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  • Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity
  • Matthew Mancini
Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity. By James C. Cobb. New York: Oxford University Press. 2005.

Along with books on Southern industrialization, James C. Cobb wrote two profound studies on Southern identity—The Most Southern Place On Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Southern Regional Identity (1992), and Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South (1995)—that have made him (along with Fred C. Hobson) the preeminent historian of twentieth-century southern culture. With Away Down South he has written a book that supersedes his previous accomplishments, and it must be recognized as an indispensable contribution not only to southern history but to American Studies as well.

Away Down South addresses the baffling and enduring questions of the nature, causes, purposes, effects, and manifestations of a Southern sense of identity, beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing down to the early years of the twenty-first, with over four-fifths of the book being devoted to the period since the Civil War. It is an often grim and distressing tale because of the centrality of myth-making, white supremacy, and Yankee-hating to Southern identity among whites, and the corresponding burden of guilt, shame, and resistance it engendered among black and white writers and intellectuals. The breadth of historical and literary reference of Cobb’s study is amazing, and his steadiness of vision, intellectual passion, and scholarly detachment shine through on every page.

One area Cobb neglects, however, is that of disease and health. (This is an omission also noted by Robert E. May in a searching 2006 essay in Reviews in American History.) Hookworm and pellagra were prominent items on Donald Davidson’s list of the features that made up the image of “the benighted South,” but Todd Savitt and James Harvey Young’s 1988 collection Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South remains the basic study of the correlation of the South’s exceptional health profile and its self-image.

Away Down South exemplifies the many bonds that connect Southern history and American Studies. From its modern beginnings in the revolt against the stultifying and repressive hegemony of New South orthodoxy, Southern history has been characterized by its critical analyses of socially destructive myths, the activism of many of its practitioners, and the multi-and inter-disciplinary nature of its best works. When C. Vann Woodward entered graduate school at the University of North Carolina in 1934, with degrees in philosophy (Emory) and political science (Columbia), he was interested mainly in working with the pioneering Southern sociologists Howard Odom and Rupert Vance. Woodward found little inspiration in the atmosphere of New South adulation that permeated the Chapel Hill history department. At the age of twenty-five, Woodward had [End Page 140] already earned impressive activist credentials, having visited the Soviet Union twice and, while in New York, forged friendships with J. Saunders Redding, Langston Hughes, and other luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance. Cobb is in the Woodward mold; he combines skillful literary interpretation with analysis of social structure, and unites a deeply felt commitment to social and racial justice with rigorous standards of scholarship. He ends with a forceful argument against the use of history in identity politics and vice versa, the immense value of which separation his own book serves to illustrate.

Matthew Mancini
Saint Louis University
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