Glenn Feldman. The Great Melding

You barely have to crack the cover of Glenn Feldman’s latest book to get a sense of its sweep and ambition. The late historian’s final work, which builds on a formidable body of scholarship on race and politics in the American South, focuses on Alabama in the mid-twentieth century. Yet with its cover image of George Wallace and Ronald Reagan and an introduction that carries the reader back to Reconstruction, Feldman evokes the larger project that consumed a prolific career. A steady stream of books, edited volumes, and articles probed questions of race and region from a variety of angles, but The Great Melding: War, the Dixiecrat Rebellion, and the Southern Model for America’s New Conservatism was the second installment in a multivolume study that would take the reader from Reconstruction to Reagan, and beyond. Following The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865–1944 (2013), The Great Melding focuses on a brief but pivotal moment in the region’s political transformation—a ten-year period (1942–1952) that witnessed wartime change, electoral rebellion, and the earliest rumblings of Republican realignment.

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