The Mind Of The South

Ever since its publication in 1941, The Mind of the South has been recognized as a path-breaking work of scholarship and as a literary achievement of enormous eloquence and insight in its own right. From its investigation of the Southern class system to its pioneering assessments of the region's legacies of racism, religiosity, and romanticism, W. J. Cash's book defined the way in which millions of readers— on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line—would see the South for decades to come. This fiftieth-anniversary edition of The Mind of the South includes an incisive analysis of Cash himself and of his crucial place in the history of modern Southern letters.

Introduction. Raising the white South -- The many faces of the South: national images of white southernness during the civil rights era, 1960-1971 -- "This world from the standpoint of a rocking chair": country-rock and the South in the countercultural imagination -- "When in doubt, kick ass": the masculine South(s) of George Wallace, Walking tall, and Deliverance -- A tale of two Souths: the Allman Brothers Band's countercultural southernness and Lynyrd Skynyrd's rebel macho -- "I respect a good southern white man": Jimmy Carter's healing southernness and the 1976 presidential campaign -- Epilogue. Playing that dead band's song -- Appendix. Southern rock in the 1970s: survey questions

From the seventeenth century Cavaliers and Uncle Tom's Cabin to Civil Rights museums and today's conflicts over the Confederate flag, here is a brilliant portrait of southern identity, served in an engaging blend of history, literature, and popular culture. In this insightful book, written with dry wit and sharp insight, James C. Cobb explains how the South first came to be seen--and then came to see itself--as a region apart from the rest of America. As Cobb demonstrates, the legend of the aristocratic Cavalier origins of southern planter society was nurtured by both northern and southern writers, only to be challenged by abolitionist critics, black and white. After the Civil War, defeated and embittered southern whites incorporated the Cavalier myth into the cult of the "Lost Cause," which supplied the emotional energy for their determined crusade to rejoin the Union on their own terms. After World War I, white writers like Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner and other key figures of "Southern Renaissance" as well as their African American counterparts in the "Harlem Renaissance"--Cobb is the first to show the strong links between the two movements--challenged the New South creed by asking how the grandiose vision of the South's past could be reconciled with the dismal reality of its present. The Southern self-image underwent another sea change in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, when the end of white supremacy shook the old definition of the "Southern way of life"--but at the same time, African Americans began to examine their southern roots more openly and embrace their regional, as well as racial, identity. As the millennium turned, the South confronted a new identity crisis brought on by global homogenization: if Southern culture is everywhere, has the New South become the No South? Here then is a major work by one of America's finest Southern historians, a magisterial synthesis that combines rich scholarship with provocative new insights into what the South means to southerners and to America as well.

You're in the American South now, a proud region with a distinctive history and culture. A place that echoes with names like Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee, Scarlett O'Hara and Uncle Remus, Martin Luther King and William Faulkner, Billy Graham, Mahalia Jackson, Muhammad Ali, Elvis Presley. Home of the country blues and country music, bluegrass and Dixieland jazz, gospel music and rock and roll. Where menus offer both down-home biscuits and gravy and uptown shrimp and grits. Where churches preach against "cigarettes, whiskey, and wild, wild women" (all Southern products) and where American football is a religion. For more than thirty years John Shelton Reed has been "minding" the South--watching over it, providing commentary upon it. He is the author or editor of thirteen books about the South, and despite his disclaimer regarding formal study of Southern history, Reed has read widely and in depth about the South. His primary focus is upon Southerners' present-day culture and consciousness, but he knows that one must approach the South historically in order to understand the place and its people. Why is the South so different from the rest of the country? Rupert Vance, Reed's predecessor in sociology at Chapel Hill, once observed that the very existence of the South is a triumph of history over geography and economics. The South has resisted being assimilated by the larger United States and has kept a personality that is distinctly its own.That is why Reed celebrates the South. His essays cover everything from great thinkers about the South--Eugene D. Genovese, C. Vann Woodward, M. E. Bradford--to the uniqueness of a region that was once a hotbed of racism, but has recently attracted hundreds of thousands of blacks transplanted from the North. There are even a few chapters about Southerners who have devoted their talents to different subjects altogether, from politics or soft drinks to rock and roll or the design of silver jewelry. Reed writes with wit and Southern charm, never afraid to speak his mind, even when it comes to taking his beloved South to task. While readers may not share all his opinions, most will agree that John Shelton Reed is one of the best "South watchers" there is.

Bringing together Michael O’Brien’s pathbreaking essays on the American South, this book examines the persistence and vitality of southern intellectual history from the early nineteenth century to the present day. At once a broad survey of southern thought and a meditation on the subject as an academic discipline, Rethinking the South deftly integrates social history, literary criticism, and historiography as it positions the South within the wider traditions of European and American culture. In his thoughtful introduction and throughout the ten essays that follow, O'Brien stresses the tradition of Romanticism as a central theme, binding togethere figures as disparate as critic Hugh Legare, literary scholar Edwin Mims, poets Richard Henry Wilde and Allen Tate, and historians W. J. Cash and C. Vann Woodward. First published as a collection in 1988, these essays confirm O’Brien’s position as a pioneer in establishing and defining the enterprise of southern intellectual history.

Examining the interaction between literature and history, King shows how such writers as William Faulkner, James Agee, W. J. Cash, Allen Tate, and C. Vann Woodward confronted Southern traditions rooted in the plantation culture, the Civil War, Reconstruction and racial reaction and raised them to a historical awareness. In the process some of these figures rejected while others reaffirmed the essence of what King calls the "Southern family romance." Book jacket.

William Abraham studied Philosophy at the University of Ghana, and even more Philosophy at Oxford University. Thereafter, he gained permission to take part in the competitive examination and interview for a fellowship at All Souls College. The examination was once described, with some exaggeration, as the hardest exam in the world! It included a three-hour essay. Following his success in becoming the first African fellow of All Souls, his interest in African politics quickly developed into a Pan-African perspective. The Mind of Africa, written while he was still at All Souls, was a fruit of that enlarged perspective. After several years as a Fellow, he had occasion to visit Ghana in 1962. There Kwame Nkrumah, then President of Ghana, successfully persuaded him to return to Ghana to teach at the University of Ghana, Legon and he subsequently resigned from All Souls. In 1968, he went to the United States as a visiting professor. This was followed by invitations to teach at various academic institutions there, including Berkeley and Stanford. He subsequently settled in California, where he continued to teach and research philosophy in the University of California at Santa Cruz until his retirement. The Mind of Africa appeared at a time when a number of African countries were obtaining, or fighting for, their political freedom from their colonial rulers and becoming independent nations and expecting to build new societies in accordance with their own visions and conceptions, though not necessarily jettisoning all the features of their colonial heritage. Building new societies requires appropriate ideologies and philosophies fashioned within the crucible of their cultural and historical experiences. Thus, the relation between ideology and society is taken up at the very outset of the book... The Mind of Africa is important for Africas future and identity.

In 2019, of the 252 Republican members of Congress, only 3 were African American. Lincoln’s progressive Republicanism had been supplanted by the regressive 1950s Southern-styled Democratic Party ideology of white primacy. America’s initial morally flawed constitution permitted slavery to persist, catalyzing and sustaining hostile unresolvable ideological warfare, driven by slavery issues, the Civil War, a failed post-war Reconstruction effort, and a brutal Jim Crow suppression. And since the 1980s, politically contrived Republican race-neutral legislation and policies have disproportionally targeted minorities, resulting in discriminatory housing, voting, policing, and criminal justice outcomes. Over the centuries, excessive white self-serving social and economic individualism of privilege, religious ethno-cultural racism, and a destructive anti-progressive, anti-intellectual, and anti-scientific mentality has been ingrained within the nation’s DNA. This is America’s continuum of racial democracy and injustice.

During the Civil War, some Confederates sought to prove the distinctiveness of the southern people and to legitimate their desire for a separate national existence through the creation of a uniquely southern literature and culture. Michael Bernath follows the activities of a group of southern writers, thinkers, editors, publishers, educators, and ministers--whom he labels Confederate cultural nationalists--in order to trace the rise and fall of a cultural movement dedicated to liberating the South from its longtime dependence on Northern books, periodicals, and teachers. By analyzing the motives driving the struggle for Confederate intellectual independence, by charting its wartime accomplishments, and by assessing its failures, Bernath makes provocative arguments about the nature of Confederate nationalism, life within the Confederacy, and the perception of southern cultural distinctiveness.

The South Carolina Encyclopedia Guide to South Carolina Writers expands the range of writers included in the landmark South Carolina Encyclopedia. This guide updates the entries on writers featured in the original encyclopedia and augments that list substantially with dozens of new essays on additional authors from the late eighteenth century to the present who have contributed to the Palmetto State’s distinctive literary heritage. Each profile in this concise reference includes essential biographical facts and critical assessments to place the featured writers in the larger context of South Carolina’s literary tradition. The guide comprises 127 entries written by more than seventy literary scholars, and it also highlights the sixty-five writers inducted thus far into the South Carolina Academy of Authors, which serves as the state’s literary hall of fame. Rich in natural beauty and historic complexity, South Carolina has long been a source of inspiration for writers. The talented novelists, essayists, poets, playwrights, journalists, historians, and other writers featured here represent the countless anonymous individuals who have shared tales and lore of South Carolina.

In a provocative exploration of the triumphant South--the region that increasingly defines American politics and values--the former Atlanta bureau chief of The New York Times illuminates the people, places, and passions of this influential section of the country--an area that has effectively decided the outcome of every presidential election in the past 30 years.

This book provides a compelling and incisive portrait of James Madison the scholar and political philosopher. Through extensive historical research and analysis of Madison's heretofore underappreciated 1791 "Notes on Government," Madison's scholarly contributions are cast in a new light, yielding a richer, more comprehensive understanding of his political thought than ever before. Tracing Madison's intellectual investigations of republics and philosophers, both ancient and modern, this book invites the reader to understand the pioneering ideas of the greatest American scholar of politics and republicanism - and, in the process, to discover anew the vast possibilities and potential of that great experiment in self-government known as the American republic.

With a fresh take on social dynamics in the antebellum South, Jonathan Daniel Wells contests the popular idea that the Old South was a region of essentially two classes (planters and slaves) until after the Civil War. He argues that, in fact, the region h

The appearance in 1920 of H. L. Mencken's scathing essay about the intellectual and cultural impoverishment of the South, "The Sahara of the Bozart", set off a firestorm of reaction in the region that continued unabated for much of the next decade. In Serpent in Eden, Mencken scholar Fred Hobson examines Mencken's love-hate relationship with the South. He explores not only Mencken's savage criticism of the region but also his efforts to encourage southern writers and the bold "little magazines", such as the Reviewer and the Double Dealer, that started up in the South during the 1920s. Originally published in 1974. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

In Decoding the Mind of God author O. M Kelly delves into the unconscious mind and discovers the secrets of the collective consciousness, showing how we can realize the potential of the human mind through belief in ourselves. The Laws of the universe are identical to the collective consciousness, they reveal an answer to every question we are capable of asking. We constantly receive these answers through the vibrations of the energy fields through our being, all without us knowing how to realign our intelligence with our unconscious mind. The truth remains hidden to us. Surprising as it may seem, the key to understanding ourselves lies in a mathematical language, which is the make-up of the unconscious mind. Kelly explores this language through the texts and myths of myriad cultures and belief systems, notwithstanding the truth of the science behind the Egyptian Hieroglyphs and the stories collected in the Bible. As we read this volume we realize that all of these stories are connected to our own story within. Kelly’s perceptions of the order of higher consciousness are framed by stories from her experiences of personal discovery and over twenty years of researching, lecturing and teaching all around the world. Once these codes are unveiled, we earn our freedom where we can release the fear in which humanity habitually traps itself, creating our accidents, diseases, why we die, right up to explaining extra terrestrial intelligence. This book exposes the secret codes of the universal language that will help us achieve the divine unity with the universe and ourselves.