With essays and commentaries by Edward L. Ayers, Shearer Davis Bowman, Michael Craton, Barbara Jeanne Fields, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, George M. Fredrickson, Eugene D. Genovese, Richard Graham, Steven H. Hahn, Richard H. King, and Peter Kolchin

What made the American South different? This ever-fascinating question is approached from a new angle in this engaging collection of essays originally presented in 1989 at the University of Mississippi in the Chancellor’s Symposium lectures.

By comparing the South with other cultures and by placing the southern experience in the broad context of world history, this volume brings into sharp focus the contours of southern peculiarity. Reconciling the incongruities became a formative experience for the American South, as well as a feat by which the South produced its own unique, contradictory culture.