Ebook: One Homogeneous People : Narratives of White Southern Identity, 1890-1920

Southerners have a reputation as storytellers, as a people fond of telling about family, community, and the southern way of life. A compelling book about some of those stories and their consequences, One Homogeneous People examines the forging and the embracing of southern OC pan-whitenessOCO as an ideal during the volatile years surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. Trent Watts argues that despite real and signi'cant divisions within the South along lines of religion, class, and ethnicity, white southernersOCoespecially in moments of perceived dangerOCoasserted that they were one people bound by a shared history, a love of family, home, and community, and an uncompromising belief in white supremacy. Watts explores how these southerners explained their region and its people to themselves and other Americans through narratives found in a variety of forms and contexts: political oratory, fiction, historiography, journalism, correspondence, literary criticism, and the built environment. Watts examines the assertions of an ordered, homogeneous white South (and the threats to it) in the unsettling years following the end of Reconstruction through the early 1900s. In three extended essays on related themes of race and power, the book demonstrates the remarkable similarity of discourses of pan-whiteness across formal and generic lines. In an insightful concluding essay that focuses on an important but largely unexamined institution, MississippiOCOs Neshoba County Fair, Watts shows how narratives of pan-white identity initiated in the late nineteenth century have persisted to the present day. Written in a lively style, "One Homogeneous People" is a valuable addition to the scholarship on southern culture and post-Reconstruction southern history. a Trent Watts is the editor of White Masculinity in the Recent South. His work has appeared in "Southern Cultures" and T"he New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture." He is assistant professor of American studies at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.