Deep Souths

Reviews / Votes

This book succeeds admirably in... show[ing] that far from being static during the years between Reconstruction and the Second World War, the southern states were rapidly changing... It would be hard to find a better ground-level account. -- Howard Temperley Times Literary Supplement This is one of those uncommon scholarly works that combines remarkable research and a fluid writing style into an illuminating and highly readable book... Harris gives voice to a heartbreaking story of economic struggle, racial conflict, and glacial change through memoirs, letters, and newspaper articles. He writes with genuine sympathy for the inhabitants of each region but never loses sight of the broad forces that shaped their lives. Highly recommended. Library Journal The ebbs and flows of capital and labor form the bones of Harris's work, while the lives of real people give it vitality-women as well as men, poor farmers and wealthy landowners, Pentecostals and politicians, sharecroppers and educators, lynchers and their victims, suffragists and blues singers, entrepreneurs and activists-often rendered in pertinent, vivid biographical detail in this absorbing work, which is based on more than a decade of research. Publishers Weekly Harris's superb synthesis of the vast scholarship on this era is matched by his identifying previously untapped archival sources that offer fresh perspectives and evidence. -- Robert C. Kenzer American Historical Review There is no static South here; Harris's story is one of constant change and evolution, in response to forces both internal and external... Harris's achievement is not in reconceptualizing southern history, it is in synthesizing many of the strands of recent historiography, helping us understand how they fit together in the lives of real Deep Southerners. -- David B. Parker H-South, H-Net Reviews [A] very satisfying analysis. Harris' exhaustive research, his careful attention to the regional distinctions, and his sensitivity to the complexities of change make this an important contribution to the study of the Jim Crow South. -- Steve Tripp Journal of Social History It should come as no surprise the Deep Souths, written by J. William Harris, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize... Deep Souths brings us closer to an understanding of how place and time shaped the different ways that the politics and cultures of segregation played out on the Georgia Sea Coast, in the Mississippi Delta, and in the Georgia Piedmont. -- Sarah Judson Journal of American History Deep Souths is unusual... rigorous comparative studies of different subregions of the wider South are extremely rare... His book is agreeably written and he has a nice touch in telling stories that make the economic and social abstractions complete. -- Michael O'Brien The Historical Journal 2003 Harris has constructed a mosaic of impressive dimension and subtlety in Deep Souths, a study that adds significantly to our understanding of the South on several levels. -- George B. Ellenberg Register of the Kentucky Historical Society