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 […]
The Carolina Piedmont
Landscape and Settlement As pioneers, traders, and military men traversed the region in the early eighteenth century, they found the towns of Catawba, Saponi, and Saura Indians and trading paths that connected mountains with coast. Faced with increasing white numbers and hostility, as well as the ravages of smallpox and the occupation of their familiar […]
The Chesapeake Bay
Introduction The Chesapeake Bay’s environmental history is complex and well-documented. Over four-hundred years of textual records document the Bay’s environmental history, and over ten-thousand years of archaeological, geological, and biological evidence complements the record. Recent environmental histories of the region stress the interrelationship between human settlement and activity and environmental systems and processes. Liam Gumley. […]
The Shenandoah Valley
The Shenandoah Valley The Shenandoah Valley’s history marks it as a distinct region of the American South with a geography that has encouraged in-migration, land and industrial development, and trade. The Shenandoah Valley has a habit of confounding and surprising visitors. In local parlance to go “up the Valley” is to go south and to […]
The Border South
Defining the Border Anyone who has lived for a time in Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, or Maryland has heard their place of residence categorized as “not really the South.” Sometimes, folks from the deeper South dismiss these places as not representative of the region; at other times Northerners make the comment, often with a sigh of […]
The Seventeenth Southern Writers Symposium: September 19–20, 2003 at Methodist College, Fayetteville, North Carolina
The Mere Region by Robert Jackson A critical review of some of T.S. Eliot’s narrowly ideological invocations of region encourages us to clarify and redefine the term, for Eliot’s own experience of the South was of a complex regional culture in which competing and contradictory forces were “inextricably involved with one another.” Robert Jackson completed […]
Genres of Southern Literature
Introduction “Southern literature” announces the conjunction of the US South and an expressive art — texts identified as belonging to a particular history, social organization, and cultural imaginary. In defining a text’s “southernness,” the matter of its genre might not seem a touchstone of much value. To some, genres are universal categories that describe formal […]
Re-imagining the Red States: New Directions for Southern Studies
Video Part 1b: Re-imagining the Red States: New Directions for Southern Studies Part 2: Re-imagining the Red States: New Directions for Southern Studies Part 3: Re-imagining the Red States: New Directions for Southern Studies About the Speaker Tara McPherson is Associate Professor of critical studies and gender studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television. […]
Southwestern Humor: The Beginning of “Grit Lit”
Southwestern Humor Southwestern humor is perhaps the most intriguing of southern antebellum literary genres, for writers of this loose-knit “school,” often contributors to sporting or gentlemen’s magazines, abandoned the plantation setting entirely and envisioned the South as an indeterminate space of unstable and shifting boundaries. Indeed the salient slogan for the South delineated by this […]
Blues in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley
Introduction The Lower Chattahoochee River Valley region has a rich tradition of blues music, but if it weren’t for the efforts of field researcher George Mitchell from 1969 until the early 1980s, this blues history would be largely unknown. The Lower Chattahoochee is most well-known as home to Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (1882–1939), one of the most celebrated […]