“From the outset, Mississippi’s commission had a clear goal, evinced by its name. The Mississippi Commission on the War Between the States was unapologetically pro-Confederate, though willing to acknowledge, however begrudgingly, the Union victory.” On Tuesday, March 28, 1961, the overcast clouds above Jackson, Mississippi, parted just around ten o’clock in the morning. Shortly after, »
“‘When my husband James was growing up, there was no race question. They assumed that was settled by the war. The Negroes were slaves and then they weren’t. That settled it.’” These oral history excerpts demonstrate the enduring influence the Civil War has had on southerners’ memories, family narratives, and even present-day self-perceptions. John Wesley »
“The most powerful memories of the Civil War continue to be the personal stories, and while the transmission may be sputtering today, they remain the most evocative, both of the winners’ frail victims and the losers’ human pain.” Readers who experienced the Civil War Centennial of 1961–65 may recall a pair of cartoons that circulated »
“We started to wonder: did twenty-first century Charleston have separate—even segregated—tourism industries, one that focused on the city’s white history and another that told of its Black past?” I was so rushed that I could barely maintain my balance. The struggle to pull pantyhose over my tired feet, newly liberated from a pair of running »
“‘In the name of the future manhood of the south I protest. What are we to teach them? If we cannot teach them that their fathers were right, it follows that these Southern children must be taught that they were wrong.’” In the July 1900 edition of Confederate Veteran magazine, readers discovered that a “sensation” »
“I drilled until the book was lace.” The gaps between experience and history are filled with unauthorized cosmologies. Worldview. Origins of myth. While artifacts of war are found in pawnshops, artifacts of survival are found in cosmology. Through my work, I chart the southern imaginary—from the Culture Wars back to Reconstruction, from a Food Lion »
“The question arises: wouldn’t the mammy characters be rendered more believeable in their altruism if it extended beyond white children to all children?” A popular caricature postcard from the 1920s shows an African American woman shopping with her three young children. A white saleswoman holds out a pair of white gloves to her and asks, »
“Pleasure and anger are dependent on one another for heightened authenticity. Discussing The Help with delight and outrage seems just the right action.” Kathryn Stockett’s first novel The Help, published in 2009, seemed destined for bestseller status. Janet Maslin, in a review for the New York Times, called it a “button-pushing, soon to be wildly »
“I am glad she used what the women told us and made something different from it. She made people listen. I know it is fiction, and I know not everyone liked it, but she made people not forget. What more can you want?” For Telling Memories Among Southern Women, Mary Yelling interviewed about one-third of »
” . . . No, I regret nothing because what I’ve lived has led me here, to this room with its marvelous riches . . . “ I regret nothing.My cruelties, my betrayalsof others I once thoughtI loved. All the unlivedyears, the unwrittenpoems, the wasted nightsspent weeping and drinking.
“The more one examines the reception of The Help, the less one is able to categorize the reception as divided between blacks and whites or academics and general readers or those who have worked as domestics and those who haven’t.” The reception of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (2009) calls to mind the reception of two »
“Culture products – literary texts, television series, films, music, theatre, etc. – that look back on the Movement tell us at least as much about how contemporary culture views its own racial politics as they do about the past they purport to represent, often conveying the fantasy that the United States has triumphed over and »
