It suggests that many Southerners, haunted by fitful memories, stood on the future's brink at present with a genuine sense of precariousness, knowing in their hearts that there was no turning back, while at the same time feeling cold and uncomfortable at the inception of a new era, lacking any feeling of rejuvenation and wondering if they were not merely beginning again a cycle which had already ended in broken images.

No region of the country had a more colorful history, but neither had any history been subjected to such shameless tampering by latter-day counterfeiters and myth-makers, with many Southerners unable to distinguish between fact and fiction, portrait and caricature, history and hyperbole. Their faith had not been bolstered by the "pseudo-historic twaddle" being retailed by contemporary commentators with an ax to grind. The inevitable result was enigmatic insecurity, "however boldly it may be rhapsodized into pride and defiance."

It finds that the book being reviewed provided a rare opportunity, capturing in its pages at least part of the heritage and history of the South and doing so almost entirely with the words and emotions of the people who had lived its triumphs and tragedies. It indicates that it was the South as it actually had been, reconstructed with painstaking care from the diaries, letters, fiction, travel books, newspapers and magazines. It set forth the customs, thoughts and manners of Southerners and of non-Southerners who had come to the South to examine it, with the story tied together by explanatory notes of the author, a professor of history.

It finds that the result was not entirely satisfactory, as great sectors of Southern thought were left unexplored, but it was "not too terrible", as it would take many volumes of the type to cover all of the ground and examine all of the nuances of the subject.

The publishers emphasized that it was the first book devoted to a documentary study of the South, and it congratulates the author for her diligence and enterprise in collecting so much fascinating source material, much of it new to the eyes of contemporary students of Southern history.

Her story began with the Spanish explorers in 1528 and ended with a hopeful look at the New South of 1956. It finds that its major strength lay in its careful examination of the antebellum period, the Cotton Kingdom, the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Some of the passages were unforgettable, such as the indignant description of the death of a black slave on a Georgia plantation, chronicled by actress Fanny Kemble, who had gone to the plantation to live as the wife of Senator Pierce Butler: "On the plantation where I lived the Infirmary was a large room, the walls of which were simply mud and laths; the floor, the soil itself, damp with perpetual drippings from holes in the roof; and the open space which served for a window was protected only by a broken shutter, which, in order to exclude the cold, was drawn so near as almost to exclude the light at the same time. Upon this earthen floor, with nothing but its hard damp surface beneath him, no covering but a tattered shirt and trousers, and a few sticks under his head for a pillow, lay an old man of upward of 70, dying … and so, like a worn-out hound, with no creature to comfort or relieve his last agony, with neither Christian solace nor human succor near him, with neither wife, nor child, nor even friendly fellow-being to lift his head from the knotty sticks on which he had rested it, or drive away the insects that buzzed around his lips and nostrils like those of a fallen beast, died this poor old slave, whose life had been exhausted in unrequited labor, the fruits of which had gone to pamper the pride and feed the luxury of those who cared neither for his life nor his death…"

It finds also impressive the "fine, cold, blue flame" of Lt. General Wade Hampton's fury as expressed in a letter written in the field in February, 1865 to Maj. General William T. Sherman of the Union Army, who had complained to Confederate General Hampton that the Confederates were "murdering" his foraging parties in South Carolina after capture, indicating that he had "ordered a similar number of prisoners in our hands to be disposed of in like manner." General Hampton had accused General Sherman of disgracing the profession of arms by allowing "the thieves whom you designate as your foragers" to put the torch to private dwellings, vowing that Union house-burners would be shot on sight, and assuring General Sherman that "for every soldier of mine 'murdered' by you, I shall execute at once two of yours."

It finds that the mind of the New South was scrutinized with less skill and selective care than had been that of the Old South, indicating that the book was short on examples of the new awakening of Southern liberalism, "surely one of the region's most interesting social and political developments of the last half-century." It finds it difficult to understand how the influences of W. J. Cash, Hodding Carter of the Greenville (Miss.) Delta Democrat-Times, Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution and Virginius Dabney of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and others of real importance had been underrated or completely omitted—there having been absolutely no mention, for instance, of Mr. Cash, formerly of The News, or his seminal work from 1941, from which the piece takes its title.

The late Howard Odum of the UNC sociology department was represented not by anything from his monumental study, Southern Regions, of 1936, but from his less consequential Rainbow Round My Shoulder, a tale of a wandering black man.

It finds it also a shame that the chapter on the literature of the New South could not have been more representative of the 20th Century literary renaissance, during which a large share of the country's best fiction had been produced in the South. William Faulkner was represented by an excerpt from one of his lesser efforts, Absalom, Absalom!, as was Ellen Glasgow of Richmond, (though one might quibble with the reviewer regarding the inclusion of an excerpt from Barren Ground, considered to be one of her better novels, which Cash had called "the first real novel, as opposed to romances, that the South had brought forth; certainly the first wholly genuine picture of the people who make up and always have made up the body of the South"), with nothing set forth from Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe, Paul Green, Erskine Caldwell, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers or Richard Wright.

It finds also that the book drew perhaps too much on North Carolina sources, and yet there was little to indicate the tremendous influence of UNC in the development of the modern South.

It determines, however, those to be minor reservations for a book which ought be judged primarily by what it offered rather than what it did not, indicating that what it did offer was very fine. It also suggests, however, that it deserved a better introduction than that of Francis Butler Simkins, in which White Supremacy appeared "unaccountably to be bracketed with hot biscuits as an agreeable hallmark of Dixie's charm." (Professor Simkins, who says in his Introduction, "Hot biscuits bind the Southern province together with an authority almost as intimate as White Supremcy," was a proponent of the maintenance of segregation. While much of what he says is merely a frank assessment of the region historically and as he saw it in 1958, there is the occasional hint of dark fatalism, that for the South to integrate would inexorably mean a return to the type of miscegenation which had occurred on the plantation, not allowing any room for the passage of a hundred years and the increase in educational standards in the meantime on both sides of the color line—which were merged informally far more in the work place and in domestic help in middle-class homes prior to desegregation of the public schools and public facilities generally by the mid to late 1960's, even if inevitably in passively subjugated relations prior to that later time, than he appears to understand or assume, moving from actual or at least functional illiteracy in the antebellum days to the proliferation by the 1920's of genuine scholarship on a fairly widespread basis, as much so as in other regions of the country, tending instead to relegate, quite condescendingly, Southerners to biscuits and gravy diets and also, as a staple with it, to a steady diet of "White Supremacy", which he seems to regard as an inescapable result of the complex of being Southern, more a function of his generation's false assumptions from having come of age in a strictly segregated society than any long-enduring reality through time. Historically, he appeared to be of the school of "happy-happy land", as Cash ruefully called the false perception by some apologists of slavery on the plantation, happy slave, happy master, existing only in Cloud-Cuckoo Land, with the next stop being the pointy caps to enforce it all with whip, pistol and rope, as necessary, in that order to address obstinacy of continued disobedience to the established order.)

The editorial book review is too tactful in 1958 to point out that the choice of Introduction may explain in great degree why the author, apparently embraced of a more traditionalist view of the South, did not treat of the liberal, progressive new writers from the region to any significant extent, apparently finding them distasteful to her staid scholarship. The book never made much of a splash, insofar as it is recorded, and long ago, probably by around 1959, disappeared from Southern bookshelves, having had little, if any, significant impact. Perhaps, the library from which she was consigned to work in Boone was simply not up to the task at the time, though she acknowledges use of UNC's Wilson Library and its Southern Historical Collection to which, she says, she had free access, but only obviously via a four to five hour journey in those times by car from Boone to Chapel Hill, before Interstates 40 and 85 were completed and U.S. 421 was widened to ameliorate the hazards and reduce the time for the journey. (In saying that, we are not unmindful that Cash began his 11-year work on The Mind of the South from the back of the tiny post office run by his Aunt Bertha in Boiling Springs, N.C., the unsung building being still extant nearly a hundred years on from 1929, and, later, from Shelby, before finishing the last three years of the writing of it in Charlotte. The two books, to be fair, do not compare, as the one under review was merely a compendium of selected resources interspersed by occasional comments of the author.)

She did treat of the vaunted Mary Chestnut, upon whom we have commented earlier, whose diary was made famous anew by the Ken Burns Civil War documentary of 1990, and who had achieved a fair measure of fame long before that, but whose unfortunate editorialization on the times in which she lived was also of the more traditionalist mold, unlike Ms. Kemble, whose journal should be read long before one wastes a lot of time with Ms. Chestnut's fantasies born of magnolias, moony-eyed blossoms and four-columned, wind-blown shotgun houses expanded at each side to form a "main-sion" fit for the whole growing family—the largest sustaining full example of which, we note, recently burned to the ground in Louisiana, oddly enough when there is an occupant in the White House whose most ardent followers would wish to take America back to those times of darkness and decay, so that he can lord over all of us as his slaves for his Florida Xanadu.

As Margaret Mitchell once commented to Cash in Atlanta in March, 1941, she had to look high and low throughout Georgia to find one example which formed in her mind "Tara", which was then turned into a fictionalized version of that fictionalized version by Selznick Studios on a back lot in Hollywood, an unfortunate representation which has endured in the minds of moviegoers far longer than the actual Old South ever endured, and never endured in that framework, save, perhaps, within a few still surviving examples along the Gulf Coast between Mobile and New Orleans, those not blown away by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, certainly, however, not around Atlanta, with only a smattering of such supposed palaces having appeared here and there around Charleston and Savannah, virtually none in North Carolina, save one or two, and again only a handful, notably Monticello and Mount Vernon, in Virginia. The rest were little more than tobacco farms and cotton patches of varying sizes, mostly middling to small.

The Old South, in short, largely is a Hollywood concoction of modern times, built off an occasional actual model, not the thing of reality as it existed in numbers in the unrelenting heat and humidity of Deep South summers, all without the relief of air conditioning or even ice tea, from which the mostly absentee plantation owners took their leave to the north, some even as far north as Boston, leaving their landholdings in the hands of overseers. One has to dig and read, and visit some of those places in the heat of summer fully to appreciate the conditions under which it all existed in fact. It was not the romanticized story book which is so often depicted.

Ms. Chestnut was, unfortunately, out of her mind, sick in her ferment.

Unless one is wedded to a ridiculous fantasy which never existed, reading the journals compiled in the Journeys of Frederick Law Olmsted, from 1853 through 1857, would provide a more objective view of the region during the antebellum era, in the decade before the outbreak of the Civil War, in combination with Impending Crisis of the South by Hinton Helper of North Carolina, published in 1857, and serving as a practical Republican manual during the election of 1860. Mrs. Van Noppen does regard both.

A piece from the Manchester Guardian, titled "Bolting and Battles", indicates that using a national flair for probing into whys and wherefores of the ordinary, an American physical culturalist had maintained that everyone ate much too fast, with the rate of consumption having doubled during the previous 50 years, producing eventual chronic indigestion and general gumming up of the works.