HOW SOUTHERN IS THAT? brings southern ways of cool evenings, hot days. Fast-paced stories, poetry, snappy quotes make you want to kick off your shoes, sit back, and enjoy. Reading about scandal, sensational leaders, words forming pictures make readers feel they are part of each story, rather than merely reading them. Want to go to tea? You're here. Want to go to the movies about the south? Pick one, and feel that you are on a vacation for sure. Y'all ready? Hold steady. Enjoy what the South has--and all that jazz.

From the New York Times bestselling authors at Garden & Gun comes a lively compendium of Southern tradition and contemporary culture. The American South is a diverse region with its own vocabulary, peculiarities, and complexities. Tennessee whiskey may technically be bourbon, but don’t let anyone in Kentucky hear you call it that. And while boiling blue crabs may be the norm across the Lowcountry in South Carolina and Georgia, try that in front of Marylanders and they’re likely to put you in the pot. Now, from the editors of Garden & Gun comes this illustrated encyclopedia covering age-old traditions and current culture. S Is for Southern contains nearly five hundred entries spanning every letter of the alphabet, with essays from notable Southern writers including: Roy Blount, Jr., on humidity Frances Mayes on the magnolia Jessica B. Harris on field peas Rick Bragg on Harper Lee Jon Meacham on the Civil War Allison Glock on Dolly Parton Randall Kenan on Edna Lewis The Lee Brothers on boiled peanuts Jonathan Miles on Larry Brown Julia Reed on the Delta

Taking a wide focus, Southern Journey narrates the evolution of southern history from the founding of the nation to the present day by focusing on the settling, unsettling, and resettling of the South. Using migration as the dominant theme of southern history and including indigenous, white, black, and immigrant people in the story, Edward L. Ayers cuts across the usual geographic, thematic, and chronological boundaries that subdivide southern history. Ayers explains the major contours and events of the southern past from a fresh perspective, weaving geography with history in innovative ways. He uses unique color maps created with sophisticated geographic information system (GIS) tools to interpret massive data sets from a humanistic perspective, providing a view of movement within the South with a clarity, detail, and continuity we have not seen before. The South has never stood still; it is—and always has been—changing in deep, radical, sometimes contradictory ways, often in divergent directions. Ayers’s history of migration in the South is a broad yet deep reinterpretation of the region’s past that informs our understanding of the population, economy, politics, and culture of the South today. Southern Journey is not only a pioneering work of history; it is a grand recasting of the South’s past by one of its most renowned and appreciated scholars.

The appearance in 1920 of H. L. Mencken's scathing essay about the intellectual and cultural impoverishment of the South, "The Sahara of the Bozart, " set off a firestorm of reaction in the region that continued unabated for much of the next decade. In Serpent in Eden, Mencken scholar Fred Hobson examines Mencken's love-hate relationship with the South. He explores not only Mencken's savage criticism of the region but also his efforts to encourage southern writers and the bold "little magazines, " such as the Reviewer and the Double Dealer, that started up in the South during the 1920s.

Southerners are once again discovering that being Southern is a good thing after all The author has gathered together the elements of Southern heritage and gives a short course in its splendid legacy. It could be called a "handbook for Southerners." The entire South is reflected in this work, from Oklahoma to Virginia, from Texas to Florida. There is no other book like it on the market today. Some features you'll find: * Biographical Sketches and Photos of Seven Confederate Heroes * A Section on Southern Folklore * 200 Old Photographs from 1853 through 1919 * A Humorous Southern Dictionary for Helping Yankees Better Understand Us * A Chapter about the War Between the States * A Genealogical Bonanza * The Real Story of Reconstruction * A Look at Why Southerners Are Special * Recommended Reading List.

He analyzes the founders' backgrounds as a distinctive free people of color in the Old South; the migration that culminated in the communities' successful beginnings; the settlements' transformations through the pioneer and Civil War eras; and the increasing transition to commercial farming in the late nineteenth century." "Southern Seed, Northern Soil is based on source materials, including census manuscripts, land deeds, probate records, family letters, and newspapers."--BOOK JACKET.

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the North assumed significant power to redefine the South, imagining a region rebuilt and modeled on northern society. The white South actively resisted these efforts, battling the legal strictures of Reconstruction on the ground. Meanwhile, white southern storytellers worked to recast the South's image, romanticizing the Lost Cause and heralding the birth of a New South. Prince argues that this cultural production was as important as political competition and economic striving in turning the South and the nation away from the egalitarian promises of Reconstruction and toward Jim Crow.

Leelee Satterfield's efforts to run a new restaurant with Peter are challenged by her unpredictable friends, a male dog named Roberta, and the return of Leelee's notorious ex-husband.

From grits to deep-fried okra, from barbecue to corn bread, Southern food stirs greater loyalty and passion than any American cuisine. Yet as the crops that once defined it have disappeared, much of the flavor has leeched out of Southern cookery until today. Thanks to a community of devoted chefs and farmers, and one indefatigable historian, Southern heirloom greens and grains and with them America s greatest cuisine--are being revived. Searching the archives for evidence of how nineteenth-century farmers bred their enormous variety of vegetables and grains, and of their contemporaries tastes and cooking practices, David S. Shields has become a key figure in the effort to reboot Southern cuisine. "Southern Provisions" draws on ten years of research and activism to tell the story of a quintessentially American cuisine that was all but forgotten, and the lessons that its restoration holds for the revival of regional cuisines across the country. Shields vividly evokes the connections between plants, plantations, growers, seed brokers, markets, vendors, cooks, and consumers. He shows how the distinctiveness of local ingredients arose from historical circumstances and a confluence of English, French Huguenot, West African, and Native American foodways. Shields emphasizes the Southern Lowcountry, from the peanut patches of Wilmington, North Carolina; to the Truck Farms of the Charleston Neck, South Carolina; to the sugar cane fields of the Georgia Sea Islands; to the citrus groves of Amelia Island, Florida. But the book also takes up the cuisine of New Orleans and other areas of the South and the nation, and even the West Indies. Offering a fascinating panorama of America s culinary past, "Southern Provisions" also shows how the renovation of traditional southern ingredients will enable cooks to take regional cuisine into the future."