Today, Jeremi talks with Professor Michelle Nickerson about the historical and ideological roots of Sunbelt politics in the United States.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, entitled "Sonnet for the Sunbelt."

Michelle Nickerson is associate professor of history at Loyola University of Chicago.  She teaches the history of American politics, women and gender, cities, and religion.  Nickerson is NOT from the Sunbelt.  She was born and raised in New Jersey, where she got her undergraduate degree at Rutgers University.  She moved to the Sunbelt after she received her Ph.D. at Yale in American Studies, first to do research in Los Angeles, and then in Dallas, where she taught at the University of Texas at Dallas.  Nickerson’s first book was a volume of essays she co-edited, Sunbelt Rising:  The Politics of Space, Place, and Region.  This project grew out of her research and highly regarded book on women and right-wing politics: Mothers of Conservatism:  Women and the Rise of the Postwar Right.  That book examines how activist women in Los Angeles shaped American conservatism.