American Politics in the Postwar Sunbelt

Sean P. Cunningham is Associate Professor of History at Texas Tech University. A decorated teacher, he holds a PhD in Modern American History from the University of Florida and teaches broadly in twentieth-century US history, while specializing in the history of post-1945 American political culture. His first book, Cowboy Conservatism: Texas and the Rise of the Modern Right, was published in 2010.

• Introduction: what is the Sunbelt ... and why is it important? 1. Convergence, metropolitanization, and anticommunism; 2. Race, rights, and the liberal consensus; 3. Wars against liberalism; 4. Southern, suburban, and Sunbelt strategies; 5. Mobilizing the religious right in the politicized 'Bible Belt'; 6. Reagan's Sunbelt, Reagan's America; 7. Shades of red, shades of blue; Epilogue. Sunbelt politics in the twenty-first century.

'For forty-some years, pundits and scholars have portrayed the Sunbelt as a free-market haven for strip malls, megachurches and metropolitan sprawl - and the bastion of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan conservatism. With great breadth and care, Sean Cunningham tracks the long history of this region's rightward drift and its pivotal role in reddening American political culture. Yet with great creativity and innovation, he also depicts the Sunbelt in refreshingly textured terms as a place of remarkable diversity, adaptation, contestation, and ceaseless transformation. Nuanced and engaging, Cunningham's beautifully crafted text offers an invaluable glimpse at how this trendsetting region has evolved in the past generation, and where it (and hence the nation) is headed in the next.' Darren Dochuk, Washington University in St Louis, author of From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism