The Southern Political Tradition (Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History) - Hardcover

Perman, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807144010 ISBN 13: 9780807144015

Publisher: LSU Press, 2012

Synopsis

In The Southern Political Tradition, the distinguished southern historian Michael Perman explores the region's distinctive political practices and behaviors, primarily resulting from the South's perception of itself as a minority under attack from the 1820s to the 1960s. Drawing on his extensive research and understanding of southern politics, Perman singles out three features of the area's political history. He calls the first element "The One-Party Paradigm," a political system characterized by one-party dominance rather than competition between two or more. The second feature, "The Frontier and Filibuster Defense," illustrates a dramatic, preemptive response within Congress to any threat to the region's racial order. And in the third, "The Over-Representation Mechanism," Perman describes the skillful manipulation of institutional mechanisms in Congress that resulted in greater influence than the region's relatively small population warranted.
This anomalous tradition has all but disappeared since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Southern Political Tradition offers an insightful and provocative perspective on the South's political history.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Perman is research professor in the humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has written or edited eight books in American history, most recently Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888--1908 and Pursuit of Unity: A Political History of the American South. He has also held a Guggenheim Fellowship and won three book prizes.

Review:

''In this compact book Michael Perman has achieved the near impossible: encapsulate the sweep of southern political history in a close examination of how a determined southern minority used every device in the parliamentary and constitutional toolkit to ward off threats to sectional interests, particularly racial ones. A welcome addition to the literature.'' --Lawrence N. Powell, author of The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans

About this edition

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0807144010
• ISBN 13: 9780807144015
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 128