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 late 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

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

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

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

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

Suggested Reading List
for Undergraduates and High School Students:

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

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

Outside the Southern Myth (1997)
by Noel Polk

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

The Politics of White Rights by Joseph Bagley (2018)

The South Never Plays Itself by Ben Beard (2020)

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

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

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

Framing the South by Allison Graham (2001)

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

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

The Countercultural South by Jack Temple Kirby (1995)

Media-Made Dixie by Jack Temple Kirby (1986)

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

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

The Silent Majority by Matthew Lassiter (2007)

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

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

The Omni Americans by Albert Murray (1990)

Getting Right with God by Mark Newman (2001)

Outside the Southern Myth by Noel Polk (1997)

The Presence of the Past by Roy Rosenzweig (2001)

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

Deep South by Paul Theroux (2015)

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

Southern documentaries

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