Discovering the South

In the summer of 1937, Jonathan Daniels, the young, white, liberal-minded editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, took a ten-state driving tour to ""discover"" his native land. He thought the true South lay somewhere between Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, and he set out to find it--ultimately interviewing even Mitchell herself.

In Discovering the South historian Jennifer Ritterhouse pieces together Daniels's unpublished notes from his tour along with his published writings and a wealth of archival evidence to put this brilliant observer's journey through a South in transition into a larger context. Daniels's well-chosen itinerary brought him face to face with the full range of political and cultural possibilities in the South of the 1930s, from New Deal liberalism and social planning in the Tennessee Valley Authority, to Communist agitation in the Scottsboro case, to planters' and industrialists' reactionary worldview and repressive violence. Daniels found a region in the midst of transformation and was himself changed by the experience. Following him on his journey, Ritterhouse sketches a portrait of black and white southerners fighting for and against democratic social change at the start of the nation's long civil rights era.

For more information on this book, see discoveringthesouth.org.