Vol. 15, No. 2: Summer 2009

Vol. 15, No. 2: Summer 2009

Join us in this issue as we do the Chitlin’ Strut, cruise the Core Sound in old workboats, pray for a broken van, consider memorials, sneak a nip of whiskey, and more.

Front Porch: Summer 2009

by Harry L. Watson

"I once listened attentively as a native New Yorker explained the South to some newcomers more recent than he. 'What made this place possible was the invention of air conditioning,' he pronounced. 'Before that, nobody could live here.'"

Constructing the Cause, Bridging the Divide: Lee’s Tomb at Washington’s College

by Christopher R. Lawton

"When Lee surrendered at Appomattox, there were already 1,800 Union dead from First Manassas buried in his wife's rose garden."

Keeping Sin from Sacred Spaces: Southern Evangelicals and the Socio-Legal Control of Alcohol, 1865–1915

by Michael Lewis

"'Alcohol undermines the health, enfeebles the will, makes the mind coarse and the tongue vulgar, brings discord to the family, deprives children of their rights, lowers the standard of morals, corrupts politics, fills prisons and asylums with human wrecks, mocks religion and ruins immortal souls.'"

Memorial Observances

by Catherine W. Bishir

"For years I had wanted to visit Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, that battlefield where the direction of the nation's history changed, the center of more than a century of memorialization. Yet, no amount of reading prepared me for its effect."

Lessons of Core Sound Workboats

by Lawrence S. Earley

This essay first appeared in vol. 15, no. 2009 (Summer 2009).

On Being Asked to Pray for a Van and Snapper

by Michael Chitwood

"It's a kind of monster, cobbled from parts of other creatures—"

Chitlin Function

by Jerry Leath Mills

"Although I had been around chitlins from time to time all through my childhood, I always considered the actual eating of them as a spectator sport. In the first place, they stank."

Privy Thoughts

by Randal L. Hall

"I stood on the back porch and gazed across the fresh spring grass toward the squat little outhouse nestled at the edge of the meadow, behind the old chicken coop. All outdoor toilets are not the same, and ours has some unusually fine qualities."

Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (Review)

by Daniel C. Littlefield

University of North Carolina Press, 2007

Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History by Anne Mitchell Whisnant (Review)

by Nancy J. Martin-Purdue, Charles L. Purdue

University of North Carolina Press, 2010