The Fall of the Old South?

After more than twenty years of teaching in southern land grant universities, the only course I have ever offered that did not "make" due to low enrollment was the Old South.To be fair, this happened once and may have had nothing to do with the subject.Perhaps its scheduled time was the problem.Maybe HIST 468, The Old South, competed for students with an enrollment magnet like FIS 202, Crime Scene Investigation, a course offered by the Forensic Science Department that has its own television series.Possibly the professor was to blame.I could have advertised it with colorful flyers or encouraged students I knew to sign up.I did nothing to help it "make," because the Old South always did fine on its own.Until it didn't.When I started my career at Mississippi State University, the Old South was as popular as the Civil War and Reconstruction.Both courses were upper-level staples in my teaching rotation that attracted the same students, history majors and upperclassmen looking for an elective.Students who took one course with me often signed up for the other.When I moved to West Virginia University, I expected more of the same.I had traded one land grant university in a poor southern state for another.The Civil War remained as popular as ever-not a surprise in the only state forged by the conflict and the home of Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson.However, my introductory class activity in the Civil War course confirmed that I was in a different South.(Located five miles south of the Mason-Dixon Line, West Virginia University is barely southern.)On our first day, I asked students to take five minutes and write down every name they knew for the Civil War.In Mississippi, this exercise yielded a screed of southern terms for the War of Northern Aggression, sparking conversations about how culture and memory frame our understanding of the war and its legacies.In West Virginia, the class's list of names was more tempered and split.Students from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Ohio rattled off northern or neutral names for the war.