“Some devout Baptists complained that there was too much booze in a mini bottle for one drink; the rest of us complained that there wasn’t enough.” William Faulkner must have smiled down from heaven back in 2010 when his birthplace, New Albany, Mississippi, went wet—or at least damp—by making the sale of beer and “light »
“At mid-century, the South had no Republican senators and only two Republicans in the 105-person southern House delegation. By 2000 [both] delegations were majority Republican.” You don’t have to be a historian, a political scientist, or even a particularly astute political observer to know that the South has moved from one-party Democratic control to a »
“Maggie’s neighbor-women saw a young woman just like themselves, with no children to feed, trying to build a life, and so they helped her, unquestioning in recognition that she would help them in return. This was so.” She was the only child born to parents with children from earlier marriages. America Lewis and James Henry »
This article first appeared in the Summer 2014 Issue. For most of my youth, Elizabeth Glynn Griffitts (my paternal grandmother) was a hushed subject. I distinctly remember a gathering at my Aunt Janet’s home when I was about thirteen. It was the first time I had ever seen a photograph of Elizabeth. She was regal, »
“One of the challenges—and, simultaneously, deep pleasures—of studying the South is that the disciplinary walls of the academy neither contain nor constrain the work.” What makes the South a region distinct from its surroundings, and what makes it tick? These sorts of questions are at the heart of Southern Studies, an enterprise unbounded by academic »
“When train number nine on the Western North Carolina Railroad tumbled off Bostian’s Bridge in 1891, it ignited a media frenzy, as well as a firestorm of outrage, a detailed investigation, a compelling mystery, and a series of unanswered questions.” Norfolk Southern locomotives still rumble periodically over Bostian’s Bridge trestle, a 300-foot long stone bridge »
“When the unlimited energy of adolescence comes to bear on the limited experience of childhood, the results often swing toward one of the poles – an enthusiastic confirmation of the culture a child grew into or a bold rejection of the culture they grew out of.” We devote our teenage years, perhaps more than any »
“‘There will be no coal to go in, no ashes to go out, no gas, no soot, no dirt.’” Leading North Carolinians, among them James B. Duke, the fortune behind the American Tobacco and Southern Power companies, crowded into a Raleigh courtroom in November 1920. The state’s Corporation Commission was considering the Southern Power Company’s »
“In May 1933, the United States government enacted legislation establishing the Tennessee Valley Authority. Within several decades, the TVA’s construction of dams in pursuit of its goals transformed a millennia-old network of free-flowing rivers into a chain of slow-moving reservoirs creating a new landscape or, more properly, a new lakescape.” In May 1933, the United »
Photo Essay
In the autumn of 1938 a photographer named Charles A. Farrell visited a seasonal mullet fishing camp at Brown’s Island, in Onslow County, North Carolina. What he discovered there captured his imagination: a remote hamlet of fishermen’s shanties far from civilization and two legendary clans of fishermen in relentless pursuit of one of the Atlantic’s »
Poetry
Ethel Freeman’s body sat for days in her wheelchair outside the New Orleans Convention Center. Her son Herbert, who had assured his mother that help was on the way, was forced to leave her there once she died. Gon’ be obedient in this here chair,gon’ bide my time, fanning against this sun.I ask my boy, »
“Whose land was condemned; who was displaced? What did all the shoals look like when the lilies bloomed? And . . . what would it be like to witness the great shad migrations and fishing parties of the past?” For millennia southern marshes, swamps, oxbows, Carolina Bays, steep creeks, mountain bogs, ponds and reservoirs have »