Before Tuskegee: Public Health and Venereal Disease in Hot Springs, Arkansas
Overview Introduction In the winter of 1936, Minnie Lee Ishcomer left home in Idabel, Oklahoma, and journeyed to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Thirty years old, white, poor, and the victim of a long-standing venereal infection, Ishcomer came to Hot Springs hoping to obtain treatment at the VD clinic operated there by the United States Public Health […]
Mapping the “Big Minutes”: Visualizing Sacred Harp’s Geographic Coalescence and Expansion, 1995–2014
Overview Blog Post The Sacred Harp, a shape-note tunebook first published in 1844, has long been the center of a network of “singing conventions,” weekend meetings featuring a cappella harmony singing at which participants take turns leading an informally assembled group in singing selections from the book. Beginning with singings in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, […]
Sapelo Island Flyover
Overview Video and Essay View the transcript of the video, along with a glossary of terms, here. A barrier island on the Georgia coast, Sapelo has an unusually long and varied blend of natural and human history. The western half of the island is composed primarily of Pleistocene sediments deposited along a shoreline 40–50,000 years […]
Ungesund: Yellow Fever, the Antebellum Gulf South, and German Immigration
Overview Introduction During the antebellum era, New Orleans became the second largest port of US immigration after New York City, leading hundreds of thousands of Germans to begin new lives at the mouth of the Mississippi rather than the Hudson. 1Carl Leon Bankston, ed., Encyclopedia of American Immigration, vol. 2 (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2010), […]
All Roads Led from Rome: Facing the History of Cherokee Expulsion
Overview Georgia led the United States in the expulsion of the Cherokee Nation from its homeland. In the spring of 1838 more than two thousand soldiers arrested some nine thousand Georgia Cherokees, confined them briefly, then marched them to holding camps in east Tennessee to await their miserable trek to Indian Territory eight hundred miles […]
Public Health in the US and Global South
Overview Introduction Global patterns of development over the past two decades have meant that many of the health risks that affected the US South in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries plague the Global South in the twenty-first. Yellow fever, malaria, hookworm, pellagra, and industrial accidents shape life in the developing world. In Atlanta, known as […]
Daily Life, State Power, and Theory in the Lonestar State: A Review of Robert Wuthnow’s Rough Country
Overview Review As I write this review of Robert Wuthnow‘s compelling account of Texas religious and cultural history, I am struck by two seemingly unrelated yet telling events that resonate with his meticulous and elegantly written Rough Country. First, in 2015, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed into law a bill allowing Texas residents to openly […]
Tracing the Arctic Regions: Mapping 19th Century Photographs of Greenland
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“Aint that Something?”
Overview Review Since the late nineteenth century, Appalachia has been exploited, sensationalized, or deeply romanticized across literature, art, and popular culture. The “local color” authors after the Civil War depicted stereotypes of the region that still endure; think of the toothless, bearded hillbilly with a jug of moonshine, or simple folks carving wood or making […]
Keywords for Southern Studies: An Introduction
Overview Excerpt Any collection that aims, as this one does, to represent the upheaval and diversity of a field that is remaking itself must confront at the outset the difficulties posed by that upheaval and diversity. What is “southern studies” today, well into the twenty-first century, in the age of the global-superpower United States? Whatever […]