Sotterley to Host Author Ritterhouse

Historic Sotterley will present People & Perspectives with Jennifer Ritterhouse from 7 to 8:30pm Wednesday, June 11.

Ms. Ritterhouse will discuss her book, “Discovering the South: One Man’s Travels Through a Changing America in the 1930s.” Those interested can attend in-person or tune in virtually. In-person attendees are invited to join Sotterley for a pre-reception at 6:15pm with refreshments.

When white newspaper editor Jonathan Daniels set out to “discover the South” in his stately black Plymouth in summer 1937, he especially hoped to find the land that existed somewhere between the mythical old plantation and the sharecropper’s cabin, between Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” and Erskine Caldwell’s “Tobacco Road.” He succeeded. His published and unpublished accounts of his trip captured a panoramic picture of the South during the Great Depression.

In “Discovering the South: One Man’s Travels through a Changing America in the 1930s,” Ms. Ritterhouse follows Daniels on his journey to explore a wide range of interrelated topics, from the impact of the New Deal and the southern literary Renaissance, to the tragic Scottsboro case and planters’ and industrialists’ violent suppression of labor organizing.

The questions at the center of “Discovering the South” are big ones: What was the true nature of the South and its problems, and who was trying to address them –in what ways, against what opposition, and with what results – during the Roosevelt years? More provocatively, why, in the late 1930s when Jonathan Daniels, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and a great many other Americans were “traveling,” did the destination of a more just and egalitarian South prove so impossible to reach?

Registration is requested for the event. Register here.

Sotterley is at 44300 Sotterley Lane in Hollywood, MD.