Southern Cultures

Jim Crow Era

Southern Cultures has published numerous essays on Jim Crow and related topics.  Often these essays do not focus exclusively on racial injustice and violence, but the Jim Crow South remains an important backdrop against which many of the authors here have situated their essays at least in part.  These essays are available online at the Project Muse digital archive by following the direct links below. Each of our most recent essays and features also is available with a single click as a $0.99 Kindle download.

For additional material, check these subjects: INTERVIEWS and CIVIL RIGHTS. 

Amy Louise Wood
Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in the Jim Crow South, 1890-1940 (review)
     reviewed by Seth Kotch 
     "Power rested not only on the brutality of lynching, but also on its communicability, the way in which mob violence traveled from person to person, across state and regional lines, and from the striving white men of the South to African American activists in the Northeast."
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Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 4, Winter 2010 

Haunting America: Emmett Till in Music and Song
     by Philip C. Kolin
“Dylan linked Till’s innocent blood to a Mississippi downpour—so much blood shed from the brutal beatings; Till’s killers ‘rolled his body down a gulf of bloody red rain.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 2009: Music III

Sundown Towns and Counties: Racial Exclusion in the South
     by James W. Loewen
"In 1987, Oprah Winfrey broadcast her television show from Forsyth County, Georgia, which had expelled its black population seventy-five years earlier."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2009

Jennifer Ritterhouse
Growing up Jim Crow 
How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (review)
       reviewed by Clara Silverstein
       "Black and white children recounted playing together, then being confused by the pressure to give up their friendships as they grew older. Blacks remembered how normal childhood disputes could take on frightening repercussions if white adults became involved."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2009

The Discovery of an Architect: Duke University and Julian F. Abele
     by William E. King
"In 1937, the English novelist Aldous Huxley was traveling through North Carolina by auto one hot summer day. He described 'a pleasant but unexciting land' when 'all of a sudden, astonishingly, a whole city of gray Gothic stone emerged from the warm pine forest.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2009

"When Carolina Indians Went on the Warpath": The Media, the Klan, and the Lumbees of North Carolina
     by Christopher Arris Oakley
"On a frigid Saturday night in January 1958, Grand Dragon James ‘Catfish’ Cole and fifty other members of the Ku Klux Klan gathered for a rally in a cornfield near Hayes Pond just outside of Maxton, a small town located in Robeson County in southeastern North Carolina. But before the rally even began, several hundred Lumbees chased the Klansmen from the frozen cornfield."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2008: First Peoples

To Know Tobacco: Southern Identity in China in the Jim Crow Era
     by Nan Enstad
"Many southerners from rural areas did not yet have electricity or indoor plumbing in the early twentieth century. In Shanghai they encountered more modern amenities and an elaborate public nightlife, full of perfect strangers."
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 4, Winter 2007: Global South

Jim Crow's Drug War: Race, Coca Cola, and the Southern Origins of Drug Prohibition
     by Michael M. Cohen
"'You could buy all the dope you wanted in the drug store. Just ask for it, and you got it.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2006

Georgia Scene: 1964
     poetry by John Beecher
“. . . dragging that 70-year-old white lady down the courthouse steps with her head going bam on every step...” 
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 4, Winter 2003

The Phoenix Riot and the Memories of Greenwood County
     by Daniel Levinson Wilk
“‘I was with my father when they rode up, and I remember starting to cry.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 4, Winter 2002: Ghosts

An Ironic Jim Crow: The Experiences of Two Generations of Southern Black Men
     by Angela Hornsby and Molly P. 
Rozum
 “This black man called the Secretary of the Navy. And the Secretary of the Navy says to the judge: ‘Let him go.’"
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2002: Biography

Youngest Living Carpetbagger Tells All Or, How Regional Myopia Created "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman
     by Stephen David Kantrowitz
“It won’t shock readers of Southern Cultures to learn that when northerners begin to study the South, they bring along what we’ll just agree to call misconceptions.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2002,: Biography

Racial Violence, "Primitive" Music, and the Blues Entrepreneur: W. C. Handy's Mississippi Problem
     by Adam Gussow
“‘My idea of what constitutes music was changed by the sight of that silver money cascading around the splay feet of a Mississippi string band.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2002: Biography

"A Position of Respect": A Basketball Coach Who Resisted Segregation
     as told to Pamela Grundy by John B. 
McLendon Jr.
“One of the best ways to play the game is avoid confrontation. The next is to make the adversary ridiculous.” 
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 2, Summer 2001

The Redemption of Atticus Finch
   letters to the editor by Marcus Jimison, J. Wayne 
Flynt, Jewell 
Knotts, and Joseph
 Crespino
“Joseph Crespino’s interpretation of To Kill a Mockingbird must be politically motivated, because it certainly is not based on the text.” 
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 4, Winter 2000

Commemorating Wilmington's Racial Violence of 1898: From Individual to Collective Memory
     by Melton A. McLaurin
“On November 10, 1898, an armed mob of whites destroyed the state’s only daily African American newspaper by burning the building in which it was housed.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 4, Winter 2000

Also set largely during the Era of Jim Crow:

Kenneth Turan on They Won't Forget and I Was a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
from "Personal in My Memory": The South in Popular Film
Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2011: Memory
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No Sweat: Memories of Southern Appalachia
by Danny Fulks
"Cooney Simms, the grocer, had a big Philco floor-model radio with push buttons and short wave. Neighbors gathered around when Joe Lewis was fighting. And wasn't he always this good giant who whipped Adolph Hitler's man Max Schmeling? Static wasn't too bad; one could hear Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats if they didn't come on the same time as the Grand Ole Opry."
Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2011: Memory
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Voices from the Southern Oral History Program
Mountain Feminist:
Helen Matthews Lewis, Appalachian Studies, and the Long Women's Movement
from an interview by Jessica Wilkerson
compiled and introduced by Jessica Wilkerson and David P. Cline
"They didn't take us to jail. They pulled us out individually, and the policeman said to me, ‘What would your daddy think if he saw you dancing with a nigger?'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2011: Memory
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Hot Springs, Arkansas
by Keith Maillard
"‘Well, of course I remember Pearl Harbor,' my mother says, the tone of her voice adding,What do you think I am, an idiot? She and my grandmother were working in the shop when they heard on the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. She was five months pregnant with me. It was a Sunday. They'd never heard of Pearl Harbor."
Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2011: Memory
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Heroes of Hell Hole Swamp:
Photographs of South Carolina Midwives by Hansel Mieth and W. Eugene Smith
     by Dolores Flamiano
     featuring the original Life photographs
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Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2011: Photography II
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David A. Taylor
Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America (review)
     reviewed by Robert Hunt Ferguson 
     "Although they approached their writing very differently, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright found the space through the WPA to write compassionately and realistically about black life in America."
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 4, Winter 2010
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Canning Tomatoes, Growing “Better and More Perfect Women”: The Girls’ Tomato Club Movement
     by Elizabeth Engelhardt
 "If somebody were to tell you that a group of little country girls who never have been near a big city have built up a business so large and important that papers all over the country are telling about it, you would think it was a new kind of fairy tale."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I

“When I Say Get It”: A Brief History of the Boogie
     by Burgin Mathews
“‘I like to boogie-woogie,’ Madonna proclaimed.  ‘It’s like riding on the wind and it never goes away.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 2009: Music III

Mill Mother’s Lament: Ella May Wiggins and the Gastonia Textile Strike of 1929
     by Patrick Huber
“Ella May Wiggins, the ‘poet laureate’ of the Gastonia Textile Strike of 1929, was silenced by a mill thug’s bullet on September 14, 1929.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 2009: Music III

Alan Lomax: The Long Journey
     by William R. Ferris
"Stories about Alan Lomax and his exploits are legendary.  While doing research in the Library of Congress Music Division, Lomax was sitting at a table across from a student who was reading his classic Folksongs of North America.  At one point the student looked across the table asked, 'Is Alan Lomax still alive?' Lomax replied, 'Just barely.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2007: Music II

The First Century of Blues: One Hundred Years of Hearing and Interpreting the Music and the Musicians
     by R. A. Lawson
"In 1961 Bob Koester, a producer with Chicago-based Delmark Records, made an amazing discovery. Sleepy John Estes, a bluesman who had achieved fame on the race record labels during the interwar years, was found to be still alive and residing on the outskirts of the small western Tennessee town of Brownsville."
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2007: Music II

Elvis Presley and the Politics of Popular Memory
     by Michael T. Bertrand
"'A Lonely Life Ends on Elvis Presley Boulevard,' blared the headline of a late-summer special edition of the Memphis Press-Scimitar. 'The King is Dead.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2007: Music II

O. N. Pruitt's Possum Town: The 'Modest Aspiration and Small Renown' of a Mississippi Photographer, 1915-1960
   by Berkley Hudson
"He documented tornadoes and floods of biblical proportions, a fire at a cotton mill and fires in the downtown business district, train wrecks and celebrities such as world heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey and Columbus native son playwright Tennessee Williams, the parents of celebrated writer Truman Capote."
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 2, Summer 2007: Photography I

Fat Tuesday at Dixie's: Jack Robinson's New Orleans Mardi Gras Photographs, 1952-1955
     by Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman
"Shaw became national news in 1969, when District Attorney Jim Garrison accused him of leading a circle of gay men from New Orleans who, Garrison was convinced, orchestrated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2006

K. Michael Prince 
Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! South Carolina and the Confederate Flag (review)
    reviewed by John M. Coski
    "'The flag is, in its very essence, irresolute and contradictory. Wiping it out, eliminating it from view, would be just as wrong as hoisting it atop the highest flag-pole in the center of town--if only because it serves as a useful reminder of a past that failed and of an alternate future not taken.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 2, Summer 2005 

Louis M. Kyriakoudes
The Social Origins of the Urban South (review)
    reviewed by Tom Hanchett
    "Thank you to Louis Kyriakoudes’s Social Origins of the Urban South for showing the social history behind the songs."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2005

Henry Clay Anderson
Separate, But Equal: The Mississippi Photographs of Henry Clay Anderson (review)
     reviewed by Todd J. Moye     
     “Wedding couples beam. Bathing beauties strut their stuff. A homecoming queen waves from the back of a convertible. A couple of motorcycle riders simply show off in one of the most evocative                   portraits I have ever seen.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2004

"Looking for Railroad Bill": On the Trail of an Alabama Badman
     by Burgin Mathews
“Over the next two years, Morris Slater--known forever after as “Railroad Bill”--terrorized trains, illegally riding the south Alabama freighters, often robbing them of their goods and occasionally engaging in shootouts with resisting trainmen or police. Eventually, in one of those shootouts, he added murder to his record.” 
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 3, Fall 2003

Benjamin R. Justesen
George Henry White: An Even Chance in the Race of Life (review)
     reviewed by John H. Haley
     “In July 1900, George Henry White allegedly stated, ‘May God damn North Carolina, the state of my birth.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2003

Michelle Brattain
The Politics of Whiteness: Race, Workers, and Culture in the Modern South (review)
     reviewed by Carl Burkart
     “No wonder federal efforts to integrate schools and workplaces met with hard-line opposition from white mill-hands.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2003

My Twentieth Century: Leaves from a Journal
     by Anne Firor Scott
“For a moment the world stopped turning while we, a great nation, felt ourselves suddenly headless, directionless.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2003

 

Kari A. Frederickson
The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968 (review)
     reviwed by Jack Bass
     “‘There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the southern people to admit the Negro race into our schools and into our homes.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 4, Winter 2002: Ghosts

Ralph W. Johnson
David Played a Harp: A Free Man's Battle for Independence (review)
     reviewed by Hunter James
     “He soon lost count of how many times the windows of his shop had been shot out by vigilantes passing through in the night.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2002 

Sarah-Patton Boyle
The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian's Stand in Time of Transition (review)
     reviewed by Melton Alonze McLaurin
     “‘We’re all bastards; God loves us anyway.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2002

 

Forty Defining Moments of the Twentieth-century South
     by John Shelton Reed
“It will surprise no one to see that the two big stories of the twentieth-century South are the transition from an agricultural to an urban society and the transformation effected by the civil rights movement.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 2, Summer 2001

Pete Daniel
Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (review)
     reviewed by Fred C. Hobson
     “In Ellis Auditorium in Memphis in 1955, twenty-year-old Elvis Presley, one year removed from obscurity, stands with his arm around bluesman B. B. King.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 4, Winter 2000 

Other Essays that reference “Jim Crow”

Growing Roots in Rocky Soil: An Environmental History of Southern Rock
     by Bartow J. Elmore
"In 1967, the Allman brothers headed to California, hoping to make it big in a band called Hour Glass. The band quickly became popular on the Los Angeles music circuit, playing at popular clubs like the Whiskey a Go Go and drawing the attention of rising rock stars like Neil Young and Janis Joplin."
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 3, Fall 2010: Music IV

Jimmy Anderson: Natchez Swamp Blues
     by Vincent Joos
"I learned how to sing from the radio. I didn't care what kind of songs. I like music, period. Any kind, you know. Country-western or blues, I would jump on it."
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 3, Fall 2010: Music IV

"I train the people to do their own talking": Septima Clark and Women in the Civil Rights Movement
     by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
, Eugene P. Walker
, Katherine Mellen Charron, and 
David P. Cline
“They don't give the women any of the glory.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2010: Southern Lives

The Long Gay Line: Gender and Sexual Orientation at The Citadel
     by Steve Estes
“‘I’m going to get a blanket party tonight,’ he thought, fearing an infamous hazing ritual in which one group of cadets holds down a victim in bed, while another group pummels him. ‘Some guys are going to come in here and kick my ass.’” 
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2010

Wormsloe’s Belly: The History of a Southern Plantation through Food
     by Drew A. Swanson
"The plantation's residents were such voracious drinkers that the remains of wine bottles were the most reliable way to date colonial discoveries during excavation of the old fort site."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I

Food for Thought: Race, Region, Identity, and Foodways in the American South
     by Beth A. Latshaw
"I've eaten it all my life, and I'm not dead yet."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I

Blues Power in the Tuscarora Homeland: The Music of Pura Fé
     by John W. Troutman
“Pura Fé has developed a highly unusual style of weaving a fast-paced and complex, sinewy web of notes to follow and accent her extraordinarily dynamic vocal range. . .  a unique and engagingly melodic tour de force.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 2009: Music III

Memorial Observances
     by Catherine W. Bishir
"For years I had wanted to visit Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, that battlefield where the direction of the nation's history changed, the center of more than a century of memorialization. Yet, no amount of reading prepared me for its effect."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 2, Summer 2009

Remembering Cherokee Removal in Civil Rights–Era Georgia
     by Andrew Denson
"Sanctifying a historic site almost always involves an effort to derive some kind of clear moral message from the events that have taken place there. At New Echota in the early 1960s, that interpretive effort focused on the story of Cherokee Removal, and the moral message was atonement."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2008: First Peoples

The “Golden” Era of Civil Rights: Consequences of The Carolina Israelite
     by Stephen J. Whitfield
"The Carolina Israelite was a remarkable solo act, a bold effort to liberate its southern white readers from the inertia of tradition, defying the odds that anyone producing a one-man newspaper in the mid-twentieth century was very likely to be a crank."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2008: Civil Rights

“For Us the Living”: Visits to Civil Rights Museums
     by Robert Hamburger
"'When I came to, I was laying on the seat of a car and my sister was leaning over me. I thought she was crying. I could feel her warm tears spilling down on my face. But they weren’t tears. She was bleeding because someone had hit her upside the head. And the next day we were marching again.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2008: Civil Rights

Truth, Reconciliation, and the Ku Klux Klan
     by David Cunningham
"The drive for minimal justice on behalf of black people had come to this: the ordinary white people of the South . . . on the edge of a collective nervous breakdown composed in roughly equal parts of ignorance, rage, and paranoia.."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2008: Civil Rights

Still Distinctive After All These Years: Trends in Racial Attitudes in and out of the South
     by Larry J. Griffin and 
Peggy G. Hargis
"Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the genuine heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, once said, 'So this ain’t just Mississippi’s problem. It's America’s problem.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2008: Civil Rights

Martin Luther King Jr. Streets in the South: A New Landscape of Memory
     by Derek H. Alderman
"Martin Luther King Drives, Boulevards, and Avenues are important centers of African American identity, activity, and community—constituting what journalist Jonathan Tilove has called 'Black America's Main Street.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2008: Civil Rights

Broken Levees, Broken Lives, and a Broken Nation after Hurricane Katrina
     by Karen M. O'Neill
"Many people viewed the extreme disorder after Hurricane Katrina as the failure of a comprehensive system of public works and emergency preparedness they assumed was designed to ensure safety and security. No such system exists."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 2, Summer 2008: Katrina

Through a Purple (Green and Gold) Haze: New Orleans Mardi Gras in the American Imagination
     by Anthony J. Stanonis
"The New Orleans Times-Picayune argued it was 'fortunate that being naked in other cities doesn't produce the same je ne sais quoi as stripping on a Bourbon Street balcony. Otherwise the tourism revenue we count on from Carnival might remain locked in coffers not our own.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 2, Summer 2008: Katrina

Pete Seeger, San Francisco, 1989
     by William R. Ferris and Michael K. 
Honey
"I first started learning about the world, and there was a place called the South. It was a distant, romantic place, like the Far West or the islands of the Caribbean."
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2007: Music II

Give Me That Old-Time Music. . . or Not
   by Larry J. Griffin
"American popular culture would be unimaginable without the music created by the South's disfranchised, impoverished, and forgotten peoples."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 4, Winter 2006: Music I

"Everything leads me back to the feeling of the blues." B.B. King, 1974
     by William R. Ferris
"I almost lost my life trying to save my guitar."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 4, Winter 2006: Music I

"Where Is the Love?": Racial Violence, Racial Healing, and Blues Communities
     by Adam Gussow
"Does love have the power to heal our blues?"
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 4, Winter 2006: Music I

The American South and the Self
     by Larry J. Griffin
"Just as the history of the South is contradictory and contested, so, too, is the identity of southerners."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2006

The South, the Nation, and Tobacco
     by Larry J. Griffin
"My firmly devout Church of Christ grandmother from the hills of east Mississippi dipped snuff for most of her eighty-five years. She wasn’t proud of her habit—tried to hide it, in fact." 
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2006: Tobacco

Interview with Julian Bond
     by Elizabeth Gritter
"We just said, 'Whoa, what was that?' and later saw this bullet hole."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2006

Martin Luther King and the Southern Dream of Freedom
     by Timothy B. Tyson
"Southern culture, properly considered, actually more or less rules the world."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 2005

Teaching Southern Lit in Black and White
     by Michael Kreyling
"I had to stop. It wasn’t funny, and the bravura failed to lift any literary hearts. In this reading in this place, these words, whatever I might think about their literary merits, described white men on horseback with dogs hunting a defenseless black man on foot."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 2005

Teaching Gone with the Wind in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam
     by Mart A. Stewart
"'There were a lot of Scarletts in Vietnam after 1975.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 3, Fall 2005

"An Oasis of Order": The Citadel, the 1960s, and the Vietnam Antiwar Movement
     by Alex Macaulay
"Pat Conroy, a 1967 Citadel graduate, recounts the horrors of his freshman year in gruesome detail. In My Losing Season, Conroy describes the plebe system he endured as 'mind-numbing, savage, unrelenting, and base.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 3, Fall 2005

Southerners, All?
   by Larry J. Griffin, Ranae Jo Evenson, and Ashley B. Thompson
"Exactly who is a southerner, exactly who wishes to be a southerner, and who is thought to have the right to claim southern identity are now highly uncertain."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2005

Enough About the Disappearing South: What About the Disappearing Southerner?
     by Larry J. Griffin and Ashley B. Thompson
“Are southerners a dying breed?”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 3, Fall 2003

Our Kind of Yankee: September 11 Reminded Southerners of What We Admire about New York
     by John Shelton Reed
“What’s going on here? Texans and South Carolinians playing kissy-face with New York City? Isn’t New York the heart of Yankeedom? Isn’t it the city southerners love to hate?” 
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2003

Graveyard Blues
     by Rob Golan
“The soundtrack for my Revelation was a simple three-cord ditty.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 4, Winter 2002: Ghosts

Robert F. Williams and the Promise of Southern Biography
     by Timothy B. Tyson
“But nonetheless I have been lurking in the shadows, plotting and sulking like one of William Faulkner’s vindictive barn-burners.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2002: Biography

Mississippi's Giant House Party: Being White at the Neshoba County Fair
     by Trent Watts
“‘No normal person could resist the gregarious contagion of this congenial event where merchants and farmers, visiting celebrities and natives met and mingled.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 2, Summer 2002

Is It True What They Sing About Dixie?
     by Stephen J. Whitfield
“‘Won’t-cha come with me to Alabammy,

Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 2, Summer 2002

Chicago as the Northernmost County of Mississippi
     by Anthony Walton
“It took my experience in the North to teach me that I am first and last a southerner, as I was raised to be.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2002

The Contradictory South
     by Sheldon Hackney
“The tension between individualism and organization is a central theme of American history, a running argument between Clint Eastwood and Bill Gates. It occurs in the South with a regional flavor.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 4, Winter 2001

"I'm Just a Louisiana Girl": The Southern World of Britney Spears
     by Gavin James Campbell
“The controversial stage outfits, she reassured us, ‘were the kind of clothes we used to wear in Kentwood. It can be scorching during the summer, so the barer the better!’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 4, Winter 2001

Rethinking Southern History
     by David L. Carlton
“Reed burst on the southern scene in 1972 as a contrarian, and, as we know, he has remained very much a contrarian to this day.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2001: Reed

The Promise of a Sociology of the South
     by Larry J. Griffin
“Even as he turned to a form of largely conservative cultural commentary on all sorts of things, Reed retained a keen sociological consciousness.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2001: Reed

The Well Wrought "Durn": A Postmodern Writer in the Southern World
     by Anne Goodwyn Jones
“‘Southerners can’t grasp anything that isn’t couched in a Br’er Rabbit tale. They got cornmeal mush for brains.’” 
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2001: Reed

Surveying the South: A Conversation with John Shelton Reed
     by Elizabeth 
Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese
“I don’t have much patience with folks who say the Civil War was not about slavery.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2001: Reed

Love Songs, and: Music From the Zydeco Kingdom, and: Let's Go!, and: Sam's Big Rooster (review)
     by Gavin James Campbell
“This cd is a delightful complement to any romantic evening.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 4, Winter 2000