On January 11, 2023, Charles Reagan Wilson discussed his new book The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South as part of the History Is Lunch series.
In the work Wilson explores how diverse communities of southerners have sought to define the region’s identity. Surveying three centuries of southern regional consciousness across many genres, disciplines, and cultural strains, he challenges prior portrayals of the region with a vision of southern culture that has always been plural, dynamic, and complicated by race and class.
“The concept of a distinctively southern way of life is as enduring as it is disputed,” Wilson said. “The South is a rich tapestry woven with contestations, contingencies, and change.”
Structured in three parts, The Southern Way of Life begins in the colonial era, when complex ideas of “southern civilization” rooted in slaveholding and agrarianism dominated, and continues into the current century and the rise of a modern, multicultural “southern living.”
Charles Reagan Wilson is professor emeritus of history and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, where he taught from 1981 to 2014. Wilson was director of the Southern Studies academic program from 1991 to 1998 and director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture from 1998 to 2007. He earned his BA and MA degrees from the University of Texas at El Paso and his PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin. Wilson’s other books include Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920; Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis; and Flashes of Southern Spirit: Meanings of the Spirit in the U.S. South. He is co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and The Mississippi Encyclopedia.
History Is Lunch is sponsored by the John and Lucy Shackelford Charitable Fund of the Community Foundation for Mississippi. The weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building at 222 North Street in Jackson and livestreamed on YouTube and Facebook.
