While evoking both the pleasures and the problems of his past - band trips, a yearning for cityscapes, religious conversion, awakening to the realities of fundamentalist fervor - Polk offers himself, his family, and his town to exemplify an aspect that is more "American" than "Southern" and a tradition that is not mired in the past.

Like many other southern men, Noel Polk doesn't fit the outside world's stereotype of the southern male. This notable Faulkner critic is a native of the small Mississippi city of Picayune. In his career as an international scholar and traveler and in his role as a teacher and a professor of literature, he has moved beyond his origins while continuing to be nourished by his hometown roots. "I almost invariably see myself depicted in the media as either a beer-drinking, mean-spirited, pickup-driving redneck racist; a julep-sipping, plantation-owning, kind-hearted, benevolent racist; or, at best, a nonracist good ole boy, one of several variations of Forrest Gump, good-hearted and retarded, who makes his way in the modern world not because he is intelligent but because he's--well, good hearted." In Outside the Southern Myth Polk offers an apologia for a huge segment of southern males and communities that don't belong in the media portraits. His town was not antebellum. There were no plantations. No Civil War battles were fought there. It had little racial divisiveness. It was one of the thousands that mushroomed along the railroads as a response to logging and milling industries. It was mainly middle-class, not reactionary or exclusive. While evoking both the pleasures and the problems of his past--band trips, a yearning for cityscapes, religious conversion, awakening to the realities of fundamentalist fervor--Polk offers himself, his family, and his town to exemplify an aspect that is more "American" than "southern" and a tradition that is not mired in the past. As he explores the ways in which his experience of the South defined him, he concludes that his life has been experienced in a parallel universe, not in a time warp. He and many like him exist outside the southern myth.

The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism dismantles clichés about regional distinctiveness and rewrites modern American history through a national focus on topics such as the civil rights movement, conservative backlash and liberal reform, the rise of the Religious Right, the emergence of the Sunbelt, and the increasing diversity of the suburbs.

"Ty Seidule scorches us with the truth and rivets us with his fierce sense of moral urgency." --Ron Chernow In a forceful but humane narrative, former soldier and head of the West Point history department Ty Seidule's Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the myths and lies of the Confederate legacy—and explores why some of this country’s oldest wounds have never healed. Ty Seidule grew up revering Robert E. Lee. From his southern childhood to his service in the U.S. Army, every part of his life reinforced the Lost Cause myth: that Lee was the greatest man who ever lived, and that the Confederates were underdogs who lost the Civil War with honor. Now, as a retired brigadier general and Professor Emeritus of History at West Point, his view has radically changed. From a soldier, a scholar, and a southerner, Ty Seidule believes that American history demands a reckoning. In a unique blend of history and reflection, Seidule deconstructs the truth about the Confederacy—that its undisputed primary goal was the subjugation and enslavement of Black Americans—and directly challenges the idea of honoring those who labored to preserve that system and committed treason in their failed attempt to achieve it. Through the arc of Seidule’s own life, as well as the culture that formed him, he seeks a path to understanding why the facts of the Civil War have remained buried beneath layers of myth and even outright lies—and how they embody a cultural gulf that separates millions of Americans to this day. Part history lecture, part meditation on the Civil War and its fallout, and part memoir, Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the deeply-held legends and myths of the Confederacy—and provides a surprising interpretation of essential truths that our country still has a difficult time articulating and accepting.

An insightful exploration of the relentless myth of the famous Civil War general, this volume scrutinizes the collective public memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest as it has evolved through the press, memoirs, biographies, and popular culture.

More than one-third of the population of the United States now lives in the South, a region where politics, race relations, and the economy have changed dramatically since World War II. Yet historians and journalists continue to disagree over whether the modern South is dominating, deviating from, or converging with the rest of the nation. Has the time come to declare the end of southern history? And how do the stories of American history change if the South is no longer seen as a region apart--as the conservative counterpoint to a liberal national ideal? The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism challenges the idea of southern distinctiveness in order to offer a new way of thinking about modern American history. For too long, the belief in an exceptional South has encouraged distortions and generalizations about the nation's otherwise liberal traditions, especially by compartmentalizing themes of racism, segregation, and political conservatism in one section of the country. This volume dismantles popular binaries--of de facto versus de jure segregation, red state conservatism versus blue state liberalism, the "South" versus the "North"--to rewrite the history of region and nation alike. Matthew Lassiter and Joseph Crespino present thirteen essays--framed by their provocative introduction--that reinterpret major topics such as the civil rights movement in the South and the North, the relationship between conservative backlash and liberal reform throughout the country, the rise of the Religious Right as a national phenomenon, the emergence of the metropolitan Sunbelt, and increasing suburban diversity in a multiracial New South. By writing American history across regional borders, this volume spends as much time outside as inside the traditional boundaries of the South, moving from Mississippi to New York City, from Southern California to South Carolina, from Mexico to Atlanta, from Hollywood to the Newport Folk Festival, and from the Pentagon to the Attica prison rebellion.

First published in 1970, The New South Creed has lost none of its usefulness to anyone examining the dream of a "New South" -- prosperous, powerful, racially harmonious -- that developed in the three decades after the Civil War, and the transformation of that dream into widely accepted myths, shielding and perpetuating a conservative, racist society. Many young moderates of the period created a philosophy designed to enrich the region -- attempting to both restore the power and prestige and to lay the race question to rest. In spite of these men and their efforts, their dream of a New South joined the Antebellum illusion as a genuine social myth, with a controlling power over the way in which their followers, in both North and South, perceived reality.

History isn't always written by the winners... Twenty-first-century controversies over Confederate monuments attest to the enduring significance of our nineteenth-century Civil War. As Lincoln knew, the meaning of America itself depends on how we understand that fratricidal struggle. As soon as the Army of Northern Virginia laid down its arms at Appomattox, a group of Confederate officers took up their pens to refight the war for the history books. They composed a new narrative—the Myth of the Lost Cause—seeking to ennoble the sacrifice and defeat of the South, which popular historians in the twentieth century would perpetuate. Unfortunately, that myth would distort the historical imagination of Americans, north and south, for 150 years. In this balanced and compelling correction of the historical record, Edward Bonekemper helps us understand the Myth of the Lost Cause and its effect on the social and political controversies that are still important to all Americans.

Howard's unparalleled history of "queer" life in the South shows how homosexuality flourished in the conservative institutions of small-town life, interspersing the life stories of both the ordinary and the famous. 22 halftones. 4 maps.