A little more than a half-century ago, C. Vann Woodward wrote that the social, economic and political transformation of the United States in the post-World War II era would render the American South obsolete. In the years since Woodward penned his ironic lament, one could be forgiven for thinking that the eulogy had been too hasty. The tumult of the civil rights movement and the rise of the southern wing of the Republican Party – not to mention the dominance of Walmart capitalism, NASCAR and the flood of books and movies about the region and its troubled past – has made it difficult to see the region's influence as on the wane. It is an indication, though, of how much has changed in the field of twentieth-century American history over the past few years that a volume like this one has surfaced. By interrogating the place of the South in the nation's historical narrative, the editors and contributors to this collection have made it clear that southern regionalism obscures so much more than it reveals. Together, the essays make a powerful case for seeing Woodward's insight as absolutely correct and for seeing the history of the United States in often startling new ways.

The goal of the volume, as laid out by Lassiter and Crespino in their introduction, is not so much to declare an end to the South as to call for its demise as an interpretive tool in the hands of historians. As, for instance, Matthew Lassiter and Grace Hale make clear in their fine studies of the civil rights movement, the South has served as a crucible which has masked the truly national scope of the struggle. For Lassiter, the de facto and de jure legal distinction, developed in part by civil rights leaders to focus the movement on Jim Crow segregation, obscured the battle African Americans waged in other parts of the country in the wake of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision. For Hale, the romanticization of black southerners by folk singers in the late 1950s and early 1960s allowed white middle-class fans of Pete Seeger and others to empathize with authentic “black folk” in a manner fundamentally different from the way whites made sense of urban black communities outside the South and their grievances in the same period. What several of these essays bring into the light is the way in which the South became a national crucible: a region apart into which whites from other parts of the country could (self-consciously or not) pour their anxieties about race, while at the same time shielding themselves and their own communities from any blame.

Another theme of this collection is the extent to which southern regionalism has also served as a skein which obscures a more multifaceted study of the South itself. The overwhelming focus on the black/white divide in southern history leaves little room for historians to understand Latin Americans, and their rise to prominence in politics, as Mary Odem makes clear in her contribution to the collection. And as Allison Graham shows in her essay on the persistent power of the South in Hollywood film, the region remains a flat stereotype, trapped in a narrative built in the 1950s, where white southerners act as stand-ins for racism and cultural backwardness.

By holding it up as a place apart, several of the essays here show just how the southern regional framework insulates the rest of the country from much of what might destabilize the modern, liberal narrative of the American nation. What is unclear, however, is what a new story of the United States in the so-called “American Century” would look like. While it is worth casting a critical eye at the underpinning of twentieth-century historiography, the question readers of this volume are left with is: “what next?” For all of its faults, the virtue of southern regionalism is that it lends clarity to a particularly complex era in American history. Pulling at that narrative thread frees up an array of important and obscure stories, but it is unclear what historians are left with. Shards of history and a decentralized narrative certainly leave room for reinterpretation, but not for coherence. Like most good volumes, a reader is left with questions and answers in equal number. Certainly as a manifesto, this collection sets out a bold research agenda and for this reason alone it should be required reading for any student of the period.