“Warren Brown recounts his hurried educational career. Unable to attend school until he was ten years old, Brown completed twelve grades in just seven years.” Before a packed crowd of over 700 parents, teachers, and students, R. R. Moton High School alumnus Willie Shepperson revealed the high stakes involved with public school desegregation. At the »
“Next to football and religion, politics might well be southerners’ favorite sport.” In school we learn that American democracy had a southern birthplace, when Virginia elected its first House of Burgesses in 1619, a year before the Pilgrims signed their celebrated Mayflower Compact. And Virginia also gave us Thomas Jefferson, America’s favorite political philosopher. When »
“Politically, the South is not an assembly of states, acting in unison, in the grip of one party. The region is not one South, undivided.” Twenty-four years ago, both the Democratic and Republican parties held their national conventions in cities of the American South. Democrats gathered in Atlanta to nominate Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts for »
“Of all the women ever romantically linked to Strom Thurmond, none was as deadly as Sue Logue. The judge who sentenced her to the electric chair for murder called her crime ‘the most cold-blooded in the history of the state.’” In 2011, Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life, sat down with his »
University of North Carolina Press, 2010 The Chief Vann House is one of Georgia’s more popular State Historic Sites, drawing thousands of guests to a restored house and estate that interprets antebellum Cherokee and plantation culture. Tiya Miles’s new book, The House on Diamond Hill, delves into the Chief Vann House’s formative years, bringing to »
University of Missouri Press, 2010 In 1987, American feminist Charlotte Bunch penned the now-famous phrase, “You can’t just add women and stir.” Instead of simply tacking on a few paragraphs about women to male-dominated historical accounts, Bunch argued that scholars must reshape their understanding of history, giving women’s actions and views equal weight to those »
“That archaic system of child labor that often sent me home bleeding at thirteen or saw me faint from heat exhaustion at sixteen seems terribly oppressive and immoral to one who never lived it. Ask tobacco kids how they remember it, and they will paint a radically different picture.” I keep a real tobacco leaf »
“for smooth-talking Negro boys from Chicago more equal than separate . . .” They said I had picturesin my wallet, white girlsGisele MacKenzie, Joan Collins.It was immoral for a black boyto tote these Hit Parade darlingsin his hip pocket, going jukingwith their sweet white voices.
University of Georgia Press, 2011 The best thing about Allen Tullos’s new book Alabama Getaway is the voice. At the end of the book, in a beautifully written passage called “Hospitality’s Nutshell,” Tullos visits the gift shop of a pecan processing plant. There, he speaks with a saleswoman “who could have been one of my »
University of North Carolina Press, 2010 In her recent work Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960, Rebecca Sharpless provides an intriguing account of the personal and public lives of African American domestic workers from Reconstruction to the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. She traces how cooking and the other »
“‘On a shelf behind the speaker’s desk, was a marble bust, on the base of which in relief were the words “John C. Calhoun.” Poised on its crown, was an inverted inkstand, whose contents had descended in copious streams over the face . . . Under the name, in pencil, was written this explanatory clause. »
“Crossing the Mississippi River, putting my head out of the window to stare at its broad muddy width—the last boundary of my well-known southern world—I left Tennessee.” In 1946, a year after World War II was over and just before school started, my ten-year-old brother and I (twelve then), and my father and his new »