Media-Made Dixie

InMedia-Made DixieJack Kirby shows how the American public's perceptions of the South have been influenced, even controlled, by the mass communications media. In this newly updated edition, Kirby surveys major movies, radio and television shows, plays, popular histories, and music from the turn of the century through the 1980s. He documents a progression in the national image of the South from the cracker wasteland of Erskine Caldwell'sGod's Little Acreto the antebellum wonderland of Hollywood's Shirley Temple-"Bojangles" Robinson musicals; from William Styron's searching account of the Old South inConfessions of Nat Turnerto the New South ingenuity of Jimmy Carter and Ted Turner; and from the regressive back-roads of television'sThe Dukes of Hazzardto the complex reconciliation found in Alice Walker's and Steven Spielberg'sThe Color Purple.

Jack Temple Kirby is emeritus W. E. Smith Professor of American History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His most recent books include Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture and The Countercultural South (Georgia).