Local Manufacturing in the Antebellum South and Midwest

1980 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond L. Cohn
Keyword(s):  
Manufacturing Industry ◽  
American South ◽  
Location Theory ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
The South ◽  
Local Manufacturing ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The American South

It has been a long time since clichés like “cotton was king” have satisfied historians as an answer to the question of why the American South did not develop a manufacturing industry at least as vigorous as that of the Midwest in the antebellum years. Professor Cohn thinks that the South may well have done just that, and presents an analysis based on location theory that supports such a conclusion.

Southern Agrarians

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny LeRoy
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
The South ◽  
Robert Penn Warren ◽  
The American South ◽  
John Crowe Ransom

The Southern Agrarians were twelve writers from the American South who advocated a return to an agrarian-based economy throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In their 1930 collection of essays I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974), Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) and others attacked the system of modern industrial capitalism and its effect on the traditional way of Southern life.

Latinas/os in the Southern United States

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Perla M. Guerrero
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
The South ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
New Destinations ◽  
Southern States ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
The American South ◽  
And Migration

Latinas/os were present in the American South long before the founding of the United States of America, yet knowledge about their southern communities in different places and time periods is deeply uneven. In fact, regional themes important throughout the South clarify the dynamics that shaped Latinas/os’ lives, especially race, ethnicity, and the colorline; work and labor; and migration and immigration. Ideas about racial difference, in particular, reflected specifics of place, and intersections of local, regional, and international endeavors and movements of people and resources. Accordingly, Latinas/os’ position and treatment varied across the South. They first worked in agricultural fields picking cotton, oranges, and harvesting tobacco, then in a variety of industries, especially poultry and swine processing and packing. The late 20th century saw the rapid growth of Latinas/os in southern states due to changing migration and immigration patterns that moved from traditional states of reception to new destinations in rural, suburban, and urban locales with limited histories with Latinas/os or with substantial numbers of immigrants in general.

“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done”: Southern Religious History in Retrospect and Prospect

1998 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald G. Mathews
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious History ◽  
The South ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The American South ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Many

One of the most distinguishing marks of the American South is that religion is more important for the people who live there than for their fellow citizens in the restof the country. When this trait began to identify the region is surprisingly unclear, but it has begun to attract attention from scholars of religion and society who have hitherto been esteemed as students primarily of areas outside the South. The study of religion in Dixie cannot but benefit from this change. After centuries of obsession with thickly settled, college-proud, and printexpressive New England—an area not noted for excessive modesty in thinking about its place in the New World—students of American religion are turning to a region whose history has sustained a selfconsciousness that makes its place in American religious history unique. For studying the American South begins with a dilemma born of ambiguity: whether to treat it as a place or an idea. Sometimes, to be sure, the South appears to be both; but sometimes it is “place” presented as an idea; and sometimes it is a place whose historical experience should have, according to reflective writers, taught Americans historical and moral lessons they have failed to learn. Confusion results in part from the South's contested history not only between the region and the rest of the United States but also among various competing groups within its permeable and frequently indistinct borders. Differences between region and nation will, however, continue to dominate conversation even though the myth of southern distinctiveness may mislead students as much as the myth of its evangelical homogeneity. If inquiry about religion in the South should be sensitive to the many faith communities there, the history of the South will still by contrast provide insight into the broader “American” society.

The Violent Citizens of the American South

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-185
Author(s):  
BRUCE E. BAKER
Keyword(s):  
Atlantic World ◽  
American South ◽  
The South ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The American South

The three books reviewed here each examine the American South with one central idea in mind: violence, citizenship, and the Atlantic world. The first two seem quite primal ideas, the sort of things historians have been using for ages, and even the Atlantic world is getting rather long in the tooth now. However, each of these three books, in different ways, demonstrates new ways of thinking about ideas central to our understandings of the South and, at their best, make the familiar strange, giving us new ways to understand an old region. Since two of them are edited collections, it probably makes best sense to take them up first, leaving the monograph for later.

Southern Eruptions in Asian American Narratives

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ho
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American South ◽  
Foreign Student ◽  
The South ◽  
Bruce Lee ◽  
The American South ◽  
Racial Harmony ◽  
Fitting In

This chapter discusses the emergence of Asian American literature and film about the South as they disrupt multiple narratives about race relations and racial subjectivity. It particularly studies Susan Choi's novel The Foreign Student (1998), Mira Nair's feature-length film Mississippi Masala (1992), and Paisley Rekdal's creative nonfiction collection of autobiographical essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In (2000). Asian American stories set in the South erupt the myth of imaginary lines between the past and present, arguing that the inclusion of Asian American voices signals not simply a pluralistic affirmation of racial harmony but the complications of understanding race beyond a black–white paradigm. Indeed, a true understanding of southern race relations crosses the geographic borders of the American South into not only Europe and Africa but the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia as well, because the South is a space that is implicated in larger transnational and global flows.

Discrepancies in Dixie: Asian Americans and the South

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jigna Desai ◽  
Khyati Y. Joshi
Keyword(s):  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
American South ◽  
The South ◽  
Recent Immigrant ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
The American South ◽  
The Relationship

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the relationship between the Asian American and the American South. The figure of the Asian American is perceived to be discrepant in and antithetical to the American South. Within the American imaginary, the Asian American as perpetual foreigner and alien is always seen as a recent immigrant, and therefore associated with contemporary times, while the South is perceived as an anachronistic and isolated region. This renders the two—the Asian American and the South—allegedly mutually exclusive and incongruous. In these imaginings, the South remains a space quintessentially American but one steeped in an antebellum era of White supremacy, anti-Black racism, and outdated isolation. In supposed contrast stands the figure of the Asian American who is associated with immigration and borders, globalization, and contemporaneity.

Resilience of Southern Identity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher A. Cooper ◽  
H. Gibbs Knotts
Keyword(s):  
Republican Party ◽  
American South ◽  
First Century ◽  
The South ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Remarkable Change ◽  
Southern Identity ◽  
Interstate Highway System ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
The American South

The American South has experienced remarkable change over the past half century. Black voter registration has increased, the region’s politics have shifted from one-party Democratic to the near-domination of the Republican Party, and in-migration has increased its population. At the same time, many outward signs of regional distinctiveness have faded--chain restaurants have replaced mom-and-pop diners, and the interstate highway system connects the region to the rest of the country. Given all of these changes, many have argued that southern identity is fading. But here, Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts show how these changes have allowed for new types of southern identity to emerge. For some, identification with the South has become more about a connection to the region’s folkways or to place than about policy or ideology. For others, the contemporary South is all of those things at once--a place where many modern-day southerners navigate the region’s confusing and omnipresent history. Regardless of how individuals see the South, this study argues that the region’s drastic political, racial, and cultural changes have not lessened the importance of southern identity but have played a key role in keeping regional identification relevant in the twenty-first century.

The Economic Revolution in the American South

1987 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Wright
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
Initial Conditions ◽  
Regional Growth ◽  
Labor Costs ◽  
The South ◽  
Apparent Paradox ◽  
Regional Labor Market ◽  
Labor Legislation ◽  
The American South ◽  
Intractable Problem

As recently as twenty-five years ago, regional economic backwardness in the states of the traditional American South was considered an intractable problem of continuing national concern. Obviously, much has changed since then. The modern period of economic convergence for the South only began in earnest when the institutional foundations of its regional labor market were undermined, largely by federal farm and labor legislation dating from the 1930s. Ironically, the resurgence of the South came in the wake of policies which threatened to cripple the region's industrialization, by forcing up labor costs in low-wage sectors. This apparent paradox calls for a closer look at initial conditions as well as at the regional growth process over the last 50 years. Though it may be the case that Southern wages and incomes were bound to converge to national levels eventually, the path actually taken was a choice of one among several alternative paths to that result.

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