Stories of the South offers a reconceptualization of the period between the end of the Civil War and the rise of Jim Crow segregation, centered on the changing visions of "the South" at play in U.S. culture. In the wake of a Civil War of unprecedented scale and destruction, the identity of the South — defined as a place, a culture, and a people — was very much an open question. As the United States embarked on the project of Reconstruction, it simultaneously opened an extended conversation centered on a single question: "what is the South?" Northerners parlayed victory in the Civil War into the early upper hand, assuming the power to redefine the South in the years immediately following Appomattox. White southerners fought back, however, contesting northern definitions of their region with the same tenacity with which they battled Reconstruction on the ground. Despite the best efforts of African-American activists and white liberals, the last two decades of the nineteenth century saw an almost complete return to a sort of cultural home rule, as conservative white southerners claimed the exclusive right to tell their story to the nation. How white southerners battled for and finally won the right to define their region, and the effect of this shift on the nation's long slide from Reconstruction to Jim Crow — these are the subjects of this dissertation, its own story of the South.

This narrative is rooted in research in the paper collections of a number of influential northerners and southerners, as well as extensive work in the newspapers, journals, pamphlets, visual culture, political speeches, and popular literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From these sources, Stories of the South offers an overview of the national discussion surrounding the Southern Question a reconsideration of one of the most bloody and contested periods in the history of United States race relations, and a meditation on the inextricable link between cultural considerations and political power.