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Podcast: New Books in the American South
Episode: William D. Bryan, “The Price of Permanence: Nature and Business in the New South” (U Georgia Press, 2018)
Description: Southern capitalists of the postbellum era have been called many things, but never conservationists. Until now. Environmental historian William D. Bryan has written a brilliantly disorienting reassessment of the South’s economic development in the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression. In The Price of Permanence: Nature and Business in the New South (University of Georgia Press, 2018), Bryan finds that in all corners of the region’s 800,000 square miles debates about reconstructing the South’s economy focused on how industries could derive profits from its natural resources in perpetuity. Boosters imagined a New South that would not ex...