South to America

Imani Perry, a Princeton scholar raised in Birmingham, journeys through more than a dozen cities and towns across the American South, from Appalachia to the Gulf, from Charleston to the Mississippi Delta. In each place she layers regional history, the lives of enslaved people and their descendants, contemporary art and music, exploitative opportunists, unsung heroes, and her own family's memory. Out of these threads she builds a sustained argument that the meaning of America is inseparable from the South, and that the region usually written off as the nation's exception is in fact its truest mirror.