Country People in the New South: Tennessee's Upper Cumberland

Country People in the New South: Tennessee's Upper Cumberland. By Jeanette Keith. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. xi, 293 pp. $18.95. ISBN 0-8078-452S4. Jeanette Keith's Country People in the New South: Tennessee's Upper Cumberland is the latest addition to a growing collection of community studies of the post-Civil War South. In this wellwritten and provocative work, Keith examines an eleven-county area along the Cumberland River in north-central Tennessee in order to show how the forces of progress and modernity affected an isolated and primarily agricultural section of the South. Through a consideration of economics, education, religion, and kinship, Keith argues that the Upper Cumberland was a sharply divided community. Town folk favored progress, reform, and modernity, seeking to integrate this hill-country community into mainstream America. These townspeople saw modernization, especially the railroad, as the route to economic prosperity. Rural farmers, however, held fast to the tenets of traditional society, finding comfort in familiar approaches to family, faith, and community. While these country people could not restrain indefinitely the forces of modernity in the Upper Cumberland, they were able to temper its effects. This book presents a fresh perspective on the New South; it would be enjoyed by anyone interested in how different groups of southerners dealt with the massive political, social, and economic changes that followed the Civil War.

-RICHARD D. STARNES, Auburn University

Copyright University of Alabama Press Apr 1998
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