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The modern South is a thriving region that is increasingly like the rest of the United States; however, that has not always been the case. Indeed, the political history of the American South is one that has been focused on the integration of this historically underdeveloped region into the remainder of American society, economically (especially in terms of labor markets), politically, judicially, and socially. And, even as the South has become increasingly similar to the rest of the country, it remains an especially important region for the balance of national political power. In this essay, I describe a class I teach on Southern Politics, explaining how I have organized it around topics critical to an understanding of American political development, and I describe the innovative pedagogical perspective I bring to the class (rooting the course in the labor economics of slavery and the "peculiar institution's" long-term consequences). I also discuss in some detail the importance of this class for American students as they try to understand America's development as a nation and the lessons that can be learned by international students from the South's experiences, providing some qualitative evidence of the course's impact. (Contains 55 notes.)

One of the environments in which political science faculty most directly face issues of community, communities, and politics is when they find themselves teaching in programs abroad. The rigors of international teaching force faculty to confront issues of community identity, assumptions about political orientation, and presumptions about how communities interact that often remain unstated or unexplored at home institutions in the United States. In this paper, we will explore these matters based on our experiences teaching in the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies during the late 1990s. The Hopkins-Nanjing Center brings together Chinese and international (mainly American) graduate students in a unique living-learning environment. Chinese students take graduate-level course work in political science, American history, economics, and ESL in English from visiting American faculty members, while international students take analogous classes in Chinese from faculty at Nanjing University. Faculty and students are housed in the Center's residential wing, where Chinese and international students are paired together as roommates. We discuss the unusual pedagogy involved in teaching Chinese students in the program (who are extremely bright and motivated, but usually lack substantive and methodological backgrounds in political science); the opportunities for extracurricular education afforded by the Center's living-learning facility; and describe our experiences interacting with our Chinese faculty counterparts. (Contains 24 notes.)