Flashes of a Southern Sprit is a compilation of essays published between 1993 and 2007. In it, Wilson's subject includes a 1993 foray into southern historical memory, which foreshadowed much of the recent scholarship on the topic, an assessment of the sources of southern musical creativity, and insight into the evolution of his scholarly interests over his career. Readers who thread their way through these essays will recognize two consistent themes: the search for a new approach to the American South, one that both anticipates and compliments the so-called “new southern studies,” and an insistence that any understanding of the South must take into account “spirit” and spirituality. Because Wilson moves back and forth across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and from literature and the visual arts to music and theology effortlessly and without pause, it is a fool's errand to attempt to neatly summarize the essays. But by focusing on three essays I may be able to give a hint of their richness.

Wilson devotes several essays to the role of invented tradition and myth in the South. His interest in the topic has been evident since his highly regarded Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980). Almost all subsequent scholars of southern memory have followed in his footsteps by concentrating on the deeply conservative uses of myth and memory in the region. Indeed, in no other region of the United States has the reactionary use of memory been more fully charted. In “The Myth of the Biracial South,” Wilson complicates this understanding by reminding us that myths need not be exclusively conservative. During the 1970s, Wilson contends, black and white southerners agreed that the region had undergone an abrupt and profound moral transformation that would make possible a biracial future unique in the nation. Wilson acknowledges that the myth was wishful thinking. But he also points out the myriad ways that the myth energized black and white politicians, artists, and activists to undertake initiatives that had previously been unthinkable in the South. The myth provided a mythic present for unprecedented experiments in biracialism. In the absence of the myth, Wilson wonders, what sources of optimism would have sustained champions of biracialism. Although more than a decade has passed since its first publication, this essay remains useful for understanding why George Allen's off-the-cuff bigotry on the campaign trail in 2006 was so costly or why, even during a era of heated “culture wars,” the most ambitious commemorative project in present-day North Carolina is a memorial to African American freedom.

Several of Wilson's essays address the relationship of religion to cultural expression, another one of Wilson's abiding interests. In “Flashes of the Spirit,” he offers a respectful riposte to H. L. Mencken's 1917 withering attack on southern cultural primitivism. From the vantage of Mencken's desk in Baltimore, most of the South was rife with snake-handling religious zealotry, lynch mob barbarism, and unspeakable cultural ignorance. The root cause of the region's cultural depravity, Mencken insisted, was southern religion, which suffocated creativity and curiosity alike. Wilson deftly turns Mencken's critique on its head by pointing out that the same South lampooned by Mencken was at that very moment nurturing the culture that would become synonymous with American culture during the twentieth century. In addition to the canonical “Southern Renaissance” in literature, Wilson points to a litany of seminal musical genres (jazz, blues, country, gospel) and visual art (especially folk art) as examples of creativity overlooked by Mencken. How, Wilson asks, do we explain this profusion of cultural innovation in a region otherwise lacking in traditional cultural resources and institutions? In a word: religion. Southerners, white and black, lived in a culture suffused with a Protestant evangelicalism that exalted intense, personal religious expression and experience. Although some southerners may not have been believers they could not escape the language, symbols, and rituals of the religious culture that engulfed them. Thus, the shared language of the Bible and the ubiquity of collective religious catharsis were the common culture that fueled the creativity Hank Williams, Sr. and Thomas A. Dorsey, William Faulkner and Reynolds Price, and Randall Kenan and William Christenberry. Wilson leaves unanswered whether contemporary southern religious culture will continue to sustain “flashes of the spirit” in the twenty-first century.

The concept of civil religion, which has been a recurring theme in Wilson's work, surfaces in “Richard Wright's Pagan Spain.” Richard Wright's 1957 meditation on Spanish culture and religion, at first glance, may seem an unlikely subject for Wilson's gifts. It is hard to imagine two societies less alike than the Jim Crow South and Franco's Spain. But, according to Wilson, Wright made sense of Spain by tapping into his experience with suffering, oppression, and religious mysticism in the American South. Raised in the stern religion of his grandmother, Wright could recite Bible verses, endure all-night revivals, and knew first-hand what it was like to live in a society in which civil religion was hegemonic. Jim Crow Mississippi was just such a place. So too was Franco's Spain, where, as Wilson puts it, the state was sacralized. The ruling Falangists there when Wright visited during the 1950s assigned transcendent meaning to the state and explicitly blurred the line between the sacred and the state. (Wilson observes that the civil religion of the Jim Crow South and of Franco's Spain were both products of catastrophic civil wars.) Likewise, the influence of the sacred extended far beyond the confines of organized religion in both Franco's Spain and the South of Wright's youth. The elevation of female morality and the cult of feminine purity, for instance, took similar forms in the two societies. Wilson's larger point is that Wright's transnational meditations, to which Wright devoted much of his later years, were profoundly shaped by his Mississippi youth, including his immersion in southern evangelical Protestantism.

Years ago, E. F. Hutton, a now long vanished brokerage, had a catchy advertising slogan, “When E. F. Hutton speaks, people listen.” E. F. Hutton is now mute, but Charles Reagan Wilson is not. And when Wilson speaks about the South, we should listen. At the outset, I confess that I typically flee whenever I hear a scholar propose to explain “southern distinctiveness” or southerners’ purported “sense of place.” How many trees have been felled and gallons of ink have been squandered in the quixotic pursuit of the “central theme” of southern history or of the essence of southern identity? Wilson, however, wastes neither trees nor ink. Whenever he turns his attentions to a topic, he does so with enviable thoughtfulness. He also is an uncommonly generous historian who treats the interpretations of fellow scholars with utmost respect. All of this is by way of highlighting that any new book by Wilson is an occasion of note. Flashes of a Southern Spirit is no exception to this rule.