The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family’s History

Opposing perspectives on the desirability of democracy and equality dominates white Southern history. Both before and after the end of slavery, plantation oligarchs rejected democracy, while small farmers in the upcountry embraced it--if only for whites. Drawing from his own family’s centuries-old roots in the region, the eminent American politics scholar Bryan Jones compares the experiences of a slaveholding line with three non-slaveholding lines to retell the entire history of the region. Through his family’s history across a host of Southern states, he retells in vivid detail the ceaseless battle between Southern oligarchy and democracy--and how racial politics threads through all of it.

Bryan Jones is J.J.＂Jake＂ Pickle Regents’ Chair in Congressional Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests center on the study of public policy processes, American governing institutions, and the connection between human decision-making and organizational behavior. He directs the U.S. Policy Agendas Project, the major resource for examining changes in public policy processes in American national institutions. The Policy Agendas system has been adopted in thirty countries, allowing comparisons of policy change worldwide.