Last Train to Dixie

Last Train to Dixie  is a collection of Jack Trotter’s Southern essays, many of them published over the course of more than a decade in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Several of these essays look back towards the legacy of slavery, Reconstruction, and segregation, while others explore cultural themes in the more recent past, including several forays across the troubled terrain of the New South.

Implicit in most of these essays, both serious and humorous, is a concern for the question of Southern identity: how it was shaped, how it is threatened, and how it might endure.

ESSAYS

• “In All the Ancient Circles”: Tourism and the Decline of Charleston’s Elite Families
• Of Monkeys and Mermaids
• The Strange Career of Segregation
• Grace King and the Prayers of Women
• The Faces of Men
• Zora Neale Hurston’s White Mare
• The Crossroads Merchants
• GOP Country
• Books Are for Blockheads! or, the Buckhead Bomber
• The Flamingo Kid
• Dixie for Dummies
• Eating Crow
• On Secession Hill
• The Last Train: An Epilogue