“Tupelo is one of the most-mentioned place names in southern geography. The author takes a look at Tupelo’s evolving image.” I am interested in landscape, local history, and sense of place. This is a common avocation for southerners; we identify strongly with our region. I am particularly fascinated by Tupelo, Mississippi. I was born there »
“Can a prominent Mississippi liberal love the Battle Flag? The answer may surprise you.” When I went to work for Jimmy Carter, I left the South I had known. It’s now been nineteen years since I came to perch here on the outer rim of northern Virginia, and no one is more aware than I »
It will come as no surprise to modern South-watchers that things just aren’t what they used to be. You can’t count on getting sweet tea anymore. Mississippi votes Republican. Jim and Tammy Faye broke up. And Southern Cultures has a new publisher, the University of North Carolina Press.
At the age of 51, Jesse Whitaker began drawing pencil sketches of his memories of being a schoolboy in eastern North Carolina. The collection of his sketches that follows and his accompanying thoughts about the events taking place during that time are vehicles through which southerners can understand his life and his sense of place »
While historians have long studied the way generations of southern leaders and intellectuals have debated the benefits of an agrarian versus an industrial way of life, the attitudes toward the environment of those who lived and worked close to the land remain much less explored. In the past southern intellectuals, arguing for an agrarian or »
“In the South, both hearing you-all and saying it are pretty much unaffected by education and income, and both are almost as common among urban southerners as among rural ones.” “You-all” (or “y’all”) is probably the best-known southernism. Certainly it’s what Yankees invariably turn to when they want to imitate southern speech. And with good »
“They were Republicans under the skin, but they could not join a party indentified with the destruction of the South.” The “rock” in this case is the Granite State of New Hampshire; the “hard place” is the South, where Republican candidates for any office have had a hard row to hoe over the last century. »
Throughout the rural South, men with regular business in the country—hunters, fishermen, farmers, surveyors, and traveling agents of various trades—traditionally enjoy a repast known as the Store Lunch. I say “men” advisedly, for this tends to be a gender-specific ceremony seldom enjoyed by women. The beauty of this meal lies partly in its simplicity—everything needed »
Donald Davidson, a southern poet and leader of the Southern Agrarians, a group of antimodernists who opposed industrial capitalism, conceived of social memory as a “folk-chain,” which binds a people together. The folk-chain transmits tradition, which, Davidson declared, tells southerners “who we are, where we are, where we belong, what we live by, what we »
On 17 August 1844, a Tennessee schoolteacher named Jason Niles joined a large crowd of spectators to watch the raising of a “Clay pole” celebrating the Whig party’s presidential ticket of Henry Clay and Theodore Frelinghuysen. Local party organizers were undoubtedly embarrassed when the pole fractured and had to be sent to the local blacksmith’s »
Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931), the American poet from Springfield, Illinois, who gave us “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight,” “General William Booth Enters into Heaven,” and “The Congo,” has always been a difficult character to figure out. He first rose to prominence following the publication of “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine »
“Emmett Till has no voice in all that has been written about him. But how have Americans—white and black, male and female, liberal and conservative—written about the case and the boy, and how have these impressions changed over time?” The undisputed facts of the case are simple and few: In August 1955 Mrs. Mamie Till »