The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960-1980

A roundtable discussion among Zachary J. Lechner, Darren Grem, and Margaret T. McGehee about Lechner\u27s book, The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960-1980 (U of Georgia Press, 2018).https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studythesouth/1011/thumbnail.jp

The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity

The Book of Matthew cautions readers that Ye cannot serve God and mammon. But for at least a century conservative American Protestants have been trying to prove that adage wrong. In The Blessings of Business, Darren E. Grem argues that while preachers, activists, and politicians have all helped spread the gospel, American evangelicalism owes its enduring strength in a large part to private enterprise. Grem argues for a new history of American evangelicalism, demonstrating how its adherents strategically used corporate America--its leaders, businesses, money, ideas, and values--to advance their religious, cultural, and political movement. Beginning before the First World War, conservative evangelicals were able to use businessmen and business methods to retain and expand their public influence in a secularizing, diversifying, and liberalizing age. In the process they became beholden to pro-business stances on matters of theology, race, gender, taxation, trade, and the state, transforming evangelicalism itself into as much of an economic movement as a religious one. The Blessings of Business tells the story of unlikely partnerships between well-known champions of the evangelical movement such as Billy Graham and largely forgotten businessmen like Herbert Taylor, J. Howard Pew, and R.G. LeTourneau. Grem also shows how evangelicals set up their own pro-business organizations and linked the quarterly and yearly growth of Christian businesses to their social, religious, and political aspirations. Fascinating and provocative, The Blessings of Business uncovers the strong ties that conservative Christians have forged between the Almighty and the almighty dollar.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/libarts_book/1106/thumbnail.jp

Protests in Pro Football, 1965–2020

Chuck Ross’s “Protests in Pro Football, 1965–2020” talk examines both the events leading up to the 1965 American Football League All-Star game protest and the events that led to Colin Kapernick’s 2016 NFL protest. Ross will also discuss the legacy of Kapernick’s actions in the wake of the death of George Floyd and the different responses by professional sports leagues and teams in America. Chuck Ross is a native of Columbus, Ohio, and currently is professor of history and African American studies at the University of Mississippi. He holds a BA in history from Stillman College. He has an MA in Black studies, an MA in history, and a PhD in history, each from The Ohio State University. He is the author of Mavericks, Money, and Men: The AFL, Black Players, and the Evolution of Modern Football, which was published by Temple University Press in 2016, and Outside the Lines: African Americans and the Integration of the National Football League, which was released by New York University Press in 1999. His teaching interests include twentieth-century US history, African American history, and sports history. He has appeared on ESPN’s Outside the Lines and on ESPN Radio. Associate Professor of History and Southern Studies Darren Grem introduced and facilitated the Q&A for this talk originally recorded on February 11, 2021. To learn more about the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the SouthTalks series, please visit the Center\u27s website

The Southern Cultural Renaissance of the Early Twenty-First Century

Reflecting the dramatic changes in southern society in the last twenty years, the South’s culture has been transformed. The increasing social diversity is leading to a multicultural society in which African Americans, Latinos, Asians, the white working classes, LGBT people, and others are claiming a new, dramatically different southern identity. In this SouthTalk, Charles Reagan Wilson explores how popular magazines have become a surprising carrier of this new identity to broad regional and national audiences. Wilson is professor emeritus of history and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. He served as the director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture (1998–2007) and the Kelly Gene Cook Sr. Chair of History (2007–2015). He is the series editor of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, the coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and the coeditor of The Mississippi Encyclopedia (2017). Frequently interviewed by such media outlets as CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and southern newspapers and magazines, he has been an essayist and reviewer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Raleigh News-Observer. Most recently, he served as an Obama Fellow at the Obama Institute of Transnational American Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany. To learn more about the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the SouthTalks series, please visit the Center\u27s website

The Business Turn in American Religious History

Business has received little attention in American religious history, although it has profound implications for understanding the sustained popularity and ongoing transformation of religion in the United States. This volume offers a wide ranging exploration of the business aspects of American religious organizations. The authors analyze the financing, production, marketing, and distribution of religious goods and services and the role of wealth and economic organization in sustaining and even shaping worship, charity, philanthropy, institutional growth, and missionary work. Treating religion and business holistically, their essays show that American religious life has always been informed by business practices. Laying the groundwork for further investigation, the authors show how American business has functioned as a domain for achieving religious goals. Indeed they find that religion has historically been more powerful when interwoven with business. Chapters on Mormon enterprise, Jewish philanthropy, Hindu gurus, Native American casinos, and the wedding of business wealth to conservative Catholic social teaching demonstrate the range of new studies stimulated by the business turn in American religious history. Other chapters show how evangelicals joined neo-liberal economic practice and right-wing politics to religious fundamentalism to consolidate wealth and power, and how they developed marketing campaigns and organizational strategies that transformed the American religious landscape. Included are essays exposing the moral compromises religious organizations have made to succeed as centers of wealth and influence, and the religious beliefs that rationalize and justify these compromises. Still others examine the application of business practices as a means of sustaining religious institutions and expanding their reach, and look at controversies over business practices within religious organizations, and the adjustments such organizations have made in response. Together, the essays collected here offer new ways of conceptualizing the interdependence of religion and business in the United States, establishing multiple paths for further study of their intertwined historical development.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/libarts_book/1107/thumbnail.jp

Southern Religion, Southern Culture: Essays in Honor of Charles Reagan Wilson

Over more than three decades of teaching at the University of Mississippi, Charles Reagan Wilson’s research and writing transformed southern studies in key ways. This volume pays tribute to and extends Wilson’s seminal work on southern religion and culture. Using certain episodes and moments in southern religious history, the essays examine the place and power of religion in southern communities and society. It emulates Wilson’s model, featuring both majority and minority voices from archives and applying a variety of methods to explain the South’s religious diversity and how religion mattered in many arenas of private and public life, often with life-or-death stakes. The volume first concentrates on churches and ministers, and then considers religious and cultural constructions outside formal religious bodies and institutions. It examines the faiths expressed via the region’s fields, streets, homes, public squares, recreational venues, roadsides, and stages. In doing so, this book shows that Wilson’s groundbreaking work on religion is an essential part of southern studies and crucial for fostering deeper understanding of the South’s complicated history and culture.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/libarts_book/1105/thumbnail.jp