Segregation’s New Geography: The Atlanta Metro Region, Race, and the Declining Prospects for Upward Mobility
[author_affiliation] Overview Atlanta metro region is known by many titles: as the “capital of the New South” thanks to a robust economy and rising population;1Obie Clayton, Cynthia Hewitt, and Gregory Hall, “Atlanta and ‘The Dream’: Race, Ethnicity, and Recent Demographic and Socioeconomic Trends,” Past Trends and Future Prospects of the American City: The Dynamics of […]
Interstate Road Project, Single-State History: Tammy Ingram’s Look at the Dixie Highway
[author_affiliation] Overview Review Tammy Ingram explores both more and less than the history of the Dixie Highway, built between 1915 and 1926 as a six-thousand-mile loop from Chicago and other Lake Michigan towns to Miami Beach and back. Dixie Highway foregrounds the political challenges in conceiving and creating an integrated, cross-country road in an era […]
Carolina’s Caribbean Origins: A Review of Hubs of Empire
[author_affiliation] Overview Review Any historical account requires a framing device—temporal, thematic, or geographical—establishing the scope of enquiry. A Caribbean history typically invokes fairly settled geographical parameters that delimit the area to insular territories of the Caribbean Sea, with occasional forays into the Guianas and Suriname. While a geographical imaginary can be intuitive and helpful, this […]
“The Choctaw Miracle”: A Review of Katherine Osburn’s Choctaw Resurgence in Mississippi
[author_affiliation] Overview Review In this meticulously researched book, Katherine M. B. Osburn follows the history of the Mississippi Choctaws from the Antebellum era to the “Choctaw Miracle” of the 1970s, when this small community emerged from poverty and built thriving businesses in plastics and direct-marketing. Osburn is especially interested in how the Choctaws navigated their […]
No Country for Old Hippies: Jason Mellard’s Progressive Country
[author_affiliation] Overview Review Jason Mellard’s Progressive Country: How The 1970s Transformed The Texan in Popular Culture broadens our understanding of this musical style’s dynamic role in negotiating the political contentions of a historical period marked by economic stagnation, political scandal, and the emerging cultural power of previously marginalized social groups. By linking the local music […]
The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project
[author_affiliation] Overview Introduction The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project’s current home page, showing the “shelf” of texts from which a user can select one to explore, 2014. Screenshot by Stephen Railton. Courtesy of Digital Yoknapatawpha Project. Taylor Hagood: I’m an associate professor of American Literature at Florida Atlantic University and a member of a team of scholars, […]
“The Ohio River Was Not the River Jordan”: A Review of Matthew Salafia’s Slavery’s Borderland
[author_affiliation] Overview Review The Ohio River figures prominently in what are arguably the three most significant novels of American slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Toni Morrison‘s Beloved both feature key scenes of Kentucky slave mothers making dramatic escapes across the river with children in tow (or in the case of Beloved, born […]
Rethinking the Geography of Lynching
[author_affiliation] Overview Review “Lynching of Negroes is growing to be a southern pastime,” declared the Reverend D. A. Graham of the A.M.E. church in a sermon preached in Indianapolis, Indiana, as part of a nationwide protest against the practice, organized by the National Afro-American Council in 1899.1Rev. D. A. Graham, “Some Facts About Southern Lynching,” […]
States’ Rights Resurgent: The Attack on the Voting Rights Act
On June 25, 2013 Chief Justice John Roberts invalidated the application of Section 5 of the federal Voting Rights Act in a five to four opinion of the US Supreme Court. In a case out of Shelby County, Alabama, the Court held that the criteria adopted in 1965 by which jurisdictions were identified for coverage […]
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 […]