Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790–2020 by Edward L. Ayers

Abstract

Reviewed by: Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790–2020by Edward L. Ayers Robert Cassanello Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790–2020. By Edward L. Ayers. Maps by Justin Madron and Nathaniel Ayers. Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History. ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 153. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-7301-5.) Edward L. Ayers has combined his passion for digital history methods and traditional hard copy publications in a book that examines migration patterns in the South throughout the entire history of the United States. The book, upon casual inspection, appears like a coffee-table book. It is oversized with a cloth binding and vivid color photos on almost every page. Ayers builds a grand narrative about the South as ever-changing due to migrations, which should once and for all put to rest W. J. Cash's Mind of the South(New York, 1941), which depicts the South as a geography and people that are unchanging and unchanged. Ayers's South is constantly on the move, and the people who inhabit it are responding to economic, environmental, social, and political push and pull factors. The endnotes catalog all the major works on migration as well as document a deep dive into minor works that might be only state or locally focused. Ayers provides a narrative text to accompany the numerous maps, graphs, and charts that are embedded on almost every page of the book. Scholars researching and publishing on migration and the South might not find anything new in the text. Although the maps reproduced here are stunning to look at, they tell only a limited story because each is based on one or two variables. For example, one map titled "White Population Change, 1980–1990," we are told, demonstrates the white abandonment of the rural South except for Florida and the upper South (p. 111). We have only one data point, that of race, to work with here; if we could also see age, we could understand that the migration to Florida might be partly an aged migration such as those tracked by William H. Frey or a snowbird migration from Canada and the Northeast as documented by Godefroy Desrosiers-Lauzon in Florida's Snowbirds: Spectacle, Mobility, and Community since 1945(Montreal, 2011). The Florida case probably was dominated by a much different demographic of people than those who moved to the upper South during the same decades. Ayers explains these differences in the text, at least regarding the Florida migration, but the map cannot visually tell that same story. The first map of the book is "Southern Soils and Rivers" (p. xi). The rest of the maps are clearly marked and have keys, but for some reason this first map does not. In this map we see different colors to represent different soils; however, what the different colors represent is left to the imagination and not explained. This was the one map I was not sure what to make of or how to interpret al.so, the inclusion of Native peoples in the South is a surprise addition; however, due to the lack of specifics and [End Page 596]accuracy in the original data, these maps are overgeneralized to represent the few Indigenous nations and tribes most familiar to nonacademics. The text does a better job of explaining how to think about Native peoples and migration, but the maps in these cases do not offer much to researchers; the only value might be to locate the secondary sources Ayers has drawn this material from for the text. This book is a valuable asset to anyone interested in migration in the South; it is an indispensable first step. At the end of the book there is a list of all the sites used to create those maps, so anyone can go to those digital sources and create follow-up maps with more specific or multiple variables to dig deeper and tell further stories of migrations in the South, at least as long as those websites are still around. Robert Cassanello University of Central Florida Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association