Up South in the Ozarks

Dispatches from the Margins

Brooks Blevins

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781610757874
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias

The Ozarks is a place that defies easy categorization. Sprawling across much of Missouri and Arkansas and smaller parts of Oklahoma and Kansas, it is caught on the margins of America's larger cultural regions: part southern, part midwestern, and maybe even a little bit western. For generations Ozarkers have been more likely than most other Americans to live near or below the poverty line—a situation that has often subjected them to unflattering stereotypes. In short, the Ozarks has been a marginal place populated by marginalized people.
 
Historian Brooks Blevins has spent his life studying and writing about the people of his native regions—the South and the Ozarks. He has been in the vanguard of a new and vibrant Ozarks Studies movement that has worked to refract the stories of Ozarkers through a more realistic and less exotic lens. In Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins, Blevins introduces us with humor and fairness to mostly unseen lives of the past and present: southern gospel singing schools and ballad collectors, migratory cotton pickers and backroad country storekeepers, fireworks peddlers and impoverished diarists.
 
Part historical and part journalistic, Blevins's essays combine the scholarly sensibilities of a respected historian with the insights of someone raised in rural hill country. His stories of marginalized characters often defy stereotype. They entertain as much as they educate. And most of them originate in the same place Blevins does: up south in the Ozarks.     

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• One. The Ozarks and Dixie: Considering a Region’s Southernness
• Two. Fireworking Down South
• Three. The South According to Andy
• Four. Where Everything New Is Old Again: Southern Gospel Singing Schools
• Five. Against the Current: Landowners and the Fight for Ozarks Streams
• Six. The Country Store: In Search of Mercantiles and Memories in the Ozarks
• Seven. Rethinking the Scots-Irish Ozarks: Diversity and Demographics in Regional History
• Eight. Revisiting Race Relations in the Upland South: LaCrosse, Arkansas
• Nine. The Spruills: Who and Why?
• Ten. Collectors of the Ozarks: Folklore and Regional Image
• Eleven. The Ordinary Days of Extraordinary Minnie: Diaries of a Life on the Margins
• Twelve. A Time Zone Away and a Generation Behind: Appalachia and the Ozarks
• Thirteen. Back to the Land: Academe, the Agrarian Ideal, and a Sense of Place
• Notes