Farmland Blues: The Legacy of USDA Discrimination
The Dispossession What happened in rural America during the quarter century after 1950 has been eclipsed by the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, and growing concern over pesticides, nuclear testing, and other environmental issues. During these years, 3.1 million farmers left the land, over one half million of them African […]
Spirits of the Landscape Rediscovered: Ras Michael Brown’s African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry
Review Although scholars of the African diaspora have long acknowledged the persistence of African cultural forms within the musical, material, and linguistic cultures of African Americans in the United States, with few exceptions, the prevailing wisdom concerning religion has been: “In the United States the gods of Africa died.”1On the non-survival of African forms, see […]
Voting Rights, the Supreme Court, and the Persistence of Southern History
Essay Map of Alabama with percentage of white population. Map based on image courtesy of Social Explorer. Seven years ago, as I sat doing research at the historical society of Shelby County, Alabama, a county commissioner arrived, hailing the librarian and me. “Happy Martin Luther Coon Day!” he shouted. Earlier this year, on the last […]
Desegregation, Delaware, and Civil Rights Liberalism: A Review of Brett Gadsden’s Between North and South
Review I came to Brett Gadsden’s work with some doubts of how and why the state of Delaware merited its own local study, and with growing apprehension about the proliferation of local studies within civil rights historiography in general. We are now some years past landmark publications such as Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard‘s Freedom […]
Imagining Southern Bodies: A Review of Sex, Sickness, and Slavery
Review A Gullah proverb warns, “every sick ain’t fa tell de doctor” (“don’t tell the doctor all your ailments”). After reading Sex, Sickness, and Slavery, the wisdom of that saying seems more obvious, especially as it applies to women and blacks in the antebellum South. The late Marli Weiner, a professor of history at the […]
Inside the Jackson Tract: The Battle Over Peonage Labor Camps in Southern Alabama, 1906
Introduction Location of Lockhart, Alabama, 2012. On a warm spring day in 1904, former governor of Maryland and lumberman E. E. Jackson, along with several associates, traveled to Alabama to view their extensive holdings of southern yellow pine forests. The party took a private train car owned by the president of the Louisville and Nashville […]
Three Poems and a Critique of Postracialism
“What the Same Body Means in Different Places” Section one of “Three Poems and a Critique of Postracialism.” See the full transcipt of this video below. I am at work on a book about the interpenetration of locality and racial consciousness in American poetry between Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Barack Obama’s inauguration. Tentatively titled “The Ditch is […]
Vernacular and Universal Prejudice
Introduction I begin an exploration of the history of prejudice by looking at the process of othering—or social and political distancing—that is a central part of the history of African Americans and Dalits (formerly known as Untouchables), two long subordinated and stigmatized groups in the United States and India, respectively. The juxtaposition of two rather […]
Making Space: A Review of Robert Paulett’s An Empire of Small Places
Review Understanding the creation of social spaces in an unfamiliar landscape is, according to Robert Paulett, a productive way to account for eighteenth-century developments in the American Southeast, particularly in Georgia. In his interesting but not entirely successful study of non-Native participants in the southeastern deerskin trade, Paulett uses the word “mapping” to convey their […]
A Review of Matt Miller’s Bounce: Rap Music and Local Identity in New Orleans
Review In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, clubs in Houston, Dallas, and many other centers of New Orleanian displacement hosted “New Orleans” nights, featuring rap music from the Crescent City. New Orleans artists and personalities like Kenneth “DJ Chicken” Williams Jr. and Wayne “Wild Wayne” Benjamin started internet-based radio and mixtape projects geared toward those […]