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Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (Review)

by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

Louisiana State University Press, 1992 Gwendolyn Midlo Hall has written an impressive and wide-ranging book based on research in archives in Africa, America, and Europe. Africans in Colonial Louisiana is a major contribution to the history of Black Americans and the study of slavery in the Americas. This book, like Michael Mullins’s two studies, Flight »

Embattled Emblem: The Army of Northern Virginia Battle Flag, 1861 to the Present (Review)

by Edward L. Ayers

Exhibition at the Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia, through April 1995. The battle flag of the Confederacy continues to fly over scenes of tumult and conflict. It turns up at Ole Miss football games, over the Georgia capítol, at German political rallies, and in Harvard dorm rooms. Laid end to end, recent newspaper discussions »

Community Archiving at the Southern Historical Collection

by Southern Cultures

Many of the photographs you see in the pages of Southern Cultures are drawn from the library collections of UNC-Chapel Hill. As we look back at our past 22 years, we would like to highlight one of our primary sources that is often buried in our endnotes. The Southern Historical Collection (SHC) encompasses more than »

22 Years, 22 Articles

by Southern Cultures

Over our 22-year history, we’re proud to have published 22 articles by our esteemed colleague and friend William Ferris—from interviewing B.B. King to finding Faulkner in Bulgaria. William Ferris is one of the greatest documentarians of the twentieth-century South. His collection of photographs, audio, film, and writings at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Southern Folklife Collection encompasses some »

Memoir

On and On: Appalachian Accent and Academic Power

by Meredith McCarroll

“Let’s go around the room and say where we’re from.” It was my first day in a class called “Experiencing Appalachia” during my first year of college. “Raleigh,” someone said. “Just outside of Charlotte,” said another. “High Point.” The professor continually nodded as the circle made its way to me. “Haywood County,” I said. Her »

Unburied Treasure: Edgar Allan Poe and the South Carolina Lowcountry

by Scott Peeples, Michelle Van Parys

While researching his 1885 biography of Edgar Allan Poe for Houghton Mifflin’s American Men of Letters series, George E. Woodberry discovered that Poe had enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1827 under the name of Edgar Perry. As is now well known, Poe was shipped to Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, a barrier island on Charleston »

Call Me a Pogophile and We’ll Take It Outside

by Bryan Albin Giemza

“‘No shirt, no sleeves, no service. . . . No guns.’” My buddy Floyd is a native of Wisconsin. He’s half Minnesotan and half Wisconsinite, which makes him half German and half Norwegian and about six-feet nine-inches of Aryan genetics. It’s impossible not to attract attention when traveling with Floyd. I’m going to have a »

The Chinaberry Trees in Niggertown

by Andrew Hudgins

“The subtle yet significant distance established between the speaker of this persona poem and its author asks us here at the beginning of the 21st century whether much has changed.” Under the flowering chinaberrywe parked and closed our eyesto the warm night, cool enough thenfor scent to claim our senses.

Poetry

Autumn’s Sidereal, November’s a Ball and Chain

by Charles Wright

Autumn’s Sidereal, November’s a Ball and Chain After the leaves have fallen, the sky turns blue again,Blue as a new translation of Longinus on the sublime.We wink and work back from its edges.                                                               We walk aroundUnder its sequence of metaphors,Looking immaculately up for the overlooked.Or looking not so immaculately down for the same thing.If there’s nothing »

All Landscape is Abstract, and Tends to Repeat Itself

by Charles Wright

“Still, who knows where the soul goes . . . after the light switch is turned off, who knows?” I came to my senses with a pencil in my handAnd a piece of paper in front of me.To the yearsBefore the pencil, O, I was the resurrection.