SOURCE: O’Brien, Michael. “Modernization and the Nineteenth-Century South.” In Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History, pp. 112-28. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

In the following essay, originally published in 1981, O'Brien surveys historical treatments of the South from the prewar decades to Reconstruction, emphasizing the theme of historical continuity.

Students of the South have not infrequently arrived late to historical theory about to go, or just gone, into disrepute. Modernization theory is no exception. Southern historians have begun to flirt with it just when it has come to seem little more than the natural successor to Social Darwinism as a beguilingly comprehensive explanation of historical change. The “Third World” has been treated (and still is by some) as out in the jungle of economic and social history, there awaiting the opportunity of Lamarckian will power to join that happy few who bellowed instructions from well-defended clearings...