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  • Whose South?Lessons Learned from Studying the South at the University of Mississippi
  • Charles Reagan Wilson (bio)

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Instant Civil War capsules, which, when dropped in water, produce a Yankee and Confederate soldier. Trivialization of the Civil War at work. All photos from the author’s “Southern Tacky” collection, by Danny K Photography, 2016.

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On the occasion of my retirement from the University of Mississippi in 2014, I knew I had to talk about the South, the topic I have spent my career studying, pondering, writing about, and teaching. The more I thought about what to present in a final, university-wide lecture, my personal journey seemed relevant, for I think my family and personal stories parallel some developments in the South’s history. My roots and raising were in middle Tennessee, as part of a very close-knit southern family. My parents were from small towns in tobacco country north of Nashville. They were what historians would call the “plain folk”—not wealthy, not the stereotypical poor whites, but, in my father’s case at least, poor in worldly goods as a child. My father’s people were burdened with a hardscrabble life as tenant farmers. My mother’s life was more sheltered, growing up in the small town of Springfield, near the Kentucky border. Neither had traveled farther than Nashville, but that changed when the United States entered World War II. Their story was typical of so many southerners of the early twentieth century, and the Great Depression of the 1930s was a particularly hard context in which to grow up. Many historians would now say that World War II had a greater impact on changing the South than even the Civil War did. My father joined the new Army Air Force and was stationed for three years in Bassingbourn, England. One of the most important themes in the study of the South now is globalization, and my father was part of that early on, in his uprooting from rural, farm Tennessee to be sent halfway across the globe.

After the war ended in the spring of 1945, my dad came home, and he and my mom married within a few months, and moved to Nashville, becoming a part of the postwar migration of southerners to cities and towns. The 1960 census was the first one in which more southerners lived in cities than in rural areas, and my family’s experience reflected that change. I was born in Nashville, but when I was nine years old, in 1957, we left Tennessee to move to El Paso, Texas, a move occasioned by my mother’s worsening health in the wet and humid Southeast. So we went west, going on Highway 80, shortly after which the federal government built what’s now called the Eisenhower Interstate Highway system. That program would tie the nation together in productive ways, and one result was bringing the South more directly into connection with the rest of the nation. That interstate highway system was a tangible expression of one of the most important factors in modernizing the South and making life better for our people, namely, the investment the federal government made in sending a disproportionate amount of federal tax money to the South to stimulate economic development.

In any event, this uprooting severed me from an extended kin of grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins, but it bound me even closer to my nuclear family. We had joined the movement to the Sunbelt, that term coined in the 1980s to reflect the South’s close ties to the Southwest, stretching to southern California. I grew [End Page 97]


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Texas glass collected by the author while living in the state.

up in a very cosmopolitan, suburban place—El Paso, a city with a mobile military population, high tech researchers associated with the defense industry, and strong cultural influences from southern California (my high school was just like that one in American Graffiti). And I was amidst an intriguing Anglo– Hispanic culture of a Mexican border town. In those days, it was a free-flowing border where...

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