Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
William Harris, the editor of Routledge's The Old South: New Studies of Society and Culture, aims in The New South to introduce students to the historiography of this later volatile period of southern history, which starts from the racial segregation prevalent after the end of the Civil War and continues through the Civil Rights Movements of the 1950s and 1960s. For many years, this historiography centered on the writing of C. Vann Woodward. Woodward remains an important touchstone in the field, but in The New South, Harris gathers the most significant scholarship illustrating the range of challenges to Woodward's interpretation of the South, including the importance of place, the role of women, the significance of memory, and the story of the long Civil Rights Movement. The collection also features an introduction to the historiography of the New South, and a Guide to Further Reading.
Synopsis
The history of the South after the Civil War is generally called "The New South", as it narrates the rise of the new cities of the South and the changes brought by the Civil Rights Movement. But this area of study is also contested, and new work is being done on how the South has changed over time, building on the work of C. Vann Woodward.
J. WIlliam Harris has collected the best of the newer arguments, and set them around several themes-place, women, memory, and the 'long' Civil Rights Movement, to show students what the new arguments are, who is making them, and how they relate to the older version of the history of the New South.