What made the South the South for nineteenth-century Americans? Was it its geography, its economy, its slavery, its culture, its history, its politics? Or was it the stories that were told about the South—and the people who told them? In a Land of Strangers contends that the idea of a “distinctive” South did not crystallize out of the Civil War or politics; instead, it took shape decades earlier through the everyday observations of thousands of Northern teachers who lived and worked there from the late eighteenth-century through the Civil War. Young, white, educated, and marked as outsiders, these men and women occupied an unusual position of trust within Southern spaces, granting them rare, intimate access to the inner workings of slaveholding society.

Michael T. Bernath offers the first full-length study of this vast group of teachers—the most sustained point of contact between North and South in the antebellum era. Bewildered, curious, and constantly translating the South for themselves and audiences back home, these educators described a strange and profoundly different place in their diaries and letters. Collectively, they fixed a shared image of the South in the national imagination. In this book, Bernath reshapes our understanding of sectional identity, American culture, and why the idea of a distinctive South endures.