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There's an ethic that says: 'You don't run off to the church for the sacraments of salvation, you establish a personal relationship with God. You don't run off to the courts for justice, you settle it yourself. You don't run off to labor unions to sort out your work relations, you can take this job and shove it if you don't like what you're doing.

John Shelton Reed

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John Shelton Reed
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: January 8
Sociologist
New York City
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More quotes by John Shelton Reed

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The nature of the South is changing faster than the stereotypes are. Much of the South now looks like San Jose. Is it still southern?
John Shelton Reed
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Barbecue is the third rail of North Carolina politics.
John Shelton Reed
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Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the US to Europe’s wines or cheeses drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.
John Shelton Reed
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Every time I look at Atlanta I see what a quarter of a million Confederate soldiers died to prevent.
John Shelton Reed
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We could say that people who eat grits, listen to country music, follow stock-car racing, support corporal punishment in the schools, hunt 'possum, go to Baptist churches and prefer bourbon to Scotch are likely to be Southerners.
John Shelton Reed
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I do believe states' rights was a sound doctrine that got hijacked by some unsavory customers for a while - like, 150 years or so. I'm professionally obliged to believe that knowledge is better than ignorance, but some kinds of forgetting are OK with me.
John Shelton Reed
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As long as there are Japanese tourists, there will be a market for the Old South.
John Shelton Reed
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I don't think massification and globalization and all those other 'izations' are necessarily hostile to regionalism.
John Shelton Reed
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Southerners smile more than other Americans.
John Shelton Reed
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You ask people what their ethnicity is, and a lot of Scots-Irish people either don't know or if they know it they just don't acknowledge it. It's not something they really identify with. They're just plain old Americans, plain vanilla. I don't think they are a self-conscious voting bloc.
John Shelton Reed
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Maybe we've been brainwashed by 130 years of Yankee history, but Southern identity now has more to do with food, accents, manners, music than the Confederate past. It's something that's open to both races, a variety of ethnic groups and people who move here.
John Shelton Reed
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Country music historically has been sort of middle-aged people's music.
John Shelton Reed
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I think there's a suspicion in the South of people putting on airs. You see it in most successful Southern politicians, but you also see it in someone like Richard Petty, who may be a multimillionaire stock car driver, but he's also beloved because he has a nice self-deprecatory way about him.
John Shelton Reed