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Anthony J. Stanonis

While traditional industries like textile or lumber mills have received a majority of the scholarly attention devoted to southern economic development, Faith in Bikinis presents an untold story of the New South, one that explores how tourism played a central role in revitalizing the southern economy and transforming southern culture after the Civil War. Along the coast of the American South, a culture emerged that negotiated the more rigid religious, social, and racial practices of the inland cotton country and the more indulgent consumerism of vacationers, many from the North, who sought greater freedom to enjoy sex, gambling, alcohol, and other pleasures. On the shoreline, the Sunbelt South—the modern South—first emerged.

This book examines those tensions and how coastal southerners managed to placate both. White supremacy was supported, but the resorts’ dependence on positive publicity gave African Americans leverage to pursue racial equality, including access to beaches often restored through the expenditure of federal tax dollars. Displays of women clad in scanty swimwear served to market resorts via pamphlets, newspaper promotions, and film. Yet such marketing of sexuality was couched in the form of carefully managed beauty contests and the language of Christian wholesomeness widely celebrated by resort boosters. Prohibition laws were openly flaunted in Galveston, Biloxi, Myrtle Beach, Virginia Beach, and elsewhere. Yet revenue from sales taxes made states reluctant to rein in resort activities. This revenue bridged the divide between the coastal resorts and agricultural interests, creating a space for the New South to come into being.

University of Georgia Press

Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South

Faith in Bikinis: Politics and Leisure in the Coastal South since the Civil War

Megan Hunt

Like the media coverage of the civil rights era itself, Hollywood dramas have reinforced regional stereotypes of race, class, and gender to cleanse and redeem the wider nation from the implications of systemic racism. As Southern by the Grace of God reveals, however, Hollywood manipulates southern religion (in particular) to further enhance this pattern of difference and regional exceptionalism, consistently displacing broader American racism through a representation of the poor white southerner who is as religious as he (and it is always a he) is racist. By foregrounding the role of religion in these characterizations, Megan Hunt illuminates the pernicious intersections between Hollywood and southern exceptionalism, a long-standing U.S. nationalist discourse that has assigned racial problems to the errant South alone, enabling white supremacy to not only endure but reproduce throughout the nation. 

Southern by the Grace of God examines the presentation and functions of Protestant Christianity in cinematic depictions of the American South. Hunt argues that religion is an understudied signifier of the South on film, used—with varying degrees of sophistication—to define the region’s presumed exceptionalism for regional, national, and international audiences. Rooted in close textual analysis and primary research into the production and reception of more than twenty Hollywood films that engage with the civil rights movement and/or its legacy, this book provides detailed case studies of films that use southern religiosity to negotiate American anxieties around race, class, and gender. Religion, Hunt contends, is an integral trope of the South in popular culture and especially crucial to the divisions essential to Hollywood storytelling.

Southern by the Grace of God: Religion, Race, and Civil Rights in Hollywood's American South

Lauren Braun-Strumfels

Partners in Gatekeeping illuminates a complex, distinctly transnational story that recasts the development of U.S. immigration policies and institutions. Lauren Braun-Strumfels challenges existing ideas about the origins of remote control by paying particular attention to two programs supported by the Italian government in the 1890s: a government outpost on Ellis Island called the Office of Labor Information and Protection for Italians, and rural immigrant colonization in the American South—namely a plantation in Arkansas called Sunnyside. 

Through her examination of these distinct locations, Braun-Strumfels argues that we must consider Italian migration as an essential piece in the history of how the United States became a gatekeeping nation. In particular, she details how an asymmetric partnership emerged between the United States and Italy to manage that migration. 

In so doing, Partners in Gatekeeping reveals that the last ten years of the nineteenth century were critical to the establishment of the modern gatekeeping system. By showing the roles of Italian programs in this migration system, Braun-Strumfels establishes antecedents for remote control beyond the well-studied Chinese and Mexican cases.

Partners in Gatekeeping: How Italy Shaped U.S. Immigration Policy over Ten Pivotal Years, 1891–1901

Patrick Dixon

For McDonald’s, the Chicken McNugget, the flagship product of further processed chicken, represented a once-in-a-generation innovation, a snack item that quickly evolved into a meal, spawned a legion of imitators, and gained a large share of the global poultry market. Yet, almost as soon as the McNugget made its North American debut, it quickly became the subject of opprobrium and ridicule, taking on a symbolic status among serious food connoisseurs as an indication of Americans’ culinary decline and a growing disconnection between diners and the origins of the food that they ate.

During a time of rising beef prices and growing health concerns regarding red meats, the Chicken McNugget was received as a lighter alternative to traditional burger meals, clean and easy to consume, popular with children, and adaptable to busy “on-the-go” lifestyles of working parents. Consumers understood that they were not purchasing a premium product made from the finest cuts but selected the McNugget as a rational economic purchase that represented a new way of dining.

In reassembling the rise of poultry in the United States, Nuggets of Gold presents a multilayered approach, connecting the entwined stories of workers and industrialists with restauranteurs and consumers, the former geographically moored within the South, the latter diverse and nationwide. Patrick Dixon centers further processed chicken within an analysis of the U.S. food system that demonstrates that consumers did not unwittingly succumb to a “junk food” diet but made deliberate and aspirational decisions based on conceptions of leisure, lifestyle, and bodily needs.

Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet

Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South - Bogserien

Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South - Bogserien

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