History of the American South

When Barbara Fields addressed the Southern Historical Association in her 2015 presidential speech, she noted that “what has made the notion of ‘the South’ coherent is a history, localized to an identifiable place, in which slavery, racism, and the Civil War and Reconstruction figure in a particular way.” ¹ While Fields argues that other regions of the United States also practiced slavery, she demonstrates how that “peculiar institution,” with its practices, values, and global impact, was strongly tied to the notion of southern identity and was integral to the history of the region. The enslavement of people of African descent provided an essential ingredient for the modernizing world; it was the backbone of the global trade in the Atlantic world, providing for cultural and commodity exchanges at a soaring level. These exchanges and interactions occurred in the American South on a scale not experienced in other regions, and became the source of global human and economic development that marked the area as a distinct and identifiable place. It is the complex history of the area—more than geography, more than slavery, and more than war—that has created the region identified as the American South. As Barbara Fields noted:

A sense of history does not arise, and cannot survive, as a mental essence. It arises and survives through the collective ritual actions that define it, render it intelligible to disparate members of the population, and make it portable from generation to generation. ²