On The Mind of the South by W.J. Cash

 The concluding paragraph from "The Mind of the South" 1941 is often cited as a distillation of the entire book:

Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible, in its action -- such was the South at its best. And such at its best it remains today, despite the great falling away in some of its virtues. Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism – these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today.[7]

According to the biographer Bruce Clayton, the central themes in The Mind of the South were romanticism, violence, hyperbolic rhetoric, individualism, and white racial solidarity. Class consciousness was of minor importance.[8]

Cash emphasized continuity, rather than change, and thereby downplayed the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction and led some critics to attack his generalizations.[9] C. Vann Woodward, while praising Cash's vigorous style, contends that Cash routinely ignored contrary evidence, missed the power of the southern aristocracy, downplayed blacks, and minimized the central importance of slavery. He also overemphasized the plain white farmers and the Piedmont region, as opposed to the more influential plantation owners in the Black Belt. Woodward rejected Cash's consensus thesis of unity and continuity.[10]

-From Wikipedia on W.J. Cash