Art
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Art
Essay
The Grey Gardens of the South
by Karen L. CoxGrey Gardens, the house first made famous by the 1975 documentary on the lives of Jackie Kennedy’s aunt and cousin—better known as “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” Beale—is, in many ways, familiar in southern culture. The story of the Beales and their derelict home in East Hampton, New York, later dramatized in the 2009 hbo »
Music
Jazz and the Magic City
An Alabama Diaspora
by Burgin Mathews“From the heyday of swing through the dawn of bop, wherever there was jazz, there was some piece of Birmingham.” This is the story of jazz in Birmingham, and of Birmingham in jazz—of how Alabama’s “Magic City” helped create some of the nation’s most swinging and celestial sounds, and of how that city, in the »
Art
Curers, Charms, and Curses / Meddygon, Swynion, a Melltithion
Celebrating the Shared Folk Cultures of Appalachia and Wales
by Peter Stevenson“Appalachia and Wales share many folk tales and traditions, such as those of the granny women. These sisters made tinctures and potions and had remedies for every kind of ailment, though not of the hubble-bubble kind.” In May 2019, a group of illustrators, filmmakers, photographers, book artists, and folk artists from West Wales exhibited their »
Essay
Strange Fruit and Patriotic Flowers
E. McKnight Kauffer's Illustrated South
by Mary A. KnightonIn January 1941, literati tastemaker Carl van Vechten wrote in mock reproach to Gertrude Stein in Paris—whom he addressed as “Baby Woojums”—chastising her and her partner Alice B. Toklas for their absence when simply everyone else who mattered was there in Manhattan. To further pique the envy of author and art aficionado Stein, he noted »
Photo Essay
Where We Find Ourselves
The Photographs of Hugh Mangum, 1897–1922
by Margaret SartorIn the late 1890s, self-taught photographer Hugh Mangum (1877–1922) began riding the rails as an itinerant portraitist, traveling primarily in North Carolina and Virginia. Mangum worked during the rise of the segregationist laws of the Jim Crow era. Despite this, his portraits reveal a clientele that was both racially and economically diverse, and show lives »
Essay
The Original Southerners
American Indians, the Civil War, and Confederate Memory
by Malinda Maynor LoweryWhen Robert E. Lee met Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox in 1865, Grant introduced Lee to his personal military secretary, a man named Ely S. Parker. At first, the story goes, Lee refused to shake Parker’s hand, mistaking his darker complexion for that of an African American soldier in Union blue. But Parker was not »
Essay
A Traveler’s Tale
by Karida L. Brown“So crucial are these battles over this place that we have made war—and monuments, songs, stories, and quilts to give it meaning. Southern history—past, present, and future—is still being made.” When I received the invitation to serve as guest editor for this twenty-fifth anniversary Here/Away special issue of Southern Cultures, I was far, far away. »
Essay
Front Porch: Winter 2019
by Marcie Cohen FerrisThis special issue marks the closing of a year-long celebration of the twenty-fifth year of publication for Southern Cultures. Over that year, we turned to the themes that have animated the study of the South—Backward/Forward, Inside/Outside, Left/Right, and, for this issue, Here/Away—and the talent of four distinguished guest editors and scholars—Charles Reagan Wilson, William Sturkey, »
Food
Woke Up, Pilgrim
by Kelly AlexanderLet us consider the absurdity of our collective national decision to consume turkey on Thanksgiving. Not everyone serves it, but it is the cultural norm. My favorite alternative: In “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving,” Charles Schulz’s Peanuts characters produce a kingly feast of toast, pretzel sticks, and popcorn. If the sight of little yellow Woodstock virtuously »
Essay
Conditions for All of Us
by Emily Hilliard, Emily ComerIn February 22, 2018, West Virginia public school teachers and school service employees, most of them women, walked out of their classrooms in what would become a nine-day statewide strike, fighting for a 5% raise and affordable healthcare coverage. But what the teachers’ statements, speeches, and protest signs indicated was that this was not just »
Essay
Witness This Moment
by Seth KotchTwo weeks ago, President Trump tweeted that a future Democratic president risked impeachment “without due process or fairness or any legal rights. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here—a lynching.” Trump’s claims to victimhood are absurd. He is a wealthy white man and President of the United States; lynchings targeted and killed vulnerable »