The Social Origins of the Urban South: Race, Gender, and Migration in Nashville and Middle Tennessee, 1890-1930 / Edition 1

by Louis M. Kyriakoudes

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807854846
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	10/22/2003
Edition description:	1
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Louis M. Kyriakoudes is associate professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

[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



[Kyriakoudes] complicates a story that many historians once believed straightforward. . . . He builds a new account that puts complexity and ambiguity at the center of the story of southern migration. [The Social Origins of the Urban South] is also a book that puts forgotten people, men and women, African American and white, into a single coherent narrative. . . . Kyriakoudes's work is a model of how to integrate social, cultural, commercial, and migration history.—Georgia Historical Quarterly



[The term] 'rural to urban migration' becomes a multi-layered story of ambition and desire for independence in this concise and illuminating historical study. . . . There is much to use and celebrate in this valuable history.—Contemporary Sociology



A rigorously argued and lucidly written study on an extremely important but under-explored aspect of southern history: the role of migration in the urbanization process in the New South. With its close attention to both the rural and the urban dimensions of this process, Kyriakoudes's well-researched and broadly interdisciplinary study represents a breakthrough in the literature in southern urban history. A very impressive debut.—Peter A. Coclanis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Editorial Reviews

A rigorously argued and lucidly written study on an under-explored aspect of southern history: With its close attention to both the rural and the urban dimensions of this process, Kyriakoudes's well-researched and broadly interdisciplinary study represents a breakthrough in the literature in southern urban history. A very impressive debut.(Peter A. Coclanis, Unversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

"A rigorously argued and lucidly written study on an extremely important but under-explored aspect of southern history: the role of migration in the urbanization process in the New South. ... Represents a breakthrough in the literature in southern urban history."

From the Publisher