A compelling argument that over its history the South changed from
a polyglot society into two homogeneous ones divided by race, but
that in recent decades the region has been rapidly acquiring a new
ethnic diversity. Tindall (History/Univ. of North Carolina;
America, 1984) develops this thesis in three short pieces drawn
from his 1992 Averitt lectures at Georgia Southern University. In
the first, "Natives and Newcomers," Tindall gives an overview of
the surprisingly diverse social composition of the South from the
time of the first European settlers through modern times. The
pervasive presence of African-Americans and Indians, Scotch-Irish
settlers, English colonists, Louisiana Cajuns, and German
Protestants seeking religious freedom gave the 18th-century South,
in Tindall's view, "the most polyglot population in the English
colonies." After the Revolution, Indians were expelled from the
Southeastern states and far fewer new immigrants settled in the
South than in the North. In "Ethnic Southerners," Tindall traces
the growth of a distinctive southern ethnicity from the colonial
period to the 20th century. The regional identity of southern
people, he asserts, grew both out of the ethnic traditions they
brought with them and out of perceived contrasts with other regions
of the country in lifestyle, custom, and outlook. In "Southern
Ethnics," Tindall looks at the modern phenomenon of foreign
immigration to the South. He points out that, in recent decades,
more people have moved into the region than have moved out: from
Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the northern states. Tindall
anticipates that the nativism, xenophobia, and political tension
that met earlier waves of immigration to the US may occur in the
modern South, but that the diverse cultures of the new southern
ethnics will ultimately enrich their region. Tindall eruditely
shatters stereotypes about the South, drawing a picture of a region
that is at once distinctive and much like the rest of the US in its
diversity. (Kirkus Reviews)
In Natives and Newcomers, George Brown Tindall surveys the changes
in the South's cultural and racial makeup over the past two
centuries. Tindall discusses southern ethnicity in light of
immigration laws and trends, attitudes toward immigrants, and
economic and political forces that have changed the region's ethnic
makeup from within (such as the Civil War) or without (such as
Castro's rise to power in Cuba). Tindall shows that the colonial
South developed the most polyglot population in the English
colonies, encompassing Indian tribes, Western Europeans, and West
Africans. The southern and western rims of the South, moreover,
were adjoined by Spanish and French colonies into the nineteenth
century. After the American Revolution, fewer immigrants came
south, Indians were largely expelled, the slave trade subsided--and
southerners of whatever color came to be almost wholly native-born.
A single group of ethnic southerners with white and black subgroups
emerged--subgroups that had more in common, Tindall observes, than
they cared always to admit. After World War II a trend toward
greater diversity reemerged when newcomers from abroad (primarily
Hispanic, Caribbean, and Asian people) and from other regions in
the United States began entering the South in greater proportions
than at any other time since the colonial period. Immigrants living
in the South now account for 23.2 percent of the total United
States immigrant population, Tindall points out. "Now, just over
two hundred years after the birth of the Cotton Belt and one
hundred years after the birth of the New South," he concludes, "the
conviction grows that the region is at a new conjuncture in its
history. One thing seems already clear about the post-New South.
The shades of the Sunbelt will no longer be a simple matter of
black and white. They will span a much broader spectrum of color."
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