Regenerating Dixie - by Casey Cater (Hardcover)

About the Book

Electrification as an Engine of Change in the Modern South

Book Synopsis

Regenerating Dixie is the first book that traces the electrification of the US South from the 1880s to the 1970s. It emphasizes that electricity was not solely the result of technological innovation or federal intervention. Instead, it was a multifaceted process that influenced, and was influenced by, environmental alterations, political machinations, business practices, and social matters. Although it generally hewed to national and global patterns, southern electrification charted a distinctive and instructive path and, despite orthodoxies to the contrary, stood at the cutting edge of electrification from the late 1800s onward. Its story speaks to the ways southern experiences with electrification reflected and influenced larger American models of energy development.
Inasmuch as the South has something to teach us about the history of American electrification, electrification also reveals things about the South's past. The electric industry was no mere accessory to the "New South" agenda--the ongoing project of rehabilitating Dixie after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Electricity powered industrialism, consumerism, urban growth, and war. It moved people across town, changed land- and waterscapes, stoked racial conflict, sparked political fights, and lit homes and farms. Electricity underwrote people's daily lives across a century of southern history.
But it was not simply imposed on the South. In fact, one Regenerating Dixie's central lessons is that people have always mattered in energy history. The story of southern electrification is part of the broader struggle for democracy in the American past and includes a range of expected and unexpected actors and events. It also offers insights into our current predicaments with matters of energy and sustainability.

Review Quotes

Regenerating Dixie provides a peek into overlooked corner of planning history, and offers an interesting take on regional economic development in the process. The book is the kind of detailed, deeply sourced scholarship that helps reveal how the country's critical infrastructure systems remain, as Richard White has suggested, hidden in plain sight.-- "Journal of the American Planning Association"

Regenerating Dixie is the first book that traces the electrification of the US South from the 1880s to the 1970s. It emphasizes that electricity was not solely the result of technological innovation or federal intervention . . . one of its central lessons is that people have always mattered in energy history.-- "Contingent Magazine"

A timely and important study of electrification in the American South, which highlights race and ownership politics as fundamental to the writing of energy history.-- "Journal of Southern History"

Casey Cater employs a multifaceted approach to paint a comprehensive picture of how electrical energy and the deployment of the southern grid were essential parts of the formation of the Modern South. From racial politics to the influence of the TVA, Cater effectively illustrates that southern electrification was different in character than that of the country at large. I know of no other work like it."--Dan French, author of When They Hid the Fire

Casey Cater has written an excellent narrative about the rise of the electricity generation industry in the southeastern United States. . . . Cater's book adds to the larger conversation about energy and power, and energy transitions in the nineteenth- and early twentieth century United States. As a business and social history, Cater's work will appeal to readers seeking to understand why 'ordinary people mattered' in the shaping of southern energy utilities.-- "Environmental History"

In Regenerating Dixie, Casey Cater fills an important gap in the history of electrification scholarship by focusing on the American South. His work combines business and technical history to show how essential electricity was to Southern urbanization and regional growth."--David Nye, University of Southern Denmark; and Senior Research Fellow, Charles Babbage Institute & The History of Science and Technology, Anderson Library, University of Minnesota

About the Author

Casey P. Cater is an enrgy historian in Atlanta, Georgia.