Skip to content

All Articles

The Front Porch: Fall 1994

by John Shelton Reed, Harry L. Watson

“If this is your first look at Southern Cultures, we’re glad you’ve joined us. If you’re paying us a return visit, welcome back.” What is the “real” South? Is there any such thing? Rival images jostle each other in popular imagery: the tall-columned Big House and the dog-trot cabin, the lynch mob and the civil »

From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 by Bruce J. Schulman (Review)

by Carl Abbott

Oxford University Press, 1991 This thoroughly documented and clearly argued book is true to its subtitle. Bruce Schulman’s explicit purpose is to trace the variety of deliberate and inadvertent ways in which the federal government helped to transform the economy of the South in the middle decades of this century. His implicit goal is to »

The Emergence of David Duke and the Politics of Race Edited by Douglas Rose (Review)

by Richard A. Pride

University of North Carolina Press, 1992 This book is interesting for the story it tells, the story that it fails to tell, and the story it ought to have told but didn’t. There is no confusion, though, about the central fact: David Duke, an articulate if wily racist, attracted a majority of Louisiana’s white voters »

Homeplaces: The Social Use and Meaning of the Folk Dwelling in Southwestern North Carolina by Michael Ann Williams (Review)

by Chris Wilson

University of Georgia Press, 1991 The study of the vernacular architecture of the United States flourished as never before during the 1970s and 1980s. The establishment of the National Register of Historic Places in 1966 and the subsequent funding of state historic building surveys unleashed architectural historians, cultural geographers, folklorists, and historic preservationists on cities, »

Morgan Sexton: Bull Creek Banjo Player by Anne Johnson (Review)

by Wayne Martin

1/2″ video format, 28 minutes, color. Appalshop Inc., 306 Madison Street, Whitesburg, KY 41858. Morgan Sexton (1911-1991)—logger, miner, and musician—lived all of his life in the coal country of southeastern Kentucky. As a boy, Sexton sang ballads and love songs learned from family members and local musicians. He also mastered a two-fingered method of picking »

The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction by Edward L. Ayers (Review)

by Robert C. McMath

Oxford University Press, 1992 Edward Ayers confesses that while he was working on The Promise of the New South “someone else’s book was never far from my mind.” For more than forty years, C. Vann Woodward’s magisterial Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 has never been far from the minds of those who write about »

Home Ground: Southern Autobiography Edited by J. Bill Berry (Review)

by Dolan Hubbard

University of Missouri Press, 1991 The thirteen essays in Home Ground explore ways in which “a sense of family and a sense of place are wedded in Southern autobiography.” They blend the personal with the critical as they offer us an intimate critique of how the South shapes our imagination and makes us heir to »

Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Review)

by Suzanne Lebsock

University of North Carolina Press, 1992 When Jefferson Davis published his hefty history of the Confederate government in 1881, he dedicated it to the “WOMEN OF THE CONFEDERACY,” praising their services as nurses, their “domestic labors,” their “faith,” their “fortitude,” and their “patriotism.” Such tributes were legion in southern letters, having first appeared about ten »

Pioneer Commercial Photography: The Burgert Brothers of Tampa, Florida by Robert E. Snyder and Jack B. Moore, and: Equal Before the Lens: Jno. Trlica’s Photographs of Granger, Texas by Barbara McCandless (Review)

by Jim Carnes

Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992. Texas A&M University Press, 1992. By the late nineteenth century, virtually every Main Street in the United States boasted a photographer’s shingle. No longer did small-town newlyweds, graduates, and decorated veterans have to seek an itinerant cameraman or venture to a metropolis in order to declare themselves in the »

Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War by Drew Gilpin Faust (Review)

by William L. Barney

University of Missouri Press, 1992 Southern Stories, a collection of ten essays published over the past fifteen years, provides a dazzling platform for the elegant skills of Professor Faust in intellectual and cultural history. Evenly balanced in their treatment of the antebellum and Civil War South and the gendered realities of men and women, the »

Southward, Ho!: Mapping the Archival South

by David Moltke-Hansen

“Despite the vision and commitment behind them, these initial efforts were too meagerly funded to go far toward solving a critical problem of southern studies: the scarcity of accessible original sources, print as well as manuscript.” In 1901, Alabama created the first state archives in the United States, followed quickly by many other southern states. »

South Polls

by John Shelton Reed

“Richard Weaver observed once that the religious ‘solid South’ preceded the political one; and apparently it will be longer lived, as well.” Richard Weaver observed once that the religious “solid South” preceded the political one; and apparently it will be longer lived, as well. Many surveys have documented the religious distinctiveness and relative homogeneity of »