Lost Revolutions

The South in the 1950s

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by Pete Daniel

University of North Carolina Press

Due/Published May 2000, 392 pages, paper

ISBN 0807848484

This work of cultural history explores a time of turbulence and change in the South, years that have been dismissed by many as placid and dull. In the wake of World War II, southerners anticipated a peaceful and prosperous future, but as Daniel demonstrates, the road into the 1950s took some unexpected turns.

Daniel chronicles the many forces that turned the world southerners had known upside down in the postwar period. In chapters that explore such subjects as the civil rights movement, segregation, and school integration; the breakdown of traditional agriculture and the ensuing rural-urban migration; gay and lesbian life; and the emergence of rock 'n' roll music and stock car racing, as well as the triumph of working-class culture, he shows that the 1950s South was a place with the potential for revolutionary change. In the end, however, the chance for significant transformation was squandered, or at least put off, Daniel argues. One can only imagine how different southern history might have been if politicians, the press, the clergy, and local leaders had supported democratic reforms that bestowed full citizenship on African Americans--and how little would have been accomplished if a handful of blacks and whites had not taken risks to bring about the changes that did come.

"This is an important book by one of the leading historians of the twentieth-century South. No one has written with more originality and authority about the pivotal, contradictory decade of the 1950s and its profound impact on the region."--Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill