White Masculinity in the Recent SouthFrom antebellum readers avidly consuming stories featuring white southern men as benevolent patriarchs, hell raising frontiersmen, and callous plantation owners to post Civil War southern writers seeking to advance a model of southern manhood and male authority as honorable, dignified, and admirable, the idea of a distinctly southern masculinity has reflected the broad regional differences between North and South. In the latter half of the twentieth