Spring ‘05
Southern Cultures volume 11, number 1
Front Porch
by Harry L. Watson
"Southern identity is a moving target. Its meaning keeps changing and so do those who claim it."
Essays
Southerners All?
by Larry J. Griffin, Ranae J. 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."
South to Death
by Earl Higgins
"Those who are given the power by law to exercise mercy become too intoxicated, overwhelmed by the power to end life; they can no longer grant the mercy advocated by the scriptural teachings they purport to follow. Matthew 5:7, for example, instructs, 'Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.'"
Playing Rebels
Defending the Confederacy in the Reenactment of the Battle of Aiken
by James O. Farmer
"South Carolina cannot boast a Civil War reenactment on the scale of those held at Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, or other famous battle sites, yet since the mid-1990s it has played host to one of growing size and reputation."
Photo Essay
Rebels in the Wake of 9-11
Homecoming Weekend in Oxford, Mississippi, October 2001
by Katy Vinroot O’Brien
"The usual terrain of southern homecoming celebrations—cheerleaders rah-rahhing, smartly-clad members of the homecoming court soaking up the crowd, mothers and babies at parade's edge, hastily-built fraternity floats—contrast with markers of heightened national pride and sudden, uncomfortable transformation."
Features
Mason-Dixon Lines
"Bartram’s Trail" and "Pawley's Island Shakedown"
two poems by Thorpe Moeckel
"There's no horizon,
no line on the Atlantic…"
Not Forgotten
A Valentine for Miss Welty
by Ann Taylor Peden
"Thank you, heart lady."
Books
Keith Perry
The Kingfish in Fiction
reviewed by Bryan Giemza
"In the Senate Chamber there is a bizarre reminder of a failed assassination attempt—a bomb in a desk—that sent a pencil rocketing into the ceiling. There it remains, stuck in a tile, a spotlight vigilantly trained upon it."
Michael B. Montgomery and Joseph S. Hall
Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English
reviewed by Michael Chitwood
"I remembered my maternal grandmother saying of a man she did not care for, 'Oh, he's always got a plug of tobacco in this mouth and that ambeer running down to his chin.'"
Louis M. Kyriakoudes
The Social Origins of the Urban South
reviewed by Tom Hanchett
"Thank you to Louis Kyriakoudes’s Social Origins of the Urban South for showing the social history behind the songs."
Robert A. Caro
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 3
reviewed by John Quinterno
"Lyndon Johnson combined talent, ambition, and genius into a form of power capable of taming the Senate, that most unruly and aristocratic of America's political institutions."
About the Contributors