Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The first historian to survey the historiography of the twentieth-century South began with a caveat. Writing in 1965, Dewey Grantham complained: “No period offers more abundant materials for the writing of the region's history than the recent past, yet historians have scarcely begun to confront the southern experience in the twentieth century” (Link and Patrick 1965: 410). Commissioned to write the final essay in a volume entitled Writing Southern History, Grantham somehow managed to fill 35 pages adorned with 115 footnotes. But he did so only by liberally expanding the definition of history to include the works of journalists, sociologists, folklorists, economists, and political scientists. While this ecumenical approach produced an interesting and thought-provoking essay, it underscored the collective failure of southern historians to confront six decades of regional history. The South had passed through the crises of racial disfranchisement, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the modern civil rights movement, not to mention massive urbanization, industrialization, and demographic change. Yet the sub-field of southern history had continued to focus almost exclusively, even obsessively, on the events of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, revisiting and reinterpreting lives and events that had been studied many times before. The lack of temporal balance among ... log in or subscribe to read full text