Dixie Destinations: Rereading Jonathan Daniels’s A Southerner Discovers the South
Overview Introduction I am planning to leave here shortly after the first of May and follow the main street of the new industrial South from Greensboro to Charlotte, Spartanburg and Greenville; then turn to the right and cut through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to Knoxville; then via Dayton (of monkey trial fame) to […]
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 […]
“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, […]
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 https://vimeo.com/126189360?fl=pl&fe=sh 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 […]
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: […]
The US South and the 2008 Election
Overview 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 […]