Published in 2011
210 pages
Karen L. Cox is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Dr. Cox received her BA and MA in history from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and her Ph.D. from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1997.
What is this book about?
From the late nineteenth century through World War II, popular culture portrayed the American South as a region ensconced in its antebellum past, draped in moonlight and magnolias, and represented by such southern icons as the mammy, the belle, the chivalrous planter, white-columned mansions, and even bolls of cotton. In Dreaming of Dixie, Karen Cox shows that the chief purveyors of nostalgia for the Old South were outsiders of the region, playing to consumers’ anxiety about modernity by marketing the South as a region still dedicated to America’s pastoral traditions. In addition, Cox examines how southerners themselves embraced the imaginary romance of the region’s past.
