Contributions by Catherine Clinton, Joseph Crespino, Jane Dailey, Lisa Lindquist Dorr, Anya Jabour, John F. Kasson, Jennifer Ritterhouse, and Charles F. Robinson II The concept of southern manners may evoke images of debutantes being introduced to provincial society or it might conjure thoughts of the humiliating behavior white supremacists expected of African Americans under Jim Crow. The essays in Manners and Southern History analyze these topics and more. Scholars here investigate the myriad ways in which southerners from the Civil War through the civil rights movement understood manners. Contributors write about race, gender, power, and change. Essays analyze the ways southern white women worried about how to manage anger during the Civil War, the complexities of trying to enforce certain codes of behavior under segregation, and the controversy of college women's dating lives in the raucous 1920s. Writers study the background and meaning of Mardi Gras parades and debutante balls, the selective enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws, and arguments over the form that opposition to desegregation should take. Concluding essays by Jane Dailey and John F. Kasson summarize and critique the other articles and offer a broader picture of the role that manners played in the social history of the South.

This book tells the story of how people struggled to define, reform, and overturn racial etiquette as a social guide for Southern Rhodesian politics. Underlying what appears to be a static history of racial etiquette is a dynamic narrative of anxieties over racial, gender, and generational status. From the outlawing of "insolence" toward officials to a last-ditch "courtesy campaign" in the early 1960s, white elites believed that their nimble use of racial etiquette would contain Africans' desire for social and political change. In turn, Africans mobilized around stories of racial humiliation. Allison Shutt's research provides a microhistory of the changing discourse about manners and respectability in Southern Rhodesia that by the 1950s had become central to fiercely contested political positions and nationalist tactics. Intense debates among Africans and whites alike over the deployment of courtesy and rudeness reveal the social-emotional tensions that contributed to political mobilization on the part of nationalists and the narrowing of options for the course of white politics. Drawing on public records, legal documents, and firsthand accounts, this first book-length history of manners in twentieth-century colonial Africa provides a compelling new model for understanding politics and culture through the prism of etiquette. Allison K. Shutt is professor of history at Hendrix College.

A funny and provocative cultural history of class, manners, and the decline of civility In his smart and thought provoking new book, literary/social critic Mark Caldwell gives us a history of the demise of manners and charts the progress of an epidemic of rudeness in America. The breakdown of civility has in recent years become a national obsession, and our modern climate of boorishness has cultivated a host of etiquette watchdogs, like Miss Manners and Martha Stewart, with which we defend ourselves against an onslaught of nastiness. But Caldwell demonstrates that the foundations of etiquette actually began to corrode several centuries ago with the blurring of class lines. Touching on aspects of both our public and private lives, including work, family, and sex, A Short History of Rudeness examines how the rules of our behaviour have changed and explains why, no matter how hard we try, we can never return to a golden era of manners and mores.

Hospitality as a cultural trait has been associated with the South for well over two centuries, but the origins of this association and the reasons for its perseverance often seem unclear. Anthony Szczesiul looks at how and why we have taken something so particular as the social habit of hospitality—which is exercised among diverse individuals and is widely varied in its particular practices—and so generalized it as to make it a cultural trait of an entire region of the country. Historians have offered a variety of explanations of the origins and cultural practices of hospitality in the antebellum South. Economic historians have at times portrayed southern hospitality as evidence of conspicuous consumption and competition among wealthy planters, while cultural historians have treated it peripherally as a symptomatic expression of the southern code of honor. Although historians have offered different theories, they generally agree that the mythic dimensions of southern hospitality eventually outstripped its actual practices. Szczesiul examines why we have chosen to remember and valorize this particular aspect of the South, and he raises fundamental ethical questions that underlie both the concept of hospitality and the cultural work of American memory, particularly in light of the region’s historical legacy of slavery and segregation.

With keen insight and subtle humor, John F. Kasson explores the history and politics of etiquette from America's colonial times through the nineteenth century. He describes the transformation of our notion of "gentility," once considered a birthright to some, and the development of etiquette as a middle-class response to the new urban and industrial economy and to the excesses of democratic society.

New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 1: Religion

This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture addresses the cultural, social, and intellectual terrain of myth, manners, and historical memory in the American South. Evaluating how a distinct southern identity has been created, recreated, and performed through memories that blur the line between fact and fiction, this volume paints a broad, multihued picture of the region seen through the lenses of belief and cultural practice. The 95 entries here represent a substantial revision and expansion of the material on historical memory and manners in the original edition. They address such matters as myths and memories surrounding the Old South and the Civil War; stereotypes and traditions related to the body, sexuality, gender, and family (such as debutante balls and beauty pageants); institutions and places associated with historical memory (such as cemeteries, monuments, and museums); and specific subjects and objects of myths, including the Confederate flag and Graceland. Together, they offer a compelling portrait of the "southern way of life" as it has been imagined, lived, and contested.

An indispensable manual to navigating life from birth to death without making a false move. Your neighbor denounces cellular telephones as instruments of the devil. Your niece swears that no one expects thank-you letters anymore. Your father-in-law insists that married women have to take their husbands' names. Your guests plead that asking them to commit themselves to attending your party ruins the spontaneity. Who is right? Miss Manners, of course. With all those amateurs issuing unauthorized etiquette pronouncements, aren't you glad that there is a gold standard to consult about what has really changed and what has not? The freshly updated version of the classic bestseller includes the latest letters, essays, and illustrations, along with the laugh-out-loud wisdom of Miss Manners as she meets the new millennium of American misbehavior head-on. This wickedly witty guide rules on the challenges brought about by our ever-evolving society, once again proving that etiquette, far from being an optional extra, is the essential currency of a civilized world.

Among Nashville's many slogans, the one that best reflects its emphasis on manners and decorum is the Nashville Way, a phrase coined by boosters to tout what they viewed as the city's amicable race relations. Benjamin Houston offers the first scholarly book on the history of civil rights in Nashville, providing new insights and critiques of this moderate progressivism for which the city has long been credited. Civil rights leaders such as John Lewis, James Bevel, Diane Nash, and James Lawson who came into their own in Nashville were devoted to nonviolent direct action, or what Houston calls the “black Nashville Way.” Through the dramatic story of Nashville's 1960 lunch counter sit-ins, Houston shows how these activists used nonviolence to disrupt the coercive script of day-to-day race relations. Nonviolence brought the threat of its opposite—white violence—into stark contrast, revealing that the Nashville Way was actually built on a complex relationship between etiquette and brute force. Houston goes on to detail how racial etiquette forged in the era of Jim Crow was updated in the civil rights era. Combined with this updated racial etiquette, deeper structural forces of politics and urban renewal dictate racial realities to this day. In The Nashville Way, Houston shows that white power was surprisingly adaptable. But the black Nashville Way also proved resilient as it was embraced by thousands of activists who continued to fight battles over schools, highway construction, and economic justice even after most Americans shifted their focus to southern hotspots like Birmingham and Memphis.