Books in the New Directions in Southern Studies series

By the late twentieth century, Houston's South Asian community had become one of the most prosperous in the metropolitan area and one of the largest in the country. Mining archives and using new oral histories, Uzma Quraishi traces this pioneering community from its midcentury roots to the early twenty-first century.

When Tammy Wynette sang "D-I-V-O-R-C-E", she famously said she "spelled out the hurtin' words" to spare her child the pain of family breakup. In this innovative work, Ted Ownby considers how a wide range of writers, thinkers, activists, and others defined family problems in the twentieth-century American South.

In this groundbreaking study, Adam Gussow takes the full measure of the devil's presence in the blues. Working from original transcriptions of more than 125 recordings released during the past ninety years, Gussow explores the varied uses to which black southern blues people have put this trouble-sowing, love-wrecking, but also empowering figure.

Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town

Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933

Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness

When Zandria Robinson returned home to interview African Americans in Memphis, she was often greeted with some version of the caution ""I hope you know this ain't Chicago"". In this important new work, Robinson critiques ideas of black identity constructed through a northern lens and situates African Americans as central shapers of contemporary southern culture.

Celebrated as the home of the blues and the birthplace of rock and roll, Memphis, Tennessee, is where Elvis Presley, B B King, Johnny Cash, and other musical legends got their starts. Using this iconic southern city as a case study, this title explores the significance of place in a globalizing age.

From Storyville brothels and narratives of turn-of-the-century New Orleans to plantation tours, Bette Davis films, Elvis memorials, Willa Cather's fiction, and the annual prison rodeo held at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, this title considers spatial and ideological evolutions of southern plantations after slavery.

Proposing a different way to map intersections of photography and American literature, this work demonstrates the importance of pinpointing specific cultural and subcultural history. It traces the visual and literary cultures of southern womanhood that have ordered the image of ""the South"".