“For as long as some people have thought of themselves as southerners, they have believed that their manners were better than (or at least different from) those of other Americans—who have, by and large, been willing to grant them that.” For as long as some people have thought of themselves as southerners, they have believed »
“Even the casual observer knows that the working poor are the predominant dramatis personae in the rhetorical vision of country music.” The American South has always been a mythic land of contrast and juxtaposition—black and white, rich and poor, mountaineer and planter, hospitality and violence, unregulated development and a sense of place, greed and grace, »
“On the surface the story is about growing up in a small southern town.” During his speech to the jury at the climactic trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch presents a fundamental distinction between the two forces in conflict during the rape trial—the law and the code. Tom »
“My approach was simply to tell them exactly what I was trying to do, stating that I was helping with a study of the South and that I needed their help to show how Southerners really lived.” In the late 1940s, with support from the Rosenwald Fund and the University of North Carolina’s Institute for »
“There’s plenty of cultural diversity in the American South, and you can always get a friendly argument started by trying to pronounce on who or what lies at the center of the southern cultural experience.” There’s plenty of cultural diversity in the American South, and you can always get a friendly argument started by trying »
Harvard University Press, 1993 In To Wake the Nations, Eric Sundquist argues persuasively that literary scholars have not yet fully appreciated the contribution of African American literature to American literary culture. He also makes the more fundamental argument that they have hardly begun to recognize the general impact of African American culture on mainstream American »
Louisiana State University Press, 1993 Joy Jackson’s Where the River Runs Deep sets out to tell two stories: first, the life of the author’s father, Oliver Jackson, who spent most of his life on or near the Mississippi River, and second, the modern “history of the river between Baton Rouge and the Gulf.” Jackson provides »
University of North Carolina Press, 1993 “The South is feminine,” a northern Jungian psychologist remarked to me recently, endowing her statement with the authority of a discipline that defines archetypes. What Silber’s chronicle would inform her, and many of us, is that this sort of categorization is the product of decades of cultural construction fueled »
University of Illinois Press, 1994 Kneeling at an altar between a prostitute and a “bum,” John Lakin Brasher did something that few scholars understand: he yielded to Christ’s saving and sanctifying death and the power of his Holy Spirit. The year was 1899, and the place was Birmingham, Alabama, where the young minister’s experience became »
W. W. Norton and Co., 1994 Having previously written a fine study of the Tredegar Iron Works, Charles Dew now takes up a topic that is both narrower and broader. Bond of Iron deals with a group of slaves and masters involved in a successful and long-term enterprise in the iron industry in the Shenandoah »
Oxford University Press, 1992 In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1954-55 decisions striking down state-enforced segregation in the public schools, two young black women embarked upon a courageous mission to challenge racial barriers in Alabama, one of the most unreconstructed of southern states. In 1956 frantic University of Alabama officials found “moral” grounds for »
University of Illinois Press, 1993 The content of this well-researched book is not exactly what many readers will expect. Kenneth Rayner, a prominent and well-connected North Carolina politician in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, fathered an illegitimate son by one of his slaves in 1850. That child, John B. Rayner, became prominent among »