Submissions
The Council of Editors of Learned Journals has called Southern Cultures “indispensable to a number of fields” and “a hallmark of what ambitious journals should be attempting in the 21st century.” We are a peer-reviewed quarterly and welcome thoughtful and well-written submissions year-round from authors, scholars, and anyone else with insights into our region.
Writing for the Southern Cultures Audience
When writing for Southern Cultures, please keep in mind our readers include scholars from many academic disciplines but that the interested general public makes up approximately 75% of our audience. Consequently, we are especially interested in reader-friendly articles that deal with southern topics in the broadest possible way and that open up a larger discussion on the South. For this reason we strongly recommend that you read Southern Cultures before you submit your work.
Southern Cultures publishes several types of material. Our full-length essays and articles generally run 15–20 double-spaced manuscript pages (3,750–5,000 words). Under this format, your introduction should offer our non-specialist, non-scholarly readers a context for your topic, but should not survey the relevant historiography in detail. References and concepts familiar to your discipline likely will need a brief explanation at first mention. (Many issues that are often left implicit in full-length articles in strictly academic journals receive a more direct and accessible treatment in Southern Cultures.) Please keep technical jargon to a minimum, as well as endnotes, which we typically try to cap at twenty.
Photo essays also are integral part of our content. We ask that photo essay submissions include 10–25 high-resolution (at least 1.5 MB) black and white images on CD or USB key, along with a short introduction of 200–300 words. (We will also accept submissions of film prints but cannot at this time work directly from negatives.) We select images and copyedit all introductions to accepted photo essays, but please do note your personal preferences among those photographs you have submitted.
Over the last several years Southern Cultures also has published many full-length interviews with notable, interesting, and often famous Southerners. Please do not submit an interview, however, without first discussing it with the Executive Editor.
We also publish shorter features: Upbeat Down South (music), Not Forgotten (personal reminiscences), Beyond Grits and Gravy (food), South Polls (surveys on contemporary trends), Southern Voices (short interviews), and Mason-Dixon Lines (poetry). We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts for South Polls or Mason-Dixon Lines. You may submit writing for the other features, though, which typically run 8–14 pages (2,000–3,500 words).
Lastly, Southern Cultures publishes book reviews of 3–4 pages (750–1,000 words). We do not accept unsolicited book reviews, however. If you would like to review a book for us, please first contact the Deputy Editor.
Submitting a Manuscript
* Please email your Word-compatible (.doc or .rtf) manuscript. Please put "submission to Southern Cultures" in the subject line of your email.
* We ask that you do not submit your work elsewhere while it is under review at Southern Cultures.
* Please double space, use 12-point Times New Roman font, and leave wide margins (1½ inches) to allow room for marginalia and copyediting.
* Notes should be numbered sequentially and placed at the end of the article using the endnote function in Microsoft Word. [From the menu bar: Insert > Reference > Footnote > Choose “Endnotes” > In “Number Format” choose 1,2,3…> Click “Insert”]
* The author’s name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, and affiliation should appear on a separate title page preceding the text. Include a brief biographical sketch of approximately 50 words.
* Include suggestions for possible illustrations with your manuscript.
* Attach a cover letter summarizing the article’s major points.
* See the additional specific guidelines below for preparing your manuscript.
* All submissions are subject to review by the editors and by selected outside experts.
* Authors transfer copyright of accepted work to Southern Cultures. We are pleased to grant authors permission upon their request to reprint their Southern Cultures essays at no cost.
We make all efforts to respond to submissions in a timely fashion; however, authors may feel free to contact the Southern Cultures office if they have not heard from us within six weeks of submitting their manuscript.
Copyediting
We copyedit all accepted manuscripts. In copyediting your manuscript we seek to make your prose as clear and effective as possible. The substantive revisions we will ask you to make will be in the interest of best communicating with a broad readership. We hope to offer you as many suggestions as we can to enhance your essay’s readability and accessibility to our audience.
Common problems in the manuscripts we receive include mixed metaphors, inconsistent tenses, and excessive use of the passive voice. We will do our best to reduce wordiness and correct any errors of grammar, syntax, and punctuation. Authors, however, are responsible for ensuring that their text and notes are accurate. We are not responsible for fact-checking a manuscript. All errors we discover, however, we will note, correct, and bring to the author’s attention.
Authors will have an opportunity to review the copyedited version of their manuscript, which will contain queries, stylistic changes, and suggested revisions.
Illustrations
Southern Cultures has access to a wide array of photographic resources and, due to budgeting restrictions, will privilege sources that are available to us gratis or, on occasion, for a nominal fee. If you are aware of archival, institutional, or personal resources particular to your topic, please mention them when you submit your manuscript. We are pleased to collaborate with authors in obtaining these resources; however, the editors make all final artwork decisions based on many considerations, including space, strength and quality of image, content, copyright restrictions, and audience.
* Please provide captions and credit lines for any illustrations you submit.
* We will need written permission from the owner/copyright holder of the image to reproduce any illustrative materials not in the public domain.
* Authors submitting graphs, figures, and/or tables with their manuscript are asked to provide hard copies and digital files of all graphs, figures, and/or tables.
Additional Guidelines for Preparing a Manuscript
Formatting (miscellaneous)
* Do not use all caps for authors' names in notes.
* To indent paragraphs, use only the tab key—not the space bar, your word processor’s automatic indent feature, or a “style sheet” of any sort.
* Use only one space after periods, colons, semi-colons, and quotation marks at the end of sentences.
* Never use letters for numbers or vice versa; in other words, do not type the lowercase “L” for the number one or the capital letter “O” for zero.
Spelling, punctuation, and other matters of style
* Please spell-check and proofread your text, including endnotes.
* For spelling and word division, follow Webster’s Third International Dictionary or the latest edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.
* For capitalization, hyphenation, use of numbers, punctuation, and other matters of style, follow The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition (2003).
* Please capitalize all references to “South” but not to “southern” or “southerner” (as opposed to our own informal capitalization of each of these terms in correspondence, advertising, and website text).
* Do not capitalize black and white; do capitalize African American, Asian American, American Indian, etc., none of which take a hyphen.
Names
* Give the complete name on first reference to an individual; last name only thereafter.
* Do not use honorifics (Ms., Mrs., Mr., etc.)
* Neither “Jr.” nor “III” are preceded by a comma (Joe Doe Jr.; Joe Doe III)
* Initials indicating first and middle names are separated by a space (W. R. Valentiner).
Endnotes
* Number consecutively from 1, but if you are providing a note to your title (e.g., “This paper was originally presented at a conference . . .”), begin numbering after that note. Place the notes at the end of the manuscript (not at the bottom of the page), using the endnote function in Microsoft Word. Please double space.
* All references must be complete. (Please, no “author will supply information with proof.”)
* Please streamline and consolidate notes as much as possible. There should be no more than one note per paragraph. The primary purpose for endnotes is to provide the source citation for direct quotations in the text. We generally edit out textual material in the notes. If that material is integral to your essay, please incorporate it into the text.
* Once a work has been cited in full, subsequent references to the work should be in short form. Short reference form consists of author’s last name, a logically shortened title of the book (or journal article title), and page number(s) of reference.
* Ibid. refers to a single work cited in the note immediately preceding. Ibid. takes the place of the author’s name, title of the work, and as much of the succeeding material as is identical.
* Do not use p. or pp. to indicate references to page numbers unless the use of the number would be unclear without it.
* Use Arabic numerals for volume numbers, even if the title page of the work carries a roman numeral.
* Use en-dashes between series of numbers (1860–1865, 12–18).
* Book reviews should not have endnotes.
* Consult The Chicago Manual of Style (chapters 16 and 17), visit The Chicago Manual of Style Citation Quick Guide (refer to humanities style, “N,” guidelines), and/or see below for additional guidance on formatting specific sources in endnotes.
For a book
* Author’s full name
* Complete title of the book
* Editor, compiler, or translator, if any
* Series, if any, and volume or number in the series
* Edition, if not the original
* Number of volumes
* Facts of publication—location of publication for little-known presses, publisher, and date of publication
* Volume number, if any
* Page number(s) of the particular citation
Richard Wright, Black Boy (Harper and Row, 1966), 201.
Valeria Gennaro Lerda and Tjebbe Westendorp, eds., The United States South: Regionalism and Identity (Bulzoni Editore, 1991);
Allen Wardwell, Objects of Bright Pride: Northwest Coast Indian Art from the American Museum of Natural History, 2nd rev. ed. (American Federation of the Arts, 1988), 30.
For a chapter/essay in an edited book (example)
Michael Heale, “Writings in Great Britain on United States History: Some Reflections on a Liberal Moment,” in Guide to the Study of United States History Outside the United States, 1945–1980, ed. Lewis Hanke (Krause International Publishers, 1985).
For a journal article
* Author’s full name
* Title of the article
* Name of the periodical
* Volume of the periodical
* Date of the volume or of the issue
* Page number(s) of the particular citation
James F. Powers, “Frontier Municipal Baths and Social Interaction in Thirteenth-Century Spain,” American Historical Review 84 (June 1979): 655.
Cornelius C. Vermeule, “The Rise of the Severan Dynasty in the East: Young Caracalla, about the Year 205, as Helios-Sol,” North Carolina Museum of Art Bulletin 14, no. 4 (1990): 30–49.
Unpublished material
* Author’s name
* Title of document, if any, and date
* Folio number or other identifying number
* Name of collection
* Depository, and city where it is located
Stephen Walsh, “Black-oriented Radio and the Campaign for Civil Rights in the United States, 1945–1975” (Ph.D. diss., University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1997).
Timothy Habick, “Sound Change in Farmer City: A Sociolinguistic Study Based on Acoustic Data” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1980), Cabell Greet Papers, Columbia University Library Special Collections.
Interview
* Interviewee
* Date
Interview with Janis Joplin, February 2, 1962.
Thank you for your interest in Southern Cultures.