Myth, Manners & Memory

 edited by Charles Reagan Wilson

 

“From Civil War monuments to African influences on southern language and music, and from the plantation to postmodernism, this fascinating volume covers a lot of territory. It provides an invaluable resource for anyone wanting to know just how the South is different, and how many different Souths there are. Nobody interested in the region should be without it.”

— Richard Gray, author of Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region and Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism

“This volume maintains the project’s high standards of writing, scholarship, and coverage. It is an essential work for all southern historians, for myths, manners, and memory lie at the very core of the South’s identity as a distinctive region.”                             — David Goldfield, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture addresses the cultural, social, and intellectual terrain of myth, manners, and historical memory, in the American South. Many of these topics are echoed throughout other volumes in the series, but this collection helps paint the broad and multihued picture of how a distinct southern identity has been created, recreated, and performed through memories both fact and fiction.

Of the ninety-five entries here, about half are brand new or completely revised for this edition. They address issues such as myth and memory of the Old South and the Civil War; stereotypes and traditions related to the body, sexuality, gender, and family, such as courtship rituals and beauty pageants; institutions and places associated with historical memory, such as cemeteries, monuments, and museums; and specific subjects and objects of myth and manners, including the Confederate flag and Graceland. Together, they offer a compelling portrait of the “southern way of life” as it has been imagined, lived, and contested.

Charles Reagan Wilson is Kelly Gene Cook Sr. Chair of History and Professor of Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi and coeditor of the original Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

          • Mythic South
            __________________________

          • African Influences

          • Automobile

          • Beauty, Cult of

          • Benighted South

          • Body

          • Clocks and Time

          • Community

          • Confederate Monuments

          • Debutantes

          • Etiquette of Race Relations in the Jim Crow South

          • Family

          • Fashion

          • Fatherhood

          • Fighting South

          • Fraternal Groups

          • Fraternal Orders, Black

          • Garden Myth

          • Gays

          • Icons, Southern

          • Ladies and Gentlemen

          • Lynching

          • Maiden Aunt

          • Manners

          • Memory

          • Modernism

          • Motherhood

          • Museums

          • New South Myth

          • Northern Mythmaking

          • Plantation Myth

          • Postmodernism

          • Racial Attitudes

          • Reconstruction Myth

          • Regionalism

          • Religion and Mythology

          • Romanticism

          • Sexuality

          • Stereotypes

          • Stoicism

          • Tobacco

          • Victorianism

          • Visiting


            ____________________________
  • Agrarians, Vanderbilt
  • Anglo-Saxon South
  • Appalachian Myth
  • Babylon, South’s (New Orleans)
  • Black Collectibles
  • Black Confederates, Myth of
  • Burma Shave Signs
  • Carter Era
  • Cash, W. J.
  • Cavalier Myth
  • Celtic South
  • Chosen People Myth
  • Christmas
  • “City Too Busy to Hate” (Atlanta)
  • Civil War Reenactments
  • Confederate Memorial Day
  • “Crackers”
  • Elderly
  • Evangeline Myth
  • Family Reunions
  • Farm Security Administration Photography
  • Feuds and Feuding
  • Flag, Confederate
  • Gardner, Dave
  • Good Old Boys/Girls
  • Graceland
  • Holidays
  • Hospitality
  • Jim Crow
  • Juneteenth
  • Lost Cause Myth
  • L.Q.C. Lamar Society
  • “Mammy”
  • Mencken's South
  • Mitchell, Margaret
  • “Moonlight and Magnolias” Myth
  • Nationalism, Southern
  • Patriotic Societies
  • Pickup Truck
  • Pilgrimage
  • Place, Sense of
  • Poor Whites
  • Reb, Johnny
  • Rednecks
  • Sambo
  • “See Rock City”
  • Selma March
  • Stone Mountain
  • Trucking
  • Uncle Tom's Cabin
  • Yerby, Frank
  • Yoknapatawpha County