The American South has always been different – slavery, secession, poverty, rural, and segregated – seemingly the reverse of American ideals. As novelist William Faulkner noted, in the South, the past is not even past, as the recent conflict over Confederate monuments attests. Why is this so? How have other regions in the U.S. contributed to the Southern mixture of myth and history? And what does its persistence say about the nation?

On April 15th, Michele Rivkin-Fish (Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) gave a lecture as part of an interdisciplinary seminar hosted by the EUSP’s Gender Studies Program and the Department of Political Science and Sociology.