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  • Published: 15 November 2007
  • ISBN: 9780307275509
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $45.00

There Goes My Everything

White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975





During the civil rights movement, epic battles for justice were fought in the streets, at lunch counters, and in the classrooms of the American South. Just as many battles were waged, however, in the hearts and minds of ordinary white southerners whose world became unrecognizable to them. Jason Sokol’s vivid and unprecedented account of white southerners’ attitudes and actions, related in their own words, reveals in a new light the contradictory mixture of stubborn resistance and pragmatic acceptance–as well as the startling and unexpected personal transformations–with which they greeted the enforcement of legal equality.

  • Published: 15 November 2007
  • ISBN: 9780307275509
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $45.00

About the author

Jason Sokol

Jason Sokol grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, and attended Oberlin College and the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his doctorate in American history. He lives in Ithaca, New York, and teaches at Cornell University.

Praise for There Goes My Everything

"A fine new book . . . the first book-length study of this important topic. . . . Sokol piles on lively anecdotes, telling vignettes and arresting contemporary statements. . . . The cumulative, layered effect of these stories is powerful. . . . The major premise of this book is extraordinarily important. . . . [It] points the way to a fuller, more satisfying history of one of the most important dramas of 20th century America." --Chicago Tribune

"It's difficult not to approach Sokol's book with sheer astonishment that it has been written by one so young . . . but in truth, just about any scholar in the field would be happy to claim There Goes My Everything as his or her own work."--The Washington Post Book World

—The Atlantic Monthly

“[There Goes My Everything is] on my personal list of the year’s best books.”

—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

“A richly documented, often compellingly dramatic narrative, whose strength is its absence of polemic.”

—Dallas Morning News

"As eye-opening a look at race relations in the Civil Rights Era as anything this side of Dr. King's own Letter From a Birmingham Jail."

—Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

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