The Editor’s Reading List

From November 2021 through November 2024, editor Foster Dickson read and reviewed the following books in lengthy posts on the project’s blog Groundwork. With publications dates ranging from the early 1970s to the early 2020s, the books in the list provide a sampling of perspectives on Southern culture over the last fifty-plus years.

Books are listed alphabetically by the author’s or first editor’s last name.

The Politics of White Rights by Joseph Bagley (2018)

The South Never Plays Itself by Ben Beard (2020)

Cathedrals of Kudzu by Hal Crowther (2000)

Biracial Politics by Chandler Davidson (1972)

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)

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

Heritage and Hate by Stephen M. Monroe (2021)

The Omni-Americans by Albert Murray (1970)

South to a Very Old Place by Albert Murray (1971)

Getting Right with God by Mark Newman (2001)

Outside the Southern Myth by Noel Polk (1997)

One South by John Shelton Reed (1982)

The Presence of the Past by Roy Rosenzweig (2001)

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

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