Magnolias without Moonlight: The American South from Regional Confederacy to National Integration

Hackney uses quantitative analysis of homicide data to establish beyond doubt for the first time that the South has long been more violent, and that there is a cultural component of that violence that exists beyond the usual social predictors of higher homicide rates in the United States. He muses over the failure of the usual social predictors of votes for the Democratic Party to predict the party’s performance in the region. Timely, elegantly written, and wide in intellectual scope, Magnolias without Moonlight will be of interest to a broad readership of historians, cultural studies specialists, political scientists, and sociologists.