Students will gain knowledge of Georgia history, multicultural history, and histories of politics, economics, and society as each of these is expressed through the unique experience of various southern foodways. Students will read and navigate primary and secondary sources, learn critical thinking skills, and how to read history from non-traditional sources. Students will write multiple drafts of papers of original research and present their findings to the class.

1. Indigenous foodways on the East Coast of North America, 15th century

2. Spanish/Aztec interactions; Columbian Exchange; first "Southern food" is MesoAmerican

3. English plans upon colonization of Jamestown; multiple "starving times" require the adoption of Native ways of farming, cooking, and eating

4. Developing food cultures in the Colonial Lowcountry; Black majority spaces, African influence over Carolina cuisine, combined with English taste and Atlantic rice economy; First visit to New Orleans

5. Westward movement into Appalachia; foraging cultures of the mountain South (ginseng, muscadine, mushrooms, mulberries) before, during, and after Civil War

6. Civil War as crisis and reinvention of foodways rooted in slavery and the plantation; Return to Union-occupied New Orleans

7. Post-War spread of cotton cultivation to Upcountry; Changes to local food cultures with increasing market dependence; spread of railroads; new farming techniques

8. World War I; boll weevil; the collapse of southeastern cotton farming and the Great Migration; Overlapping foodways of white, but especially Black rural folk spread northward and to the cities with Great Migration; Southern food begins to become American food

9. An examination of Texas; borderlands politics, labor migrations, and "southwestern cuisine"; bracero program and WWII

10. Post-WWII decline of small farmers and growing urban landscape of the South; Second return to New Orleans to examine the rise of a "Southern restaurant culture," the formulation of "Creole cuisine," and the role of Black chefs in that development; Relationship between Civil Rights movement, Black Power movement, and ideas of "Soul food," but also Black economic empowerment and return to the land

11. Post-1965 changes in immigration; Large influxes of East Asian, Cuban, and South Asian populations to southern cities from Miami to Atlanta to Charlotte; Examination of Cold War impacts on the food cultures of new Southerners' countries of origin as well as the ways they transformed the food scenes of these Southern cities

12. The rise of "Southern food" to the apex of national food culture in the 1980s and 1990s through popular culture, celebrity chefs, and new notions of traditionalism - what gets left out of the story? 

13. Reflections on where "Southern food" stands in a divided South in 2021