“Constituent case files provide important information on the effects of government on the populace and the manner in which government interacts with them.” Sir John Seeley, in his book The Growth of British Policy (1895), wrote, “History is past politics, and politics present history.” In their work to document recent history, archival, and special collections, »
“It appears that favorable opinions about the banner are more widespread than the flag itself.” The rebel flag (properly, the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia) is increasingly an “embattled emblem,” as a recent exhibit and symposium at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond recognized and illustrated. A few surveys, mostly recent »
Poetry
The South is an enigma,Secret and sacred.
More than twenty-five years on, the distinction Willie Morris once drew between the formative influences shaping New York intellectuals and southern intellectuals still strikes a resonant chord. As Morris wrote in North toward Home (1967): With the Eastern Jewish intellectuals … the struggle as they grew up in the 1930s was for one set of »
“The baby boomers are having children (creating the so-called ‘baby boomlet’), returning to church in great numbers, and (not coincidentally) finding in country music (especially ‘suburban country’) a musical expression for their increasingly conservative tastes.” People magazine, that indispensable source for vital information on Americana, has once again sniffed out the Zeitgeist. In a recent »
“Both symbolically and in reality the hog has become ingrained in the culture of the South.” The “King of the Road,” Roger Miller, had a genuine understanding of the southern fondness for hogs. “In the scheme of things, in the way things go,” wrote Miller, “you might get bit by the old Fido, but not »
Which is more “southern”: a Faulkner symposium or a barbecue joint? From this porch swing, there’s no easy answer because everybody we know agrees that southern cultures range widely, embracing everything from literature to down-home cooking, from the highbrow to the lowlife and back again.
I have recently been reflecting on the significance of the porch in the South, on what that space allows and what it means. I have been thinking about the history of sharing and interaction that characterizes porch space in southern culture, about the voices that bring the space to life, about what this space meant »
“A firsthand look at the artisitc and business records of south Louisiana’s Goldband enterprises.” In spring 1995 the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill acquired a rich group of archival records from Goldband Recording Corporation, a small but important recording studio that has operated out of Lake Charles, Louisiana, »
“Examining the persistence of a pyrotechnic custom.” Like the Chinese, southerners have long been inclined to welcome the New Year with fireworks or, lacking those, with gunfire. When the Southern Focus Poll asked, “Have you ever set off fireworks or fired a gun to celebrate New Year’s Eve?” 60 percent of native southerners acknowledged having »
“The author explores deep divisions between early-twentieth-century South Carolina’s farmers and mill hands as seen in the work of Erskine Caldwell and in recent labor history.” Will Thompson is a worker, a white southern mill worker. He is not a tenant farmer turned mill worker; he is a lifelong mill worker. “The sight of the »
“The distinguished South Carolina journalist grappled with the issues of class, race, and industrialization in the South of the 1930s and 1940s.” In the summer of 1939, Ben Robertson, former White House correspondent for the Associated Press, traveled from Clemson to Atlanta hoping to write a feature on Margaret Mitchell, the newly famous author whose »