The contemporary turn to the right in America has occurred mainly in the South, which is what drew me there. You don’t have to be Southern to be Tea Party, of course, but the white South has been a center of it. What interests me about Southern history is the series of emotional grooves, as we might call them, carved into the minds and hearts of the people I came to know through the lives of their ancestors—many of whom were white farmers of small farms. It isn’t the origin of certain ideas in history that I am curious about, as much as the way the past fixes patterns of class identification
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