John Shelton Reed

Cultural Choice Among Southerners Seven Patterns

Marsden and Reed isolate seven patterns of cultural choice using a cluster analysis of a multidimensional scale of items from a 1977 survey of leisure activities in the Southern region of the United States. They then use regression analysis to isolate the social demographic correlates of the clusters.

A Single‐dose pharmacokinetic study of the antisickling agent cetiedil

Cetiedil citrate is an antisickling agent shown to be effective in reducing the severity and duration of acute sickle cell crisis. With the use of a sensitive GC/MS assay, the pharmacokinetic profile of cetiedil was studied in normal men and in men with sickle cell anemia who were not in crisis at the time of study. A peak cetiedil concentration of 70 to 200 ng/ml was found immediately after a 30‐minute drug infusion. The plasma level then gradually declined to approximately 10 ng/ml during a 3‐hour distributive phase. Computer analysis of the data was most consistent with a three‐compartment model. No pharmacokinetic differences were found between the normal men and the subjects with sickle cell. Because the cetiedil plasma levels achieved during this in vivo study are well below concentrations that exhibit antisickling activity in vitro, additional clinical studies will be necessary before an optimal dosing regimen can be established.

Continuity and change in the regional stereotypes of southern college students, 1970–1987

A 1970 study, using the Katz and Braley typical trait list to examine the stereotypes of Americans, white southerners, and white northerners held by a sample of southern college students, was replicated in 1987. The stereotypes were largely unchanged from the earlier study, despite striking changes in American regions and regional relations in the intervening years. White southerners were seen as traditional, religious, family oriented, and courteous compared with white northerners and to Americans in general. Among the many changes in detail, however, were that all three groups were less likely to be seen as intelligent, white northerners and Americans in general were less likely to be seen as industrious, and white southerners were no longer characterized as lazy or ignorant.

Searching for the Dixie Barbecue: Journeys into the Southern Psyche (review)

There aren’t all that many books I wish I’d written, but this is one of them. Wilber “Pete” Caldwell, who lives in Gilmer County, Georgia, and has written on subjects as diverse as public architecture and cynicism, turns his attention here to barbecue, and he obviously had a really good time writing this book. He begins with a brief essay on the history of pit-cooked meat from Prometheus onward, but concludes that barbecue is an American — specifically, a southern — invention if only because most southerners believe that barbecue isn’t barbecue if it’s not called barbecue. Bringing in Prometheus (and the Iliad, and Brillat-Savarin) reveals his learning — worn lightly, thank goodness, since nothing could be more dreary than a pedantic treatment of this subject, except maybe a postmodern one. (In one instance, alas, the learning is deployed carelessly: “Harleian” is not the writer of a medieval cookbook but the name of the British Library collection that includes it.) (Just showing off.) Caldwell moves on to a series of loosely connected chapters that answer a great many fascinating questions that it hadn’t occurred to me to ask. For instance: • how barbecue manners differ from regular table manners, and when each is appropriate • how three places in the same county can all have “the best barbecue in [the county/the state/the South/the nation/the world],” and what “world famous” might mean in that context • why some southerners don’t like Brunswick stew (because it reminds them of school cafeteria food) • why side dishes are generally boring (because they are “designed not to distract from the main event”) • what southerners usually tell the truth about (e.g., war records, athletic achievements) and what they feel free to lie about because everyone knows they’re lying (e.g., fishing, barbecue) books

The Front Porch: "Telling about the South"

Dixie, the song tells us, is the place where old times are not forgotten. Reminiscence about the past does seem to be a major preoccupation for many inhabitants of the southern cultural landscape. Stock car fans remember Bobby Allison, the UDC remembers the Lost Cause, black Texans remember Juneteenth, and we all have a holiday to remember Dr. King. Spotting an opportunity, some enterprising publishers have created a major industry by helping us to remember important things like the best recipe for mint juleps, or how to add an authentic hot tub wing onto a suburban Big House, or what nice people will be wearing to next years Collard Festival.

Howard odum and regional sociology

Howard W. Odum, the distinguished southern sociologist whose career spanned most of the first half of the twentieth century, is now largely forgotten by his own discipline, as is the subdiscipline of regional sociology that he essentially invented. But Odum and his fellow regionalists produced a body of work devoted to detailed description of the South and its institutions that is still widely appreciated by scholars in other disciplines. Much of this work was ahead of its time, in method and assumptions, and some of it was first‐rate intellectual craftsmanship. If it is not what we understand today to be sociology, perhaps that says more about the shortcomings of sociology than of this work.

The self‐conscious South

Richard Gray, WRITING THE SOUTH, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, xiv + 333pp., £12.95 (

Regionalism and the South: Selected Papers of Rupert Vance.

15.95) (paper).

The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society.

Rupert Vance is known as one of the principal developers of the intellectual apparatus of regional sociology, and he observed and commented for some fifty years on the problems and progress of his native region. In these wide-ranging articles, Vance masterfully combines data drawn from historical, demographic, geographical, and statistical sources with anecdotes, personal recollections, and a journalists ability to extract the telling image from a welter of complex circumstances.

The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society

First published in 1972, The Enduring South challenges the conventional wisdom that economic development, urbanization, and the end of racial segregation spelled the end of a distinctive Southern culture. In this edition, John Reed updates the public opinion data to the 1980s and reinforces the books original conclusions: Southerners are different and are likely to stay that way.