Making whiteness : the culture of segregation in the South, 1890-1940 / Grace Elizabeth Hale.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 381-408) and index.

Preface -- Introduction: Producing the ground of difference -- No Easy Place Or Time: -- Black side of segregation -- Necessary space -- Double self -- Making Blackness -- Of my womanhood -- I, too, sing America -- Lost Causes And Reclaimed Spaces: "History" As The Autobiography Of Southern Whiteness: -- Race in the garden -- Civil war -- Hell that is called Reconstruction -- Domestic Reconstruction: White Homes, "Black Mammies," And "New Women: -- Passing of the plantation household -- Whiteness makes a home -- Remembering my old mammy -- Motherhood in black and white -- White Self, White South -- Bounding Consumption: For Colored And For White: -- Training the ground of difference -- Dixie brand -- Segregation signs: racial order in the national market -- Shopping between slavery and freedom: general stores -- Segregation signs: racial disorder in the Southern market -- Deadly Amusements: Spectacle Lynching's And The Contradictions Of Segregation As Culture: -- Genealogy of lynching's as modern spectacle -- Lynching of Sam Hose -- Lynching of Jesse Washington -- Lynching of Claude Neal -- Meaning of the spectacle -- Stone Mountains: Lillian Smith, Margaret Mitchell, And Whiteness Divided: -- Segregated youth -- White maturity of Stone -- Cracks in the mountain -- Strong white wind -- Seeing the land of difference -- Epilogue: American whiteness -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Permissions acknowledgments -- Index.

Overview: Making Whiteness is a profoundly important work that explains how and why whiteness came to be such a crucial, embattled - and distorting - component of twentieth-century American identity. Grace Elizabeth Hale shows how, when faced with the active citizenship of their ex-slaves after the Civil War, white southerners reestablished their dominance through a cultural system based on violence and physical separation. And in analysis of the meaning of segregation for the nation as a whole, she explains how white southerners' creation of modern "whiteness" was, beginning in the 1920s, taken up by the rest of the nation as a way of enforcing a new social hierarchy while at the same time creating the illusion of a national, egalitarian, consumerist democracy.