Date

12-4-2025

Department

College of Arts and Sciences

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)

Chair

Jeffrey L. Zvengrowski

Keywords

Georgia, Lost Cause, New South, Civil War, Confederacy, United Daughters of the Confederacy, UDC, Henry Grady, Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens, Reconstruction, Abram J. Ryan, Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Dixon, Birth of a Nation, Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, Song of the South, Civil Rights

Disciplines

Film and Media Studies | History

Abstract

The defeat of the Confederacy led way to the development of two related but distinctly separate ideological movements, the New South and the Lost Cause. However, in the course of Civil War historiography, the two have been conflated with one another, with the Lost Cause winning out as the solely accredited ideological product of the vanquished Confederacy. The modern Neo-Reconstruction school of thought discredits the New South as a distinct sociopolitical movement, and frequently associates its cultural products to the Lost Cause. This dissertation examines the cultural and political evolution of each movement, with a focus upon their primary cultural battleground of the state of Georgia, to determine how this occurred, and why, through the lenses of both the political ramifications and the works of media created by proponents of the New South and the Lost Cause movements. Through examining the historical frameworks of the Lost Cause and the New South as distinct but related ideologies, a greater nuance and historical context can be applied in the course of understanding the increasingly contentious topic of the Confederacy’s legacy and place in the history of the South.

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