Some 20 years ago in these pages George B. Tindall, in an essay entitled "The Benighted South: Origins of a Modern Image," discussed the growth in the 1920's of the "neo-abolitionist" image of a backward, violent South. In the twenties, as he demonstrated, the South put its ills and prejudices on display for the nation to observe—in lynching bees and Ku Klux Klan activity, hookworm and pellegra and child labor, in the Scopes evolution trial of 1925, the anti-Catholic demagoguery of the Al Smith presidential campaign of 1928, the Gastonia textile violence of 1929—and Northern journalists and sociologists flocked south with both messianic mission and devilish glee to tell the rest of the nation about the horrors of life below the Potomac and Ohio. Southern journalists also got into the act, with the result that five crusading editors won Pulitzer prizes between 1923 and 1929.Tindall's essay was a venture into Southern mythology —which, as he announced in another essay published the same year, was a "new frontier in Southern history." That frontier had had its early explorers—Francis P.Gaines and, somewhat later, C.Vann Woodward among others—but in the early 1960's it was still largely open territory. In the 1980's it is pretty well settled: William R.Taylor and David Bertelson joined Mr. Tindall in the 1960's as early homesteaders, and since that time Paul Gaston, Michael O'Brien, Richard King, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Daniel J.Singal, and other historians have taken up residence. So have numerous Southern literary scholars, sociologists, and journalists.