“I don’t have much patience with folks who say the Civil War was not about slavery.” Editor’s note: On a Saturday afternoon in August 2000, John Reed sat down for a conversation with Betsey and Gene Genovese, noted historians of the South, at their home in Atlanta. The tape recorder was turned on— JOHN SHELTON »
University of Missouri Press, 1993. Surveying the South reprints ten articles published by John Shelton Reed between 1978 and 1991. Appropriately, Reed dedicates his collection of essays to distinguished pioneer sociologists Guy B. Johnson, Edgar T. Thompson, and Rupert B. Vance. One of the nation’s foremost regional sociologists, Reed devotes considerable attention to the contributions »
Essay
I have always been drawn to those places that mark the landscape, serve as our monuments of remembrance and guide our way and knowledge of the local, seeming to last in our consciousness even when they have nearly disappeared on a return to their previous unbuilt state. “It’s over there where Cedric’s house used to »
Essay
“America is Mississippi,” Malcolm X asserted in 1964, as he appeared in Harlem alongside Fannie Lou Hamer. “There’s no such thing as the South—it’s America.” Over the summer and fall of 2022, as this issue of Southern Cultures took shape, Mississippi produced an extraordinary archive of moral manifestos that echoed this conflation of the state »
Art
In the middle of a childhood marred by hard labor and an abusive father, Eddie Owens Martin got out. While Eddie had already been sharecropping cotton with his family for years, he was only fourteen years old when he took up sex work to support his travel from Glen Alta, Georgia, to New York City »
Art
Emmet Gowin, “Here on Earth Now: Notes from the Field,” Pace/MacGill Gallery, September 28, 2017–January 27, 2018. Before cable television, video games, Netflix, and smartphones, insects filled the summers of southern childhoods. Remembering the pain of past stings, kids learned to watch for wasps’ nests in the poles of swing sets and chain link fences. »