Teaching and Researching the American South

Abstract

The American South is a region of endless paradoxes. While today the South's economic expansion is attracting in-migrants by the tens of thousands, many of its residents continue to live in grinding poverty. Though its history includes periods of substantial racial injustice and violence, today more African Americans are moving to the South than any other region of the United States. The region where “cotton was king” now includes many dynamic, prosperous, and rapidly expanding metropolitan areas (e.g., Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas). But in the shadows of these cities reside rural populations who have experienced only limited improvement in the size of their paychecks, the quality of the education provided to their children, and the substance of their interaction with the rest of the nation and world.