Myth, Media and the Southern Mind

This book never received the attention it should have, and I'm not sure why not. It traces the competing myths of the South (e.g., moonlight and magnolias) that dominated American thinking up to the 1960s, and argues that they ran out of steam in that decade, leaving Americans, including Southerners, uncertain about how to think of the South. Smith, a professor at the University of Arkansas (and former aide to Governor Clinton), looks at the available replacements in the 1980s -- the Southern Living version, the Sunbelt, the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture's South, etc. Not much has changed since then, in my view, so the book is still valuable.