Productions: The South

Intelligent Television, Insignia Films, Alexandria Productions, and PBS are producing an epic television and education project on the history of the American South in the 20th century.

Such an initiative is long overdue. Southerners of every era have believed that the worlds of their youth and the cultures of their region are vanishing. This concern motivates the historians, archivists, and filmmakers involved in the project. Indeed, the urgency behind “The South” becomes stronger with each Southerner's death. Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, and June Carter Cash, with their diverse backgrounds in Southern music, are now gone. Strom Thurmond and David Brinkley, with their divergent views of Southern politics, are gone. Dale Earnhardt of North Carolina and Willie Morris of Mississippi are gone. Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King have passed into history.

As these iconic figures disappear, “The South” must move quickly to collect, archive, and convey their history and legacies.

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The South Video

Edward L. Ayers, prize-winning historian and chair of The South’s editorial advisory board, has written:

Given all that has been written and said about the South, we might expect that Americans would be able to think clearly about the region.  Yet television, movies, novels, roadside markers, old history books, and jokes tell the same basic stories about the South over and over, even when people know they are not true to their own experience or to the complexity of human life…. The South has suffered from generalizations that trivialize it, whether those generalizations take the form of romantic and nostalgic dreams of the past, arrogant regional stereotypes, or scholarly arguments about central themes and unifying characteristics.  Positive or negative, these images of the South keep us from seeing the people of the region with the fullness and empathy all people deserve.

This project draws upon the work of historians and scholars who link the power of traditional storytelling with new advances in media, information technology, humanities computing, library science, and the digitization of primary documents.  The project’s editorial advisory committee is chaired by Ayers, whose work exemplifies this connection.  The “Valley of the Shadow” project, storytelling and digital media combined to present the history of comparable counties in Virginia and Pennsylvania, serves as a model of such scholarship and presentation, and Ayers’s recent work, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863, serves as a printed capstone to this deep, rich, and popular online archive about the coming Civil War.  The project is also inspired by The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, edited by Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris—a book that, eleven years in the making, involved the work of hundreds of scholars and writers.  U.S. News and World Report heralded its publication, remarking that the 1,634-page Encyclopedia represents “the first attempt ever to describe every aspect of a region’s life and thought, the impact of its history and politics, its music and literature, its manners and myths, even the iced tea that washes down its catfish and cornbread.”

The South is found wherever Southern culture is found.  That culture is located not only in the Deep South, the Upper South, and border states, not only in the 11 states that formed the original Confederacy, but also in “little Dixies” (the Southern parts of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and parts of Missouri and Oklahoma), among black Mississippians who migrated to south Chicago, among white Appalachians and black Alabamians who migrated to Detroit, among former Okies and Arkies who settled in California, and among Latinos throughout Florida and the south Atlantic, including the Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.  The South is found elsewhere, too—in Hollywood films and New York plays that have nurtured its various images, legends, and myths.  It is found in the works of expatriate Southern artists and writers—Richard Wright and Tennessee Williams, for example, who lived in Paris and New York but continued to explore the South in their writing.  It is international.  “Roots,” Gone with the Wind, blues, country music, rock and roll, William Faulkner, and Alice Walker are admired and studied throughout the world; Southern-based businesses such as Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, and FedEx have global reach.  The series definition of the South is thus a broad and inclusive one.  It embraces all the aspects of Southern life and thought—the people, places, ideas, experiences, symbols, myths, and values—that have sustained the region’s distinctiveness.

“The South” draws upon many collections of materials on the history of the American South, across the region and the country.  These include collections—of books, newspapers, journals, documents, manuscripts, photographs, music, video, audio, and online resources—at the University of Virginia; the Virginia Center for Digital History; the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture; the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University; joint projects such as AmericanSouth.org; and state digitization projects such as NC ECHO.

“The South” is also producing new material in video, audio, print, image, and born-digital media to enrich these collections in enduring ways.  The project is providing support to enhance the key bibliographic and search features in these repositories—features that serve to make them accessible to anyone, anywhere, online.  Indeed, the project’s mandate for all the media that it produces will make explicit how all series components, from interviews to research essays and primary documents and photos, will be archived, preserved, and made freely accessible to educators and the public.  The project also will increase the renown of these collections, publicizing them as a resource via public television, radio, and online.  “The South” will focus national attention on preserving and rendering accessible more material about Southern culture and history, and also serve as a case study for overcoming the barriers—legal, technical, financial—involved in preserving critically important public media.

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For further information about Intelligent Television projects and productions, or to get involved, please contact the company.