DIXIE RISING: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture.

Applebome, Peter.

ISBN 10: 0812926536 / ISBN 13: 9780812926538

Published by Crown, New York, 1996

About this Item

First printing. A book which is even more true now than when it was written. The author "argues that the South is the region which is increasingly defining the whole United States. The roots of the major national debates on conservative politics, race, guns and states' rights are in the South - debates which the South once was losing, but has now reshaped. In a chapter on George Wallace, he traces the 1994 Republican take-over of Congress back to Wallace's racially charged campaigns that lost the white South for the Democratic party, changing the American political landscape. Applebome makes race the central issue, but also explores other southern influences like country music and Southern Baptism." SIGNED on the half title page. Photographs, notes on sources, bibliography, index. xii, 385 pp. Very near fine in a like dustjacket.

Seller Inventory # 79114

Bibliographic Details

• Title: DIXIE RISING: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture.
• Publisher: Crown, New York
• Publication Date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0812926536
• ISBN 13: 9780812926538
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: FINE
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Southern Writers and the South

About this title

Synopsis

As we move toward the end of the century, Southern values have become American values. Southern politicians lead both political parties, and the South has powered the rightward shift in American politics over the course of the past three decades. The South is far and away the leading area of population and economic growth in America. People in Michigan are listening to country music and parishioners in California are worshiping at Southern Baptist churches. New Yorkers are lining up to hear Newt Gingrich speak and militia members in Idaho look at Southern neo-Confederates as allies and inspirations. And while the nation wrestles with problems of race, ethnicity, and diversity, no place has grappled with those problems longer, with both tragic and triumphant results, than the South.
Applebome takes us on a wild ride through a South that is both undoubtedly new and still shaped by old ways. We visit Montgomery, Alabama, where an aging and ill George Wallace looks back and realizes that he's won; Charlotte, North Carolina, where the go-go spirit of the entrepreneurial New South and a vibrant political progressivism live side by side; Nashville, Tennessee, where country music suddenly finds itself the most popular thing on America's radio dial; Honea Path, South Carolina, where the ghosts of murdered strikers still haunt the town - and labor relations - sixty-two years later; Cobb County, Georgia, where old racial issues play out in a new suburban setting; Wilmington, North Carolina, where school segregation is again an issue, only this time those in favor of it are black.
Applebome also takes us to Selma, Alabama, where veteran civil rights activists gather again to remember the past and wonder about the future; to the Mississippi Delta, where neon-drenched casinos and gourmet catfish farms are neighbors to some of America's most astonishing poverty; and Columbia, South Carolina, where a growing group of Southerners believe that the Confederacy was more than a lost cause - it is one still worth fighting for.

From the Back Cover

tive exploration of the triumphant South--the region that increasingly defines American politics and values--the former Atlanta bureau chief of The New York Times illuminates the people, places, and passions of this influential section of the country--an area that has effectively decided the outcome of every presidential election in the past 30 years.