From traditional claims by Marxists that the economic re-configurations of United States “regionalism” during Reconstruction constituted the birth of American “modernity” to engaging present-day work on a “global” United States South, historians and cultural critics alike have been fascinated by the relationship between the domain “south” of Mason and Dixon's Line and the technological, ideological, and social offices of “Modernism.” A New Southern Studies currently unfolding in the Untied States has much to offer for contemporary scholarly discussions. And the role of “violence” and modernism in the American South is an especially provocative matter for contemporary southern studies.