Newhouse News Service offers this report, which begins: “Historians Matthew Lassiter, Joseph Crespino and Kevin Kruse are part of the first generation of whites to grow up in the post-Jim Crow South. They’re also at the leading edge of a group of younger scholars who say it’s time to stop considering the South a region apart — especially on race, the sine qua non of Southern exceptionalism.” Another snippet: “It isn’t a strictly academic matter. Civil rights groups seeking congressional extension of the Voting Rights Act depend on evidence that the South remains different as proof that the region still requires federal oversight. And David Bositis, an expert on black politics at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, said the evidence is ample — beginning with far higher rates of racially polarized voting, of felon disenfranchisement, of poverty and of capital punishment. Lassiter acknowledged that ‘our argument could be misused or misinterpreted for political purposes.’ But, he said, to indulge what he considers the fiction that the South now approaches race in wholly different ways distorts not just Southern history, but American history.”