Almost three decades after publication of the tenth volume of A History of the South - George Brown Tindall's The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 - Numan V. Bartley now presents Volume XI: a masterly synthesis of the region's most complex years to date. From the close of World War II to the end of the seventies, the South underwent changes of such a radical nature and such tumultuous process - from rural orientation to urban, from segregated society to racially commingled, from poverty-saturated economy to positively booming Sunbelt - that the contrast between 1945 and 1980 almost defies cogent explanation. Bartley, however, meets that challenge, illuminating the intervening years both individually and collectively within one monumental work.

Numan V. Bartley is E. Merton Coulter Professor of History at the University of Georgia. He is the author of The Creation of Modern Georgia; From Thurmond to Wallace: Political Tendencies in Georgia, 1948--1968; and The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950s. He has also co-written or edited many books.