Oak Ridgidness: Lindsey Freeman’s Longing for the Bomb
[author_affiliation] Overview Review It is a central contradiction of contemporary life that Americans have learned to coexist with mechanisms of human extinction.1The United States currently maintains an arsenal of 4,760 nuclear weapons, a decrease from its 1967 Cold-War-era high of 31,255. The use of only a fraction of these weapons would render vast quantities of […]
Southern Spaces: A Partial History
[author_affiliation] Overview Beginnings How did you become involved with Southern Spaces? Halbert: I was involved in the inception of Southern Spaces and can shed some light on the endeavors that led to the creation of this marvelous and innovative new vehicle for scholarly communication. A fascinating and unpredictable journey through accidents and sagacity took us […]
The Black Civil Rights Movement on the Border
[author_affiliation] Overview Review Lawrence Aaron Nixon, born in Marshall, Texas, in 1883—as Will Guzmán chronicles in Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands—grew to manhood at a time when whites in the Lone Star State, across the South, and indeed, across the entire United States, were vigorously undoing the gains achieved by blacks during the Civil […]
Born In Violent Conquest: A Review of Jacksonland
[author_affiliation] Overview Review In May 2015, journalist Steve Inskeep wrote an op-ed for the New York Times arguing that nineteenth-century Cherokee leader John Ross should be featured on the opposite side of the twenty-dollar bill from Andrew Jackson. Jackson contributed greatly to the expansion and development of the United States, Inskeep noted, but this “nation-building” […]
Confederates in Mexico: Lost Cause or New South Vanguard?
[author_affiliation] Overview Review The defeat of the Confederacy, the prospect of military occupation and Republican state government, and the financial collapse of many plantations and businesses sent a number of white southerners in pursuit of life in a foreign land during the late 1860s. Between 1865 and the early 1870s approximately five thousand white and […]
Six Degrees of Alan Lomax: A Review and Multimedia Excerpts
[author_affiliation] Overview Review Essay Of all the southern spaces Alan Lomax visited during his Depression-era excursions into vernacular American music, the French-speaking communities populating south Louisiana forever captivated his imagination. “The Cajun country is one of the richest and at the same time least known mines of folk music and literature in North America,” he […]
And the Prize Goes to…
[author_affiliation] Overview At the end of the Spring 2015 semester, seventeen students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill conducted an in-class contest to choose the most interesting example of interdisciplinary methodology in a recently published southern studies article. Completed as part of the requirements for my senior seminar, “How to Study the […]
Crossing Over: Sustainability, New Urbanism, and Gentrification in Austin, Texas
[author_affiliation] Overview Greetings from Austin In July of 2011 Bon Appétit named Franklin Barbecue of Austin, Texas, the best barbecue restaurant in America. As one of the flagship businesses in an area of the city undergoing significant redevelopment Franklin (which began as a food truck three years earlier) had recently moved into a building on […]
St. Catherines Island Flyover
[author_affiliation] Overview Video and Essay One of the barrier islands along the Georgia coast of the Atlantic Ocean, St. Catherines has an extraordinary ecological and settlement history. First inhabited more than four thousand years ago, the undeveloped island is privately owned but protected for the public good. A small network of unpaved roads connect the […]
Nascent Nations: A Review of Chiefdoms, Collapse, and Coalescence in the Early American South
[author_affiliation] Overview Review When Hernando de Soto‘s army of six hundred soldiers reached the middle Savannah River in 1540, arriving in what is today South Carolina and Georgia, they likely thought they had come to an abandoned wasteland. The desolation of this landscape must have presented a sore disappointment. The large indigenous populations, and their […]