Discovering the South

Jennifer Ritterhouse's Discovering the South is a book about a book: A Southerner Discovers the South, published in 1938 by Jonathan Daniels, the editor of the Raleigh (NC) News and Observer and the son of Josephus Daniels. Since readers are figuratively stuck in the car with Daniels on his 1937 tour through the South described in the book, it is helpful that he is an interesting and pleasant character, definitely a product of the modern South rather than a throwback to the Old South or even his father's New South. Daniels encounters white liberals, radicals (black and white), and the forces of the “long segregationist movement” on the road and has insightful things to say about them all (p. 11). While Daniels's book is more descriptive, Ritterhouse supplements it with his notes from the trip and a wide range of other primary sources to provide an analysis that suggests that the changes in Daniels's outlook in the late 1930s recorded in his book were part of a larger process

Archaeology · Art history · Character (mathematics · Josephus · White (mutation · History · Race, History, and American Society