University of Tennessee Press, 1997 Emory, Virginia, played host to a polyglot gathering of locally focused intellectuals in October 1992. Over a span of two days, scholars interested in frontier Virginia met there to consider, debate, and reevaluate settlement of the Old Dominion’s early westward fringes. From this ferment, editor Michael J. Puglisi of Marian »
Princeton University Press, 1996 “Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, The Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South”: What’s not to love about a subtitle like this? But even if we love it, what in the world is the author trying to do? Reviews »
Alfred A. Knopf, 1997 The Bible Belt. Few images of the South have a more tenacious grip on the popular imagination. Many who use the term as shorthand for evangelism’s centrality to southern culture assume it has always been so. The South, after all, never changes. Southern Cross should help dispel the idea of a seamless history »
Louisiana State University Press, 1996 J. Russell Snapp’s volume joins a rapidly lengthening list of new studies of the southern frontier in the eighteenth century—all intent on enlarging our understanding of Native Americans, Indian-white relations, and/or the American Revolution in the region. Insofar as it shares these aims, Snapp’s volume is not unique, but to »
University of Georgia Press, 1997 In 1847 while debate over the controversial War with Mexico raged in Congress, the decoration of Charles Bulfinch’s U.S. Capitol Building was nearing completion. John Trumbull’s four epic scenes of the revolutionary era had graced one side of the massive Rotunda for several decades, and three paintings featuring Columbus, Pocahontas, »
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.
