Southern Politics

John C. Calhoun is among the most notorious and enigmatic figures in American political history. First elected to Congress in 1810, Calhoun went on to serve as secretary of war and vice president. But he is perhaps most known for arguing in favor of slavery as a "positive good" and for his famous doctrine of "state interposition", which laid the groundwork for the South to secede from the Union - and arguably set the nation on course for civil war. The strain of radical politics he developed has found expression once again in the tactics and extremism of the modern Far Right.

For proslavery leaders like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, the 19th-century world was torn between two hostile forces: a rising movement against bondage and an Atlantic plantation system that was larger and more productive than ever before. In this great struggle, Southern statesmen saw the United States as slavery's most powerful champion. Overcoming traditional qualms about a strong central government, slaveholding leaders harnessed the power of the state to defend slavery abroad.

In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased 40 acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans - an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the Black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of Southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed.

The 2020 Presidential Election is undoubtedly, the most important election of the century. Amid an onslought of senseless killings among unarmed African Americans by vigilante civilians and trigger-happy police and a pandemic which unveiled an enormous disparity in health care for African Americans, the country is being led by an incumbent Commander in Chief who appears “unbothered” by it all. In November, America is tasked with choosing its next leader - one who will be charged with salvaging what’s left of its democracy.

Meredith Mason Brown traces Daniel Boone's life from his Pennsylvania childhood to his experiences in the militia and his rise as an unexcelled woodsman, explorer, and backcountry leader. In the process, we meet the authentic Boone: he didn't wear coonskin caps; he read and wrote better than many frontiersmen; he was not the first to settle Kentucky; he took no pleasure in killing Indians. At once a loner and a leader, a Quaker who became a skilled frontier fighter, Boone is a study in contradictions.

John Rodriguez er den nyansatte leder af det nedslidte forskningscenter, Southern Reach, der har til opgave at bevogte det mystiske vildnis kaldet Område X. John modtager ordrer fra sin ukendte chef, Stemmen, der lige fra første dag på jobbet sætter John til at håndtere eftervirkningerne af den fejlslåede tolvte ekspedition til Område X. Efter at have gennemgået en række forhør, en samling af skjulte noter og timevis af dybt foruroligende videooptagelser, begynder John at gennemskue nogle af Område Xs mange hemmeligheder. Hver opdagelse han gør sig, tvinger ham dog til at se skræmmende sandheder i øjnene om sig selv og om den virksomhed, han har svoret sit troskab til. Autoritet er andet bind i "South Reach-serien" og fortsættelsen til "Udslettelse".

Caliph Washington's life was never supposed to matter. As a Black teenager from the vice-ridden city of Bessemer, Alabama, Washington was wrongfully convicted of killing an Alabama policeman in 1957. Sentenced to death, he came within minutes of the electric chair - nearly a dozen times. A Kafka-esque legal odyssey in which Washington's original conviction was overturned three times before he was finally released in 1972, his story is the kind that pervades the history of American justice.

In 1892, investigative journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett published a pamphlet with unflinching and honest descriptions of the cruelties being enacted against Black Americans in the South by their White neighbors. Wells’ poignant and raw reporting of the horrors of lynching scandalized many of her readers outside the South, yet the practice continued unimpeded for more than half a century after. Today, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases is a sobering reminder that American racism and inequality did not simply end with emancipation.

The Southern Strategy is traditionally understood as a Goldwater and Nixon-era effort by the Republican Party to win over disaffected white voters in the Democratic stronghold of the American South. To realign these voters with the GOP, the party abandoned its past support for civil rights and used racially coded language to capitalize on southern white racial angst. However, that decision was but one in a series of decisions the GOP made not just on race, but on feminism and religion as well, in what Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields call the "Long Southern Strategy."

In the early years of the twentieth century, Mississippi County, Arkansas, was a brutal and profitable place. Home to starving, landless farmers, the county produced almost two percent of the entire world’s cotton. It was also the site of two rape trials that made national headlines: an accusation that sent two Black men, almost certainly innocent, to death row; and the case of two white men, almost certainly guilty, who were likewise sentenced to death but who would ultimately face a very different fate.

Jake believes he has found happiness, but a devastating blow sends him back into the world of evil that lies beneath tropical beauty. He begins a path of revenge, carefully crafting a plan to ensure the end of Santiago and Group 45.

The Sweet Potato Queens like men. They like them so much that they have devoted an absolutely inordinate amount of time to the pursuit of men, marriage, and great sex. And then, when that doesn't work out, they've devoted an inordinate amount of time to divorce, gittin another one and having great sex with him instead. The Sweet Potato Queens' Field Guide to Men is the Queens manifesto on all matters of the heart, featuring tales from Queens around the world, plus the continuing adventures of the women you've come to know and love (and envy just a little bit).

Barbers and beauticians are expertly positioned to have a hand on the pulse of their communities—and Barnard the Barber is no exception. Learning from his village as the barber, the author shares those lessons learned on how we can liberate the rural South by building anti-racist communities everywhere.

Jarret Ruminski examines ordinary lives in Confederate-controlled Mississippi, to show how military occupation and the ravages of war tested the meaning of loyalty during America's greatest rift. This study focuses on wartime activities - such as swearing the Union oath, illegally trading with the Union army, and deserting from the Confederate army - to show how Mississippians acted on multiple loyalties to self, family, and nation. It probes the relationship between race and loyalty, to indicate how an internal war defined Mississippi's social development, well into the 20th century.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Cynthia Tucker and award-winning author Frye Gaillard reflect on the role of the South in America's long descent into Trumpism. In 1974, Southern author John Egerton published his seminal work, The Americanization of Dixie, reflecting on the double-edged reality of the South becoming more like the rest of the country and vice versa. Tucker and Gaillard dive deeper into that reality from the time that Egerton published his book until the present.

Intentionally plural, Southern Cultures, the journal of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was founded in 1993 to present all sides of the American South, from sorority sisters to Pocahontas, from kudzu to the blues.

This riveting historical narrative reconstructs the armed resistance of Black activists, their challenge of racist terrorism, and their fight for human rights.

Waffle House has long been touted as an icon of the American South. The restaurant's consistent foregrounding as a resonant symbol of regional character proves relevant for understanding much about the people, events, and foodways. Smothered and Covered: Waffle House and the Southern Imaginary is the first book to socioculturally assess the chain within the field of contemporary food studies. In this groundbreaking work, Ty Matejowsky argues that Waffle House's often beleaguered public persona is informed by various complexities and contradictions.

In this riveting new book, John Laband, pre-eminent historian of the Zulu Kingdom, tackles some of the questions that swirl around the assassination in 1828 of King Shaka, the celebrated founder of the Zulu Kingdom and war leader of legendary brilliance. In his search for answers, Laband turns to the Zulu voice heard through recorded oral testimony and praise-poems, and to the written accounts and reminiscences of the Port Natal trader-hunters and the despatches of Cape officials.

Prior to World War II, Finley explains, southern senators recognized the fall of segregation as inevitable, and consciously changed their tactics to delay, rather than prevent defeat, enabling them to frustrate civil rights advances for decades. As public support for civil rights grew, southern senators transformed their arguments to limit the use of overt racism and appeal to northerners. They granted minor concessions on bills only tangentially related to civil rights.