Mississippi as Metaphor: State, Region, and Nation in Historical Imagination
Overview 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 […]
Regions of Alabama
Overview 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 Interested in […]
Re-imagining the Red States: New Directions for Southern Studies
Overview 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 Interested in submitting your work to Southern Spaces? Similar Publications Sections
The Carolina Piedmont
Overview 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 […]
The Seventeenth Southern Writers Symposium: September 19–20, 2003 at Methodist College, Fayetteville, North Carolina
Overview 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 […]
The Shenandoah Valley
Overview 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 […]
The Border South
Overview 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 […]
The Chesapeake Bay
Overview 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 […]
Mississippi Delta
[institution_name] Overview 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 […]
Blues in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley
Overview 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 […]