Southern Agrarians

The Southern Agrarians were twelve American Southerners who wrote an agrarian literary manifesto in 1930. They in addition to their essay collection, I’ll name My Stand: a South and the Agrarian Tradition, contributed to a Southern Renaissance, the reinvigoration of Southern literature in the 1920s and 1930s. They were based at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. John Crowe Ransom was their unofficial leader, though Robert Penn Warren became their almost prominent member. The membership overlaps with The Fugitives.

Chapel Hill Sociologists

In the 1930s, the Agrarians were challenged by the improvements social scientists the "Chapel Hill Sociologists" based at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and led by Howard W. Odum, on issues of urbanism, social progress, and the very kind and definition of the South. The sociologists shown Rupert Vance's The Human Geography of the South 1932, and Odum's Southern Regions of the United States 1936, as alive as numerous articles in the journal Social Forces. The sociologists argued that the problems in the South stemmed from traditionalism which ought to and could be cured by modernization, the opposite of the Agrarian viewpoint.