Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award
978-1-58838-053-1
1-58838-053-X
5 3/8" x 8 3/8"
$21.95 paperback
308 pages
notes, bibliography, index
NewSouth Books
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One of the few books
in our profession that can truly be called a classic...Paul Gaston
artfully blends deep research, graceful prose, and judicious
interpretations...His brilliant afterword looks beyond history to show
how the myth still conceals appalling realities today.
--Charles Joyner, Coastal Carolina University
The New South Creed is very simply the best book ever written about
the way in which Southerners invented a mythology called “The Old
South” in order to accommodate New South modernization. In the
never-ending debate about the price the South is willing to pay for “progress”
and “modernity,” Paul Gaston’s masterpiece remains the starting
place for discussion.
— Wayne Flynt, Auburn University
Read against the efflorescence of new work on history and memory in
the South, we can now understand that The New South Creed was
thirty years ahead of its time….Paul Gaston reminds us that visions of
reality are always socially constructed, whether one uses memories or
hopes to mobilize people, resources, and institutions.
— Glenda E. Gilmore, Yale University
Like the proverbial cat with nine lives, the notion of a “new South”
has been reappearing periodically since Jamestown trumped Plymouth four
centuries ago. Nobody has ever interpreted this phenomenon more clearly
than Paul Gaston. — John Egerton
First published in 1970, The New South Creed has lost none of its
usefulness to anyone examining the dream of a prosperous, powerful,
racially harmonious New South that developed in the three decades after
the Civil War, and the transformation of that dream into widely accepted
myths, shielding and perpetuating a conservative, racist society.
Many young moderates of the period
created a philosophy designed to enrich the region—attempting to both
restore power and prestige and to lay the race question to rest. In
spite of these men and their efforts, their dream of a "New
South" joined the Antebellum illusion as a genuine social myth,
with a controlling power over the way in which their followers, in both
the North and South, perceived reality.
This edition contains a new
afterword by the author and a new Introduction by Robert Jefferson
Norrell.
about the author
Paul M. Gaston is Professor of History Emeritus in the
University of Virginia. He is a native of Fairhope, Alabama, a
single-tax colony founded by his grandfather, about which he has written
two books: Women of Fairhope and Men and Mission: E.B. Gaston
and and the Origin of the Fairhope Single-Tax Colony. He
is past president and now Life Fellow of the Southern Regional
Council.
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