Dreaming of Dixie

From the late nineteenth century through World War II popular culture portrayed the American South as a region ensconced in its antebellum past draped in moonlight and magnolias and represented by such southern icons as the mammy the belle the chivalrous planter white-columned mansions and even bolls of cotton. In <i>Dreaming of Dixie</i> Karen Cox shows that the chief purveyors of nostalgia for the Old South were outsiders of the region playing to consumers' anxiety about modernity by marketing the South as a region still dedicated to America’s pastoral traditions. In addition Cox examines how southerners themselves embraced the imaginary romance of the region’s past.