The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South

University of Mississippi historian Wilson (Flashes of Southern Spirit) delivers a sweeping and scholarly examination of the American South’s “regional consciousness.” Spanning the arrival of the first European settlers in the 16th century to the 21st-century emergence—in the pages of glossy magazines like Garden and Gun—of “the southern living concept as one rooted in conspicuous consumption but also in issues of craft and aesthetic values,” Wilson sheds light on the South’s multifaceted identity and major historical developments. Topics include the exploitation of African American labor through slavery, sharecropping, domestic work, and, most recently, low-wage service jobs; how the region’s fraught civil rights history influences its portrayal as the “gothic South of menace and danger” in popular culture; the “key role” University of Alabama football coach Bear Bryant played in fostering racial integration in the Deep South in the 1970s; and the recent emergence of suburban megachurches as discreet, all-encompassing “sanctuaries from the larger world.” Throughout, Wilson counters notions of the region’s “backwardness,” revealing how Southern identity is in a constant state of reinvention, and proves equally adept at analyzing colonial archives and lyrics by the rock group Drive-By Truckers. The result is an impressive and elucidating work of cultural history. Illus. (Jan.)