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New Books in the American South

New Books in the American South

By: New Books Network
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 Interviews with scholars of the American South about their new books. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-southNew Books Network Art Literary History & Criticism World
Episodes
  • John Bardes, "The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930" (UNC Press, 2024)

    John Bardes, "The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930" (UNC Press, 2024)
    Jul 5 2025
    The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930 (UNC Press, 2024) reveals that Americans often assume that slave societies had little use for prisons and police because slaveholders only ever inflicted violence directly or through overseers. Mustering tens of thousands of previously overlooked arrest and prison records, John K. Bardes demonstrates the opposite: in parts of the South, enslaved and free people were jailed at astronomical rates. Slaveholders were deeply reliant on coercive state action. Authorities built massive slave prisons and devised specialized slave penal systems to maintain control and maximize profit. Indeed, in New Orleans—for most of the past half-century, the city with the highest incarceration rate in the United States—enslaved people were jailed at higher rates during the antebellum era than are Black residents today. Moreover, some slave prisons remained in use well after Emancipation: in these forgotten institutions lie the hidden origins of state violence under Jim Crow. With powerful and evocative prose, Bardes boldly reinterprets relations between slavery and prison development in American history. Racialized policing and mass incarceration are among the gravest moral crises of our age, but they are not new: slavery, the prison, and race are deeply interwoven into the history of American governance. Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south
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    49 mins
  • Bryan D. Jones, The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    Bryan D. Jones, The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History" (Oxford UP, 2025)
    Jun 27 2025
    The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History (Oxford University Press, 2025) explores the under-appreciated division in the South between the oligarchic rule of plantation owners and industrialists on the one hand, and the more democratic mindset of the mountain-dwelling small farmers on the other. These two mindsets were in continual tension from the 1800s to the 1960s, when the adherents of the more democratic side of the struggle capitulated to the oligarchical side in response to the Civil Rights movement. Bryan Jones draws from his own family's centuries-old history in the region to explore the rise and fall of the "two minds" of the South. Through a comparison of the experiences of a slaveholding line in his family with three non-slaveholding lines, Jones provides a rich history of the politics of both class and race in the region from the Founding era to the present. The slaveholding side of his family settled in Black Belt Alabama, while ancestral members of the other side of his family were poorer uplanders. In the 1890s, the latter supported the burgeoning populist movement, which for a short window of time tried to unite poor Blacks and poor whites against the patrician planter class and industrialists. After a series of close elections, the planter class was able to stanch the populist tide. They did this in large part by sowing racial division among populism's supporters. Indeed, one of Jones' ancestors helped draft the 1901 Alabama constitution that made Jim Crow the law of the state. Throughout, Jones shows how deep the political differences were between the two regions, with oligarchy characterizing the slaveholding region and a more democratic ethos shaping the non-slaveholding areas. Jones serves as the final observer, a white boy observing not only the demise of the Jim Crow South, but--in the wake of the Civil Rights movement--the demise of the mountain democratic South as well. Today, the vast majority of Southern whites regardless of class support an oligarchical Republican Party. Bryan Jones is J.J."Jake" Pickle Regents' Chair in Congressional Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south
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    58 mins
  • Kathryn L. Beasley, "The Proof Is in the Dough: Rural Southern Women, Extension, and Making Money" (University of Georgia Press, 2025)

    Kathryn L. Beasley, "The Proof Is in the Dough: Rural Southern Women, Extension, and Making Money" (University of Georgia Press, 2025)
    Jun 22 2025
    The Proof Is in the Dough: Rural Southern Women, Extension, and Making Money (University of Georgia Press, 2025) examines how rural white and African American women in Alabama and Florida used the Cooperative Extension Service's home demonstration programming between 1914 and 1929 as a means to earn extra income. Kathryn L. Beasley explores an area of rural women's history that has not been closely examined--that is, how rural American women involved with home demonstration used the skills they learned as a way to better themselves economically. Furthermore, Beasley traces how this extra income allowed these women to shape their own producing and consuming habits. While most home demonstration programming during the Progressive Era and 1920s focused on ways to save money--among other objectives--rural women in Alabama and Florida used different strategies to earn more money and gain some economic independence. Beasley's research shows how Alabama and Florida's rural women exercised their own determination and resourcefulness to create ways to economically sustain themselves by using food, tangible items, handicrafts, small businesses, and more to their advantage. However, while there were similarities in how these rural women earned extra money, the states in which they lived differed in important agricultural ways. Florida offered a wider variety of growing and environmental seasons and, as a result, a larger diversity of crops. By taking a comparative approach--both Florida versus Alabama and Black versus white--Beasley details the unique and innovative ways that rural southern women applied their considerable agricultural and domestic skills to improve their lives and the lives of their families. In so doing, she also reveals how disposable income helped establish ideas of empowerment and financial independence in the years before the economic struggles of the 1930s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south
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    1 hr and 15 mins
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