The U.S. South and Europe

The U.S. South is a distinctive political and cultural force—not only in the eyes of Americans, but also in the estimation of many Europeans. The region played a distinctive role as a major agricultural center and the source of much of the wealth in early America, but it has also served as a catalyst for the nation's only civil war, and later, as a battleground in violent civil rights conflicts. Once considered isolated and benighted by the international community, the South has recently evoked considerable interest among popular audiences and academic observers on both sides of the Atlantic. In The U.S. South and Europe, editors Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg have assembled contributions that interpret a number of political, cultural, and religious aspects of the transatlantic relationship during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors discuss a variety of subjects, including European colonization, travel accounts of southerners visiting Europe, and the experiences of German immigrants who settled in the South. The collection also examines slavery, foreign recognition of the Confederacy as a sovereign government, the lynching of African Americans and Italian immigrants, and transatlantic religious fundamentalism. Finally, it addresses international perceptions of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement as a framework for understanding race relations in the United Kingdom after World War II. Featuring contributions from leading scholars based in the United States and Europe, this illuminating volume explores the South from an international perspective and offers a new context from which to consider the region's history.

The U.S. South and Europe: An Introduction
Southerners Abroad: Europe and the Cultural Encounter, 1830 - 1895
Alexis de Tocqueville and Three German Travel Accounts on the Antebellum South and New Orleans
The German Forty-Eighters' Critique of the U.S. South, 1850-1861
In the Days of Her Power and Glory: Visions of Venice in Antebellum Charleston
Elizabethan Dreams, Victorian Nightmares: Antebellum South Carolina's Future Through an English Looking Glass
Slavery or Independence: The Confederate Dilemma in Europe
The Lynching of Southern Europeans in the Southern United States: The Plight of Italian Immigrants in Dixie
Southern Politicians, British Reformers, and Ida B. Wells's 1893-1894 Transatlantic Anti-lynching Campaign
Transatlantic Fundamentalism: Southern Preachers in London's Pulpits during World War I
Europeans Interpret the American South of the Civil War Era: How British and French Critics Received The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939)
Gunnar Myrdal and Arthur Raper in the Jim Crow South
Explaining Jim Crow to German Prisoners of War: The Impact of the South on the World War II Reeducation Program
Britain, the American South, and the Wide Civil Rights Movement
Resisting the Wind of Change: The Citizens' Councils and European Decolonization