Latinas/os and Asians are rewriting the meaning and history of race in the American South by complicating the black/white binary that has frequently defined the region since before the Civil War. Arriving in southern communities as migrants or refugees, Latinas/os and Asians have experienced both begrudging acceptance and prejudice as their presence confronts and troubles local understandings of race and difference—understandings that have deep roots in each community’s particular racial history, as well as in national fears and anxieties about race. Nuevo South offers the first comparative study showing how Latinas/os and Asians are transforming race and place in the contemporary South. Integrating political, economic, and social analysis, Perla M. Guerrero examines the reception of Vietnamese, Cubans, and Mexicans in northwestern Arkansas communities that were almost completely white until the mid-1970s. She shows how reactions to these refugees and immigrants ranged from reluctant acceptance of Vietnamese as former US allies to rejection of Cubans as communists, criminals, and homosexuals and Mexicans as “illegal aliens” who were perceived as invaders when they began to establish roots and became more visible in public spaces. Guerrero’s research clarifies how social relations are constituted in the labor sphere, particularly the poultry industry, and reveals the legacies of regional history, especially anti-Black violence and racial cleansing. Nuevo South thus helps us to better understand what constitutes the so-called Nuevo South and how historical legacies shape the reception of new people in the region.

Latinas/os and Asians are rewriting the meaning and history of race in the American South by complicating the black/white binary that has frequently defined the region since before the Civil War. Arriving in southern communities as migrants or refugees, Latinas/os and Asians have experienced both begrudging acceptance and prejudice as their presence confronts and troubles local understandings of race and difference—understandings that have deep roots in each community's particular racial history, as well as in national fears and anxieties about race. Nuevo South offers the first comparative study showing how Latinas/os and Asians are transforming race and place in the contemporary South. Integrating political, economic, and social analysis, Perla M. Guerrero examines the reception of Vietnamese, Cubans, and Mexicans in northwestern Arkansas communities that were almost completely white until the mid-1970s. She shows how reactions to these refugees and immigrants ranged from reluctant acceptance of Vietnamese as former US allies to rejection of Cubans as communists, criminals, and homosexuals and Mexicans as "illegal aliens" who were perceived as invaders when they began to establish roots and became more visible in public spaces. Guerrero's research clarifies how social relations are constituted in the labor sphere, particularly the poultry industry, and reveals the legacies of regional history, especially anti-Black violence and racial cleansing. Nuevo South thus helps us to better understand what constitutes the so-called Nuevo South and how historical legacies shape the reception of new people in the region.

Cities were the core of a changing economy and culture that penetrated the rural hinterland and remade the South in the decades following the Civil War. In New Men, New Cities, New South, Don Doyle argues that if the plantation was the world the sl

Studies of immigration to the United States have traditionally focused on a few key states and urban centers, but recent shifts in nonwhite settlement mean that these studies no longer paint the whole picture. Many Latino newcomers are flocking to places like the Southeast, where typically few such immigrants have settled, resulting in rapidly redrawn communities. In this historic moment, Jennifer Jones brings forth an ethnographic look at changing racial identities in one Southern city: Winston-Salem, North Carolina. This city turns out to be a natural experiment in race relations, having quickly shifted in the past few decades from a neatly black and white community to a triracial one. Jones tells the story of contemporary Winston-Salem through the eyes of its new Latino residents, revealing untold narratives of inclusion, exclusion, and interracial alliances. The Browning of the New South reveals how one community’s racial realignments mirror and anticipate the future of national politics.

At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century. Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee mountains, from the power brokers to tenant farmers, Ayers depicts a land of startling contrasts. Ayers takes us from remote Southern towns, revolutionized by the spread of the railroads, to the statehouses where Democratic Redeemers swept away the legacy of Reconstruction; from the small farmers, trapped into growing nothing but cotton, to the new industries of Birmingham; from abuse and intimacy in the family to tumultuous public meetings of the prohibitionists. He explores every aspect of society, politics, and the economy, detailing the importance of each in the emerging New South. Central to the entire story is the role of race relations, from alliances and friendships between blacks and whites to the spread of Jim Crows laws and disfranchisement. The teeming nineteenth-century South comes to life in these pages. When this book first appeared in 1992, it won a broad array of prizes and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The citation for the National Book Award declared Promise of the New South a vivid and masterfully detailed picture of the evolution of a new society. The Atlantic called it "one of the broadest and most original interpretations of southern history of the past twenty years.

When Latino migration to the U.S. South became increasingly visible in the 1990s, observers and advocates grasped for ways to analyze "new" racial dramas in the absence of historical reference points. However, as this book is the first to comprehensively document, Mexicans and Mexican Americans have a long history of migration to the U.S. South. Corazon de Dixie recounts the untold histories of Mexicanos' migrations to New Orleans, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina as far back as 1910. It follows Mexicanos into the heart of Dixie, where they navigated the Jim Crow system, cultivated community in the cotton fields, purposefully appealed for help to the Mexican government, shaped the southern conservative imagination in the wake of the civil rights movement, and embraced their own version of suburban living at the turn of the twenty-first century. Rooted in U.S. and Mexican archival research, oral history interviews, and family photographs, Corazon de Dixie unearths not just the facts of Mexicanos' long-standing presence in the U.S. South but also their own expectations, strategies, and dreams.

For Atlanta, the early decades of the twentieth century brought chaotic economic and demographic growth. Women--black and white--emerged as a visible new component of the city's population. As maids and cooks, secretaries and factory workers, these women served the "better classes" in their homes and businesses. They were enthusiastic patrons of the city's new commercial amusements and the mothers of Atlanta's burgeoning working classes. In response to women's growing public presence, as Georgina Hickey reveals, Atlanta's boosters, politicians, and reformers created a set of images that attempted to define the lives and contributions of working women. Through these images, city residents expressed ambivalence toward Atlanta's growth, which, although welcome, also threatened the established racial and gender hierarchies of the city. Using period newspapers, municipal documents, government investigations, organizational records, oral histories, and photographic evidence, Hope and Danger in the New South City relates the experience of working-class women across lines of race--as sources of labor, community members, activists, pleasure seekers, and consumers of social services--to the process of urban development.

In Arkansas and the New South, 1874-1929 Carl Moneyhon examines the struggle of Arkansas's people to enter the economic and social mainstreams of the nation in the years from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of the Great Depression. Economic changes brought about by development of the timber industry, exploitation of the rich coal fields in the western part of the state, discovery of petroleum, and building of manufacturing industries transformed social institutions and fostered a demographic shift from rural to urban settings.

Lynching was a national crime. But it obsessed the South. W. Fitzhugh Brundage's multidisciplinary approach to the complex nature of lynching delves into the such extrajudicial murders in two states: Virginia, the southern state with the fewest lynchings; and Georgia, where 460 lynchings made the state a measure of race relations in the Deep South. Brundage's analysis addresses three central questions: How can we explain variations in lynching over regions and time periods? To what extent was lynching a social ritual that affirmed traditional white values and white supremacy? And, what were the causes of the decline of lynching at the end of the 1920s? A groundbreaking study, Lynching in the New South is a classic portrait of the tradition of violence that poisoned American life.

In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African American women, who were forced to labor in camps and factories to make profits for private investors. In this vivid work of history, Talitha L. LeFlouria draws from a rich array of primary sources to piece together the stories of these women, recounting what they endured in Georgia's prison system and what their labor accomplished. LeFlouria argues that African American women's presence within the convict lease and chain-gang systems of Georgia helped to modernize the South by creating a new and dynamic set of skills for black women. At the same time, female inmates struggled to resist physical and sexual exploitation and to preserve their human dignity within a hostile climate of terror. This revealing history redefines the social context of black women's lives and labor in the New South and allows their stories to be told for the first time.