Dreaming of Dixie

How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture

By Karen L. Cox

224 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 39 illus., notes, bibl., index

  • Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-0986-7
    Published: August 2013
  • E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8078-7778-4
    Published: May 2011
  • E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-8429-9
    Published: May 2011

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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.

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.
For more information about Karen L. Cox, visit the Author Page.

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

Multimedia & Links

Visit the author's guest blog series at uncpressblog.com.

Check out the author's own blog, Pop South.

Visit the Facebook page for the book.

Follow the author on Twitter @SassyProf.

Listen: Radio interview with Cox on Charlotte's WFAE.