New Books in the American South

Coined in the middle of the nineteenth century, the term "voodoo" has been deployed largely by people in the U.S. to refer to spiritual practices--real or imagined--among people of African descent. "Voodoo" is one way that white people have invoked their anxieties and stereotypes about Black people--to call them uncivilised, superstitious, hypersexual, violent, and cannibalistic. In Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Danielle N. Boaz explores public perceptions of "voodoo" as they have varied over time, with an emphasis on the intricate connection between stereotypes of "voodoo" and debates about race and human rights. The term has its roots in the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s, especially following the Union takeover of New Orleans, when it was used to propagate the idea that Black Americans held certain "superstitions" that allegedly proved that they were unprepared for freedom, the right to vote, and the ability to hold public office. Similar stereotypes were later extended to Cuba and Haiti in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1930s, Black religious movements like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam were derided as "voodoo cults." More recently, ideas about "voodoo" have shaped U.S. policies toward Haitian immigrants in the 1980s, and international responses to rituals to bind Nigerian women to human traffickers in the twenty-first century. Drawing on newspapers, travelogues, magazines, legal documents, and books, Dr. Boaz shows that the term "voodoo" has often been a tool of racism, colonialism, and oppression. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

In the United States, the stoicism and importance of the “working class” is part of the national myth. The term is often used to conjure the contributions and challenges of the white working class – and this obscures the ways in which Black workers built institutions like the railroads and universities – but also how they transformed unions, changed public policy, and established community.  In Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (LIveright, 2023), Dr. Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story by interrogating the lives of laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers. The book is both a personal journey and a history of Black labor in the United States from enslavement to the present day with a focus on a critical era: after Southern Emancipation to the early 20th century, when the first generations of Black working people carved out a world for themselves. Dr. Kelley captures the character of the lives of Black workers not only as laborers, activists, or members of a class but as individuals whose daily experiences mattered – to themselves, to their communities, and to “the nation at large, even as it denied their importance.” As she weaves together rich oral histories, memoirs, photographs, and secondary sources, she shows how Black workers of all genders were “intertwined with the future of Black freedom, Black citizenship, and the establishment of civil rights for Black Americans.” She demonstrates how her own family’s experiences mirrors this wider history of the Black working class – sometimes in ways that she herself did not realize before writing the book. Even as the book confronts violence, poor working conditions, and a government that often legislated to protect the interests of white workers and consumers, Black Folk celebrates the ways in which Black people “built and rebuilt vital spaces of resistance, grounded in the secrets that they knew about themselves, about their community, their dignity, and their survival.” Black Folk looks back but also forward. In examining the labor and challenges of individuals, Dr. Kelley sheds light on reparations and suggests that Amazon package processing centers, supermarkets, and nursing homes can be spaces of resistance and labor activism in the 21st century. Dr. Blair LM Kelley is the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and incoming director of the Center for the Study of the American South, the first Black woman to serve in that role in the center’s thirty-year history. She is also the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson from the University of North Carolina Press. Dr. Kelley mentions Dr. Tera W. Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, Duke University’s Behind the Veil oral history project, and Philip R. Rubio’s There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Return of the King: The Rebirth of Muhammad Ali and the Rise of Atlanta (U Nebraska Press, 2025) tells the story of Muhammad Ali’s return to the ring in 1970, after a more than three-year suspension for refusing his draft notice as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. With Ali’s career still in doubt, he found new support in shifting public opinion about the war and in Atlanta, a city still governed by white supremacy, but a white supremacy decidedly different from that of its neighbor cities in the Deep South.  Atlanta had been courting and landing professional sports teams in football, basketball, and baseball since the end of 1968. An influential state politician, Leroy Johnson, Georgia’s first Black state senator since Reconstruction, was determined to help Ali return after his exile. The state had no boxing commission to prevent Ali from fighting there, so Johnson made it his mission for Ali to make a comeback in Georgia. Ali’s opponent would be Jerry Quarry, the top heavyweight contender and, more important, a white man who had spoken out against Ali’s objection to the war.In Return of the King, Thomas Aiello examines the history of Muhammad Ali, Leroy Johnson, and the city of Atlanta, while highlighting an important fight of Ali’s that changed the trajectory of his career. Although the fight between Ali and Quarry lasted only three rounds, those nine minutes changed boxing forever and were crucial to both the growth of Atlanta and the rebirth of Ali’s boxing career. Craig Gill is a writer, researcher and historian based in Vancouver, BC. He is the author of Caddying on the Color Line, a history of African American golf caddies in the U.S. South. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

In the spring of 1969, hundreds of workers, all Black and mostly female, went on strike at Medical College Hospital and Charleston County Hospital to protest racial discrimination, low wages, and the marginalization of their dignity. The movement began with an incident of wrongful termination in 1967 involving five Black women at Medical College Hospital that uncovered the pervasiveness of racial and economic discrimination at both hospitals. The termination sparked outrage among other hospital workers who, with support from local community leaders, organized a movement that galvanized the city, state, and nation. We Paved the Way: Black Women and the Charleston Hospital Workers' Campaign (UP of Mississippi, 2025) explores this campaign in the context of a broader protest tradition, revealing it to be a full-scale movement that demonstrates the power and complexity of Black women's activism in the mid-twentieth century. O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight argues that the experiences of the women at the center of this conflict offer a window into the plight of Southern Black working-class women and the ways in which they fought for equality, access, and well-being. Though much of what has been written about the hospital workers' campaign focuses on the strike through an institutional lens, Dixon-McKnight uses extensive interviews and oral history to expand the scope of existing scholarship. Local leaders such as Septima Clark, Esau Jenkins, William Saunders, and Isaiah Bennett served as bridge builders for the Black community's involvement in protest, which helped shape and nurture the hospital workers' campaign. By discussing the grassroots organizing that sparked the strike and tracing the aftermath of the conflict, including what workers experienced in their return to work and their relationships with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Local 1199 Hospital and Nursing Home Employees Union, this volume situates the hospital workers' movement as a critical moment in the nation's long civil rights history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Taco (Bloomsbury, 2025) is a deep dive into the most iconic Mexican food from the perspective of a Mexico City native. In a narrative that moves from Mexico to the United States and back, Dr. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado discusses the definition of the taco, the question of the tortilla and the taco shell, and the existence of the taco as a modern social touchstone that has been shaped by history and geography.  Challenging the idea of centrality and authenticity, in this latest addition to the Object Lessons series, Dr. Sánchez Prado shows instead that the taco is a contemporary, transcultural food that has always been subject to transformation. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

How and why did the South’s history, culture, and politics shape the region’s nuclear and energy industries? And how is that history linked to broader developments in the nuclear and energy industries—nationally and globally? Radioactive Dixie: A Nuclear History of the American South (U Georgia Press, 2025) by Dr. Caroline Peyton answers those questions as it traces the origins of the U.S. South’s love affair with the atom.The South contains more nuclear reactors than any other region in the United States and much of the nation’s radioactive waste. This book shows how the South’s atomic footprint resulted from a decades-long effort by Southern politicians, industry figures, universities, and government officials to transform the American South into a nuclear-oriented region. Waving the atomic talisman, the nuclear industry served as one pivotal part in a larger project of regional modernization—a process that began in the nineteenth century and lasted more than a century. From this perspective, bomb plants and nuclear reactors promised to expand the South’s economy and to cast its identity as a center of modern industry, science, and engineering and as a producer of cheap, limitless energy. Radioactive Dixie is the first book to chronicle this regional story that had national implications. Southern history informed national siting decisions, regulatory oversight, and attitudes toward the various nuclear projects that proliferated in the post–World War II period. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Despite all we know about the Civil War, its causes, battles, characters, issues, impacts, and legacy, few books have explored Canada’s role in the bloody conflict that claimed more than 600,000 lives. Until From Underground Railroad to Rebel Refuge: Canada and the Civil War (ECW Press, 2022) by Brian Martin. A surprising 20,000 Canadians went south to take up arms on both sides of the conflict, while thousands of enslaved people, draft dodgers, deserters, recruiters, plotters, and spies fled northward to take shelter in the attic that is Canada. Though many escaped slavery and found safety through the Underground Railroad, they were later joined by KKK members wanted for murder. Confederate President Jefferson Davis along with several of his emissaries and generals found refuge on Canadian soil, and many plantation owners moved north of the border. Award-winning journalist Brian Martin will open eyes in both Canada and the United States to how the two countries and their citizens interacted during the Civil War and the troubled times that surrounded it. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Summer 1936: Rainey Bethea, a young Black man, is tried for the rape and murder of an elderly white woman. The all-white, all-male jury takes just four and a half minutes to find him guilty. Bethea is hanged near the banks of the Ohio River in Owensboro, Kentucky, with more than twenty thousand white people in attendance. The crowd turns the violent spectacle of Bethea's hanging—the last documented public execution in the United States—into a brutal carnival. Bethea's story came to author Sonya Lea through her family, and it is through her family that she reckons with its truths. At her grandmother's funeral, Lea received an oral history recorded by a neighbor. In its pages, Lea, who is descended from white Kentuckians on both sides, discovered that two of the spectators at Bethea's execution were her grandparents, teenage newlyweds Sherrel and Frances Ralph. Lea's research would also divulge that she was related to the prosecuting attorney for the Commonwealth, the man considered most responsible for Bethea's hanging. American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture (University Press of Kentucky, 2025) combines memoir with reportage and cultural criticism to interrogate and complicate the traditional narrative about how lynch culture is created in families, communities, and institutions. The essays in this collection grapple with our complicity in these atrocities—including the agreement in our silences—and demonstrate how we, as descendants, might take responsibility and bring new scrutiny to ancestral and communal crimes. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Once the powerhouse of a fledgling country’s economy, the Mississippi Delta has been consigned to a narrative of destitution. It is often faulted for the sins of the South, portrayed as a regional backwater that willfully cleaved itself from the modern world. But buried beneath the weight of good ol’ boy politics and white-washed histories lies the Delta’s true story.Mississippi native and award-winning writer W. Ralph Eubanks unearths the region’s buried history, revealing a microcosm of economic oppression in the US. He traverses the Delta, examining its bellwether efforts to combat income inequality through vivid portraits of key figures like Theodore G. Bilbo and William Whittington, segregationist congressmen who sabotaged federal reparations for former sharecroppers in the 1940s and ’50s Gloria Carter Dickerson, founder of the Emmett Till Academy, whose parents were instrumental in desegregating schools in Drew, MS, where Till was murdered Calvin Head, a community organizer who runs a farming co-op in Mileston, who revived the legacy of his hometown, the only Black resettlement community in Mississippi Eubanks delivers a powerful and insightful examination of how racism and economic instability have shaped life in the Mississippi Delta. He traces the enduring consequences of political decisions that have entrenched inequality across generations. At the same time, he brings attention to the resilience of local communities and the grassroots movements working toward meaningful change. The book offers a thoughtful framework for policy reform and community investment, underscoring the need to support those who have long sustained the region through their labor and lived experience. You can find Ralph at his website. A soundtrack for the book is available here. Host Sullivan Summer is at her website, Instagram, and on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

New Orleans is an indispensable element of America's national identity. As one of the most fabled cities in the world, it figures in countless novels, short stories, poems, plays, and films, as well as in popular lore and song. T. R. Johnson's book New Orleans: A Writer's City (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides detailed discussions of all of the most significant writing that this city has ever inspired - from its origins in a flood-prone swamp to the rise of a creole culture at the edges of the European empires; from its emergence as a cosmopolitan, hemispheric crossroads and a primary hub of the slave trade to the days when, in its red light district, the children and grandchildren of the enslaved conjured a new kind of music that became America's greatest gift to the world; from the mid-twentieth-century masterpieces by William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Walker Percy to the realms of folklore, hip hop, vampire fiction, and the Asian and Latin American archives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

The promise of Reconstruction sparked a transformative era in American history as free and newly emancipated Black Americans sought to redefine their place in a nation still grappling with the legacy of slavery. Often remembered as a period of failed progressive change that gave way to Jim Crow and second-class citizenship, Reconstruction’s tragic narrative has long overshadowed the resilience and agency of African Americans during this time.Requiem for Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 2025) chronicles Reconstruction’s legacy by focusing on key Black figures such as South Carolina congressman Robert Smalls, Judge William Whipper, writer Frances Rollin, and others who shaped postbellum Black America. Robert D. Bland traces the impact of the Reconstruction generation—Black Americans born between 1840 and 1870 who saw Reconstruction as a defining political movement and worked to preserve its legacy by establishing a new set of historical practices such as formulating new archives, shaping local community counternarratives, using the Black press to inform national audiences about Southern Republican politics, and developing a framework to interpret the recent past’s connection to their present world. Set in South Carolina’s Lowcountry—a hub of Black freedom, landownership, and activism—this book shows how late nineteenth-century Black leaders, educators, and journalists built a powerful countermemory of Reconstruction, defying the dominant white narrative that sought to erase their contributions. Find Professor Bland at his website, and on Threads, BlueSky, and X. Host Sullivan Summer is at her website, Instagram, and on Substack where she and Professor Bland continued their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

American conservatism as we know it today is a West Texas export, argues College of Wooster professor Jeff Roche in The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right (U Texas Press, 2025). Tracing the roots of the state's conservative movement back to the giant cattle ranches and tycoons of the nineteenth century, Roche argues that you cannot separate the local and historical conditions in the West (and in West Texas specifically) from the "cowboy conservatism" of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Full of fascinating characters and the kind of tall tales you only find in the Lone Star State, The Conservative Frontier makes a compelling case for Texas politics eventually becoming national politics by the mid to late 20th century. No matter where you are in the United States today, the political weight of Texas creates a gravity that has proven impossible for American politics to emerge from. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

In Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle: Gossip, Rumor, and Reputation in a Small Southern Town (University of Georgia Press, 2025), Dr. Sylvia Hoffert calls on a particularly rich collection of primary sources, including diaries, letters, oral histories, census data, court documents, church records, and psychiatric hospital logs, all relating to Hillsborough, North Carolina, to argue that gossip and rumor were central to the formation of interpersonal relationships and an integral part of small-town life in the antebellum South. They exposed the insecurities and anxieties of the town’s inhabitants. Indeed, they served as important weapons in the power struggle between the white slaveholding elite—who tried to exert, maintain, and consolidate their control over community life—and the Black, white, and mixed-race men and women, free and enslaved, who did their best to challenge the socioeconomic status quo. And they exposed fissures in the social fabric that discretion, good manners, and historical amnesia could not obscure. The result was that, on a day-to-day basis, the shady streets of Hillsborough may have seemed peaceful to the casual observer. But underneath all that tranquility, the town was ripe with competition and conflict as the inhabitants used gossip to negotiate relationships with their neighbors and make places for themselves in the social, economic, and political hierarchy of the community. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people found their lives indelibly shaped by the Southern environment. By day, they plucked worms and insects from the crops, trod barefoot in the mud as they hoed rice fields, and endured the sun and humidity as they planted and harvested the fields. By night, they clandestinely took to the woods and swamps to trap opossums and turtles, to visit relatives living on adjacent plantations, and at times to escape slave patrols and escape to freedom. Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (Oxford UP, 2022) is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had profound consequences: rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce. They saw the landscape as disposable, relocating to more fertile prospects once they had leached the soils and cut down the forests. On the leading edge of the frontier, slavery laid waste to fragile ecosystems, draining swamps, clearing forests to plant crops and fuel steamships, and introducing devastating invasive species. On its trailing edge, slavery left eroded hillsides, rivers clogged with sterile soil, and the extinction of native species. While environmental destruction fueled slavery's expansion, no environment could long survive intensive slave labor. The scars manifested themselves in different ways, but the land too fell victim to the slave owner's lash. Although typically treated separately, slavery and the environment naturally intersect in complex and powerful ways, leaving lasting effects from the period of emancipation through modern-day reckonings with racial justice. Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Between King Cotton and Queen Victoria: How Pirates, Smugglers, and Scoundrels Almost Saved the Confederacy (U Georgia Press, 2025) by Dr. Beau Cleland recenters our understanding of the Civil War by framing it as a hemispheric affair, deeply influenced by the actions of a network of private parties and minor officials in the Confederacy and British territory in and around North America. John Wilkes Booth likely would not have been in a position to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, for example, without the logistical support and assistance of the pro-Confederate network in Canada. That network, to which he was personally introduced in Montreal in the fall of 1864, was hosted and facilitated by willing colonials across the hemisphere. Many of its Confederate members arrived in British North America via a long-established transportation and communications network built around British colonies, especially Bermuda and the Bahamas, whose primary purpose was running the blockade. It is difficult to overstate how essential blockade running was for the rebellion’s survival, and it would have been impossible without the aid of sympathetic colonials. The operations of this informal, semiprivate network were of enormous consequence for the course of the war and its aftermath, and our understanding of the Civil War is incomplete without a deeper reckoning with the power and potential for chaos of these private networks imbued with the power of a state. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

In 1975 workers at Life Science Products, a small makeshift pesticide factory in Hopewell, Virginia, became ill after exposure to Kepone, the brand name for the pesticide chlordecone. They made the poison under contract for a much larger Hopewell company, Allied Chemical. Life Science workers had been breathing in the dust for more than a year. Ingestion of the chemical made their bodies seize and shake. News of ill workers eventually led to the discovery of widespread environmental contamination of the nearby James River and the landscape of the small, working-class city. Not only had Life Science dumped the chemical, but so had Allied when the company manufactured it in the 1960s and early 1970s. The resulting toxic impact was not only on the city of Hopewell but also on the faraway fields where Kepone was used as an insecticide.Aspects of this environmental tragedy are all too common: corporate avarice, ignorance, and regulatory failure combined with race and geography to determine toxicity and shape the response. But the Kepone story also contains some surprising medical, legal, and political moments amid the disaster. With Poison Powder: The Kepone Disaster in Virginia and Its Legacy (U Georgia Press, 2023) Gregory S. Wilson explores the conditions that put the Kepone factory and the workers there in the first place and the effects of the poison on the people and natural world long after 1975. Although the manufacture and use of Kepone is now banned by the Environmental Protection Agency, organochlorines have long half-lives, and these toxic compounds and their residues still remain in the environment. Matthew Powell is a doctoral student studying history at the University of Georgia. He focuses on the intersection of environmental and labor history, looking at how workers understand the natural world around them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

“When the civil rights movement began to challenge Jim Crow laws, the white southern press reframed the coverage of racism and segregation as a debate over journalism standards. Many white southern editors, for instance, designated Black Americans as “Negro” in news stories, claiming it was necessary for accuracy and “objectivity,” even as white subjects went unlabeled. These news professionals disparaged media outlets that did not adhere to these norms, such as the Black press. In this way, the southern white press weaponized journalism standards—and particularly the idea of objectivity—to counter and discredit reporting that challenged white supremacy. Through deep engagement with letters and other materials in numerous archives from editors, journalists, and leaders of newswire services, Racializing Objectivity: How the White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)interrogates and exposes how the white southern press used journalism standards as a professional rationalization for white supremacy and a political strategy to resist desegregation. Gwyneth Mellinger argues that white skin privilege gave these news professionals a stake in the racial status quo and was thus a conflict of interest as they defended Jim Crow. Her study includes an examination of the Southern Education Reporting Service, an objectivity project whose impartiality, she contends, instead affirmed systemic racism. In a pointed counternarrative, Mellinger highlights Black editors and academics who long criticized the supposed objectivity of the press and were consequently marginalized and often dismissed as illegitimate, fanciful, and even paranoid. Elegant and incisive, Racializing Objectivity unequivocally demonstrates that a full telling of twentieth-century press history must reckon with the white southern press’s cooptation of objectivity and other professional standards to skew racial narratives about Black Americans, the freedom struggle, and democracy itself.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Between the late 1840s and the late 1860s, the United States and Mexico had quite a bit in common. Both suffered from reactionary succession movements, both faced brutal civil wars, and both had to figure out a method of reconstructing broken nations in their aftermath. In Torn Asunder: Republican Crises and Civil Wars in the United States and Mexico, 1848-1867 (UNC Press, 2025), Colegio de Mexico history professor Erika Pani draws out these comparisons to explain the strengths, weaknesses, and possibilities of nineteenth century republican institutions. What she reveals is that, for all their different contexts and outcomes, the Mexican and American republics both buckled but did not break in very similar ways. The experiences of these governments in an era of crisis serves as a lesson in the flexibility of republican government in our own moment of global reactionary and authoritarian revolt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

The Good Forest: The Salzburgers, Success, and the Plan for Georgia (U Georgia Press, 2024) explores some of Georgia’s earliest settlers, the Salzburgers.  Georgia, the last of Britain’s American mainland colonies, began with high aspirations to create a morally sound society based on small family farms with no enslaved workers. But those goals were not realized, and Georgia became a slave plantation society, following the Carolina model. This trajectory of failure is well known. But looking at the Salzburgers, who emigrated from Europe as part of the original plan, provides a very different story.  The Good Forest reveals the experiences of the Salzburger migrants who came to Georgia with the support of British and German philanthropy, where they achieved self-sufficiency in the Ebenezer settlement while following the Trustees’ plans. Because their settlement comprised a significant portion of Georgia’s early population, their experiences provide a corrective to our understanding of early Georgia and help reveal the possibilities in Atlantic colonization as they built a cohesive community.  The relative success of the Ebenezer settlement, furthermore, challenges the inherent environmental, cultural, and economic determinism that has dominated Georgia history. That well-worn narrative often implies (or even explicitly states) that only a slave-based plantation economy—as implemented after the Trustee era—could succeed. With this history, Auman illuminates the interwoven themes of Atlantic migrations, colonization, charity, and transatlantic religious networks. Guest: Dr. Karen Auman is an assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University and a certified genealogist. She studies Germans during the colonial period in the Atlantic World, religion on the frontiers of America, migrations, and families. Host: Lucy Smith Biemiller is an intended M.A. History student at the University of Georgia. She studies 18th and 19th material culture in the American South primarily as it relates to classical culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

The first in a new LSU Press series exploring facets of Louisiana’s iconic culture, Mardi Gras Beads (2022) delves into the history of this celebrated New Orleans artifact, explaining how Mardi Gras beads came to be in the first place and how they grew to have such an outsize presence in New Orleans celebrations. It explores their origins before World War One through their ascent to the premier parade catchable by the Depression era. Doug MacCash explores the manufacture of Mardi Gras beads in places as far-flung as the Sudetenland, India, and Japan, and traces the shift away from glass beads to the modern, disposable plastic versions. Mardi Gras Beads concludes in the era of coronavirus, when parades (and therefore bead throwing) were temporarily suspended because of health concerns, and considers the future of biodegradable Mardi Gras beads in a city ever more threatened by the specter of climate change. Doug MacCash covers New Orleans art and culture for NOLA.com, The Times- Picayune, and The New Orleans Advocate.  Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a PhD in Musicology from Florida State University. Her current research focuses on parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations. Check out some of MacCash's other pertinent writings from NOLA.com here:  "Pretend Karens, marching traffic cones and French Quarter Fools: An amazing Monday before Mardi Gras" "Biodegradable Mardi Gras beads might be rarest throw of 2022 - or ever" "Mardi Gras flashback: Texas artist, 65, says she was first to bare breasts for beads at Carnival" Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Florida State University. Her current research is about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south