From the late nineteenth century through World War II, popular
culture portrayed the American South as a region ensconced in its
antebellum past, draped in moonlight and magnolias, and represented
by such southern icons as the mammy, the belle, the chivalrous
planter, white-columned mansions, and even bolls of cotton. In
Dreaming of Dixie, Karen Cox shows that the chief purveyors
of nostalgia for the Old South were outsiders of the region,
playing to consumers' anxiety about modernity by marketing the
South as a region still dedicated to America's pastoral traditions.
In addition, Cox examines how southerners themselves embraced the
imaginary romance of the region's past.