Southern Cultures

Winter ‘10

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Front Porch
     by Harry L. Watson
     "Contrary to Mencken, the South's diversity not only has room for ‘high' culture, it also shelters a range of vernacular cultures that Mencken barely recognized. As a result, the meaning of ‘southern cultures' is far more fluid and unpredictable than he and many others recognize."

The View from Mencken's Tomb
     by Hal Crowther
     "He was a verbal bully with a bully pulpit, more entertainer than sly persuader; in terms of reach and impact, a modern equivalent would be someone like Rush Limbaugh, although Mencken's demographic share was predominantly young and intelligent while Limbaugh's is old and stupid."

"A recourse that could be depended upon"
Picking Blackberries and Getting By after the Civil War
     by Bruce E. Baker
     "Nineteenth-century newspaper accounts tell of snake attacks, such as the one on an African American woman near Montgomery, Alabama, who was killed by a large rattlesnake while out picking berries with a companion. Hornets, as my brother could tell you, can be a problem, and bears are not unheard of."

Playing Chicken With the Train
Cowboy Troy's Hick-Hop and the Transracial Country West
     by Adam Gussow
     "‘My belt buckle is my bling-bling. It's just going to keep getting bigger.'"

Mason-Dixon Lines
Getting There
     poetry by Peter Makuck
     "After two pricey tickets for speeding
     on Highways 17 and 43,
     their endless billboards screaming
     like previews of a coronary,
     I had to slow down."

South Polls
Rethinking the Boundaries of the South
     by Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts
     "We can place the South into three categories: ‘southern to the core,' ‘pretty darn southern,' and ‘sorta southern.'"

Not Forgotten
Home of the Double-Headed Eagle
The Visionary Vernacular Architecture of Reverend H. D. Dennis and Margaret Dennis
     by Ali Colleen Neff
     "In the deep peripheral ravines settled by the descendants of local sharecroppers, The Home of the Double-Headed Eagle shoots up from a long row of kudzu-covered shotgun shacks and cracked pavement to entangle passersby."

Books

Joseph T. Glatthaar
General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse
     reviewed by Gerald J. Prokopowicz
     "In the final tabulation, the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery. For slaveholder and nonslaveholder alike, slavery lay at the heart of the Confederate nation."

Amy Louise Wood
Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in the Jim Crow South, 1890-1940
     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."

David A. Taylor
Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America
     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."


About the Contributors