White supremacy shaped all aspects of post-Civil War southern life, yet its power was never complete or total. This book presents the southern men and women - some heroic and decent, others mean and sinister, most a mixture of both - who supported and challenged Jim Crow, showing that white supremacy always had to prove its power.
This important book offers a pathbreaking approach to the study of southern politics and culture. Finding the political in 'unlikely spaces, ' these essays require us to rethink the foundations of white supremacy and of southern history more generally.
"This is a very important book. It might easily have been subtitled A Treatise on the New Southern Political History. The essays in it are important ones, and they hold together very well."---Glen Feldman, The Virginia Magazine