The Search for Southern Digital History:A Review Essay Anne Sarah Rubin (bio) Civil War on the Western Border: The Missouri-Kansas Conflict, 1854–1865 (Kansas City Public Library), civilwaronthewesternborder.org Colored Conventions Project (University of Delaware and Pennsylvania State University), coloredconventions.org Visualizing Emancipation (University of Richmond), dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation Mapping Occupation (University of Georgia), mappingoccupation.org O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C., Law and Family (University of Nebraska), earlywashingtondc.org CSI: Dixie: The View from the American South's County Coroners' Offices, 1800–1900 (University of Georgia), csidixie.org Freedom on the Move: Rediscovering the Stories of Self-Liberating People (Cornell University et al.), freedomonthemove.org SNCC Digital Gateway (SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University), snccdigital.org Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all."1 There may be no greater cliché than beginning an essay or article by quoting Shreve's demand of Quentin Compson in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936). But that is what we do as southern historians, delve into the past to understand and explain, to recognize, empathize, and criticize. And for almost thirty years we have been doing that work online, using tools and techniques that would have been unimaginable a generation earlier. Most obviously, the mass digitization of sources has changed the way historians work, allowing for a depth of engagement with primary sources and data analysis that would not have been possible to do by hand. I think of myself as a member of this transitional generation: not a [End Page 877] so-called digital native, but an early adopter who has thought a lot about the potential and limits of what was once known as New Media.2 When the Journal of Southern History approached me about writing this review essay, the questions that sprang immediately to mind centered on the intersection between new methods and enduring issues. Specifically, what does it mean to study southern history in the digital age? How can digital history best illuminate the past? To attempt to answer these questions, I have broken this essay into three parts: one defining southern, one defining digital history, and the final section reviewing a range of projects. For most of the twentieth century, the study of southern history was intertwined with the study of southern identity—to be a southernist is to study people as much as a place. What did it mean to be a southerner? How did this different region emerge in the decades—or centuries—before the Civil War, and to what extent did that difference endure? How American was the South, and arguably how southern is the rest of America? From U. B. Phillips's "central theme" to W. J. Cash's mind of the "man at the center," through C. Vann Woodward's irony and burdens, the main tension was one of continuity versus change.3 Could southerners shake off their past? Would they lose their distinctiveness by so doing? What was worth celebrating? That search was dominated by the long shadow of racial slavery. It, and the system of Jim Crow that replaced it, seemed to be a sort of perverse touchstone for those early generations of white southern explainers. As Woodward explained in 1958, "To establish identity by reference to our faults was always simplest, for whatever their reservations about our virtues, our critics were never reluctant to concede us our vices and faults."4 Woodward and his fellow searchers also saw southern identity in implicitly racial terms—as a white identity and a white problem. Forty years later, Edward L. Ayers made much the same point as Woodward, regarding the South as the repository of American faults, [End Page 878] noting that the region was always described in opposition to the rest of the country: "The South plays a key role in the nation's self-image: the role of evil tendencies overcome, of mistakes atoned for, of progress yet to be made." Ayers's South is more diverse and dynamic than Woodward's was (which in turn challenged the static region of Cash...