“Mieth and Smith shared a belief that photography could bring social change. They viewed Pat Clark and Maude Callen as heroic healers whose stories would inspire racial understanding. Both photographers shot powerful images of the most visceral human experiences: birth, death, sexuality, and disease.” In 1940, Life photographer Hansel Mieth traveled to Hell Hole Swamp, »
“‘Rough. It is rough being a female.’” Hot in the summer, cold in the winter. Those were the conditions we worked in at Bollag International Corporation, a textile recycling plant in Charlotte, North Carolina. I photographed and interviewed the women I worked with in 1989 and 1990. The women spent long days standing at tables, »
“It requires very special talent to make great photographs, and those who have it are among our finest artists.” What is it about photographs? They have been around since the 1830s but still seem far more novel than paintings or drawings. Photography equipment can be cheap and simple and takes no special talent to use, »
“Photography in its finest and most decisive moments is about those tired or ignored or unseen parts of our lives, the mundane and worn paths that sit before us so firmly that we cease to notice. It is, we might say, about rebuilding our sight in the face of blindness, of recovering our collective vision.” »
“Many years ago I concluded that for me truth and beauty, and perhaps wit and wisdom as well, are more likely to reside in what is ordinary and seemingly insignificant. This is, perhaps, a sideways look at America and American culture, but it is one that can produce moments that describe us all—but without makeup »
“‘Well, of course I remember Pearl Harbor,’ my mother says, the tone of her voice adding, What do you think I am, an idiot? She and my grandmother were working in the shop when they heard on the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. She was five months pregnant with me. It was »
“Jimmy ‘Catfish’ Hunter pitched for the Oakland Athletics and the New York Yankees and in 1987 was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame – all the while maintaining his small-town farming roots. He played every game with the shotgun pellets from a childhood hunting accident lodged in his foot, and natives imagined he held »
“. . . for ten millennia, the bones seemed wreckage from a mighty dream . . .” Big Bone LickAt Big Bone Lick the first explorersfound skeletons of elephants they said,found ribs of wooly mammoths, tusks.They dug out teeth the size of bricksand skulls of giant bison, beavers.
“Cooney Simms, the grocer, had a big Philco floor-model radio with push buttons and short wave. Neighbors gathered around when Joe Lewis was fighting. And wasn’t he always, this good giant who whipped Adolph Hitler’s man Max Schmeling? Static wasn’t too bad; one could hear Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats if they didn’t come on the »
“Ruffin was ideologically sympathetic to the Confederate cause and remained so to his death. ‘The power of the master must be absolute,’ Ruffin wrote in State v. Mann (1829), ‘to render the submission of the slave perfect.’ State v. Mann became the most notorious opinion in the entire body of slavery law.” A visitor to »
“As the Soviets used to joke about their own politically driven histories, ‘The present we know; the future is certain. Only the past is unpredictable.’” I got a childhood lesson in southern memory when my father asked if I knew what had happened in Reconstruction. I didn’t, of course, but Dad left an indelible (though »
“While northerners might appear comparatively apathetic about the memory of the Union cause, white southerners have been tenacious in searching for moral clarity in the past.” Jefferson Davis sent Robert E. Lee an unusual note after the battle of Gettysburg. The dispatch did not contain any presidential recommendations or requests, only a clipped article from »