Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity [Paperback]

James C. Cobb (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195315812 | ISBN-13: 978-0195315813 | Publication Date: January 12, 2007

From the seventeenth century Cavaliers and Uncle Tom's Cabin to Civil Rights museums and today's conflicts over the Confederate flag, here is a brilliant portrait of southern identity, served in an engaging blend of history, literature, and popular culture. In this insightful book, written with dry wit and sharp insight, James C. Cobb explains how the South first came to be seen--and then came to see itself--as a region apart from the rest of America.
As Cobb demonstrates, the legend of the aristocratic Cavalier origins of southern planter society was nurtured by both northern and southern writers, only to be challenged by abolitionist critics, black and white. After the Civil War, defeated and embittered southern whites incorporated the Cavalier myth into the cult of the "Lost Cause," which supplied the emotional energy for their determined crusade to rejoin the Union on their own terms. After World War I, white writers like Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner and other key figures of "Southern Renaissance" as well as their African American counterparts in the "Harlem Renaissance"--Cobb is the first to show the strong links between the two movements--challenged the New South creed by asking how the grandiose vision of the South's past could be reconciled with the dismal reality of its present. The Southern self-image underwent another sea change in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, when the end of white supremacy shook the old definition of the "Southern way of life"--but at the same time, African Americans began to examine their southern roots more openly and embrace their regional, as well as racial, identity. As the millennium turned, the South confronted a new identity crisis brought on by global homogenization: if Southern culture is everywhere, has the New South become the No South?
Here then is a major work by one of America's finest Southern historians, a magisterial synthesis that combines rich scholarship with provocative new insights into what the South means to southerners and to America as well.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

What makes the South Southern? Is it the history of slavery and segregation? The unrelenting heat? NASCAR? All this and more, says the University of Georgia historian Cobb (The Most Southern Place on Earth). In this riveting read, Cobb charts the twisting, shifting history of Southern identity and how folks, Southern and non-Southern, have thought about the region. Cobb devotes a good bit of space to writers—from antebellum novelist John Pendleton Kennedy to William Faulkner— and their conceptions of the South. And Cobb doesn't focus only on white Southerners' understanding of their region. He also traverses Maya Angelou's memoirs and the activism of Martin Luther King Jr., and he introduces entrepreneurs like Sherman Evans and Angel Quintero, two black Charlestonians who launched Nu South sportswear, which melds icons of the Confederacy with images of African nationalism. Occasionally, Cobb strikes a pedestrian note, to wit, his discussion of recent fights over the place of the Confederate flag, which concludes mildly that battles over "symbolic memory" show that "the politics of the past is always part of the politics of the present." Further, one might wish that Cobb had devoted more space to discussions of pop culture: Southern food, Southern music. Hopefully, he has a sequel planned. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Cobb takes over 200 years of southern intellectualism and condenses it into a readable history of southern history.... An accessible, wide-ranging picture of southern identity, useful for students, professionals, and those generally interested in how the South sees itself."--Matthew L. Downs, Southern Historian

"The inhabitants of Away Down South come at us thick and fast, benighted and bemused, roaring down some unpaved back-country road, pedal to the metal. If this sounds like a breathless rendition of Southern history by an academic who loves to name names, it certainly is. Still, no one remotely interested in the South will be able to resist this book, and readers are bound to learn from Cobb's enormous erudition."--Ira Berlin, The Washington Post Book World

"In this riveting read, Cobb charts the twisting, shifting history of Southern identity and how folks, Southern and non-Southern, have thought about the region.... Hopefully, he has a sequel planned."--Publishers Weekly

"If South-gazing is your bag, Away Down South is your book.... With C. Vann Woodward's death, Cobb is perhaps our best historical interpreter of the South and this may be his best book, better even than his fine book about the Mississippi Delta.... Not only has he done his homework, he has reflected deeply and the result is mature (as in good wine), mellow, stylish and tasty."--Edwin M. Yoder Jr., Weekly Standard

"In this comprehensive, thoughtful, and utterly fascinating account, Cobb stalks the elusive mind--or rather minds--of the South. I don't use the word 'masterpiece' often, but it's the right word here." --John Shelton Reed, author of My Tears Spoiled My Aim: And Other Reflections on Southern Culture

"A special treasure for all of us who have loved, studied, and tried to understand the South, a wonderfully complicated part of our country which--despite the changes chronicled in Jim Cobb's fine work--still more than any other region, thinks of itself as being different and special. Away Down South provides not only context and perspective but Cobb's own unique and powerful insights into the South's inherent contradictions." --Hamilton Jordan

"If you want to know what makes the South tick, you might well look to James C. Cobb for insight. For that matter, if you want to understand the inner workings of the contemporary United States, Away Down South would be a good place to start." --John Egerton, author of The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America

"A tour de force from one of the South's premier historians. James Cobb shows, with characteristic wity and acuity, how a distinctive regional identity from the time of Jamestown to the Iraq war depended not just on how white and black southerners thought of themselves, but also on what others thought of Dixie." --Anthony J. Badger, author of The New Deal: The Depression Years 1933- 1940 and co-author of Race in the American South

"Away Down South exemplifies the many bonds that connect Southern history and American Studies.... Cobb 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, American Studies

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (January 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195315812
• ISBN-13: 978-0195315813
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #147,942 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Northerner Trying to Understand the South, August 8, 2006

By 

O. Guthrie (Walnut Creek CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (Hardcover)

I have lived in Nashville, TN for 12 years; during that time I have read everything I could find on the Civil War, slavery, reconstruction, civil rights, Southern men and Southern women. Still I was at a loss as to why my new friends and neighbors lived with the Civil War as if it had happened yesterday and not 140 years ago. Growing up in the midwest and spending most of my life in California, I was unprepared for the cultural differrences I found between me and them. By luck, I happened upon Mr. Cobb's book. What a revelation I had! He gives his readers a concise history of the South from the days of the first settlers though to the modern era. He explains why Southerners think and act as they do. I found this book fascinating. It is beautifully written, reads like a novel and yet is factual with all the proper footnotes, etc. A must read for anyone who is a newcomer to the South.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Study of Southern Identity, January 27, 2007

By 

Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (Hardcover)

In considering the American South, most people tend to view it as distinctive and different from the remainder of the United States. The South is thought to have an "identity" of its own -- and historians frequently view their task as determining the nature of the uniquely Southern identity. In his book "Away Down South: A Study of Southern Identity" (2005), Professor James C. Cobb studies Southern history, the nature of Southern identity over time, and the concept of identity itself. Cobb his written a challenging book. Cobb is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Georgia. He has written extensively on Southern history.

Cobb examines Southern history and the distinctiveness of the South. He begins in the colonial period and continues through the "Old South" of the pre-Civil War Era. Cobb discusses the perceived "distinctiveness" of the South. Southern distinctiveness was gnerally seen as based upon plantation slavery. The South was frequently viewed as backward and barbaric with its "peculiar institution", but its defenders saw the South romantically as a land of cavaliers. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, a "New South" developed based upon Jim Crow, and upon an attempt to build an industrial base upon small textile mills, keeping many people, white and black, impoverished. Cobb shows how the development of the "New South" was based upon the "Lost Cause" view that many Southerners developed to explain the loss of the Civil War and upon a romantic and highly exaggerated picture of the virtues of the Old South.

But Cobb's book gains in depth when he turns from a consideration of early Southern history to the manner in which that history was reflected in Southern history and literature. Cobb writes insightfully about white authors such as William Faulkner and Ellen Glasgow as they struggled with uderstanding the South as well as about African American authors, such as Zora Neal Hurston and Sterling Brown as they approached Southern history from an African American standpoint. Cobb's study focuses on a famous book by historian W.J. Cash,"The Mind of the South" (1941) which becomes, in Cobb's account, emblematic of the deeply ambivalent attitude Southerners adopted towards their region and towards its history.

Cobb discusses whether the contemporary South remains a region set apart and distinctive from the rest of the United States. I found that Cobb had perceptive things to say about Southern identity and of the way in which "identity" should be used in approaching history -- and one's own life. Late in his book, Cobb argues that while identity has most often been viewed in terms of "distinctiveness" -- what makes the South "different" from everywhere else -- that may not be the only or the most useful way to think about the nature of identity. "Identity" can change over time. Furthemore, Cobb points out, identity can be considered not as focusing on "how the South is different" from some other region or from the United States as a whole, but rather on "what the South is" for itself. In other words, Cobb suggests focusing on what the South is, and on how people view what it may be at its best, without juxtaposing it or considering it in opposition to another region or to the rest of the United States. He suggests, and well so, how this approach to thinking about the identity or uniqueness of a region might be used to consider painful questions of regional, national, and religious identity that plague much of the world today. Cobb also suggests, that individuals, in trying to understand themselves, might well consider their identities as changing rather than static. They might consider their personalities and attributes valuable for what they are without envy of or criticism of others -- that is, irrespective of comparing their identity with the identity of some other person or group. People tend to have a multitude of identities, not just one. Cobb approvingly quotes Faulker's observation that "it is himself that every Southerner writes about."

I think Cobb has done several things in this book. First he has given an overview of Southern history. Second. he has offered an excellent discussion of literature and history written about the South. There is much worthwhile material to explore here, and Cobb's book may serve as a guide to it. Third, and most importantly, Cobb has written eloquently on Southern identity. He offers wise suggestions on how the concept of identity may be modified in considering both the history of a region and the life of an individual.

Robin Friedman

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars My humble review, July 25, 2010

By 

Robert T. Champion (Tuscaloosa, AL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (Paperback)

Good comprehensive book with a lot of great details, but not as well organized as it purports to be. I sometimes find myself getting lost from paragraph to paragraph wondering how they relate to each other. Still, the overall themes are well developed.