Announcing Publication of “A New History of the American South,” the First, Collaborative Effort to Tell the History of the Region for the Twenty-First Century
The University of North Carolina Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming and long-awaited publication of A New History of the American South, edited by Pulitzer Prize-finalist W. Fitzhugh Brundage. With associate editors Laura Edwards and Jon F. Sensbach, Brundage has compiled a definitive, one-volume history of the American South. The broadly chronological collection features essays by leading scholars on various aspects of the region. The contributors—Peter A. Coclanis, Gregory P. Downs, Laura F. Edwards, Robbie Ethridge, Kari Frederickson, Paul Harvey, Kenneth R. Janken, Martha S. Jones, Blair L. M. Kelley, Kate Masur, Michael A. McDonnell, Scott Reynolds Nelson, Jim Rice, Natalie Ring, and Jon F. Sensbach—weave together a bold new narrative of Southern history from its ancient past to Black Lives Matter.
Publishing under UNC Press’s trade imprint, Ferris and Ferris Books, this groundbreaking work draws on both well-established and new currents in scholarship including global and Atlantic world history, histories of African diaspora, environmental history, and more. The volume also focuses on those whose experiences have too-often been absent from or underrepresented in scholarship of the South including those of Black, Indigenous, and poor communities.
“Our focus in this volume is not on identifying a litany of characteristics that can be assigned to the South but rather to exploring the clustered interactions between people and institutions that gave historical salience to the concept of the South,” writes Fitz Brundage in the introduction. “By shifting the focus to economic, political, and cultural contingencies and away from the search for a timeless or primal unifying thread in southern history, the volume will diverge from long established portraits of the tradition-bound South.”
“UNC Press has long been the premier publisher of books about the American South. For 100 years and in thousands of books, we have captured the history, politics, religion, race relations, fiction, music, foodways and much more about the region,” says Director of UNC Press John Sherer. “Every few decades the Press publishes a seminal volume that on its own changes the way we conceive the South: whether it is the National Book Award winning White Over Black (co-published with the Omohundro Institute) or the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. As we embark on our second century, we are proud to once again publish a book that will change how the South is studied and understood.”
A New History of the American South will be published on May 2, 2023. Pre-order your copy from:
For advance review copies and/or media requests, contact Sonya Bonczek, Director of Publicity, at sonya.bonczek@uncpress.org