University of Georgia Press, 1996 In her preface to this collection of her 1995 Lamar Memorial Lectures, Harris explains that, upon first being invited to give the lectures, she knew immediately that she wanted to speak on the “orality” of Zora Neale Hurston’s work. Her selection of Hurston’s Mules and Men points to the value »
Westview Press, 1997 In 1995 the highly publicized First International Conference on Elvis Presley sent a clear message: Elvis was entering the academy with all the eclectic fanfare that had made him King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Though controversial, academic status for Elvis seemed appropriate, since his presence had long been felt everywhere else. But »
Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. University Press of Virginia, 1995. Last year, I assigned Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road to my upper-level twentieth-century U.S. history class. On the first day of the quarter, as the students scanned the syllabus, one of them asked, “Who is this Erskine Caldwell guy?” I answered with a question, “Have any of »
University of Georgia Press, 1995 In writing this review, I promised myself I would not start by alluding to a collection of essays on the South written almost seventy years ago by a dozen intellectuals associated with Vanderbilt University. Just because the new collection, The South as an American Problem, is the work of a »
University of North Carolina Press, 1995 As southern cultures go, we may know least about the largest: the millions of rural white people, many of them poor, whom Frank Owsley called “plain folk.” Historically they have been an elusive population: celebrated by Jeffersonians as sturdy and virtuous yeomen, denigrated by conservative elites as “crackers” or »
University of Georgia Press, 1996 In her introduction to Tokens of Affection, Carol Bleser alludes to the spell that Maria Bryan’s letters cast over John Shaw Billings II, managing editor of Time magazine and Henry Luce’s second in command. In the 1950s Billings would sometimes hurry home from meetings just to spend the evening perusing »
University of North Carolina Press, 1995 Some dozen years in the making, this thoroughly researched (800 films) yet highly readable treatise draws on J. W. Williamson’s long-time fascination with hillbilliana, and on the long-running “Hollywood Appalachia” class he teaches at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He knows his subject.
The University of Alabama Press, 1996 As though following a kind of Gresham’s law in the religious realm, fundamentalisms of various kinds have surged throughout the world at the expense of moderate or liberal perspectives. This is obviously true for Islam, reportedly true for Judaism, and apparently also for Christianity. In fact, the trend is »
University of Alabama Press, 1997 Alexander Leidholdt’s Standing Before the Shouting Mob is primarily a biographical account of Lenoir Chambers, the editorial page editor of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. The book emphasizes the role that Chambers and the newspaper played in shaping public opinion during the half-decade period when Virginia practiced “massive resistance” to the desegregation of public schools. The »
The University of Tennessee Press, 1996 Jon Michael Spencer’s latest book may be taken as an extended introductory essay to his theory of theomusicology. His title invites us to “re-search” the subject and nature of black music; that is, Spencer asks his readers to begin again their consideration of African American musical traditions from a »
University of North Carolina Press, 1997 Separated from the mainland by some twenty miles, Ocracoke Island is the site of one of the oldest villages in the inhabited islands of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Founded in 1715, when the North Carolina Assembly passed a bill providing for settling and maintaing pilots at Ocracoke Inlet, an »
University of North Carolina Press, 1996 Some years back I heard a conference talk in which Darlene Clark Hine pondered the focus of recent scholarship on the experience of non-whites and non-elites in American history. Although she heartily commended all efforts to bring the stories of traditionally subordinate groups to light, Hine caught many of »