Livingston Lecture: Tracy Thompson, The New Mind of the South

Though many observers say the South has disappeared, Georgia native Tracy Thompson asserts it has merely drawn on its oldest tradition: an ability to adapt and transform. Thompson traveled throughout the region and discovered a South both amazingly similar and radically different from the land she knew as a child. Through African Americans, evangelical Protestants, Latino immigrants, and more, the South is rediscovering its agrarian traditions, seeking racial reconciliation, and reinventing what it means to have roots in an increasingly rootless global culture.

Tracy Thompson is a reporter and essayist who writes about diverse subjects, including psychiatry, law, and the Civil War. She is the author of The Beast: A Reckoning with Depression and The Ghost in the House. Drawing on mountains of data, interviews, and a whole new set of historic archives, Thompson paints a heartening, often surprising picture of a region filled with promise and paradoxes, and one that is laying a path for the rest of the nation to follow.