Ted Ownby is professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He is author of Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 (1993), and American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830-1998 (1999), and editor of books on ideas in the Civil Rights era and southern manners. He is working on a book about the conflicting definitions of family life in the twentieth-century American South.
The election interprets main issues in the election through historical lenses about the inherent instability of republics. It concentrates especially on conflicting arguments about conflicts of interest (emails or tax loopholes), old concerns about representatives of the poor using government to give favors (Obamacare), and the choice many voters made to see Hillary Clinton as part of a household still headed by a husband who used government for private sexual gain.