The Ford Campaign and the Challenge of Jimmy Carter's Southernness
by Zachary J. Lechner
“With much on the line—but virtually nothing to lose—Ford undertook a halting, intermittently bold, and ultimately ill-fated campaign to undermine Carter’s regional credibility.” America’s bicentennial was supposed to be a year of triumphant celebration. Although the nation could look back proudly on its founding, the present looked grim. Americans, after all, were still reeling from »
Finding Historical Meaning in Confederate Memorial Hall
by John Bardes
“The museum offers no chronological or thematic organization. Without context, its objects drift in ether, detached and baffling.” In May of 2017, as the world watched mammoth cranes in New Orleans lower a sixteen-foot-tall likeness of Robert E. Lee from a sixty-foot-tall marble column, few took note of the stately brick building behind the warring »
“Just as any man had ‘as much right to make a dictionary as Mr. Webster,’ he had as much right to write a history of the war as any Confederate general.” The Confederate undead have a way of rising, zombie-like, to haunt the American landscape,” the journalist Tony Horwitz wrote recently in the Washington Post following the »
“Aunt Caroline called my brother and me over to her rocker and pressed into our hands two copies of a grey-bound pamphlet, one for each of us. A tiny red, white, and blue Battle Flag accented its cover, just below the title: ‘Some Things for which the South Did Not Fight in the War Between »
This is the first installment of a new collaboration with the “50 for 50” project, an initiative of the North Carolina Arts Council in celebration of their 50th anniversary. You could say there’s something lost about William Ivey Long. Not because he wandered away from his native Seaboard, North Carolina, for a studio in New »
Our foraging friends on Occohannock Neck, Malcolm and Carol, assured us that there was a summer moment in which field corn achieved perfection for the plate—and then as quickly reverted to the unpalatable starches desired for animal feed. To prove their assertion, they invited us for a supper anchored with cold smoked venison, grilled fish, »
With nearly 25 years of publishing, we frequently share stories from our archives, and, in 2017, many of those found their way to the top (#4 is Catherine Bishir’s essay “Landmarks of Power” from our Inaugural Issue in 1993). Of course, stories read and re-read tell us something about the times we are living in—and, »
Favorite stories from the year. With nearly 25 years of publishing, we frequently share stories from our archives, and, in 2017, many of those found their way to the top (#4 is Catherine Bishir’s essay “Landmarks of Power” from our Inaugural Issue in 1993). Of course, stories read and re-read tell us something about the »
Emmet Gowin, “Here on Earth Now: Notes from the Field,” Pace/MacGill Gallery, September 28, 2017–January 27, 2018. Before cable television, video games, Netflix, and smartphones, insects filled the summers of southern childhoods. Remembering the pain of past stings, kids learned to watch for wasps’ nests in the poles of swing sets and chain link fences. »
As our editorial team looks forward to more relaxed reading time over the holidays, we’ve (temporarily) put down new submissions to recommend a few of our favorite books this past year. Though we have enjoyed a number of contemporary best-of-list reads (and have more stacked up on our bedside tables besides), you’ll find a mix »
1The scar that flows from my aunt’s thighto the boulder of her swollen ankle is a mapof the Haw River,each toe a Blue Heron. 2My mama’s water is all water, I’m every river rockinside her being smoothed over. 3The palms of my uncle’s handsare the Deep River when he is holding a gutted trout.Always somethingis bleeding. »
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