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 »
University of South Carolina Press, 1996 This new collection of a dozen tales by the Old South’s most famous writer, South Carolina’s William Gilmore Simms, seeks to broaden Simm’s modern audience by making available a selection of his short fiction in an attractive format. Editor Mary Ann Wimsatt has provided a useful chronology of Simms’s »
Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1998 The cultural life of Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s was largely the creation of southern expatriates. Think only of the writers Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Weldon Johnson; the musicians Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Eubie Blake; and the painters William H. Johnson, Marvin Gray Johnson, and »
W.W. Norton & Co., 1997 This elegant and lavish anthology, published by Double Take magazine in cooperation with Norton, boasts eleven suburb photographic portfolios intermixed with fine stories by several of the South’s best writers. It also features Allan Gurganus’s deft afterword, “Toward a Creation Myth of Suburbia.” What it lacks, however, prevents it from being the »
University of North Carolina Press, 1995 Over the past twenty years, numerous scholars have examined in considerable detail the desegregation experiences of urban school systems throughout the United States. Understandably, the Supreme Court’s 1971 decision to allow busing as a desegregation tool has been the focal point of many of these studies. When the success »
University of North Carolina Press, 1997 No issue played a more direct role in the coming of the Civil War than the status of slavery in the federal territories. Territorial acquisitions more that tripled the size of the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, and each addition of territory reopened debates »