Description
Book SynopsisThe Ozarks is a place that defies easy categorization. Sprawling across much of Missouri and Arkansas and smaller parts of Oklahoma and Kansas, it is caught on the margins of America’s larger cultural regions: part southern, part midwestern, and maybe even a little bit western. For generations Ozarkers have been more likely than most other Americans to live near or below the poverty line—a situation that has often subjected them to unflattering stereotypes. In short, the Ozarks has been a marginal place populated by marginalized people.
Historian Brooks Blevins has spent his life studying and writing about the people of his native regions—the South and the Ozarks. He has been in the vanguard of a new and vibrant Ozarks Studies movement that has worked to refract the stories of Ozarkers through a more realistic and less exotic lens. In
Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins, Blevins introduces us with humor and fairness to mostly unseen lives of the past and present: southern gospel singing schools and ballad collectors, migratory cotton pickers and backroad country storekeepers, fireworks peddlers and impoverished diarists.
Part historical and part journalistic, Blevins’s essays combine the scholarly sensibilities of a respected historian with the insights of someone raised in rural hill country. His stories of marginalized characters often defy stereotype. They entertain as much as they educate. And most of them originate in the same place Blevins does: up south in the Ozarks.
Trade Review“This book is more than just a remarkable collection of Ozark arcana (although it is that). Its good writing, wry humor, and deep, sympathetic understanding should appeal to anyone interested in the larger South.”
—John Shelton Reed, author of
Mixing It Up: A South-Watcher’s MiscellanyTable of Contents
- Introduction
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One
The Ozarks and Dixie: Considering a Region’s Southernness
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Two
Fireworking Down South
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Three
The South According to Andy
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Four
Where Everything New Is Old Again: Southern Gospel Singing Schools
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Five
Against the Current: Landowners and the Fight for Ozarks Streams
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Six
The Country Store: In Search of Mercantiles and Memories in the Ozarks
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Seven
Rethinking the Scots-Irish Ozarks: Diversity and Demographics in Regional History
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Eight
Revisiting Race Relations in the Upland South: LaCrosse, Arkansas
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Nine
The Spruills: Who and Why?
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Ten
Collectors of the Ozarks: Folklore and Regional Image
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Eleven
The Ordinary Days of Extraordinary Minnie: Diaries of a Life on the Margins
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Twelve
A Time Zone Away and a Generation Behind: Appalachia and the Ozarks
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Thirteen
Back to the Land: Academe, the Agrarian Ideal, and a Sense of Place
- Notes
