For most historians, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the hostilities of the Civil War and the dashed hopes of Reconstruction give way to the nationalising forces of cultural reunion. In truth, says Natalie Ring, this buoyant mythology competed with an equally powerful representation of the backward Problem South.

NATALIE J. RING is an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is coeditor, with Stephanie Cole, of The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South.