The "New South"–romantic it ain't. The Old South was columned mansions lorded over by hospitable, courtly gentlemen and ornamented by belles, while gallant Confederate officers defended their Way of Life from crude Yankee invaders (It was also a rough, violent land of whip-scarred slaves and impoverished white farmers–see History 262). The "New South," on the other hand, is whitebread–glass buildings, urban sprawl, clogged expressways. If there's a history to the New South at all, it's not terribly interesting–right? To the contrary--it is not until the death of the Old South that southern history really got interesting. For the apparently bland landscape of the modern South is haunted by dark ghosts. Sharecroppers still work the Delta soil in the shadow of great machines; economic insecurity still frequents the hollows of Appalachia and the mill towns of the Carolinas. Defeat in war, and economic and political subordination to outside powers, generated grievances among whites that have long survived modern prosperity and political ascendancy. Above all, the New South has been a land of extremes–the extreme violence of the lynch mob, the extreme inequality of plantations and company towns, the extreme injustice of Jim Crow. All gone now, we think–and yet much closer to us in time than we like to think, and within the living memories of many southerners, including your instructor.

     At the same time, the end of slavery opened up southern society to the sort of contention that had been silenced by the repression and paranoia of the slave regime. The Reconstruction era gave former slaves new power not only to shape their own lives but to shape their own government as well–power that a vicious white-supremacist reaction could never completely destroy. Ordinary whites, finding themselves the victims of "progress," sought economic change through the Populist movement and other forms of action–or vented their frustrations on helpless blacks and a rear-guard struggle against modernity. Other southerners–promoters of the first "New South," progressive-era social and educational reformers, post-World-War-II economic developers--grasped at opportunities to remake the region in a modern image–a "modern image" that until recently included the imposition of segregation and elite-white control of politics. In the twentieth century, an expanding group of southern intellectuals brought contention over the shape of southern society into the world of ideas. And, finally, in your instructor's time, an indigenously southern civil rights movement proved that the "southern way of life" did not have to be one thing only–that the South was not a party line, or a frozen museum piece, but a living tradition that its people could draw upon to strive toward a better and more just way of life.

     Thus the story of the New South is one of contention, indeed of revolution. The end of slavery, the "unfinished revolution" of Reconstruction, the Populist "revolt," the economic revolution of the New Deal and post-World-War-II years, the collapse of Jim Crow–these were all times when southerners felt the earth move under their feet. If poverty, racism, and the long-lasting sting of defeat and subordination still haunt the South, its people have also shown, time after time, a creative capacity to pursue and accommodate to change–a capacity drawing on distinctly southern traditions of faith, democratic politics, and community solidarity. They have displayed even more a capacity for artistic creativity, be it the high literary culture of the Vanderbilt Agrarians or William Faulkner, or the folk arts of jazz, blues, and the various streams of country music that have made "southern culture" so resonant to the daily struggles of peoples around the world. If a truly "good" South remains to be completed, southerners have the capacity to create it. If this course has an "objective," it's to make that point.

  Course Outline and Assignments

Monday, April 27, 9:00 AM--PRIMARY FINAL EXAMINATION

Thursday, April 30, Noon--ALTERNATE FINAL EXAMINATION

Nuts 'n' Bolts

There will be one midterm examination in the course of the semester, which will count 25 per cent of the final grade. The final examination will count 30 per cent of the final grade. In addition, each student will write three (3) short (3-4 pp.) papers in the course of the term, on topics to be assigned in due course by the instructor; these will count 15 per cent each of the final grade. Six opportunities to write will be provided in the course of the term, keyed to the units between discussion sections. Each paper that you choose to write will be due on the date of the appropriate discussion section, marked above with an *. Except in clear medical or family emergencies, extensions will be granted only if applied for at least one day in advance; past due papers will lose one Vanderbilt grade point for each day (including weekends) overdue.

 Your attention is called to that portion of the VU Student Handbook dealing with the Honor System. Note in particular that it is the student's responsibility to understand the principles of intellectual honesty as they apply to this course (to say nothing of how they apply to life in general). Feel free to consult the instructor if issues of genuine moral ambiguity arise.

 Readings:

Paul D. Escott, David R. Goldfield, Sally G. McMillen, and Helen Hayes Turner, eds., Major Problems in the History of the American South, Volume II: The New South, Second Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).

James L. Roark, Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977).

David L. Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880-1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).

Jacqueline Jones Royster, ed., Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1997).

David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis, eds., Confronting Southern Poverty in the Great Depression (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1996).

Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

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