Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South - Softcover

Redefining Southern Culture will undoubtably be a significant book for historians and other scholars interested in the South. Cobb has original and sage observations and his range is impressive. Cobb is at ease in dealing with issues of both economic development and cultural expression, and he engages familiar figures in this manuscript―the writers of the Southern Literary Renaissance, historian C. Vann Woodward, journalist W. J. Cash, sociologist Howard Odem, and contemporary African American writers who are reimagining the South.

Cobb's work draws upon the writing of many historians, and his notes provide for a rich bibliography . . . Highly recommended.

James C. Cobb has a distinguished record of helping to sort out the complexities of tradition and modernity in the American South. . . . Cobb's prose is deft and graceful . . . . This is a book that deserves a wide audience and a careful reading, by soccer moms and neo-Confederates alike.

[Cobb] exhibits the skills of a talented folklorist as well as historian of southern music in presenting with great detail the stories, songs, and voices of history that fascinate the imagination . . . He brings the long dead past into sharp focus . . . Cobb brings to his study a great and useful range of cultural history and wonderful detail.

Cobb is witty and always stimulating in bringing together issues of the South’s cultural identity and its economic development―as no one else writing on the South does so well.

People interested in the South and its place in the greater scheme of things need to pay attention to what Jim Cobb has to say.

Readers who want a broad scholarly treatment of southern culture and its continuous state of change will find this book to be educational, balanced and interesting.

Very few historians can turn their hand to both economic and cultural history but James Cobb is one of them.