“He documented tornadoes and floods of biblical proportions, a fire at a cotton mill and fires in the downtown business district, train wrecks and celebrities such as world heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, Columbus native son playwright Tennessee Williams, and the parents of celebrated writer Truman Capote.” Sometime in the 1930s, jack-of-all-trades photographer O. N. Pruitt »
HarperCollins, 2005 Christopher Hitchens, whose recent drift from the left has caused no little anxiety among former comrades, has used the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, among other venues, to retroactively (or is it simply anachronistically?) lay Thomas Jefferson’s blessing on the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war for the purposes of exporting democracy. Now, »
“I approach these things as a moralist, really, because honesty and truth are moral values, but beauty is something else. And it’s a word that should be used damn carefully.” Few books have touched me so deeply as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). I first read it as an undergraduate student at Davidson »
“Photographs in the South have reflected the patterns and vicissitudes of the weather, both climatic and social-political, throughout our history. And no region’s photographic tradition has been more engaged in, maybe even obsessed with, exploring and reflecting the injuries and scars of time—brought on more specifically by war, bondage, discrimination, class conflicts, and the ravages »
University of Georgia Press, 2006 Leigh Anne Duck’s The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism launches The University of Georgia Press series “The New Southern Studies,” edited by Jon Smith and Riché Richardson. Richardson is known for her work on black masculinity (the topic of the second book in the series) and Smith is known »
“The best photographs freeze time with more depth than the cheap pages of nostalgia, capturing the pain as well as the wonder that wells up in the tension between our ‘now’ and the picture’s ‘then.’ And the mixture of pain and wonder is a southern specialty.” Southerners are famous for their stories. We have sharp, »
Louisiana State University Press, 2005 Pete Daniel has written valuable books on southern agriculture and culture, Mississippi River floods, and much else, and now he adds to the too-small but growing library of books on the environment in southern history. His topic is an important new presence in the air, soil, and water of the »
Brandeis University Press, 2006 In the introduction to the anthology Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History editors Marcie Cohen Ferris and Mark Greenberg begin defensively: “For more than a century historians have wrestled with the question, why study southern Jewish history?” Such opening gambits are commonplace in studies of southern Jewry. Ferris and Greenberg respond »
“Not all ‘cool’ identities are equally cool. If the socially constructed identity of American Indian is cool, for most people it is cooler to have Indian ancestry than to be Indian.” Social scientists can go on and on about that most complicated of topics: race and ethnicity. But however varied our opinions about race and »
“During this time we played with Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Procol Harum, Cream, and Jefferson Airplane, and we even backed Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry.” Stephen Tiger was born in 1949 in Miami, Florida, and a year later I was born in Jackson Memorial Hospital. Our father, Buffalo Tiger, was one of America’s most famous »
“We wanted to grow our hair long and play in a band. It was very important to us.” The Miccosukee Tribe of Florida has a reputation for being strongly traditional and progressive. This seeming contradiction is due in great part to the founding guidance of elders and medicine men and to the understanding of both »
“They all know, out there in Indian Country, that the loss of traditional diet and the cultural skills needed to maintain it has killed more Indians than Andy Jackson.” Native food is in the news. Every day. All over the country, except in the South, foodies, farmers, chefs, environmentalists, and food writers are excited about »
Photo Essay
