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TWO MAJOR SYMPOSIA AND A NUMBER OF SESSIONS AT SCHOLARLY CON-ferences have marked 1991 as the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Wilbur J. Cash's The Mind of the South. In this monumental work, Cash contended that a unified and continuous set of distinctly southern values and attitudes had not only defied, but actually fed upon, the upheaval of Civil War and Reconstruction and then persisted through four decades of the twentieth century despite the economic and demographic transformations accompanying urbanization and industrial expansion. Cash's brilliantly descriptive terminology, such as the "Proto-Dorian convention" (which bound all whites, regardless of class, in a common, overriding commitment to white supremacy) or the "savage ideal" (a peculiarly southern strain of conformity and aversion to criticism or innovation forged during Reconstruction and dominant throughout the ensuing decades), soon served as conceptual coin of the realm for historians of the South. Meanwhile, Cash's name itself became synonymous with the seemingly indelible image of an intellectually stunted, emotionally dysfunctional South too obsessed with the past to cope with the present, much less comprehend the future.http://www.uga.edu/history/people/people.php?page=7A former president of the Southern Historical Association, James C. Cobb has written widely on the interaction between economy, society and culture in the American South. His books include The Selling of The South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936-1990 (Illinois, 1993), and The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (Oxford , 1992). His most recent book, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity, was published by Oxford University Press in 2005.
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