This book is written through the eyes of a middle-class, ten year old girl during the Civil war. This book is wonderful and has many extroidinary ocurrances. This young girl is truly amazing and this story has given m a better view of what life was like for someone just like me during the Civil War. I would definantly recommend this book to anyone and everyone!

This is by far the finest and most lucid and readable treatment of these subjects since Cash's groundbreaking study. A must.

Since Reconstruction, works of Southern history and, in this case, sociology have usually fallen into two distinct genres. The first tends to reinforce the popular Old South mythology with exaggerated, romantic imagery as inspired by an emotional attachment to the "Lost Cause." The second is a reaction to the first. The revisionists, always irritated by the chauvinism of Southern popular mythology, want to convince you that Southern mythology is exactly that--a myth. The most violent of the revisionists will have you believe that romantic images of the Old South are fundamentally fictional--an image created by the Southern propagandists eager to create only the most flattering cultural portrait. For the record, THE MIND OF THE SOUTH falls more into the second category than the first. In fact, all of the works of Southern history and sociology that we now consider "classic" are more critical and revisionist than romantic. The non-fiction works of Cash, Odum, and C. Vann Woodward, and the fiction of Ellen Glasgow are all appreciated throughout the country for their critical views of what we call the Old South. It has become nearly equivalent in Southern studies to call a work both revisionist and worthy of praise. The ideas are, unfortunately, redundant. One's appreciation for things Southern all but negates one's credibility as a serious scholar. But the problem with extreme revisionism, and with the Cash work in particular, is that it has you believe that Southern mythology is SO fictional that it is nearly arbitrary. It wants you to believe that popular Southern imagery is a product of ignornace rather than careful consideration of the evidence. There is a difference between calling mythology an exaggeration, as the best works of William C. Davis, John Shelton Reed and Edward L. Ayers do, and calling it patently false, as the works of C. Vann Woodward and W. J. Cash do. This is the challenging question for any revisionist: If the popular view you are trying to de- and reconstruct is false, why (and how) was it originally created? And more critically, if all of history is just a social construction, what makes your take on things innately more accurate than mine? It seems to me that popular mythology must have some grain of truth, for it would not have developed as it did from nothing. It must be based on something that really exists. This idea, of course, is violently rejected by most post-modern historians who believe that ALL of history is nothing more than a social construction. For those sympathetic to that view, this book will appeal to you. To those looking for some insights into the factual basis for a Southern creation myth, you'd do better to read Ayers, Davis, or Reed. These fine historians are able to treat the topic with a sensitive balance of critical insight and popular appreciation.

Published in 1941, one can't help but think that THE MIND OF THE SOUTH is an iconoclastic reaction to the immense popularity of GONE WITH THE WIND, released in 1939.

If you pick up this book, my advice to you is not to quit reading at page 200. Though Cash paints a picture of the South that is mainly unflattering, it is not entirely without reason and maybe not completely because he hates the region; I believe that in the latter half of the book, the reader gets a clear image of "The Mind of WJ Cash."

This book indeed embodies a comprehensive history of the South, beneficial and useful once the reader embraces the flow of Mr. Cash's prose and his myiad tangents. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of the South, though some readers have and will indubitably see this "classic" work as self-righteous, hypocritical and incongruent as the author's subject matter.

For Boomer aged Southerners, there was no formal Southern history. At school you got Yankee cant; at home you got Lost Cause and Jim Crow. That doesn't fit the Chamber of Commerce image of cities too busy to hate, but that was the reality for all but the most miniscule minority of white Southerners. Through public school and college in The South, I never had a word from Southern thinkers with the minor exception of Faulkner - not much of a thinker, but a good describer.
Cash was my introduction to Southern intellectual history, and by the time I found him I was far from the South in both space and time. I can feel Cash in my very bones; a dose of Tom Watson populism, a dose of Mencken's cynicism, and a whole bunch of the self-loathing that a defeated and impoverished people wore like tattered old clothes every day. Some neo-Southerners call Cash a South-hater, but they miss the point; Cash wanted desperately to love The South, but could find little to love except myth. You get much the same with Woodward, though in finer clothes. "Strange Career" is nothing but myth, yet it propelled Woodward to the heights of the Academy. The key to both these books is that they are Yankee approved mythology. The publishing houses are not on Peachtree Street, they are on 5th Avenue. For anyone wishing to begin exploration of Southern thought, Cash, the Nashville Agrarians, and Strange Career are the places to start. If you go no further, you won't know anything about The South, but to go further, you must start here.

The first reviewer of this book is an obvious moron when it comes to the history of the War Between the States. The north did not attack the south because of slavery. Lincoln did not even mention slavery till the Gettysburg Address in 1863! It was fought over money, power and control....to save New Englands economic !*#! If you want to read a book about the causes of the war read "When In The Course Of Human Events" by Charles Adams.

Slavery was a major cause of the civil war, and yet most Southerners did not own slaves. This is a very telling fact and an interesting question. Southern Honor is an interesting look at the concept of Honor in the south and how it tied into the culture of the whole region and all classes. When Northerners attack the south for slavery, because of the concept of honor, it became not just an attack on the slave owners, or the rich southerners it was an attack on the whole region and culture. This is an important fact when looking at the causes of the civil war. I enjoyed reading this book, I learned a lot from it, and it helped to explain why many Southerners did what they did. This is an important book to read when studying the civil war or the history of the South.

I had the privelege of reading Brown's work in the eleventh grade. It was recomended to me by a former History proffesor at West Point who was my American Studies instructor.

While, as pointed out by some other reviews, the book is slow to read (such as other great authors such as Page Smith, and select works by Stephen Ambrose, it offers a vital and credible perspective into the society that we lost, in my opinion, when reconstruction began. I enjoyed the read (it took me two weeks) and found it enlightening and, while comprehensive and labyrinthian in references it is a populist perspectiveon the very elitist social environment in the pre-bellum South. Overall, I would reccomend this book to any intellectual, especially those young WASPs in the South who find their cultural influences constantly being bruised by hasty generalizations, who has an interest in the gentry class of the Old South. I would reccomend a parralel read with William Faulkner or other promenint Southern writers, such as Twain, as well.