Bioregional Approach to Southern History: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta
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, and […]
Natasha Trethewey Interviews Elizabeth Alexander
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 Levine’s […]
Wherein the South Differs from the North: Naming Persons, Naming Places, and the Need for Visionary Geographies
Essay No Southerner by origin, Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. “As I am an ardent Californian,” she has Alice B. Toklas say in The Autobiography, “and as she [i.e., Stein] spent her youth there I have often begged her to be born in California but she has always remained firmly born in Allegheny, […]
Mapping Souths
Essay Stories that use the South by purporting to map it are no new thing, as two nineteenth-century passages responding to the question of southern secession will illustrate: It is true that science has achieved, over space and time, triumphs almost miraculous, but it has not annihilated them. . . . It is almost impossible […]
“This is Not Dixie:” The Imagined South, the Kansas Free State Narrative, and the Rhetoric of Racist Violence
Introduction Emporia, Kansas, 1909 Library of Congress American Memory Archive The South “is as much a fiction, a story we tell and are told, as it is a fixed geographic space,” argues Tara McPherson. “If one is to understand the many versions of the South that circulate throughout US history and culture, one has always […]
On Native Ground: Indigenous Presences and Countercolonial Strategies in Southern Narratives of Captivity, Removal, and Repossession
Introduction Map of Major Indian Tribes in the “South,”circa 1750 I borrow only my title from Alfred Kazin’s 1942 study On Native Grounds, an influential reading of modern American prose in which Kazin never, by “Native,” means American Indian writing from any region of the Americas. My new book project, On Native Southern Ground, sets […]
Mississippi as Metaphor: State, Region, and Nation in Historical Imagination
Mississippi as Metaphor Part 2: The limits of James Silver’s image of Mississippi as “the closed society” Part 3: The idea of Mississippi as America writ large: did the “Mississippi Plan” become the American way? Part 4: The role of the scapegoat metaphor of Mississippi as “innocent victim” in segregationist politics Part 5: How metaphors can function as instruments […]
Regions of Alabama
Video Part 2: Dr. Flynt offers an historical-geographical perspective on Alabama’s economy from the antebellum era through 20th century Part 3: Dr. Flynt discusses the importance of a sense of place to “Alabamians,” highlighting the good and bad of provincialism Part 4: Dr. Flynt explores the failure of Alabama’s political leadership About the Speaker […]
Cajun South Louisiana
Beginnings to 1800s No other area of the US South has so embraced a French heritage as a foundational and enduring part of its culture as south Louisiana. A complex ethnic and demographic history, combined with a striking topography compared to other places within the South, have made south Louisiana a distinctive place, one that […]
Religion and the US South
Introduction Religion has been a formative experience for those living in the US South. “It’s just there,” said William Faulkner in explaining why religion appeared so often in his novels and stories (Glynn and Blotner, 1959, 41). It was not a matter of whether Faulkner or other southerners were necessarily believers themselves, but it was […]