The Liminal Site
Red Mountain Garden Location of Smith’s house, Birmingham, Alabama. Copyright GoogleMaps, 2013. My backyard garden is sited on the steep north slope of Red Mountain in Birmingham, Alabama, about sixty vertical feet down from the ridgeline and about 250 feet above downtown.1We now live in North Vancouver, British Columbia, but—since we moved during the Great […]
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 […]
Landscapes and Ecologies of the US South: Essays in Eco-Cultural History
Essay Nancy Marshall, Altamaha River, Georgia, 2010. From “James Holland, Riverkeeper: Environmental Protection along the Altamaha.” Chiding conventional historians for their neglect of nature has a long tradition among environmental historians.1Adam Rome, “What Really Matters in History?: Environmental Perspectives on Modern America, “Environmental History 7, no. 2 (2002): 303–318. Scholars have similarly lamented environmental historians’ […]
The Place of Appalachia
Essay How might spatial theory help us understand the political significance and potential of the diverse, place-based struggles documented in Transforming Places? First, place matters in the pursuit of social justice because inequality and the power relations that produce it are spatial. Some of the earliest and most influential efforts to theorize Appalachia as a […]
Flit Lit in the Sweet Sunny South
Review When I saw a note about Chuck Thompson’s new book, Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession, I had to take a look. From the title alone I thought it might be the proverbial train wreck of colliding stereotypes, but like most passersby of an accident I had to stare at […]
Confederate Literary Nationalism: Coleman Hutchison’s Apples and Ashes
Review Coleman Hutchison‘s Apples and Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America is the first literary history to focus exclusively upon Confederate literature. Dating back to Edmund Wilson‘s Patriotic Gore (1962), studies of the literature of the Civil War have paid far more attention to the North. Hutchison seeks to rescue the […]
A Conversation with Digital Historians
Careers and Possibilities How did you get your start in the digital humanities? Robert K. Nelson: In 1997, at the end of my first year of graduate school, I needed a summer job. Ken Price taught in my graduate program in American Studies at the College of William and Mary and was the co-editor of […]
A Mess of Poke
Essay If some of y’all never been down South too much, I’m gonna tell you a little bit about this, so that you’ll understand what I’m talking about Down there we have a plant that grows out in the woods and the fields, Looks somethin’ like a turnip green. Everybody calls it polk salad. Polk […]
Putting the Hospital into Southern Hospitality
Review Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry, Cambridge University Press, 2011. In a few days, well before the first mosquito-killing frost reaches the South Carolina Lowcountry, I’ll head to Charleston for a conference. I look forward to the visit, and I expect to return home in good health. As medical historian Peter McCandless […]
Jake Adam York Interviews Sandra Beasley
Interview with Sandra Beasley Part 2: Jake Adam York & Sandra Beasley discuss traveling and engaging with the “culinary South,” “traditional” cuisine, and more Part 3: Jake Adam York & Sandra Beasley discuss embodying other spaces and Beasley reads two poems Part 4: Jake Adam York & Sandra Beasley discuss living at UVA and the traces of Faulkner; […]