University Press of Mississippi, 1993 Growing up in Georgia, we attended my father’s “country” church on occasion during the year and always on “First Sunday”—the church’s homecoming that fell on the first Sunday of each August. There were some differences between my father’s church and the “city” church (in a town with a population of »
“But first things first.” Yesterday a total stranger called me white trash. On my quiet suburban street walking my dogs. I guess the fact that it’s a middle-class neighborhood was the reason he left off the “poor.” Before being insulted for my family and my family’s family, I was alternately amused, shocked, and wary. But »
National Museum of American Art, 1991 The last twenty years or so have seen a growing number of substantial studies devoted to African American art, necessary since so much of this work has been virtually ignored in earlier surveys of American art. Richard Powell’s study of the life and work of William H. Johnson is »
The Jargon Society, 1993. Eighty-year-old Mamie Neugent leans over her kitchen table, plunging her head of long white hair into a metal bowl of water at the newspaper-covered edge. On the bowl’s rim, above the dampened print, she rests fingers swollen wide from age and use, their shape betraying the same kind of long working »
Oxford University Press, 1993 Few historians have dared to draw comparisons between American and European landed elites and the societies over which they presided. Logistical, linguistic, and conceptual problems abound; voluminous and complex historiographies have to be mastered. Shearer Davis Bowman courageously bridges the Atlantic divide in historical studies by pursuing two objectives in this »
General Hall, Inc., 1994 Autobiographical writing must require some degree of boldness. Politicians and generals and other “stars” of our firmament have that, usually in abundance. More modest human beings have to make a case for claiming other people’s attention. Lewis Killian does. He does by giving us several ways of reading this, his latest »
Oxford University Press, 1993 Walter Pitts’s premature death, 20 July 1991, is our true misfortune, for his scholarship can be labeled cutting edge, groundbreaking, and most innovative. The Old Ship of Zion is a significant contribution to the fields of sociolinguistics, ritual anthropology, ethnomusicology, and African American folklore—a cross-cultural investigation that ultimately covering the African »
University Press of Kentucky, 1992 John H. Ellis has written an excellent study of yellow fever and public health in the postbellum South, using as case studies the three largest cities of the late nineteenth-century South: New Orleans, Memphis, and Atlanta. His story is two-fold. He highlights the history of epidemics in New Orleans and »
University of Alabama Press, 1993 For several decades historians have disputed the value of calling tape-recorded oral interviews “history.” No one doubts the usefulness of personal reminiscence when used as one of many sources. But as freestanding accounts of past events, oral memory claims remain dubious for many historians. Despite such skepticism, few question the »
Louisiana State University Press, 1992 Louisiana Women Writers is a commendable, albeit problematic, contribution to the existing scholarship on southern women writers. Although the exhaustive bibliography (admirably remedying a fifty-year gap in Louisiana’s bibliographic history) is both fascinating and highly readable, the biographical and critical essays are uneven, and several are too esoteric to be »
Louisiana State University Press, 1993 The frontispiece and dust jacket of Jacqueline Goggin’s Carter G. Woodson show a photographic portrait of Woodson identified merely as “in middle age.” He looks past the camera, mouth set firmly in the next best thing to a scowl. The photo is retouched, but a less formal shot in the »
University of Georgia Press, 1993 As his children began to leave home in the 1890s, Joel Chandler Harris often took time away from his Uncle Remus stories and other projects to write letters to them. After Harris’s death in 1908 a number of these letters were reprinted or excerpted in Uncle Remus’s Home Magazine and »