A scholarly collection of essays that show the American South in comparative perspective

What made the American South different? This ever-fascinating question is approached from a new angle in this engaging collection of essays originally presented in 1989 at the University of Mississippi in the Chancellor's Symposium lectures.

By Comparing the South with other cultures and by placing the southern experience in the broad context of world history, this volume brings into sharp focus the contours of southern peculiarity. Reconciling the incongruitites became a formative experience for the American South, as well as a feat by which the South produced its own unique, contradictory culture.

The Editor Kees Gispen is an associate professor of history at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of New Profession, Old Order: Engineers and German Society, 1815-1914.