Overview

Engaging a medley of perspectives and methodologies, these collected essays explore the sport-related symbols and events that have shaped southern regional identities since the Civil War. The authors range from the ""backcountry"" fighter stereotypes portrayed in modern professional wrestling to the significance of Crimson Tide coaching legend Paul ""Bear"" Bryant for white Alabamians while other essays tackle gender and race relations in intercollegiate athletics, the roles athletic competitions played in desegregating the South, and NASCAR's popularity in southern states.  Pairing the action and anecdotes of good sportswriting with rock-solid scholarship, The Sporting World of the Modern South adds historical and anthropological perspectives to legends and lore from the gridiron to the racetrack.

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9780252070365

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Reviews

"""Illuminates the South's role in shaping the South. . . . Miller's collection of essays . . . consider the past role of sport in Southern distinctiveness and push historians to consider more heavily the role that sport continues to play.""--J.R. Duke, Southern Register ""Miller and his colleagues have made a valuable contribution to the study of southern sports. Students of southern history will find much of interest in this useful collection.""--North Carolina Historical Review"

[This volume] is about how sports have reflected and influenced the evolution of social justice in the last 150 years of southern history... Well researched. -- Choice Illuminates the South's role in shaping the South... Miller's collection of essays ... consider the past role of sport in Southern distinctiveness and push historians to consider more heavily the role that sport continues to play. -- J.R. Duke, The Southern Register Miller and his colleagues have made a valuable contribution to the study of southern sports. Students of southern history will find much of interest in this useful collection. --The North Carolina Historical Review ADVANCE PRAISE This fascinating book will become a landmark in the historiography of sport. Because sports are so important in the region's culture and because the essayists take a broad view of their subjects, this collection will also appeal to everyone interested in the South's obsession with honor, its conceptions of manhood and womanhood, its transition into modernity, and especially its race relations. -- Gaines Foster, author of Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913 This volume is a challenging interpretation that significantly advances the study of sports in America and provides the best single volume on sports in the South. -- Charles Reagan Wilson, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi

Author Information

Patrick B. Miller teaches history at Northeastern Illinois University. He is the coauthor of The Unlevel Playing Field: A Documentary History of the African American Experience in Sport and coeditor of Sport and the Color Line: Black Athletes and Race Relations in Twentieth-Century America.

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