Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s
by Pete Daniel

$45.00 hardcover
$19.95 paperback

   

Press Release

For Immediate Release

THE SOUTH IN THE TUMULTUOUS 1950s

Chapel Hill, N.C.--The 1950s in the United States is popularly understood as a period of peace and prosperity, relative tranquillity in the aftermath of the second World War. A new book from the University of North Carolina Press looks at the South in the fifties and shows the decade to be one not of tranquillity but of tumultuous change and upheaval.

Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (April 2000) by Pete Daniel is a sweeping work of cultural history that explores a time of startling turbulence in the South. Featuring more than 90 black and white historical photographs of the period, Lost Revolutions chronicles the myriad forces that turned the world southerners had known upside down in the postwar period.

Chapters of Lost Revolutions explore such subjects as the civil rights movement, segregation, and school integration. Daniel also examines the breakdown of traditional agriculture and the ensuing rural-urban migration; gay and lesbian life; and the emergence of rock 'n' roll music and stock car racing, as well as the triumph of working-class culture. The book's innovative approach in covering rural life and working class culture reveals that the 1950s South was a place with the potential for revolutionary change.

This grassroots "people's history" argues that during this time of upheaval in the South, the civil rights movement had an opportunity to take off among the working class. Such cultural forces as rock 'n' roll music and stock-car racing, Daniel argues, sparked intersections along racial, sexual, and religious lines.

"Rock 'n' roll music and stock car racing sponsored by the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR), two important manifestations of working-class culture, were the backbeat to migration and the accelerating movement to secure civil rights," Daniel writes.

In the end, however, the chance for significant transformation was squandered, Daniel argues. Although the years between World War II and Freedom Summeróthe attempt to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in 1964--were ripe with possibilities, the postwar climate failed to produce political visionaries. Daniel sharply criticizes the vacuum of white leadership that let what he sees as the opportunity for real racial change slip away.

"One can only imagine how different southern history might have been if politicians, the press, the clergy, and local leaders had supported democratic reforms that bestowed full citizenship on African Americans," Daniel argues. "And how little would have been accomplished if a handful of blacks and whites had not taken risks to bring about the changes that did come."

Pete Daniel is a curator in the Division of the History of Technology at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. He is the award-winning author of many books, including Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures Since 1880.


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