My newest book project, “Hostess City of the South: Tourism and the Making of Modern Savannah,” explores the emergence and expansion of the tourist trade in Georgia’s first city from the end of the Civil War to the present. It examines the influences of local and national artistic and literary depictions of the city’s places, people, and culture; efforts to capture a share of the flow of northern winter vacationers to and from Florida via railroad; the effects of the Good Roads movement, the city’s early 20th-century promotion of “automobiling” and racing on sand courses through surrounding forestlands, and struggles to improve access from the Atlantic Coastal Highway; interwar-era campaigns to protect and beautify the city’s distinctive squares and open gardens to the public; the expansion from winter to four-season tourism promotion; early historic preservation efforts and their coalescence into a citywide movement in the postwar era; the changing racial dimensions of tourism development before and after the Civil Rights movement; and the more recent ascendancy of Savannah’s ghost tours. Initial research for this project is funded by a generous 2025-26 Faculty Scholarship Initiative grant from the Cleveland State University Office of Research.
Mark Souther 