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Mason–Dixon Lines

by Southern Cultures

For some cultured southerners, Southern Cultures has published very little when it comes to Arts & Letters. Sure, we’ve shared a story here and there, and we’ve certainly printed author interviews and scholarly analyses, but our forthcoming 21st-century Fiction Issue (available October) marks our first full plunge into the wellspring of creative writing that surrounds »

Art

Weedeater: Chapter 1

by Robert Gipe

GENE First day of July I was thumbing the Caneville Road. I’d walked off another of Brother’s clean-up jobs, mine sludge up to my pant pockets, throat raw, hands itching and broke out. For eight dollars an hour I told him I couldn’t do it. Told him I’d walk back to Canard. He didn’t like »

The South Moves into Its Future: Studies in the Analysis and Prediction of Social Change (Review)

by Dwight B. Billings

University of Alabama Press, 1991. The year 1986 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Southern Sociological Society. More than just a professional association of sociologists in the South, the society was originally established to encourage the sociological study of the South and thus to contribute to regionwide processes of social evaluation, planning, and improvement. This »

Southern Baptists Observed: Multiple Perspectives on a Changing Denomination (Review)

by Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp

University of Tennessee Press, 1993. Sociologists of religion have expended considerable effort in recent years trying to explain the rise of conservative evangelicalism in America since the late 1970s. Perhaps the only people not surprised by the political and social resurgence of right-wing Protestant believers are the conservatives themselves. Others, including scholars, secular bystanders, and »

Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, and: Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama (Review)

by Steven F. Lawson

University of North Carolina Press, 1992. University of North Carolina Press, 1993. The struggles of Black southerners during the early 1960s aroused concerned people across America to leave the relative comfort and safety of their homes and risk their lives in the struggle for freedom. Northerners Danny Lyon and Jon Daniels ventured southward in the »

For God, Country and Coca-Cola: The Unauthorized History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It (review)

by Annette C. Wright

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993. 556 pp. Cloth, $27.50; paper, $14.00. When asked by Southern Cultures to review this book on Coca-Cola, I was tempted to concentrate on the southern penchant for soft drinks. According to marketing experts, striking regional differences still exist in the consumption of drinks such as colas, imported beers, and “new age »

Daughters of Time: Creating Woman’s Voice in Southern Story (Review)

by Sarah Gordon

University of Georgia Press, 1990. At least since the publication of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic in 1979, feminist literary critics have acknowledged the temerity of a woman’s decision to seize the pen—with its obvious associations with phallocentric power—for her own use. Lucinda MacKethan adds her voice by asserting that »

The Letters of a Victorian Madwoman (Review)

by Anastatia Sims

University of South Carolina Press, 1993. It sounds like the plot of a Victorian melodrama. A woman with the improbable name of Andrew becomes addicted to narcotics and has an affair with the doctor who supplies her drugs. He persuades her to set fire to the home of one of his enemies. She is caught »

Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction (review)

by Wayne K. Durrill

Oxford University Press, 1993. Between 1865 and 1876 at least 1,465 Black men held public office in the former Confederate states. They were a varied lot. Some such as U.S. Congressmen Blanche K. Bruce were well educated, articulate, wealthy, and politically well connected. Bruce and others like him are well known to American historians. Others »