Why read The Silent Majority?

Book cover of The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South

Book description

Suburban sprawl transformed the political culture of the American South as much as the civil rights movement did during the second half of the twentieth century. The Silent Majority provides the first regionwide account of the suburbanization of the South from the perspective of corporate leaders, political activists, and especially…

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American history

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Silent Majority as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Timothy N. Thurber

Author

Lassiter presents a nuanced examination of how social and political conflicts in Richmond, Atlanta, and Charlotte during enabled Richard Nixon and other Republicans to resurrect the GOP from its 1964 electoral disaster through reliance, not on a “southern strategy,” as many pundits have long claimed, but rather on a suburban strategy that involved the complex interplay of race, class, and other factors.

The messages that enabled the GOP to gain traction in the suburban South, Lassiter emphasizes, worked across the nation. The South was not as different as many observers have long claimed. Lassiter also chronicles how these conflicts reshaped…

From Timothy's list on Republicans and Democrats in the 1960s.