The Worst of Times: Children in Extreme Poverty in the South and Nation
Essay A just-released report from the Southern Education Foundation—”The Worst of Times: Children in Extreme Poverty in the South and Nation“—finds that more than 5.7 million children lived in extreme poverty in the United States in 2008—surviving on less than seven or eight dollars per day. Almost one in every twelve children was in a […]
“Out Yonder on the Road”: Working Class Self-Representation and the 1939 Roadside Demonstration in Southeast Missouri
Introduction In the early morning hours of January 10, 1939, more than fifteen hundred men, women and children piled their meager belongings along US Highways 60 and 61 in the lowlands of southeast Missouri, also known as the Bootheel. Over the preceding decade their lives as tenant farmers had been damaged by environmental disaster, falling […]
Revisiting Flaherty’s Louisiana Story
Introduction James V. Catano Lush wilderness in a remote bayou and the exploratory genius of oil drilling technology; traditional ways of living and the intrusions of modern life; natural wealth and mechanical power—Robert Flaherty found these in abundance as he created his vision of Louisiana in the documentary classic Louisiana Story. The making of that […]
The Countryside Transformed: The Eastern Shore of Virginia, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Creation of a Modern Landscape
Introduction Map of Eastern Virginia, circa 1862 When in 1884 the New York, Philadelphia, and Norfolk Railroad, a subsidiary of the powerful Pennsylvania system, extended its line south through the Eastern Shore of Virginia, it had been anticipated for over forty years. The coming of the Pennsylvania system’s railroad to the Eastern Shore was catalytic. […]
Local Color
Local Color Local Color as a literary genre bears the full weight of the concept of region, for its typical stories and sketches offer highly particularized visions of “locale” that are “colored” by regionally defined characters, settings, folkways, and dialects. The paradox, and thus the richness, of this often discounted form lies in the tension […]
A Mind To Stay Here: Closing Conference Comments on Southern Exceptionalism
A Mind to Stay Here Part 2: Egerton compares his observations in The Americanization of Dixie with social conditions today Part 3: Egerton traces recent politics in the New South, noting how Karl Rove built directly upon Nixon’s Southern Strategy Part 4: Egerton reflects upon the contradictions of the South, highlighting the importance of racial integration and rural […]
Latinos, the American South, and the Future of US Race Relations
Latinos, the American South, and the Future of US Race Relations: Part 2: Sanchez explores the impact of Mexican immigration on construction work in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina Part 3: Sanchez explores how the US South became the primary point of destination for Latin American immigrants in the 1990s Part 4: Sanchez explores how a century-old history […]
Mississippi Delta
Essay Sociologist Rupert Vance wrote in the 1930s of the “cotton obsessed, Negro obsessed” Mississippi Delta as “the deepest South.” A half century later, writer Richard Ford called the Delta “the South’s South.” In the 1990s, historian James Cobb referred to it as the “most southern place on earth.” Few other regions within the American […]
Single Centers of Creation?
Essay Detail from Nancy Lowe, Source, Species Icons exhibit, Schatten Gallery, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, 2009. Introduction In this sampling from ORIGIN, a collaborative exhibition celebrating the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species and the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, artist Nancy Lowe approaches the idea of “single centers of creation” through […]
The US South and the 2008 Election
Essay At least since the 1960s, every presidential election has elicited abundant commentary on the role of the South in national politics. The 2008 election has been no different. It is often difficult, however, distinguishing between what is truly notable historically and that which is mere post-election chatter. Map of the Sunbelt (marked in red) […]