Southern Cultural and Intellectual History, Part III

The South has a rich cultural and intellectual heritage dating to the first English settlers in North America, and even earlier in the Southwest and in parts of Florida. This heritage has been relegated to "slavery," "racism," and "treason" by the modern academy. Most college or university courses spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing Southern slavery and little time on the actors that made the South an important and unique--and for a time the dominant--region in American society.

This course surveys the cultural and intellectual tradition that arose from the defeated South, namely defiance and affirmation. Southerners are the only defeated people in American history and as a result were determined to remind the United States at large of their importance in American history. Southerners played a pivotal role in both the progressive era and as a conservative counterweight to the extreme centralization of the mid-twentieth century. We trace the Southern Jeffersonian tradition from Reconstruction through World War II and highlight growing Southern influence on American popular culture, from music and literature to politics and history.