University of Tennessee Press, 1995 Ellen Glasgow has long been known for attacking the South’s “evasive idealism” and calling for “blood and irony” in southern literature; but making sense of Glasgow and her work has often resisted the best efforts of students of southern literature. As Dorothy M. Scura notes in her introduction to this »
University of Georgia Press, 1995 It is now more than forty years since the lines of Arkansas National Guardsmen, under orders from Governor Orval Faubus, blocked nine black students from entering and attending classes at Little Rock’s Central High School. When the 101st Airborne, sent by President Eisenhower, mounted their bayonets and escorted the black »
University Press of Virginia, 1996 Lee Greene’s Blacks in Eden rebuts Thomas Jefferson’s remark about the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley, the eighteenth-century black poet: “The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.” Greene, who has written a biography of Anne Spencer and numerous articles on African American writers, argues that blacks consciously subverted »
University of Illinois Press, 1996 In 1898 an unsigned article in the University of Texas Magazine closed with a romantic description of the cowboy: “no man in all the world can ever take the vacant place of ‘the last cavalier.’” Nolan Porterfield believes this article, “Minstrelsy of the Mexican Border,” to be John Lomax’s first published commentary »
Scribner’s, 1997; University of Georgia Press, 1996 These volumes are the first full-fledged biographies of Jimmy Carter to appear since 1980, when political scientist Betty Glad published what may be the best biography ever written about a sitting president. When Glad’s Jimmy Carter: In Search of the Great White House appeared, her subject was widely derided as »
Smithsonian Folkways, 1996 Fans of Bernice Johnson Reagon’s award-winning radio series “Wade in the Water” will be delighted to see this four-CD set. Taking a historical approach, each CD spotlights one tradition and traces its development and influence. Volume one contains spirituals arranged for the concert stage; volume two examines the nineteenth-century roots of congregational »
Oxford University Press, 1997 For much of American history, Americans and Europeans (particularly Western Europeans) have been locked in an elaborate love-hate relationship. Though Richard Pells surveys the whole of American history, his focus in Not Like Us, as the subtitle indicates, is the post-1945 interaction of European and American culture. It has been, of course, in »
Rounder, 1998 Between 1978 and 1979 the Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project systematically documented the expressive culture of an eight-county area straddling the Virginia-North Carolina border. From this study comes the material for two CDs containing visions, singing, prophesies, prayers, and sermons. Sampling both white and black congregations, and roaming from churches to the baptismal »
University of Georgia Press, 1996 For far too long historians accepted without serious question the idea that women’s political activism diminished and all but disappeared following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Since the League of Women Voters enlisted only a small minority of suffragists, and American women did not vote as a »
University of Georgia Press, 1995 Charles Reagan Wilson has a knack for approaching a subject from an unanticipated direction. His studies of southern culture often diverge from the mainstream toward the periphery of Moon Pies, Goo Goo Clusters, Elvis, and professional wrestling. Some readers find that off-putting. Others consider it fascinating. Judgment & Grace in »
University of Georgia Press, 1996 Sometimes baffling its antagonists, other times perplexing its advocates, Bob Jones University (BJU) proclaims itself “the world’s most unusual university.” Perhaps it is also the world’s most misunderstood university. In his book, Mark Taylor Dalhouse has appropriately labeled BJU “an island in the lake of fire.” He could just as »
Mercer University Press, 1997 A heroic monument to the Confederacy first envisioned in 1914 and finally dedicated in 1970 presents an ideal opportunity to explore the Lost Cause in twentieth-century America. Inexplicably, freelance historian David B. Freeman fails to seize this opportunity in his history of Stone Mountain, Georgia.