Books about Southerner from Amazon.com

You don't have to be southern to cook southern

From the New York Times food writers who defended lard and demystified gumbo comes a collection of exceptional southern recipes for everyday cooks. The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook tells the story of the brothers' culinary coming-of-age in Charleston—how they triumphed over their northern roots and learned to cook southern without a southern grandmother. Here are recipes for classics like Fried Chicken, Crab Cakes, and Pecan Pie, as well as little-known preparations such as St. Cecilia Punch, Pickled Peaches, and Shrimp Burgers. Others bear the hallmark of the brothers' resourceful cooking style—simple, sophisticated dishes like Blackened Potato Salad, Saigon Hoppin' John, and Buttermilk-Sweet Potato Pie that usher southern cooking into the twenty-first century without losing sight of its roots. With helpful sourcing and substitution tips, this is a practical and personal guide that will have readers cooking southern tonight, wherever they live. 32 pages of full-color photographs of the recipes; fifty b/w photographs from the Lee Bros.' travels throughout the South..
Price: $15.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The owners of Southern Living's longtime "Best Restaurant in the South," the Blue Willow Inn, Louis and Billie Van Dyke have created the most complete and thorough Southern cookbook ever published.

Containing more than 600 recipes in every imaginable category, The Blue Willow Inn Bible of Southern Cooking is a staple in kitchens of everyone who appreciates classic Southern cooking. It is a book that contains not only classic recipes that have been handed down for generations, but also new Southern favorites. Destined to become a classic along the lines of Betty Crocker, Fannie Farmer, and The Joy of Cooking, The Blue Willow Inn Bible of Southern Cooking will sell for years to come.

Recipes include:

Fried Sweet Potatoes

Corn Pudding

Squash Dressing

Fried Green Tomatoes

Apple Stack Cake

Sawmill Gravy

Cathead Biscuits

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Price: $11.25 [Notify me when price goes down.]

During the civil rights movement, epic battles for justice were fought in the streets, at lunch counters, and in the classrooms of the American South. Just as many battles were waged, however, in the hearts and minds of ordinary white southerners whose world became unrecognizable to them. Jason Sokol’s vivid and unprecedented account of white southerners’ attitudes and actions, related in their own words, reveals in a new light the contradictory mixture of stubborn resistance and pragmatic acceptance–as well as the startling and unexpected personal transformations–with which they greeted the enforcement of legal equality..
Price: $8.72 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Between 1900 and the 1970s, twenty million southerners migrated north and west. Weaving together for the first time the histories of these black and white migrants, James Gregory traces their paths and experiences in a comprehensive new study that demonstrates how this regional diaspora reshaped America by "southernizing" communities and transforming important cultural and political institutions.

Challenging the image of the migrants as helpless and poor, Gregory shows how both black and white southerners used their new surroundings to become agents of change. Combining personal stories with cultural, political, and demographic analysis, he argues that the migrants helped create both the modern civil rights movement and modern conservatism. They spurred changes in American religion, notably modern evangelical Protestantism, and in popular culture, including the development of blues, jazz, and country music.

In a sweeping account that pioneers new understandings of the impact of mass migrations, Gregory recasts the history of twentieth-century America. He demonstrates that the southern diaspora was crucial to transformations in the relationship between American regions, in the politics of race and class, and in the roles of religion, the media, and culture..
Price: $13.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Why did the Confederacy lose the Civil War? Most historians point to the larger number of Union troops, or to the North's greater industrial might. Now, in The South Vs. the South, a leading authority on the Civil War era offers a critical supplementary viewpoint William Freehling argues that 450,000 Union troops from the South--especially border state whites and southern blacks--helped cost the Confederacy the war. In addition, when the southern border states rejected the Confederacy, half the South's industrial capacity swelled the North's advantage. Whether revising our conception of Union military strategy or of slavery, or changing our perceptions of blacks' role in producing Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, or finding new meanings in what is arguably America's greatest piece of sculpture, Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Shaw Memorial, or establishing the antecedents to Martin Luther King, Jr., Freehling's piercing insight and rhetorical verve yield a major new Civil War narrative..
Price: $10.84 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Focusing on the cultural conflicts between social reformers and southern communities, William Link presents an important reinterpretation of the origins and impact of progressivism in the South. He shows that a fundamental clash of values divided reformers and rural southerners, ultimately blocking the reforms. His book, based on extensive archival research, adds a new dimension to the study of American reform movements.

The new group of social reformers that emerged near the end of the nineteenth century believed that the South, an underdeveloped and politically fragile region, was in the midst of a social crisis. They recognized the environmental causes of social problems and pushed for interventionist solutions. As a consensus grew about southern social problems in the early 1900s, reformers adopted new methods to win the support of reluctant or indifferent southerners. By the beginning of World War I, their public crusades on prohibition, health, schools, woman suffrage, and child labor had led to some new social policies and the beginnings of a bureaucratic structure. By the late 1920s, however, social reform and southern progressivism remained largely frustrated.

Link's analysis of the response of rural southern communities to reform efforts establishes a new social context for southern progressivism. He argues that the movement failed because a cultural chasm divided the reformers and the communities they sought to transform. Reformers were paternalistic. They believed that the new policies should properly be administered from above, and they were not hesitant to impose their own solutions. They also viewed different cultures and races as inferior.

Rural southerners saw their communities and customs quite differently. For most, local control and personal liberty were watchwords. They had long deflected attempts of southern outsiders to control their affairs, and they opposed the paternalistic reforms of the Progressive Era with equal determination. Throughout the 1920s they made effective implementation of policy changes difficult if not impossible. In a small-scale war, rural folk forced the reformers to confront the integrity of the communities they sought to change..
Price: $5.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Even forty years after the movement, the transition from son and grandson of Klansmen to field secretary of SNCC seems quite a journey. In the early 1960s, when Bob Zellner's professors though he was crazy for even wanting to do research on civil rights, it was nothing short of remarkable. Now, in his long-awaited memoir, Zellner tells how one white Alabamian joined ranks with the black students who were sitting-in, marching, fighting, and sometimes dying to challenge the Southern way of life. He was in all the campaigns and was close to all the major figures. THE WRONG SIDE OF MURDER CREEK is Bob Zellner's larger-than-life story, and it was worth waiting for..
Price: $18.45 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Turn South at the Next Magnolia is a collection of commentaries on Southern life and phenomena. Author, Nan Graham has been a bi-weekly commentator on Wilmington, NC's local public radio station since 1994. .
Price: $5.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]