OCTOBER 6- Karen Cox

Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture, (UNC Press, 2011)

October 6, 2011 at 4:30 pm in the Kresge Foundation Common Room (039) at the Johnson Center for Undergraduate Excellence in Graham Memorial Hall

In Dreaming of Dixie, Karen Cox shows that the chief purveyors of this constructed nostalgia for the Old South were outsiders of the region, especially advertising agencies, musicians, publishers, radio personalities, writers, and filmmakers playing to consumers’ anxiety about modernity by marketing the South as a region still dedicated to America’s pastoral traditions. Dr. Cox examines how southerners themselves embraced the imaginary romance of the region’s past. Only with the pervasiveness of television did views of the South begin to change, as news coverage of the civil rights movement brought images of violence, protest, and conflict in the South into people’s living rooms.

Introduction by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, William Umstead Distinguished Professor of History, UNC-CH