Reimagining Country Dancing and Queer Community in Atlanta, Georgia
by Joshua Howard
Taking advantage of low property values caused by white flight during the 1960s, many LGBTQ+ individuals made their way into the heart of Atlanta. They established bars, clubs, businesses, and bathhouses in Midtown and Cheshire Bridge, transforming these neighborhoods into hubs of queer nightlife and culture. At the same time, the city was becoming a »
Climate Change, System Collapse, and Home in New Orleans
by Shannon Dosemagen
“New Orleans is a weather city. Our relationship to the atmosphere is daily, immediate, visceral.” Home is identity and inheritance, memory and continuity, and a place where intellectual knowledge and emotional allegiance often collide without resolution. In a city like New Orleans, home perhaps takes on a denser meaning because of the interwoven social structures »
Lincoln Beach and the Struggle over Black Public Space
by Shruti Gautam
In the summer of 2023, I followed behind families toting floaties and foam coolers, trudging up an incline on the side of a levee. As I fumbled over a fence and down a ladder, the families walking ahead of me nimbly stepped over long and wide railroad tracks. In the distance, a canopy of oak »
“Me-at-seventeen badly needed a queer mentor, someone who could open the gate to the gay world and give me a tour, answer my questions.” Hearing the line that will stay in my head for weeks and years and decades to come goes like this: I am fourteen or fifteen or maybe even sixteen. I am »
1 One drizzly Tuesday night in Chapel Hill—April Fool’s Day, 1975—my girlfriend and I were studying in the student union at the University of North Carolina. We’d found a vacant room then shut the door, spreading out books and notes to prepare for upcoming exams. After a few hours, we needed a break. Walking into »
“The historical pattern is clear: Political interference with the mission of the university has the power to shape the faculty population, influence campus culture, and ruin individual lives.” The university classroom is a recurring setting in the theatre of the American reactionary imagination. For those possessed of nightmarish and creative minds, the classroom is a »
Archives, Family History, and Black Southern Migration to Chicago
by Sumayya Ahmed
“By searching for the archival traces of my family’s pre- and early migration life, I become my family’s historian, putting primary sources in conversation with family lore and oral histories.” In summer of 2020, the Alabama State Archives issued a statement acknowledging its role in upholding systematic racism by, among other things, putting into practice »
I always talk about the paternal side of my family—Nana Boo, Paw Paw, Daddy ’nem—but rarely share about my maternal southern roots. Mommy’s side of the family is a mystery wrapped up in a legend that eggs on my curiosity ’bout where my Mommy’s people ’nem from. On her side, I got different types of »
For the past five years, Florida has been my studio and my muse. It is something I’ve been circling, leaving, returning to, and trying to understand. I moved here from Canada when I was three, and I grew up with that strange double feeling. I was an insider because I was raised in the Sunshine »
We understand history in hindsight. Or, as the German philosopher Hegel writes, “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” Twenty years have passed since Hurricane Katrina destroyed all of our family’s belongings as it devastated New Orleans neighborhoods and the Gulf Coast. When I think of Katrina, the »
From autographs to photographs, and from behind the scenes to front of stage, we offer a view of country music fandom as found in the Grand Ole Opry archives. Curated by Tim Davis, archives manager at the Opry Entertainment Group, “Here We Come Again” is on view now at the Center for the Study of »
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