John Shelton Reed
John Shelton Reed
John Shelton Reedis a sociologist and essayist, author or editor of twenty books, most of them dealing with the contemporary American South. Reed has also written for a variety of non-academic publications such as The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the Oxford American. He was graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1971. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1969 until his retirement...
ProfessionSociologist
agree asking good people
The South: What is this place? What's different about it? Is it different anymore? Good questions. Old ones, too. People have been asking them for decades. Some of us even make our living by asking them, but we still don't agree about the answers.
groups
Southerners are also like ethnic groups in that they have a sense of group identity.
barbecue closest hundred miles southern wines
Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the U.S. to Europe's wines or cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.
long tourists south
As long as there are Japanese tourists, there will be a market for the Old South.
country people middle
Country music historically has been sort of middle-aged people's music.
thinking globalization regionalism
I don't think massification and globalization and all those other 'izations' are necessarily hostile to regionalism.
southern looks stereotype
The nature of the South is changing faster than the stereotypes are. Much of the South now looks like San Jose. Is it still southern?
smile-more southerner
Southerners smile more than other Americans.
hero believe poor
But I still do believe that there are useful things to say about Elvis Presley, including what his own ordinariness as a poor Southerner says about 20th-century hero-making.
heart dixie pieces
Dixie has just fallen to pieces. There are little patches of Dixie. But even in the heart of Dixie - in Alabama - Dixie is slipping. They've stopped using the word in commercial listings.
country smart thinking
Every Southerner, I think, knows people like Bill Clinton, maybe not quite as smart and maybe not quite as liberal, but kind of a glad-handing, country-club yuppie Southerner. The problem is we don't have labels for middle-class Southerners.
believe ignorance rights
I do believe states' rights was a sound doctrine that got hijacked by some unsavory customers for a while - like, 150 years or so. I'm professionally obliged to believe that knowledge is better than ignorance, but some kinds of forgetting are OK with me.
nice successful thinking
I think there's a suspicion in the South of people putting on airs. You see it in most successful Southern politicians, but you also see it in someone like Richard Petty, who may be a multimillionaire stock car driver, but he's also beloved because he has a nice self-deprecatory way about him.
hate trying ends
I've occasionally wished I had Caller ID. Even telemarketers, I hate to hang up on them. I try to explain I'm not interested, but they have all these canned responses so I end up having to hang up on them anyway.