the dominant class through the "vastly ego-warming and ego-expanding distinction between the white man and the black." While there were in truth many Souths, the "man at the center" was the back country yeoman farmer of the Old South and his descendants, the people from whom Cash himself sprang. The book challenged both the shopworn cavalier myth of the Old South and the legend of a progressive and modernized South. The region was like "a tree with many age rings, with its limbs and trunk bent and twisted by all the winds of the years, but with its tap root still in the Old South."Cash explored many tenacious paradoxes – the juxtaposition of class unity and class exploitation, individualism and the "savage ideal" of conformity, fundamentalist morality and the "hell-of-a-fellow complex" – and the complicated interrelationship of these with race, romanticism, rhetoric, leisure, the cult of womanhood (the "lily-pure maid of Astolat"), the rape complex, violence, paternalism, demagoguery, and suspicion of outsiders. Cash's emphasis on continuity rather than change, thereby downplaying the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction, led some critics to attack his generalizations. Historian C. Vann Woodward, while praising Cash's vigorous style, Woodward rejected Cash's consensus thesis of unity and continuity. Woodward contends that Cash routinely ignored contrary evidence, underrated the Founding Fathers and the Jeffersonians, missed the power of the southern aristocracy, downplayed Blacks, minimized the central importance of slavery, failed to appreciate the Populist movement, and overemphasized the plain white farmers and the Piedmont region, as opposed to the more influential plantation owners in the Black Belt. Perhaps most significantly, Cash's essential Southerness manifests itself in his admiration for many of the core aspects of the region, and leads him to blame much of the South's problems on Northern hatred and "Yankee intervention", a weakness that is seen throughout the book, but is perhaps most significant in Cash's failure to see through the myth that the Reconstruction era was one of Black Republican and carpetbagger misdeeds. This myth, the standard Southern view of the era, has since been thoroughly destroyed by post-World War II scholarship, but there was sufficient evidence debunking it at the time Cash was writing the book if he had chosen to research the subject more completely, and was not blinded by his own prejudices. Historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown, in his introduction to the 1991 50th anniversary edition of the book, confirms some