From Bozart to Booming: Considering the Past and Future South

This essay introduces a special issue of Southern Cultures, entitled "Backward/Forward." The article reviews a few salient examples of how history, the past, and tradition have figured in southern culture over a broad period of time. It also cites brief examples from the nineteenth century, the Great Depression, and the post-Jim Crow South of efforts to look at times of change and imaginings of a future South purged of past problems. The article examines the memory of the Confederacy in this context, including recent challenges to Confederate monuments in public spaces.