Dr. Kari Frederickson’s Deep South Dynasty Wins Michael V.R. Thomason Award

Dust jacket for Deep South Dynasty. Shows four different members of the Bankhead family.Dr. Kari Frederickson’s recent publication, Deep South Dynasty: The Bankheads of Alabama (University of Alabama Press, 2022), was named the winner of the 2022 Michael V. R. Thomason Award for the Best Book in the History of the Gulf South by the Gulf South Historical Association.

The award committee praised the book as “a gripping study of the New South that deftly weaves the political, economic, and cultural story of the region with the personal triumphs and travails of its chief architects, the Bankhead family of Alabama.”

From Reconstruction through the end of World War II, the Bankheads served as the principal architects of the political, economic, and cultural framework of Alabama and the greater South. As a family, they were instrumental in fashioning the New South and the twentieth century American political economy, but now the Bankhead name is largely associated only with place names.

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