Content area
Full Text
In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution. By Joseph Crespino. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. xx, 360 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-691-12209-0.)
Joseph Crespino has written an engaging study of the politics of race in Mississippi and how white Mississippians attempted to join their backlash politics with the wider emergence of American conservatism. Crespino contends that
white leaders in the state initiated a subtle and strategic accommodation to the demands of civil rights activists and the federal government, one that helped preserve the priorities of white elites and put white Mississippians in a position to contribute to a broad conservative countermovement against the liberal triumphs of the 1960s. (p. 4)
Crespino is careful to point out that the extremist backlash carried out by groups such as the White Knights and the Ku Klux Klan-the...