Summer ‘05

Southern Cultures volume 11, number 2

[Read it online]

Front Porch
    by Harry L. Watson
    "The chances for great deeds are not limited to the dead. As often with a wisecrack as a bugle, they call us from the present life as well."

Essays

"The Dread Void of Uncertainty"
Naming the Dead in the American Civil War
    by Drew Gilpin Faust
    "More Americans died in the Civil War than in all other American wars combined up to Vietnam. Death touched nearly every American, North and South, of the Civil War era, yet the unanticipated scale of the destruction meant that at least half these dead remained unidentified."

Promoting the Gothic South
    by Rebecca C. McIntyre
    "Taking a boat ride down a swampy southern river was a thrilling escape into the unknown, a peep show of the grotesque, a blending of the realistic and the fantastic, which thrilled in a strange and disturbing way."

Photo Essay

Keepers of the Southern Byways
    by Brian Jolley
    "The greatest influence on these portraits came in the form of Charles Kuralt, the late journalist who humbly traveled the road and made all those he met heroic."

Features

Mason-Dixon Lines
Praying with George Herbert in Late Winter
    poetry by Tom Andrews
    "Outside, light swarms
    and particularizes the snow..."

Up Beat Down South
Jazz Funeral: A Living Tradition
    by Angelo P. Coclanis and Peter A. Coclanis
    "On a sweaty Saturday morning in late October 2004, a jazz funeral was held in New Orleans. Lloyd Washington had performed off and on in the postwar period in one of the many groups known as the Ink Spots that grew out of the original 1930s group of that name."

Not Forgotten
Remembering Harry Golden: Food, Race, and Laughter
    by Tom Hanchett
    "'I have a positive cure for this mental aberration called anti-Semitism. I believe that if we gave each anti-Semite an onion roll with lox and cream cheese, some chopped chicken liver with a nice radish, and a good piece of brisket of beef with a few potato pancakes, he’d soon give up all this nonsense.'"

Books

K. Michael Prince
Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! South Carolina and the Confederate Flag
    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.'"

Michael O’Brien
Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860
    reviewed by Paul D. H. Quigley
    "If all of this proves anything, it is that there was no one 'mind of the South.'"

Margaret Bender, Editor
Linguistic Diversity in the South: Changing Codes, Practices, and Ideologies
    reviewed by Michael Montgomery
    "The South was linguistically diverse before diversity was cool."

Catherine W. Bishir and Michael T. Southern
A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Eastern North Carolina

Catherine W. Bishir, Michael T. Southern, and Jennifer F. Martin
A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Western North Carolina

Catherine W. Bishir and Michael T. Southern
A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Piedmont North Carolina
    all reviewed by William S. Price Jr.
    "Among the pieces of progressive legislation that marked the early years of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966."

About the Contributors