The New Mind of the South

262 Pages·2013·3.14 MB·English

by  Tracy Thompson

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This ground-breaking, thought-provoking exploration upends stereotypes and
fallacies to reveal the true heart of the South today—a region still misunderstood by
outsiders and even by its own society.

Many observers say that “the South” has disappeared. Tracy Thompson, a Georgia native,
asserts that it has merely drawn on its oldest tradition: an ability to adapt and transform
itself.

Thompson spent four years traveling throughout the region and discovered a South both
amazingly similar and radically different from the land she knew as a child. African
Americans who left en masse for much of the twentieth century are returning in huge
numbers, drawn back by a mix of ambition, family ties, and cultural memory. Though
Southerners remain more churchgoing than other Americans, the evangelical Protestantism
that defined Southern culture up through the 1960s has been torn by bitter ideological
schisms. The new South is ahead of others in absorbing waves of Latino immigrants, in
rediscovering its agrarian traditions, in seeking racial reconciliation, and in reinventing what
it means to have roots in an increasingly rootless global culture.

Drawing on mountains of data, interviews, and a whole new set of historic archives,
Thompson paints a heartening, often surprising picture of a region filled with promise and
paradoxes—one that is laying a path for the rest of the nation to follow.

Advance praise for The New Mind of the South:
“The more that's written about the American South—as a region and as a mindset—the
more confused people seem to be. Tracy Thompson helps clear up the myths and the
outdated stereotypes. She correctly portrays the South and its people not as stubborn but as
always changing. This is a knowing and sensitive book.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and Benjamin Franklin

Tracy Thompson is a reporter and essayist who has written about subjects ranging from
psychiatry to law to the Civil War. She is the author of The Beast: A Reckoning with
Depression and The Ghost in the House. She lives just outside Washington, D.C., with her
husband, their two daughters, one tabby cat, and an enthusiastic beagle named Max.
s
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also by tracy thompson
The Beast
A Ghost in the House
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the

new mind
of the
south

Tracy Thompson
simon & schuster
New York London Toronto Sydney New Delhi
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copyright © 2013 by tracy Thompson
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First simon & schuster hardcover edition march 2013
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library of congress cataloging-in-publication Data
Isbn 978-1-4391-5803-6
Isbn 978-1-4391-6013-8 (ebook)
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For my husband
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contents
1. It’s complicated 1
2. salsa with your Grits 17
3. The big lie 41
4. shadow history 59
5. Jesusland 106
6. The sorting out 141
7. atlanta 178
8. old times There are not Forgotten 229
Acknowledgments 237
Notes 239
Index 000
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