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Vietnam and the Southern Imagination (Review)

by Melton A. McLaurin

University Press of Mississippi, 1992. The southern imagination, Owen Gilman contends, is alive and well and busily contemplating the tragic experience of Vietnam. Gilman limits his definition of imagination to creative writers, essentially novelists, although he examines several short stories and devotes a chapter to “the southern poet’s Vietnam.” His thesis is straightforward: Southerners have »

The Color of Their Skin: Education and Race in Richmond, Virginia, 1954-89 (review)

by George W. Noblit

University Press of Virginia, 1992. Almost twenty years ago, I started studying school desegregation. In Memphis, doing an ethnography of a high school caught up in the civil rights revolution, I watched the struggles of the students, faculty, and parents as they tried to sort out what desegregation would mean for their schools. Some resisted, »

We Shall Overcome (review)

by Trudier Harris

1/2-inch video, 58 minutes, color. California Newsreel, 149 Ninth Street, No. 420, San Francisco, CA 94103. As the title suggests, this video focuses on the song that became the anthem of the civil rights movement. The film shows, however, that “We Shall Overcome” has a history in civil struggle that reaches far beyond the 1960s. »

Southern Women: Histories and Identities Edited by Virginia Bernhard, Betty Brandon, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Theda Perdue (Review)

by Kathleen C. Berkeley

University of Missouri Press, 1993 Southern Women: Histories and Identities has a history. In June 1988 the Southern Association for Women Historians sponsored its first Southern Conference on Women’s History at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Although the organizers anticipated that the conference would draw participants whose research reflected all aspects of women’s history »

Unheard Voices: The First Historians of Southern Women Edited by Anne Firor Scott (Review)

by Jacqueline Jones

University Press of Virginia, 1993 Unheard Voices introduces five pioneering scholars of the history of southern women to a modem audience, with essays (originally published between 1928 and 1941) by Virginia Gearhart Gray (1903-71), Marjorie Stratford Mendenhall (1900-1961), Julia Cherry Spruill (1899-1986), Guion Griffis Johnson (1900-1989), and Eleanor M. Boatwright (1895-1950). Anne Firor Scott’s introduction »

Exiles and Fugitives: The Letters of Jacques and Raîssa Maritain, Allen Tate, and Caroline Gordon Edited by John M. Dunaway (Review)

by Alphonse Vinh

Louisiana State University Press, 1992 On 13 January 1940, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, his wife Raîssa, and his sister-in-law Véra Oumansoff arrived at the port of New York. They were among ten thousand French nationals who found themselves expatriated to the New World as the Old World disintegrated in the flames of war. Fugitives »

The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930 by William A. Link (Review)

by Stephen Kantrowitz

University of North Carolina Press, 1992 In this insightful and clearly written volume, William A. Link brings into focus a central theme in the history of American reform: the conflicts arising from cultural gaps between would-be reformers and those they are trying to help. This is not a comprehensive study of southern Progressivism but an »

African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South by Richard Westmacott (Review)

by John Rashford

University of Tennessee Press, 1992 When I read of the publication of this book, I immediately sent for a copy. When it came, I read it with great interest and I was not disappointed. It will be welcomed by many, because little systematic information has been published on African American gardens and yards. However, this »