Jake Adam York Interviews Natasha Trethewey
Overview Interview with Natasha Trethewey Part 2: Trethewey discusses “Signs, Oakvale, Missisippi, 1941” and “Flounder” as well as landscapes in Gulfport and New Orleans Part 3: Trethewey discusses “Monument,” “Elegy for the Native Guards,” “Providence,” “Prodigal I,” and the documentary impulse Part 4: Trethewey discusses “Secular,” “Saturday Drive,” “Collection Day,” “Saturday Matinee,” and photographs as family artifacts Part […]
“Out Yonder on the Road”: Working Class Self-Representation and the 1939 Roadside Demonstration in Southeast Missouri
Overview 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, […]
Revisiting Flaherty’s Louisiana Story
Overview 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 […]
The Black Belt
The Black Belt Traditional Counties of the Alabama Black Belt. In the 1820s and 30s, the Black Belt identified a strip of rich, dark, cotton-growing dirt drawing immigrants primarily from Georgia and the Carolinas in an epidemic of “Alabama Fever.” Following the forced removal of Native Americans, the Black Belt emerged as the core of […]
Bioregional Approach to Southern History: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta
Overview Essay Environmental history emphasizes the role of humans as an integral part of their natural surroundings. Ecological systems and biological diversity, however, typically ignore political and other man-made boundaries. By the 1970s, the US public land management agencies had realized the importance of land classification on the basis of regional variations in climate, vegetation, […]
Preserving the Memory of Ybor City, Florida
Overview Introduction Founded by cigar manufacturers V.M. Ybor and Ignacio Haya in 1885, Ybor City, Florida, became the “Cigar Capital of the World” in the early twentieth century. Despite efforts by émigrés from Spain, Italy, and Cuba to retain distinct ethnic and national identities, primarily through ethnically-based mutual aid organizations, the immigrant population of Ybor […]
Natasha Trethewey Interviews Elizabeth Alexander
Overview Interview with Natasha Trethewey Part 2: Alexander discusses growing up in NYC and Washington DC, DC as Upsouth, identifications with Blackness and southernness Part 3: Alexander discusses southernness and urban space, and reads from “Letter: Blues,” “Frank Willis,” “Talk Radio, DC” Part 4: Alexander reads “Race” and comments on the pale-skinned body; Trethewey compares “Race” and Phillip […]
Bodies and Souls
Overview Bodies and Souls: Video and Essay When the body is falling apart, it’s hard to pay attention to what your soul is telling you. —Sister Manette Durand After making Waking in Mississippi, I moved to Boston where I spent four years working in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School […]
Single Centers of Creation?
Overview 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” […]
An Interview with Tim Gautreaux: “Cartographer of Louisiana Back Roads”
Overview Introduction In his 1983 book, The People Called Cajuns, James Dorman observes that Cajuns “rarely speak for themselves” in the various sources that refer to them—historical, biographical, or literary—but that same year Louisiana’s Tim Gautreaux published his first short story, “A Sacrifice of Doves,” in the Kansas Quarterly.1James H. Dorman, The People Called Cajuns: […]