SOUTHERN RENAISSANCE AND THE IMAGE OF THE SOUTH IN THE 1940S-1960S AMERICAN HISTORY TEXTBOOKS
SOUTHERN RENAISSANCE AND THE IMAGE OF THE SOUTH IN THE 1940S-1960S AMERICAN HISTORY TEXTBOOKS

Summary/Abstract: History textbooks are based on facts. Occasionally, however, history textbook authors cannot escape emplotting fictional elements into their writings. Those fictional elements transform them into story tellers whose view of certain events, persons, or things might be clouded by cultural, social, or literary currents of their time. This paper aims to detect such ―cloudings‖ in the selected American history textbooks published between the 1940s and 1960s by taking as its orientation point literary and cultural changes introduced by Southern Renaissance. As a reinvigoration of literature and other types of writing in the 1930s-1950s American South, Southern Renaissance especially challenged the viability of stereotypes and clichés about the American South (the view of the South as the region burdened by its past, the notion of a ―house divided,‖ the concept of Southern paternalism, the Southern code of honor, the plantation myth, the Cavalier myth, and Southern male and female stereotypes) in the South of the 20th century. The presence or absence of those stereotypes and clichés in the selected 1940s-1960s American history textbooks will show whether the views of Southern Renaissance authors can be discerned in them and thus eventually testify to/reject historical cultural, and literary overlapping.

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