About the Conference

Edward G. Gray: "If the story of America's founding divide resonates with similar stories elsewhere, I will have achieved one of my core ambitions: reminding readers that ours is not a history sui generis but a history of processes and peoples far transcending anything so fleeting as a line on the land." Mason Dixon: Crucible of the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023), 20.

Without the Mason Dixon Line would there be a South?

We are accustomed to thinking of Mason Dixon as the line that created the South, but the history of the line is the history of the encounters and contestations of and between Indigenous peoples, Africans, and Europeans.

According to Prof. Gray's Mason Dixon, the history of the U.S. is a history of connection by division. This interdisciplinary conference pulls together scholars working on questions about what it means to be Southern in America. It commemorates the work of the late Professor Edward G. Gray

*The Symposium will be recorded. It will not be Zoomed.*