Charles Reagan Wilson

Encyclopedia of Southern culture

The American South is a geographical entity, a historical fact, a place in the imagination, and the homeland of an array of Americans who consider themselves southerners. The region is often shrouded in romance and myth, but its realities are as intriguing, as intricate, as its legends.The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture is the first attempt ever notes U.S. News & World Report, to describe every aspect of a regions life and thought, the impact of its history and policies, its music and literature, its manners and myths, even the iced tea that washes down its catfish and cornbread.There are many Souths, many southerners. The regions fundamental uniqueness, in fact, lies in its peculiar combination of cultural traits, a somewhat curious, often elusive blend created by blacks and whites who have lived together for more than 300 years. In telling their stories, the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture ranges from grand historical themes to the whimsical; from the arts and high culture (William Faulkner and Leontyne Price) to folk culture (quilts, banjos, and grits) to popular culture (Gilleys and Gone With the Wind).The Encyclopedias definition of the South is a cultural one: the South is found wherever southern culture is found. Although the focus is on the eleven states of the former Confederacy, this volume also encompasses southern outposts in midwestern and middle-Atlantic border states, even the southern pockets of Chicago, Detroit, and Bakersfield.To foster a deeper understanding of the Souths cultural patterns, the editors have organized this reference book around twenty-four thematic sections, including history, religion, folklore, language, art and architecture, recreation, politics, the mythic South, urbanization, literature, music, violence, law, and media. The life experiences of southerners are discussed in sections on black life, ethnic life, and womens life. Throughout, the broad goal is to identify the forces that have supported either the reality or the illusion of the southern way of life -- people, places, ideas, institutions, events, symbols, rituals, and values.The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture was developed by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. Contributors to the volume include historians, literary critics, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, linguists, theologians, folklorists, architects, ecologists, lawyers, university presidents, newspaper reporters, magazine writers, and novelists.

The South and the Caribbean

The South and the Caribbean. Edited by Douglass Sullivan-Gonzalez and Charles Reagan Wilson. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Pp. xii, 208. Acknowledgments, introduction, notes, contributors, index.

The South’s torturous search for the good books

35.00.) More so than by geographical proximity, the U.S. South and the Caribbean are linked by the legacies of plantation slavery-by the complex codes of racism reinforcing hierarchical and exclusive societies on the one hand, and by extraordinarily rich African-American cultures on the other. The essays collected here examine these legacies, reaching towards new understandings of the regions in question. Each of the four research articles that make up the heart of the volume is matched by a brief commentary, a format that stems from the volumes origin as a symposium. This works best when the paired authors disagree substantially, as is the case with Ralph Lee Woodward, who emphasizes large-scale economic causation and dependency theory in his sketch of the foundational political economy of the Caribbean, and David Eltis, who responds with a call for closer attention to historical contingency and to contextual information. In particular, Eltis carefully rebuts Woodwards claim that the profits of Caribbean slavery jump-started the Industrial Revolution. In leaving the work of synthesis for the reader, Woodward and Eltis fulfill the volumes goal of stimulating comparative analysis of regional problems. The format works less well when the paired authors have much the same thing to say, as is the case with Roger Abrahamss essay revealing the similarities between modes of musical expression in the South and the Caribbean and Kenneth Bilbys comment, which merely adds details to several of Abrahamss points. Both of these essays, in turn, are enriched by Charles Joyners comparison of African culture within the slave systems of the South and the Caribbean. Joyner posits the existence of a common African-American cultural grammar molding local lexicons. This formulation transcends previous dichotomies of African survivals or retentions versus New World inventions, enabling more nuanced comprehension of the real similarities underlying regionally diverse African-American cultural expressions. In one pairing, the first author unintentionally leads the second astray: in the course of developing her rich and provocative comparison of lynching in the South and in Cuba, Aline Helg refers to a Cuban black middle class that failed to defend poor blacks from a massacre perpetrated by the Cuban Army in 1912. …

Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920

The story of the book in Southern history is the story of the perception of dangers associated with reading, of the problems in establishing the communications system essential for making books available, of the differing meanings of books to different groups in Southern culture. This article traces that story from the colonial era through the present, paying special attention to friction between North and South, the role of religious orthodoxy, the dominance of oral culture, deficiencies in the library system, and the rural nature of the region. It ends with a discussion of Southern writers and their role in the development of a book culture.