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Podcast: New Books in Politics and Polemics
Episode: Bryan D. Jones, The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Description: The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History (Oxford University Press, 2025) explores the under-appreciated division in the South between the oligarchic rule of plantation owners and industrialists on the one hand, and the more democratic mindset of the mountain-dwelling small farmers on the other. These two mindsets were in continual tension from the 1800s to the 1960s, when the adherents of the more democratic side of the struggle capitulated to the oligarchical side in response to the Civil Rights movement.
Bryan Jones draws from his own family's centuries-old history in the region to...