The South of the Mind ― American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960?980

With the nation reeling from the cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s era, imaginings of the white South as a place of stability represented a bulwark against unsettling changes, from suburban blandness and empty consumerism to race riots and governmental deceit. A variety of individuals during and after the civil rights era, including writers, journalists, filmmakers, musicians, and politicians, imagined white southernness as a tradition-loving, communal, authentic—and often, but not always, rural or small-town— abstraction that both represented a refuge from modern ills and contained the tools for combating them. The South of the Mind tells this story of how many Americans looked to the nation’s most maligned region to save them during the 1960s and 1970s.

This interdisciplinary work uses imaginings of the South to illuminate the recent American past. In it, Zachary J. Lechner bridges the fields of southern studies, southern history, and post– World War II American cultural and popular culture history in an effort to discern how conceptions of a tradition-bound, “timeless” South shaped Americans’ views of themselves and their society and served as a fantasied refuge from the era’s political and cultural fragmentations, namely, the perceived problems associated with “rootlessness.” In its exploration of the source of these tropes and their influence, The South of the Mind demonstrates that we cannot hope to understand recent U.S. history without exploring how people have conceived the South, as well as what those conceptualizations have omitted.