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The University of North Carolina Press
248 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 12 illus., 18 tables, 4 maps, 14 figs, appends., notes, bibl., index
The Social Origins of the Urban South
Race, Gender, and Migration in Nashville and Middle Tennessee, 1890-1930
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of black and white southerners left farms and rural towns to try their fate in the region's cities. This transition brought about significant economic, social, and cultural changes in both urban centers and the countryside. Focusing on Nashville and its Middle Tennessee hinterland, Louis Kyriakoudes explores the impetus for this migration and illuminates its effects on regional development.
Kyriakoudes argues that increased rural-to-urban migration in the late nineteenth century grew out of older seasonal and circular migration patterns long employed by southern farm families. These mobility patterns grew more urban-oriented and more permanent as rural blacks and whites turned increasingly to urban migration in order to cope with rapid economic and social change.
The urban economy was particularly welcoming to women, offering freedom from the male authority that dominated rural life. African Americans did not find the same freedoms, however, as whites found ways to harness the forces of modernization to deny them access to economic and social opportunity. By linking urbanization, economic and social change, and popular cultural institutions, Kyriakoudes lends insight into the development of an urban, white, working-class identity that reinforced racial divisions and laid the demographic and social foundations for today's modern, urban South.
"[An] impressively constructed volume. . . . By bridging the histories of urban and agricultural history while dabbling in gender, race, labor, and other sub-disciplines, Kyriakoudes has made a valuable contribution to a number of fields. The author has combined thorough research with lucid, largely jargon-free writing."
--H-Net
"A welcome effort."
--Southern Cultures
" Kyriakoudes's attention to migration is well taken and advances our knowledge of the urban South and its rural hinterland. This emphasis should inform future regional studies of southern urbanization."
--Journal of American History
"[The Social Origins of the Urban South] makes a contribution that can further the valuable merging of history, sociology, and the regional studies subfield of cultural anthropology."
--American Journal of Sociology
"A compelling study of the complex interplay between city and country during four critical decades in which rural southerners faced the challenges of modernization. . . . deeply researched and carefully argued."
--Journal of Southern History
"Kyriakoudes is a thoughtful scholar. . . . The Social Origins of the Urban South [is] a pleasure to read and a rich text with which to work."
--Urban Geography
Paper: $25.00
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