Series Editors: Karen L. Cox, University of North Carolina, Charlotte & Françoise N. Hamlin, Brown University
The Boundless South series publishes books that are regional, readable, and deeply researched while capturing the stories of people, places, and cultures. Connecting audiences to real southerners, Boundless South presents the diversity of “southernness” and the extent of the southern diaspora with nuance and broad appeal and connects audiences to real southerners.
Boundless South (BoSo) seeks to harness a new energy surrounding the discipline of history and calls on historians to provide narrative-based books that meld scholarship with writing for the broader public. As historians of the American South who understand the importance of reaching a broader public, the series editors seek to bring together like-minded historians and writers to examine the region in ways that stretch beyond the current historiographical, geographical, and chronological boundaries, while also challenging ideas about what the South is and where southern culture can be found. BoSo, as a series, intends to gather books of history that also tell stories of people, places, and culture.
While the series expects to expand the historiography of the South, we are more concerned with how southern history is written, to overcome the tendency for insular discussions of the region that rarely speak to crossover audiences or have any effect on public discourse. The histories we write about the South today are critical to how it will be understood by Americans in the future. While the foundations of BoSo are rooted in scholarship, the writers might not call the academy home, as many historians are working as journalists, public historians, teachers in secondary education, and in the private sector. Most fundamentally, BoSo seeks to tell stories targeting the larger market: the non-scholars, be they students or the general public.
Readers of BoSo books will encounter stories about everyday people, as well as leaders, while connecting Americans to the South and its people in a way that is relatable and offers nuanced portraits of the region that also highlights its differences. The series will present a plurality of southernness that accurately matches that of nation. Submissions to BoSo are welcome. We invite you to read this press release about the series and please reach out to Andrew Winters—[email protected] with a proposal or query.
Series Editors
Karen L. Cox is a public intellectual and professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Her books include Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture, and Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South. Her most recent book is the award-winning No Common Ground, Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice.
Françoise N. Hamlin is associate professor of history and Africana Studies at Brown University. Her work focuses on a diverse array of African American experiences and epistemologies, particularly during struggles for freedom and equality. She is the author of the award-winning Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II and co-editor of These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on War and Citizenship and From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. She also republished The Struggle of Struggles, an autobiography by civil rights activist Vera Pigee.
