5. The evolving South

‘The evolving South’ explores the evolving American South in the 1970s. It looks at the beginning of a southern turn in black American culture, which coincided with the beginnings of a dramatic reverse migration as African Americans moved to the South. The “Sunbelt” became the term for a now-prosperous, fast-growing, and urbanizing South, attracting northern and international investment and gaining a large percentage of federal funding through government programs. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party had anchored the Solid South in national politics and was the only functioning party through most of the twentieth century. The effects of globalization were significant in the American South.

1. Becoming southern

‘Becoming Southern’ discusses how Native Americans became the first southerners. They developed the first regional culture from environmental conditions that would always be a foundation of regional life. The Europeans who came to what became the American South brought with them preconceptions about that area, which were part of a New World that evoked images of fertile land that produced staple crops to enrich European nations, but also represented exploitation of African and indigenous labor and the threat of racial intermingling. The early 1700s were crucial years in the emergent South. The American Revolution itself was a landmark in the appearance of a self-conscious southern identity.

Introduction

The ‘Introduction’ provides an overview of the American South. Its early history illuminates the expansion of Europe into the New World, creating a colonial, plantation, slave society that made it different from other parts of the United States. Two broad geographical subdivisions anchor what became known as “the South”: an Uplands and a Lowlands. Ultimately, speaking of the South brings attention to the importance of regionalism in American history. Atlanta Olympics refurbished the South’s claim to a special southern hospitality, epitomizing such themes as race relations, economic development, and cultural expression that figure prominently in the larger story of the American South.

7. Hybrid sounds

‘Hybrid sounds’ highlights southern music. The first association of music with the American South came from the presence of African American slaves. The pre-Civil War blackface minstrel shows displayed southern connections in its imagery of the plantation. After emancipation, African Americans gained employment in such groups as the Georgia Minstrels, as they moved to New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis, where they adopted the trumpet, the piano, and other instruments that soon became familiar in the music of black southerners. Sacred music, blues music, jazz, and folk music were all important musical genres which shaped Southern culture and the importance of the commercialization of African American music played a role.

3. Tradition and modernization

‘Tradition and modernisation’ details how, after the American Civil War, white southern ideologists minimized slavery’s importance as a cause of the war. The religion of the Lost Cause invested enormous spiritual significance to a cause portrayed as a holy war against northern atheism. The Lost Cause movement had solidified in the last decade of the nineteenth century at the same time new laws excluded African Americans from any political role in the South and segregated them into inferior schools and other public places. Jim Crow became the name for the southern system of racial segregation. The Progressive era, the Great Depression, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal are all important landmarks for this period.

6. Creative words

‘Creative words’ studies how the American South became the home to a vital cultural explosion, seen in such modernist writers as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Eudora Welty. Their themes of agrarian life, the memory of the Old South and the Civil War, religious values, the tensions of the biracial society, and the modernization of society connected their literary achievements with southern life itself. Early nineteenth-century writers generally became defenders of slavery against abolitionist attacks. By the 1920s, southern writers were incorporating aspects of modernism into their works. After 1980, a new term, “post-southernism,” became a descriptor for writers living in the most economically prosperous and racially integrated South ever.

8. Southern tastes

‘Southern tastes’ discusses southern foodways, which go back to the Native American peoples who had established distinctive food traditions by the Mississippian period. European American and African American settlers on the southern frontier came to eat as Indians ate from what grew well in southern soils, heat, and plentiful rain, in a long growing season. The household was the location of food production in the antebellum South, and the domestic economy depended on food. Meanwhile, the rural South, where most black Americans lived, nurtured distinctive African American foodways that went back to African methods of food preparation. The modernization of southern foodways has had an impact on the food of the South.

4. Confronting change

‘Confronting change’ describes how the American South became a major player in the national mobilization for World War II. The war pushed the South far along the path of modernization. Democracy became a watchword during World War II, as the nation fought against fascism and emphasized that democratic values had to be affirmed by all as the reason for fighting. Ultimately, the war produced an assertive black leadership within the South, and the continued reform spirit of the New Deal led to aggressive campaigns for organized labor and for urban efforts to improve African American living conditions and opportunities. The rise of the civil rights movement was crucial to defining this period of American history.

2. Section to nation

‘Section to nation’ examines how, by 1830, the American South had long had a predominantly agricultural economy. Its people soon idealized the agrarian republic that had taken shape after the American Revolution as the basis for an emerging sectional identity. Slavery was the basis of a productive economic system, in which the South was enmeshed with northern merchants and traders and the whole financial world of England. The American Civil War undermined southern ideology dramatically through the emancipation of slaves. The Reconstruction era would be nearly equal to the Civil War in forging a self-conscious white southern identity.