Cover of Dixie rising
Read Time: ~6.4 hr

Dixie rising

by Peter Applebome (1996)

About this book

As we move toward the end of the century, Southern values have become American values. Southern politicians lead both political parties, and the South has powered the rightward shift in American politics over the course of the past three decades. The South is far and away the leading area of population and economic growth in America. People in Michigan are listening to country music and parishioners in California are worshiping at Southern Baptist churches. New Yorkers are lining up to hear Newt Gingrich speak and militia members in Idaho look at Southern neo-Confederates as allies and inspirations. And while the nation wrestles with problems of race, ethnicity, and diversity, no place has grappled with those problems longer, with both tragic and triumphant results, than the South. Applebome takes us on a wild ride through a South that is both undoubtedly new and still shaped by old ways.^ We visit Montgomery, Alabama, where an aging and ill George Wallace looks back and realizes that he's won; Charlotte, North Carolina, where the go-go spirit of the entrepreneurial New South and a vibrant political progressivism live side by side; Nashville, Tennessee, where country music suddenly finds itself the most popular thing on America's radio dial; Honea Path, South Carolina, where the ghosts of murdered strikers still haunt the town - and labor relations - sixty-two years later; Cobb County, Georgia, where old racial issues play out in a new suburban setting; Wilmington, North Carolina, where school segregation is again an issue, only this time those in favor of it are black.^ Applebome also takes us to Selma, Alabama, where veteran civil rights activists gather again to remember the past and wonder about the future; to the Mississippi Delta, where neon-drenched casinos and gourmet catfish farms are neighbors to some of America's most astonishing poverty; and Columbia, South Carolina, where a growing group of Southerners believe that the Confederacy was more than a lost cause - it is one still worth fighting for.

Setting / LocationNew York City
Story EraContemporary / Future
Protagonist / CoreDixie rising Lead Character

Readers who enjoyed this also loved

Cover of The Nine

The Nine

Jeffrey Toobin

Bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin takes you into the chambers of the most important--and secret--legal body in our country, the Supreme Court, and reveals the complex dynamic among the nine people who decide the law of the land.Just in time for the 2008 presidential election--where the future of the Court will be at stake--Toobin reveals an institution at a moment of transition, when decades of conservative disgust with the Court have finally produced a conservative majority, with major changes in store on such issues as abortion, civil rights, presidential power, and church-state relations.Based on exclusive interviews with justices themselves, The Nine tells the story of the Court through personalities--from Anthony Kennedy's overwhelming sense of self-importance to Clarence Thomas's well-tended grievances against his critics to David Souter's odd nineteenth-century lifestyle. There is also, for the first time, the full behind-the-scenes story of Bush v. Gore--and Sandra Day O'Connor's fateful breach with George W. Bush, the president she helped place in office. The Nine is the book bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin was born to write. A CNN senior legal analyst and New Yorker staff writer, no one is more superbly qualified to profile the nine justices.

Cover of Poetics of relation

Poetics of relation

Édouard Glissant

In Poetics of Relation, French-Caribbean writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant turns the concrete particulars of Caribbean reality into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation. He sees the islands of the Antilles as enduring an "invalid" suffering imposed by history, yet also as a place whose unique interactions will one day produce an emerging global consensus. Arguing that the writer alone can tap the unconscious of a people and apprehend its multiform culture in order to provide forms of memory and intent capable of transcending "nonhistory," Glissant therefore defines his "poetics of relation" - both aesthetic and political - as a transformative mode of history, capable of enunciating and making concrete a French-Caribbean reality with a self-defined past and future. In Poetics of Relation, we come to see that relation in all its senses - telling, listening, connecting, and the parallel consciousness of self and surroundings - is the key to transforming mentalities and reshaping societies. The issues raised about identity as built in relation and not in isolation are central to current discussions not only of Caribbean creolization but of U.S. multiculturalism as well.

Cover of The restless wave

The restless wave

John McCain, with Mark Salter

"A candid new political memoir from Senator John McCain--his most personal book in years--covering everything from 2008 up to the present."--Provided by publisher.

Cover of The post-American world

The post-American world

Fareed Zakaria

"This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else." So begins Fareed Zakaria's important new work on the era we are now entering. Following on the success of his best-selling The Future of Freedom, Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the "rise of the rest"—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems. How should the United States understand and thrive in this rapidly changing international climate? What does it mean to live in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination.

Dixie rising by Peter Applebome | Literally Just Books