Media-Made Dixie

In Media-Made Dixie Jack Kirby shows how the American publics perceptions of the South have been influenced, even controlled, by the mass communications media. In this newly updated edition, Kirby surveys major movies, radio and television shows, plays, popular histories, and music from the turn of the century through the 1980s. He documents a progression in the national image of the South from the cracker wasteland of Erskine Caldwells Gods Little Acre to the antebellum wonderland of Hollywoods Shirley Temple-Bojangles Robinson musicals; from William Styrons searching account of the Old South in Confessions of Nat Turner to the New South ingenuity of Jimmy Carter and Ted Turner; and from the regressive back-roads of televisions The Dukes of Hazzard to the complex reconciliation found in Alice Walkers and Steven Spielbergs The Color Purple.