Helen Matthews Lewis, Appalachian Studies, and the Long Women’s Movement
by David P. Cline,
Jessica Wilkerson
A 1966 photograph of the Appalachian historian and activist Helen Matthews Lewis captures much about a woman who has been studying, writing about, and fighting for the people of Appalachia for three-quarters of a century. In the photo, Lewis sits outside of a mine entrance, hair emerging beneath a hard hat, with a big smile »
While working as part of the Student Action with Farmworkers program between his junior and senior year of college, Kyle was placed with Southern Migrant Legal Services, based in Nashville, Tennessee. Through his work, he met frequently with farmworkers contracted under the H-2A and H-2B guest worker programs across a five-state area, investigated farms historically »
by Jaycie Vos,
Maria Silvia Ramirez,
Laura Villa-Torres,
Hannah Gill
Although there is a longer history of Latino1 migration to the United States, in recent decades, individuals from across Central and South America and the Caribbean have been putting down new roots in the U.S. South at a particularly high rate, bringing about significant social, cultural, political, and economic change. Home to one of the fastest »
Meet the Southern Oral History Program, our colleagues at the Center for the Study of the American South, UNC-Chapel Hill. From its founding in 1973, the Southern Oral History Program has explored the history and culture of the American South by talking to its activists, politicians, educators, laborers, innovators, business leaders, and more. After more »
Now they say the Internet is being attacked by sharks.They say. Them. You know who They are,malicious backlit figures in high- backed chairs,wearing jewel- crusted gold rings, stroking white cats.
“I am in Jamaica because Frank wanted his ashes scattered here; he wanted to come home.” I have been in Jamaica for four days and cannot find a place that makes ox-tail stew. I ask one of my aunts, but she says that it’s not something you typically find on a restaurant menu. She’s not »
“The singing school may not have been a southern creation, but its proliferation in the post–Civil War years was largely a phenomenon of the South. Its survival, and revival, in the twenty-first century is almost exclusively a southern story.” He looks like he should be in pads and a helmet, protecting a quarterback on some »
Class, Wealth, and Power in the Real and Remembered South
by James C. Cobb
I am not sure how many of the now literally hundreds of times I had been asked by fellow southerners if I were related to the presumably aristocratic and historically prominent Cobb family of Athens (Clarke County), Georgia, before I realized that, for many of them, the question functioned as a first-stage screening device to »
“I passed the sign frequently and always noticed its beautiful lettering. Finally, I stopped and photographed it, thankfully, because the sign is now gone.” Editor’s Note: Outtakes from The South in Color, published by UNC Press, September 2016. This stockman’s cane was made by Victor “Hickory Stick” Bobb out of hickory wood (1976). Mr. Bobb »
“‘That night, they blew up King’s motel, and every police car they had in Birmingham got torn up. I left. I didn’t have anything in common with Bull Connor.’” Early in the Hollywood movie Selma, a pivotal scene depicts a 1965 conversation between Martin Luther King Jr. and a young John Lewis. The leaders of »
The Long History of Benevolence, Self-Help, and Parades in New Orleans
by Leslie Gale Parr
Even in a nation inclined to “constantly form associations,” as de Tocqueville observed in 1831, residents of New Orleans excelled in organizing lodges, religious groups, literary societies, charitable organizations, sporting clubs, social clubs, and, most of all, benevolent associations, the most popular—and practical—organizations to which New Orleans’ polyglot population flocked. By 1880, these organizations (also »
“It’s true that many of the “peculiar institutions” that once made the South indisputably distinctive are gone or fading, though whether this will efface southern identity or merely change it remains unsettled.” Beginning in the mid 1970s, millions of Americans began to reclaim their “roots,” partly inspired by Alex Haley’s gripping book and movie about »
Interview
