Vernon Burton
Against the Hounds of Hell
A Life of Howard ThurmanAn inspiration to Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and other leaders of the civil rights movement, Howard Thurman was a crucial figure in the history of African Americans in the 20th century. Until now, however, he has not received the biographical treatment he deserves. In Against the Hounds... More
Facing Freedom
An African American Community in Virginia from Reconstruction to Jim CrowThe history of African Americans in southern Appalachia after the Civil War has largely escaped the attention of scholars of both African Americans and the region. In Facing Freedom, Daniel Thorp relates the complex experience of an African American community in southern Appalachia as it negotiated... More
Capital and Convict
Race, Region, and Punishment in Post–Civil War AmericaBoth in the popular imagination and in academic discourse, North and South are presented as fundamentally divergent penal systems in the aftermath of the Civil War, a difference mapped onto larger perceived cultural disparities between the two regions. The South’s post Civil War embrace of chain... More
The Uplift Generation
Cooperation across the Color Line in Early Twentieth-Century VirginiaOffering a fresh look at interracial cooperation in the formative years of Jim Crow, The Uplift Generation examines how segregation was molded, not by Virginia’s white political power structure alone but rather through the work of a generation of Virginian reformers across the color line who from... More
The Risen Phoenix
Black Politics in the Post–Civil War SouthThe Risen Phoenix charts the changing landscape of black politics and political culture in the postwar South by focusing on the careers of six black congressmen who served between the Civil War and the turn of the nineteenth century: John Mercer Langston of Virginia, James Thomas Rapier of Alabama... More
Designing Dixie
Tourism, Memory, and Urban Space in the New SouthAlthough many white southerners chose to memorialize the Lost Cause in the aftermath of the Civil War, boosters, entrepreneurs, and architects in southern cities believed that economic development, rather than nostalgia, would foster reconciliation between North and South. In Designing Dixie, Reiko... More
A Deed So Accursed
Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881–1940From the end of Reconstruction to the onset of the civil rights era, lynching was prevalent in developing and frontier regions that had a dynamic and fluid African American population. Focusing on Mississippi and South Carolina because of the high proportion of African Americans in each state... More
Radical Reform
Interracial Politics in Post-Emancipation North CarolinaRadical Reform describes a remarkable chapter in the American pro-democracy movement. It portrays the largely unknown leaders of the interracial Republican Party who struggled for political, civil, and labor rights in North Carolina after the Civil War. In so doing, they paved the way for the... More
What Reconstruction Meant
Historical Memory in the American SouthA great deal has been written about southern memory centering on the Civil War, particularly the view of the war as a valiant lost cause. In this challenging new book Bruce Baker looks at a related, and equally important, aspect of southern memory that has been treated by historians only in passing... More
Religion and the Making of Nat Turner's Virginia
Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740-1840Religion and the Making of Nat Turner's Virginia provides a new interpretation of the rise of evangelical Christianity in the early American South by reconstructing the complex, biracial history of the Baptist movement in southeastern Virginia. This region and its religious history became a... More
From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850-1915
In From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, Stephen A. West revises understandings of the American South by offering a new perspective on two iconic figures in the region’s social landscape. "Yeoman," a term of praise for the small landowning farmer, was commonly used during the... More
Black, White, and Olive Drab
Racial Integration at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and the Civil Rights MovementOne of the first Army bases to implement on a large scale President Truman’s call for racial integration of the armed forces, Fort Jackson, South Carolina, quickly took its place in the Defense Department’s official history of the process. What reporters, and later on, historians, overlooked was... More
Murder, Honor, and Law
Four Virginia Homicides from Reconstruction to the Great DepressionIn 1868 a scion of one of the leading families of Richmond, Virginia, ambushed and killed the city’s most controversial journalist over an article that had dishonored the killer’s family. In 1892 a Democratic politician killed a crusading Danville minister after a dispute at the polls. In 1907 a... More
South by Southwest
Planter Emigration and Identity in the Slave SouthBetween 1815 and 1861 thousands of planters formed a unique emigrant group in American history. A slaveholding, landholding elite, southerners from Georgia and South Carolina uprooted themselves from their communities and headed for their society’s borderlands with a frequency and intensity... More

The Lynching of Emmett Till
A Documentary NarrativeAt 2:00 A.M. on August 28, 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, visiting from Chicago, was abducted from his great-uncle’s cabin in Money, Mississippi, and never seen alive again. When his battered and bloated corpse floated to the surface of the Tallahatchie River three days later and two local... More
A Way out of No Way
Claiming Family and Freedom in the New SouthAn African American folk saying declares, "Our God can make a way out of no way.... He can do anything but fail." When Dianne Swann-Wright set out to capture and relate the history of her ancestors—African Americans in central Virginia after the Civil War—she had to find that way, just as her... More
Ladies and Gentlemen on Display
Planter Society at the Virginia Springs, 1790–1860Each summer between 1790 and 1860, hundreds and eventually thousands of southern men and women left the diseases and boredom of their plantation homes and journeyed to the healthful and entertaining Virginia Springs. While some came in search of a cure, most traveled over the mountains to enjoy the... More
Forgotten Time
The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil WarAlthough it came to epitomize the Cotton South in the twentieth century, the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta emerged as a distinct entity in the decades following the Civil War. As other southerners confronted the need to rebuild, the Delta remained mostly wilderness in 1865. Elsewhere, planters struggled... More
Bloody Promenade
Reflections on a Civil War BattleOn 5 and 6 May 1864, the Union and Confederate armies met near an unfinished railroad in central Virginia, with Lee outmanned and outgunned, hoping to force Grant to fight in the woods. The name of the battle—Wilderness—suggests the horror of combat at close quarters and an inability to see the... More
Slave in A Box
The Strange Career of Aunt JemimaThe figure of the mammy occupies a central place in the lore of the Old South and has long been used to ullustrate distinct social phenomena, including racial oppression and class identity. In the early twentieth century, the mammy became immortalized as Aunt Jemima, the spokesperson for a line of... More
Haunted Bodies
Gender and Southern TextsIn Haunted Bodies, Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson have brought together some of our most highly regarded southern historians and literary critics to consider race, gender, and texts through three centuries and from a wealth of vantage points. Works as diversive as eighteenth-century... More