Deep Souths

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.