Southern Studies (U.S. South)

From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (review)

by Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas

Published in "The Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics" 1, no. 1 (2012)

James Eastland: The Shadow of Southern Democrats, 1928-1966

by Maarten Zwiers

PhD dissertation, University of Groningen, the Netherlands
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During the civil rights era in the United States, the South was often considered a country of intransigent racism,... more During the civil rights era in the United States, the South was often considered a country of intransigent racism, gothic politics and hooded terrorism. Mississippi in particular was singled out as “the South’s South,” a state where a totalitarian system of white supremacy reigned supreme. Its political establishment, represented by James O. Eastland in the U.S. Senate, accentuated the state’s devotion to segregation in its rhetoric and actions.

Undoubtedly, this image of the Magnolia State and of its political representatives was not solely based on myth. White on black violence reached unimaginable proportions in Mississippi during the 1960s. The state’s leadership did very little to stop this aggression and oftentimes even encouraged it. And white Mississippians offered stiff resistance to the attempts of the federal government to implement civil rights legislation.

This image, however, tells only part of the story about the reality of Mississippi politics. When the theory of interposition and the organizing principle of white massive resistance proved to be impracticable, southern politicians and their constituents had to find methods to accommodate to new social relations without losing too much of the old ways.

My research focuses on this particular subject, and how it developed on the federal and state level. Through the study of the career of James Eastland, I will investigate how this politician responded to the failure of massive resistance, how he adjusted his segregationist views to new realities, and how he used his position of power to defend the white southern way of life.

Eastland operated within the framework of the Democratic Party, which started to lose its status as the party of the South when it embraced a liberal ideology of racial equality. His close relationship with politicians such as John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson complicated his image as defender of the Old South even further. Yet he understood that his political influence in Washington was largely based on his connections with the administration and on his membership of the Democratic Party. As such, the story of James Eastland is a story of conflict and compromise with the federal government, the Democrats, and the agenda of the civil rights movement.

Re-examining the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Toward an Empathetic Pedagogy of the Civil Rights Movement

by Derek Alderman

Alderman, Derek H., Paul Kingsbury, and Owen Dwyer. (forthcoming, 2013) “Re-examining the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Toward an Empathetic Pedagogy of the Civil Rights Movement.” Professional Geographer.

The Andy Griffith Show: Mayberry as Working Class Utopia

by Derek Alderman

Alderman, Derek H., Terri Moreau, and Stefanie Benjamin. 2012. “The Andy Griffith Show: Mayberry as Working Class Utopia.” Blue-Collar Pop Culture: From NASCAR to Jersey Shore, (Vol. 2) Television and the Culture of Everyday Life, Praeger (edited by M. Keith Booker), pp. 51-69.

Innovations in Southern Studies within Geography

by Derek Alderman

Alderman, Derek H. and William Graves. 2011. “Innovations in Southern Studies within Geography.” Southeastern Geographer 51(4): 505-512. Non-refereed introduction to special thematic issue guest edited by the authors.

The Archaeological Study of Slavery and Plantation Life in Tennessee

by Larry McKee

Published in Tennessee Historical Quarterly, 2000, Vol 59(3):188-203.

Review of 30 years of archaeological investigations in the state of Tennessee on sites associated with slavery and... more Review of 30 years of archaeological investigations in the state of Tennessee on sites associated with slavery and plantation life. Particular focus on the author's work at The Hermitage, the home of Andrew Jackson.

Changing the Sound and Image of Commercial Country Music: The John Rich Effect

by David Pruett

For presentation at Society for American Music annual meeting,
March 2012, Charlotte, North Carolina

In his seminal study, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (1997), sociologist Richard Peterson emphasizes... more In his seminal study, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (1997), sociologist Richard Peterson emphasizes the structural arrangements in which musical artists work, i.e. their distinct social system, while deemphasizing the role of innovation in the contributions of a few select people.  Using Nashville artist, producer, songwriter, music publisher, and television personality John Rich as a case study, my research takes a different approach from Peterson, examining instead how a single individual who, while working within Nashville’s commercial structure, has contributed to significant change in the system’s output, 2004-2011.

I emphasize this time frame because it marks a period of dramatic change in both the sound and image of commercial country music. This is evidenced by the sudden popularity in 2004 of Big & Rich (John Rich and Kenny Alphin), Gretchen Wilson, whom Rich discovered and produced, and the MuzikMafia that Rich co-founded and that Country Music Television (CMT) identified as the number-one hit of the year. Rich has since charted forty Billboard Top Forty country singles as a songwriter, ten albums as a recording artist, and eleven Top Ten albums as a producer, and has been featured on a variety of hit television shows, including Donald Trump’s The Celebrity Apprentice, whose fourth season he won in May 2011. Drawing upon extensive interviews with the artist himself, this paper explores Rich’s influence on Nashville’s contemporary scene, contextualizing his frequently underrated cultural and historical significance to the ongoing development of commercial country music.

SSSL 2012 CONFERENCE SCHEDULE (FINAL VERSION) [3:5:12]

by Daniel Cross Turner

"Hellhound on His Trail: Faulknerian Blood-guilt and the Traumatized Form of Lewis Nordan's _Wolf Whistle_"

by Ted Atkinson

Craig Brewer and Kara Walker: Sexing the Difference and Rebuilding the South

by Simone Drake

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, special issue on gender and sexuality. 11.3 (2009): 230-252.

DO MESS WITH IT!: A Sociopolitical Inquiry into Littering and the Response Role of Southern and Nearby States

by Steve Spacek

Masters of Public Administration (Thesis) Project, Texas State Univ.
Presented at SECOPA (Southeastern Public Administation Conference), Little Rock, October 2005

Littering is an environmental crime in the United States--a danger to public health and safety. Although environmental... more Littering is an environmental crime in the United States--a danger to public health and safety. Although environmental quality studies single out Southern States as “having the most befouled” ecological conditions in America, experts have done little research on littering’s effects upon governmental environmental degradation using multivariate statistical analysis. This research exams social and political mores in regard to state ecological surface degradation, focusing on twelve "Old South" and three nearby “fringe” states exhibiting southern cultural characteristics. The research also examines the impact of salient sociopolitical factors that may influence littering and its consequences, through the use of environmental quality indicators of the fifty United States.

A review of relevant literature, on the American sociopolitical, legal, commercial and governmental activities that both create and curtail litter, focusing on the South and nearby states, is discussed. The review arrives at a conceptual, “real world” framework, identifying noteworthy factors that may lead to statewide environmental degradation: geographic location, demographic dynamics, environmental budgetary spending, political culture and availability of existing litter reducing legislation. These aspects become independent variables, operationalized into testable hypotheses through a multivariant model of regression analysis, with dependent variables of livability (quality of life) scores, waste disposal tonnage prices, and daily per person waste disposal for each state.

Findings indicate the three created regression models insufficiently supported ideas that scores, pricings and disposal amounts make reliable state-oriented ecological degradation determinants caused by littering and dumping. The findings did illustrate a fact that American states possessing southern-style Traditionalistic political culture and/or substantial concentrations of impoverished residents tend to have negative quality-of-life (livability) score ratings. Additionally, states with high rates of poverty positively influence the their having landfill waste disposal tonnage prices below national market average. And, states having mandated container deposits rules influence and show higher, above-market average landfill waste disposal tonnage prices.

SSSL CFPs (MLA 2013)

by Daniel Cross Turner

"She Just Called You Honey": My Quandary at Waffle House

by Brett Lunceford

Lunceford, Brett. "'She Just Called You Honey': My Quandary at Waffle House." ETC: A Review of General Semantics 68, no. 4 (2011): 446-60.

An essay is presented on rhetorical strategies used to create relationships between people. It offers the views of a... more An essay is presented on rhetorical strategies used to create relationships between people. It offers the views of a cultural outsider observing waitresses at a Southern United States Waffle House restaurant, where staff often use the epithet "honey" when speaking to customers. The author describes a shift in power where the restaurant staff are in control rather than the customer and the psychological implications, sexual aspects, and relationship defining results of his being called "honey" by the waitstaff.

Linguistic Variation and Change In Atlanta, Georgia

by Hilary Prichard

University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Vol. 16: Iss. 2, Article 17

Louisiana (from The Fifty States)

by Carl L Bankston

Immigration to Mississippi

by Carl L Bankston

Review essay of "How Celtic Culture Invented Southern Literature"

by Michael Newton

published in eKeltoi, 2006

Criticism of a book representative of recent efforts to "Celticise" the American South. Criticism of a book representative of recent efforts to "Celticise" the American South.

Barthes, Wunderkammers, and Photography: The Beginnings of a Visual Autoethnography.

by Terry Ownby

Mark Twain on Womanhood and Feminism

by Emilee Whitesell

"Meaning, if Twain’s views regarding the rights of woman and gender inequality had shifted over the course of his... more "Meaning, if Twain’s views regarding the rights of woman and gender inequality had shifted over the course of his literary career, this change would inherently appear in the reader’s perception of Pudd’nhead Wilson, based solely on the possibilities of the literary medium per se. One aspect of the novel’s narrative form is its “flexibility,” part of which allots the novel the capacity to be “immediately responsive to patterns of cultural change” (Frye 433). It should be further noted that even though the novel as a literary medium or form is incredibly prevalent today, it has had a historical and prominent association with women, and that even in Twain’s time, women associated with the novel in greater numbers, both as writers and readers. Most of Twain’s male literary contemporaries, with certain exceptions, opted for philosophical prose or experimented with poetry, short story, and essay. When we consider other major contributors to the canon of early American literature, men constitute the majority of the canon’s notable figures, such as Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and so on. Most of the novelists in this canon, also with certain exceptions, tend to be women, notably Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott. Surely, then, one claim for the novel’s feminist possibilities stems from the novel’s popularity and frequency amongst the female reader and writer. Imagine, for example, the way in which one of Twain’s female contemporaries may have alternatively perceived Pudd’nhead Wilson, particularly if that woman had also read “In Defense…” or had a history of reading female-centric or female-authored novels, as was characteristic of that time. "

(In)Visibility of the Enslaved within Online Plantation Tourism Marketing: A Textual Analysis of North Carolina Web Sites

by Derek Alderman

Alderman, Derek H., and E. Arnold Modlin, Jr. 2008. “(In)Visibility of the Enslaved within Online Plantation Tourism Marketing: A Textual Analysis of North Carolina Websites.” Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing 25(3-4): 265-281. Contribution to special issue “Geography and Tourism Marketing” (guest edited by Alan Lew and David Duval).