The online anthology Nobody’s Home: Modern Southern Folklore is being crafted with teachers in mind. Access to the anthology is free, and works can be easily linked into platforms such as Google Classroom and Schoology. Because Nobody’s Home is an anthology of nonfiction, its works fit with Common Core standards for informational texts in grades 9-10 and grades 11-12. Finally, once the initial compilation process is completed in fall 2021, each work will have an accompanying lesson plan that offers standards-based curricular connections.

The editor also invites classroom teachers to submit and share their own lesson plans for works in the anthology or to suggest a title for the reading lists. Please use the form on the Contact page to query the editor first.

Lesson Plans:

Lesson plans will be available in fall 2021, after all works are published.

Suggested Reading List
for Teachers and Graduate Students:

The Mind of the South (1941, reprint 1991)
by Wilbur J. Cash

The Idea of the South: Pursuit of a Central Theme (1964)
edited by Frank E. Vandiver

The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking  (1970, reprint 2003)
by Paul Gaston

Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (2007)
by James C. Cobb

Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie (2010)
by Allen Tullos

Suggested Reading List
for Undergraduates and High School Students:

A Turn in the South (1989)
by V. S. Naipaul

The South of Haunted Dreams: A Ride through Slavery’s Old Backyard (1993)
by Eddy L. Harris

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998)
by Tony Horwitz

Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race, and New Beginnings in a New South (2004)
by Mark Kemp

Outside the Southern Myth (1997)
by Noel Polk

The Editor’s Reading List, a work-in-progress:

The Presence of the Past by Roy Rosenzweig (2001)

Judgment & Grace in Dixie by Charles Reagan Wilson (1995)

The Countercultural South by Jack Temple Kirby (1995)

Myth, Media, and the Southern Mind by Stephen A. Smith (1986)

The Two-Party South by Alexander A. Lamis (1984)

Myth and Southern History, Volume 2: The New South, edited by Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords (1989)

South to a New Place, edited by Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith (2002) 

The Silent Majority by Matthew Lassiter (2007)

Outside the Southern Myth by Noel Polk (1997)

The Omni Americans by Albert Murray (1990)

Deep South by Paul Theroux (2015)

A Movement of the People by Katie Lamar Jackson (2017)

Framing the South by Allison Graham (2001)

Media-Made Dixie by Jack Temple Kirby (1986)

Southern Politics in the 1990s by Alexander P. Lamis (1999)

The South of the Mind by Zachary J. Lechner (2018)

The Politics of White Rights by Joseph Bagley (2018)

Navigating Souths, edited by Michele Grigsby Coffey and Jodi Skipper (2020)

Getting Right with God by Mark Newman (2001)

The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism by Matthew Lassiter and Joseph Crespino (2010)

Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State by Andrew Gelman, et al. (2008)

The South Never Plays Itself by Ben Beard (2020)

Southern documentaries

Click here for a selected list of documentaries about the South.