An iced cold Coca-Cola. A cross-country flight on Delta to visit friends. A much-needed medication overnighted via Fed-Ex. Bulk toilet paper purchased at Wal-Mart. What do these items have in common?  In today’s modern economy, each of these can be purchased from the comfort of the couch, frequently with a credit card pioneered by Bank of America. They are all also from companies headquartered in the American South.

Most Americans, when they think about the companies that have given rise to our modern-day economy, their thoughts frequently drift to places like New York, San Francisco, Seattle, all major cities that frequently draw recent college graduates eager to land a job in the high-paying tech and finance sectors. Yet, some the biggest companies responsible for our have-it-now, fly-by-the night, buy-on-credit, modern economy originated not in the urban North and Northwest, but through servicing the rural American South. Many of these same companies are some of the biggest contributors to climate change. Drawing on exclusive interviews with company executives, corporate archives, and other records, he explains how businesses from the American South helped make it possible for us to satisfy our desires from the convenience of our home and/or hometown, no matter how remote, while also revealing the environmental costs associated with each.

Check out the episode here!

Bart Elmore is a Professor of History at The Ohio State University. His latest book, out now with UNC Press, is Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet. His first book, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 2015) won the Axiom Business Book Award for best business commentary and the Council of Graduate Schools 2016 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities. His second book, Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Food Future (W.W. Norton, 2021), won the 2020 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and the 2022 IACP Food Issues and Matters Award, and was a finalist for both the American Society for Environmental History’s George Perkins Marsh Prize and the 2022 Hagley Prize in Business History sponsored by the Business History Conference and the Hagley Museum. He is a recipient of the Dan David Award.