Spring ‘08
Southern Cultures volume 14, number 1
Front Porch
by Harry L. Watson
"It's not hard to see how nostalgia could become a southern theme song."
Essays
Bottomland Ghost: Southern Encounters and Obsessions with the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker
by Michael K. Steinberg
"Until the announcement in 2005 of the rediscovery of the ivory-bill, there had not been a broadly accepted ivory-bill sighting for sixty years."
The Wildest Show in the South: The Politics and Poetics of the Angola Prison Rodeo and Inmate Arts Festival
by Melissa R. Schrift
"Against the brutal backdrop of its own history Angola now poses itself as a progressive prison."
Photo Essay
HumaNatureScapes
photography by Keri McLeod
"I shot primarily under low light, which allowed mystery to sink into each image and space."
Features
On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry: Nostalgia, Sex, and the Souths of William Alexander Percy
by Benjamin E. Wise
"'What I wrote seemed to me more essentially myself than anything I did or said.'"
Mason-Dixon Lines: "Riolama"
poetry by William Alexander Percy
"There is a land beyond the lands you know. . ."
Beyond Grits and Gravy: Molasses-Colored Glasses
WPA and Sundry Sources on Molasses and Southern Foodways
by Frederick Douglass Opie
"Poor white and black southerners ate molasses in some form with almost every meal."
Fiction: Buffalo Gals
a story by Elaine Neil Orr
"A Buffalo Gal would not be bowled over by every little thing that came along."
Books
Marcie Cohen Ferris Mark I. Greenberg, Editors
Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History
reviewed by Leonard Rogoff
"'The study of southern Jewish life has now come of age.'"
Pete Daniel
Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post@-World War II South
reviewed by Otis L. Graham
"'The corporate compulsion to market first, test later, and resist regulation has left a legacy of widespread sickness and death.'"
Leigh Anne Duck
The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalismreviewed by Michael Kreyling
"It is no secret that the South represented a tough ‘problem’ for modern literary critics because the region seemed immune to calls to shift its cultural time zone."
Christopher Hitchens
Thomas Jefferson: Author of America
reviewed by Brian Steele
"A crusade to destroy a de facto regime in hope of creating a lasting republic formed no part of Jefferson's conception of political reality."
Wendy Reed and Jennifer Horne, Editors
All Out of Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality
reviewed by Barbara Brown Taylor
"'Every Southerner has been shaped by religion in some form or fashion.'"
Andrew Silver
Minstrelsy and Murder: The Crisis of Southern Humor
reviewed by Johanna Shields
"This is a book about humor that will not let you smile."
