Contact: Sammy McDavid
STARKVILLE, Miss.—A 2015 book by a Mississippi State researcher examining regional relationships among early 20th century religion, politics and a struggling U.S. economy has received the Southern Historical Association’s Charles S. Sydnor Award for the best book in southern history published in 2015.
Alison Collis Greene’s “No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta” (Oxford University Press) describes how poverty, malnutrition and lack of basic needs long had smothered poor residents of the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta regions. When churches there proved incapable of meeting parishioners’ needs during the Great Depression, leaders of the religious bodies sought help from the federal government.
According to Greene, MSU assistant professor of history and specialist in American religious history, this shift from local to nationally provided assistance represented a dramatic break for both white and African American evangelicals that continued after President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs had ended. The metamorphosis also generated considerable anti-government backlashes from religious and political leaders because it threatened their authority—and the traditional and widespread system of racial dominance.
Greene joined the MSU faculty in 2010. In addition to a doctorate from Yale University, she holds degrees in religious studies and anthropology from the University of North Carolina, where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa honor society.
In presenting the Sydnor Award, SHA selection committee members cited Greene’s “stunning analysis of cultural, political and religious transformations in the Depression-era South.”
In its review of the book, the Journal of Southern Religion praised Greene for creating “a powerful addition to the growing literature on the relationship between religion and political economy in the South, and in the United States in general, in the modern era.”
Among other kudos for her research and writing accomplishments:
—Kevin M. Kruse, a Princeton University professor and author of “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America,” noted that, while he and other historians have considered the Great Depression a decade of political and economic upheaval, “Alison Collis Greene brilliantly demonstrates that it sparked a revolution in American religion too.”
—Reading Religion, review website of the Georgia-based American Academy of Religion, described “No Depression” as a history that also is “a framework for understanding contemporary arguments about the current and future state of the social safety net and an argument for the study of history for today’s politicians and church leaders.”
Organized in 1939, the Southern Historical Association works to promote an “investigative rather than a memorial approach” to regional history. With offices at Texas’ Rice University and the University of Georgia, the organization also seeks to encourage teaching and study in all areas of the academic field. For more, see www.thesha.org.
Greene’s book shares its title with a famous gospel song first recorded in the 1930s by the original Carter family, pioneers of country music. As it was covered by various other groups over the decades, the tune (“. . . I'm going where there's no depression, To a better land that’s free from care . . .”) became known to audiences by the shortened title of “No Depression.”
Additional biographical information on Greene is found at www.history.msstate.edu/people/alison-collis-greene.
The MSU Department of History website is www.history.msstate.edu.
MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.