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1 The U.S. South and Europe An Introduction Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg The U.S. South has always been a distinctive region: not only in the eyes of Americans from other sections of the United States but also in the perception of many Europeans. Once considered as the epitome of isolation and backwardness, the South has recently evoked considerable interest among popular audiences as well as among academic observers on both sides of the Atlantic. One reason why the South captivates national and international attention is its stunning economic development. In 1938 President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously called the region “the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem .” In 1994 New York Times journalist Peter Applebome described the South “as a dominant economic, political and cultural force in American life.” Applebome aptly noted that “to understand America, it is necessary to make sense of the South.”1 Surely the South is the key to understanding recent American politics and the rise of conservatism in particular. As political scientists Earl Black and Merle Black have demonstrated, the South, with its growing population and congressional representation, provides the Republican Party with its core white conservative constituency. The peculiar fusion of evangelical conservatism and free-market capitalism that many Europeans find hard to comprehend originated in the South.2 Then again, President Bill Clinton, a southern Democrat, has enjoyed great popularity among Europeans for two decades not least because he personifies the easygoing side of southern culture. European interest in the American South is not confined to contemporary politics but has a long history predicated on perceived cultural differences between the South and the rest of the United States. As British scholar Helen Taylor explains the region’s transatlantic appeal: “Long associated with hot passions and tempers—of the blues, the Ku Klux Klan, voodoo, and rock and roll—the South is a region associated deliciously 2 Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg with forbidden and guilty desire, racial and sexual violence, and excess of all kinds. Such associations have lingered since the mid-nineteenth century, when Harriet Beecher Stowe’s international bestseller Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) first defined it to the world as a gothic, demonic region.” Modern commentators, such as V. S. Naipaul and John Berendt, also feel that “the South is unutterably different (whether for better or worse) and that it involves different kinds of perception and judgment than those in the rest of the United States.”3 By the late twentieth century, however, Dixie and the nation had become much more akin. According to historian Paul Harvey, the American zeitgeist had moved to the South.4 In a stunning reversal of the Great Migration, both white and black Americans began moving below the Mason-Dixon line in large numbers. Enthusiasm for southern culture manifested itself in the popularity of southern music, especially country music, and southern sports such as stock-car racing. Books, movies, and television series dealing with southern history from the Civil War to the civil rights movement have attracted large audiences. The South has also experienced a boom in the academic world. Following up on the success of his pioneering Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, published in 1989, Charles Reagan Wilson launched the impressive twenty-four-volume New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.5 Spearheaded by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in Oxford and the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, southern studies programs have mushroomed at American universities. As U.S. historians emphasized the centrality of slavery and race in American history, southern history also moved to the center of the historical profession.6 The ascendency of the South has not gone unnoticed in Europe. In a special survey of the U.S. South published in December 1994, the London Economist noted cheerfully: “The South is enjoying its best years since the Civil War.” The region, “like Sleeping Beauty, [had] awakened from 100 years of slumber . . . [and] is marking out a new future. And in doing so it is beating a path for the whole country. In its economy, its politics and even in its race relations, the South is once more full of a long-forgotten confidence —at just a time when confidence seems to be deserting the rest of doubting America.” The issue featured a section entitled “The Southernization of America,” arguing that “the South is leading the nation” and that...

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