All weekend, every weekend on cspan3. Historians who edited or wrote essays for the book reinterpreting seven histories talk about new avenues for understanding the history of the south. Topics discussed include native americans, the civil war, slavery, the environment, and the Great Depression. This panel was part of the 2019 Southern HistoricalAssociation Annual conference. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us on this panel about southern history. I am lori glover and work at st. Louis university my cochair is Craig Thompson from North Carolina state university. Decades since two the publication of interpreting southern history. Survey of theark scholarship that historians produced since 1965. The publication date of writing southern history. It marked a critical moment in southern historiography. The 1965 volume has surveyed the scholarly landscape. In 1987, the authors in interpreting history raised difficult questions about the direction of the discipline including challenging graham narratives created perpetuated by historians. Interpreting southern history also signet also signaled returning to american politics and culture. As woodward said, the time is coming if it has not already arrived when the southerner will ask himself whether there was a point and calling himself a southerner. That was during the american century. The United States had proven victorious in a crusade against fascism with military, diplomatic, political success unparalleled in the countrys history. Asidealism seem to sweep regional loyalty and identity and as woodward put it, the regional historian is likely to be oppressed by a sense of his unimportantance. Woodward announced the resurgence of southern history. The United States fractured over the vietnam war and the civil rights movement. In his final revision to his classic study in 1993, woodward concluded that, americans might still have something to learn if they would from the unamerican and ironic experience of the south. By the 1980s, the power of the southern bible belt gave rise to a conservative revolution. From the dukes of hazard to the many series north and south they portrayed southern is different but delightfully still american nonetheless. In 1992, William Jefferson clinton was elected president in the following year is when woodward reiterated the americans could indeed learn something from the south. Since the publication of interpreting southern history is geography historiography has been disrupted. Cacophony creating that it is difficult to draw coherence from the diversity of voices, perspectives, and memories. We undertook a survey of the historiography to determine whether there was such a thing as southern history. The contributors to the collection experienced the challenge of discerning themes for familiar topics. A difficulty arising partially from the postmodern resistance to overarching sympathies. Technology,new incorporate viewpoints and voices, and ask fresh questions to expand southern history they contest the idea of a coherent, southern past. Today, we live in another era of intense nationalism. Particularly Southern Regional some, seems to be fading under the forces of consumerism, popular culture, and social media. The central geographic divide in America Today is not regional but urban versus rural. To echo woodward, some scholars question if the time has arrived when the southern historian must ask if there is any point to identifying as a historian of the south. Essayisttively, the point out a myriad of ways in which the south was distinctive across more than 400 years of history. Just as significant are the interconnections and immersions with the atlantic world, the western hemisphere, the nation, and Global Markets ideology and human experiences. One thing is clear it is no longer viable to reflectively portray the south, at any time, as separate from the nation or the world. The literature on the histories of the south is far richer for the questions asked in recent decades about the parameters, the essence, and existence of southern history. The narrative of social history race, gender, class remain but are energized by postmodern scholars interrogating the premises of this narratives, voices, expanded archives, and enlarged geographical context. So we gathered 40 scholars in teams of two to cowrite temporal and thematic essays on the scholarship of the south over the past two decades. The result is reinterpreting southern history. The table of contents for which you may find on the nearby seat. We invited five of the authors to join us today to offer thoughts on the process and conclusions and engage your questions about what they learned about southern his geography historiography in collecting this. There were 40 people who participated in this collection. We have five with this which im good to introduce in a moment. The other contributors to the volume if they would stand, so the people could see who they are . Thank you. Thank you. [applause] starting from my right is christina snyder, the history professor at penn state. She coauthored the chapter on the native south. Leslie gordon is the charles g summer saw chair at the university of alabama and she and steve berry of the university of georgia with the chapter on the south and the civil war. Vanessa holden, assistant professor of history and African American studies at the university of kentucky. She wrote the chapter on 19thcentury enslavement. Catherine new font, associate professor at the university of kentucky. She and William Thomas oakie partnered on the chapter on Southern Environmental history. At the end of the table is jason morgan ward, professor of history at Emory University and he and Jennifer Ritterhouse wrote the chapter on from the Great Depression to the end of southern history. We challenge the authors to write as teams. Cried and i partnered on many craig and i have partnered on many things and we thought this would lead to richer and more balanced essays. Some teams were quite successful and some teams struggled. We want to do by asking the panelists about what opportunities and challenges they found in the coauthoring process. I will start. I had the opportunity to work with my former advisor at purdue. We know each other well. Regularly over the past 12 years since i graduated. The fun thing was that we as historians work in isolation. Somethingto work on that is truly collaborative. Meetings where we talked about the essay, we sent back and forth elaborate outlines, and we did most of the writing over a two day period when she came to penn state. Collaborators,as the process was smooth but the assignment was difficult. Onre had been no essay native americans in the south in either of the previous two volumes. There was no comprehensive essay ever written about native peoples in the south. Complicating that was the fact there has been a fluorescence in that field since the 1990s. I can talk about that later but i would say what i found challenging was the assignment rather than the partnership which was a lot of fun. I had the opposite problem. As far as having terrell can you hear me . It was an honor with me to work with steve berry. He is a delight. As many of you know. We worked very well together. I would do anything with him again in this capacity. I felt like we complemented each other in our strengths. I had prior opportunities to address this question. Presentation back in 2008, and i took those old papers that i had not in anything with and rethought the questions. Emailred that to steve to and he is the one who wrote the introduction. I think you will tell if you read it, the tone sounds a lot energyrought some great to the essay. The other thing about the process as we met in person, talked on the phone, but a lot we just swapped essays. Just edited him there. It worked very well as far as i could tell. A good,d i had collaborative relationship. We started with phone conversations and used google docs to start parsing out what themes we thought would be the most important. Then divided up the themes. Each of us forged ahead and wrote out different sections. Smack dab in the wheelhouse and some that were not. They required or work on each of our part. Then we started the difficult work of sewing those sections together. We had similar politics and a similar direction we wanted to go on slavery in the 19th century. The writing voices are very different. Sounded very different. Most of the work came in the process of sending documents back and forth and finding ways to shape the essay so that it had a coherent voice. We work in isolation and are used to having our own flourishes, that was difficult. The partnership and working together was really lovely and wonderful. It made me wish i had opportunities to work in this way more frequently. I had the pleasure of working with William Thomas oakie and we had only met briefly years before he was a graduate student. We really did not know each other and that was a brief meeting. The whole thing was an absolute delight. He is wonderful to work with. We are both he is in spirit with me. We talked about what we collectively wanted to say at the session. Although i am speaking for both, i am speaking with both voices which is an indicator of our answer to the question. We had a wonderful experience. The whole piece was collaborative. Our peace is on Southern Environmental history. There was no predecessor peace in the earlier volumes. One of the challenges was there has been a industry of writing historiographical pieces on environment of history. The challenge was how to make something new. We benefited from our different areas of expertise and we hit it off really well from the beginning. We confessed in our first phone call i dont know who did it first we admitted we do not love doing historiography. That set a nicetown. That set a nicetown. Todid not want our piece read like a history peace and that was collaborative as well. Openingested the mechanism which i love. We open with several quotes from leading works of southern history that have to do with environment and several of those quotes become subsections. We decided early on we wanted to defied up the subsections wanted to divide up the subsections. Position the fortunate is that it is robust but did not exist as such a few decades ago. Decided we would settle on fields,mes, waters, towns. We would get as much history as we could. We divided the sections, we drafted, exchange, we had bad luck with google docs because of the citations. To use the having process of doing documents, or documents, and sending them back and forth. Making sure we did not work on them on the same time because we wanted the most recent. That was the logistical challenge but it was a wonderful experience. Working with jennifer was great. The originalessay, assignment was from the Great Depression to the present. I will speak a little bit later about the challenge talking about the historiography of any field that goes to the president , how close to the present, goes to the how close you get to the present. The end of southern history is in quotation marks and has a question mark on the end. That is important for how we approach this question. Not so much a conclusion as an open ended question we will address later. The process was great. I would speak briefly to the genre of the writing and what i learned about it or reflected on. There is the collaborative piece that this is something we were supposedly trained to do in graduate school. Everyone thinks they know what it means. There are two things that i would say about historiographical writing. It has rules, practices, a format, it is a Learned School learned thing. Everyone does it differently and it has no rules. [laughter] whokarmic aspect as someone taught grad students for a decade was that i had assigned to so many and claimed to know what they were, and teach people how to do them, but never had to write one again. This is a professional task you will do over and over and any moment you could be called upon to do it. In my experience, that was not true. [laughter] getting to do that again and reflect on the practice in the process and what that genre doesnt mean for this enterprise does mean for this enterprise was part of the process as well. What lori and i discovered as we entered did the essays was significant differences in ization ofnceptual the territory of the south. Some expanded the geography while others relied on the old confederate model. Others retracted the geography. Panelist, how did your coauthoring team determine the jager fee to be covered and how did that from your determine the geography to be covered and how did that frame your essay . It gives us a shallow and flawed sense of the region. The home state of mississippi, it was in the hands of the chickasaws until the 1830s. Southern planters dominated that space for over 20 years before the civil war. At in mywhat i looked own work was what Charles Hudson called the older south. Geography, webout considered it in two ways. What regional definitions what has made sense to our historical actors and how would historical actors have thought about it . History,k at native there is a really coherent ional identity as early as most places we think of the south today but not virginia and maryland. But the mississippi valley. Quite far up north. Region shared an economy and had a lot of of commonalities in politics, religion. They travel. The most important trades, which proved to be enduring were agriculture and matrilineal people traced dissent through the maternal line and that had an influence on politics and property ownership. This was a well integrated region. United by roads and river travel. When it comes later, i have thought of this question when do southern indians call themselves southern . The first historical reference actually comes from the 1740s. Group was distinguishing themselves from northern indians called the iroquois. Before the british call them southern indians, they called themselves southerns, but in opposition to iroquois, who were there enemies in warfare at that time. About a decade later the british north americans Indian Department into a northern and southern division, which reinforced the idea of the south and the continue to call themselves Southern Nations in diplomacy. If you look at treaties with federal governments, they used to this rhetoric a lot and Southern Nations, especially what is often called the five make a they actually. Eries of intertribal treaties this was among themselves among themselves, not to be bland. Most often scholars have looked at the southeast culture area and this is because originally our field developed out of anthropology. Beginning in the late 19 century, use em curators who had native american materials would split them into their cultural areas and a lot of museums retain this, by the way. Still a concept that is used and critique in anthropology. Inis still useful for them much the way the south is useful for us as historians, even if we critique it. I will stop there. In our essay on the civil war, steve and i had this issue right away because so much history does talk about the north and south, understanding the sense of place and regionalism that is essential to the conflict. So, in our essay, we looked at the traditional confederate states. The change the trends and historiography bringing them north. But also the research being done right now on expanding those boundaries. And so, we do address that. And we talk about this complaint that is very old that too much attention is paid to the eastern theater. As someone who was first affected that by that when i was going through grad school, it has not changed, the idea that we do not know enough about the western theater, but then going beyond that, what we would consider western history, bringing native american aspects and personalities and being more holistic. Its so important, historiography, the way things have gone. The other aspect is internationalizing the conflict and thinking broadly not just werepeople at the time. Ware it did have repercussions. It did call out to some of that important work right now. This does not mean that nobody should never write another book about virginia. Thats not happening. But just acknowledging the hasmism of our skilled challenged orders and also the new and attention to guerrilla warfare, which has challenged assumptions and notions of boundaries and borders. We were able to, in the space we had, to talk about it. I wanted to mention this point. It is hard to do and to keep up in our field where there is so much coming out and titles and approaches. To focus on for big names and one of those was the question of geography. Us. That helped of jug of the is similar and different. We explicitly deal with human geography and the ways in which, particularly emancipated people bring the south with them wherever they go, and the ways in which communities of color outside of more traditional definitions of the south, along the lines of the old confederacy dont apply when you have the ellite communities evenees of enslavement, across the border to the south and mexico. On the other hand, the geography that comes up more frequently, the geography of forced migration, deeper and deeper south, the ways in which virginia has the ds for a in the deep south has the ds for a aspora in the deep south. And then finally, because one of the key themes to us was historytion in gender in the field, we care a lot about to met domestic geography, the geography of labor and the way that those are explicitly southern geography. Thanok different turns just trying to map out the orders of the south. We see particularly in the antebellum. There waslum period, a way in which the south could be anywhere for anyone depending on context. Tom and i had a similarly challenging time deciding what we would cover. There was precedence within the university of Georgia Press. There is also a self defined community of environmental historians who think of themselves as environmental historians and southern historians while they eagerly trouble those labels. There are physical realities of jog review that inform environmental history rivers, mountains, trees, that we must deal with. Th