People & Perspectives with historian Jennifer Ritterhouse @ Historic Sotterley

When white newspaper editor Jonathan Daniels set out to “discover the South” in his stately black Plymouth in the summer of 1937, he especially hoped to find the land that existed somewhere between the mythical old plantation and the sharecropper’s cabin, between Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road. He succeeded. His published and unpublished accounts of his trip captured a panoramic picture of the South during the Great Depression. In Discovering the South: One Man’s Travels through a Changing America in the 1930s, historian Jennifer Ritterhouse follows Daniels on his journey to explore a wide range of interrelated topics, from the impact of the New Deal and the southern literary Renaissance, to the tragic Scottsboro case and planters’ and industrialists’ violent suppression of labor organizing.

The questions at the center of Discovering the South are big ones: What was the true nature of the South and its problems, and who was trying to address them–in what ways, against what opposition, and with what results–during the Roosevelt years? More provocatively, why, in the late 1930s when Jonathan Daniels, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and a great many other Americans were “traveling,” did the destination of a more just and egalitarian South prove so impossible to reach?

This is a FREE hybrid event, meaning you can join in person or virtually. Registration is required.
In-person attendees are welcome to join us for a pre-reception at 6:15 pm.