Sotterley Presents: People & Perspectives with Jennifer Ritterhouse
HOLLYWOOD, Md., June 11, 2025 – Historic Sotterley is delighted to host author and historian Jennifer Ritterhouse to discuss her book, Discovering the South: One Man’s Travels Through a Changing America in the 1930s, on June 11th. This is a free, hybrid event, which means those interested can attend in-person or tune in virtually. In-person attendees are invited to join us for a pre-reception at 6:15 pm with refreshments and nibbles.
When white newspaper editor Jonathan Daniels set out to “discover the South” in his stately black Plymouth in the summer of 1937, he especially hoped to find the land that existed somewhere between the mythical old plantation and the sharecropper’s cabin, between Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road. He succeeded. His published and unpublished accounts of his trip captured a panoramic picture of the South during the Great Depression. In Discovering the South: One Man’s Travels through a Changing America in the 1930s, historian Jennifer Ritterhouse follows Daniels on his journey to explore a wide range of interrelated topics, from the impact of the New Deal and the southern literary Renaissance, to the tragic Scottsboro case and planters’ and industrialists’ violent suppression of labor organizing.
The questions at the center of Discovering the South are big ones: What was the true nature of the South and its problems, and who was trying to address them–in what ways, against what opposition, and with what results–during the Roosevelt years? More provocatively, why, in the late 1930s when Jonathan Daniels, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and a great many other Americans were “traveling,” did the destination of a more just and egalitarian South prove so impossible to reach?
Jennifer Ritterhouse is Professor of History at George Mason University. She specializes in the history of the post-Reconstruction South, with emphasis on race and gender issues. She is the author of Discovering the South: One Man’s Travels Through a Changing America in the 1930s (UNC Press, 2017) and Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (UNC Press, 2006). She is the editor of a reprint edition of Sarah Patton Boyle’s autobiography, The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian’s Stand in Time of Transition (UVA Press, 2001), and one of several co-editors of Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South (New Press, 2001). Her current research focuses on the surprisingly southern history of the women’s rights projects of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in the 1970s.
Registration is requested for this event. You can find registration links at https://sholink.to/jenniferritterhouse
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About Historic Sotterley
A National Historic Landmark and a UNESCO Site of Memory for the Routes of Enslaved Peoples, Sotterley is one of the oldest museums of its kind in the United States, with a history dating back to the turn of the 18th Century. Through the preservation of the site’s historic structures and natural environment and the use of powerful stories to educate and bring American history to life, the organization strives to foster a better understanding of our world today by providing a living link to America’s complex history and legacy of slavery.