Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture

by Karen L. Cox

Overview

From the late nineteenth century through World War II, popular culture portrayed the American South as a region ensconced in its antebellum past, draped in moonlight and magnolias, and represented by such southern icons as the mammy, the belle, the chivalrous planter, white-columned mansions, and even bolls of cotton. In Dreaming of Dixie, Karen Cox shows that the chief purveyors of nostalgia for the Old South were outsiders of the region, playing to consumers' anxiety about modernity by marketing the South as a region still dedicated to America's pastoral traditions. In addition, Cox examines how southerners themselves embraced the imaginary romance of the region's past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807877784
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	05/15/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	989,440
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Karen L. Cox is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is author of Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Dreaming of Dixie is an extraordinary book that reveals how the South 'rose again' as publishing houses, television, radio, film studios, and advertising firms in New York and Los Angeles created nostalgic myths of the antebellum South. Cox has written a landmark study that shows how corporate America and Hollywood embraced and exploited the South's culture and history to market its products.—William Ferris, author of Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues



Karen Cox's Dreaming of Dixie broadens our understanding of the South in mass culture, making a compelling case for the serious and rigorous study of the topic. This fascinating book will be of great interest to all readers, north and south.—Sarah E. Gardner, author of Blood and Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937

Editorial Reviews

Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through graduate students general readers.—Choice



The book is beautifully illustrated from archival documents and from the author's large personal collection of sheet music covers and advertisements. . . . well researched and documented.—Cercles



Dreaming of Dixie therefore updates, however implicitly, what was once labeled consensus history.—Southern Jewish History



Well illustrated and topically expansive.—Journal of American History



A fascinating book.—Against the Grain



Cox's engaging and wonderfully illustrated book serves as a much-needed challenge to historians to pursue further interdisciplinary study of the American South in popular culture and would also be of interest to scholars interested in consumerism, tourism, and the intersections between regionalism and national identity.""-The Southern Register



A valuable work that helps explain why we as a nation have long viewed the South the way we have.—Public Historian



Cox provides an engaging introduction to the field, along with many rich new insights drawn from a vast array of archival materials.—North Carolina Historical Review



A very well done and thoroughly researched historical study that students and scholars of the south or of the processes of representation and place-making will appreciate.—Journal of Historical Geography



Everyone interested in the larger story of Southern tourism will want to read Dreaming of Dixie, as will anyone who wants to understand the role that images of the South and Southerners have played in American culture.—Florida Historical Quarterly

From the Publisher