My father joined the new Army Air Force and was stationed for three years in Bassingbourn, England. Many historians would now say that World War II had a greater impact on changing the South than even the Civil War did. Their story was typical of so many southerners of the early twentieth century, and the Great Depression of the 1930s was a particularly hard context in which to grow up. Neither had traveled farther than Nashville, but that changed when the United States entered World War II. My mother’s life was more sheltered, growing up in the small town of Springfield, near the Kentucky border. My father’s people were burdened with a hardscrabble life as tenant farmers. They were what historians would call the “plain folk”-not wealthy, not the stereotypical poor whites, but, in my father’s case at least, poor in worldly goods as a child. My parents were from small towns in tobacco country north of Nashville. My roots and raising were in middle Tennessee, as part of a very close-knit southern family. The more I thought about what to present in a final, university-wide lecture, my personal journey seemed relevant, for I think my family and personal stories parallel some developments in the South’s history. On the occasion of my retirement from the University of Mississippi in 2014, I knew I had to talk about the South, the topic I have spent my career studying, pondering, writing about, and teaching.
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