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.

He has lectured at over 300 colleges and universities in the United States and abroad and held visiting positions at over a dozen including Fulbright lectureships in Israel and India and the Pitt Professorship of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1969 until his retirement in 2000 as William Rand Kenan Jr. from Columbia University in 1971.