The historian Imani Perry was a guest on the book review podcast of The New York Times at the weekend, talking about her new book, South To America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (Ecco). Perry, who was born in Atlanta, but moved north as a child, says she was inspired by Albert Murray’s 1971 memoir-cum-travelogue South to a Very Old Place. Her book, she says, is “about encounters… with history but also with human beings” and an attempt to understand why a southern identity is so important to her “but also centrally important to the formation of this country”.