Developing McLeod Plantation as a Shared Space of Historical Memory
by Brian Graves
On April 25th, 2015, the Charleston Country Parks and Recreation Commission (CCPRC) officially opened the McLeod Plantation Historic Site (MPHS) on James Island, South Carolina. At first glance, the site appears to have the usual trappings of other plantation tourist destinations in the region: a Spanish moss-draped oak alley leading to the antebellum “big house,” »
On May 1, 1886, Jefferson Davis visited Atlanta for the last time. He had agreed to speak at the unveiling of a statue of the late Georgia senator Benjamin Harvey Hill. The former president of the Confederacy looked gaunt and frail. He sat on stage during the ceremony, and one might imagine that the crowd »
In Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, the character Gavin Stevens famously declares that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Stevens’s judgment on the power of history seemed profound when I first read it, back in college. It’s still true today, but now it’s become a platitude, a staple of presidential speeches and »
I think I’d been there five minutes when Larry pulled up alongside me in a golf cart, abruptly. My camera dangled from my neck as I approached him. “You know there’s a fifty dollar fine for taking photos in Love Valley.” “Oh, well . . . I didn’t think . . .” I muttered. “I’m »
Across the Rio Grande at El Paso, Texas—a city so named because it was the crossing Spaniards used to reach the country north and west of the river—sits its sister city, Ciudad Juárez. Before the Mexican-American War, the river was simply a geographical barrier within Mexico, so both sides were the same town. Today, the »
Elaine McMillion Sheldon and I are both daughters of West Virginia, young Appalachians who want to fight for our home but who also struggle to find our paths back to it. I have not lived in West Virginia for almost fourteen years; Elaine, the more peripatetic of us, now does, but when we began this »
Saltville lies in two counties—Smyth and Washington—in southwest Virginia about thirty minutes east, then north, of Abingdon. The fossil record and artifacts found in the region, now displayed in the Museum of the Middle Appalachians, indicate that Saltville was a prehistoric salt lick attracting large mammals (like the wooly mammoth skeleton in the museum’s center) »
Country Queers in Central Appalachia Five years ago I moved home to the farm where I was raised in southeastern West Virginia. For a decade I had bought into the dominant narrative in LGBTQIA spaces that because I am queer I could never live back home. I was told—in not so many words—that I could »
Though naturally I love them they are a monstrosity, acute and unruly,already pig-headed on the way from the airport to come and infect me with what kind of mayonnaise is better than Hellmann’s and which of usgot the new bike versus who crashed the old and who’s drinking too much versus who ought to get »
Essay
