“Through more than three dozen photographs, the author reveals the battle flag’s history and its symbolism.” The most controversial and ubiquitous of Confederate symbols today, as well as for the last half-century, is the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia—a blue St. Andrews cross emblazoned on a field of red.
An important campaign of the Civil War began in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1869. Sporadic outbreaks of resistance had occurred since 1865, and the events in New Orleans merely gave organization and direction to Confederate resistance efforts. Like the military operations undertaken between 1861 and 1865, the dedicated white southerners who carried out the campaign »
“Estimating the Civil War’s cost can be a difficult and unseemly business, according to the author. Yet economists and historians keep arguing over the figure.” No event has so captured the historical imagination of Americans as the Civil War. Ask Ken Burns, creator of the acclaimed PBS series, or better yet one of his accountants. »
As kids, we obviously lacked a lot of factual information, but age and ignorance were not our only sources of confusion. Instead, as Americans and white southerners both, we couldn’t be entirely sure who “we” were. It must have been about the time of the Fort Sumter Centennial that a bunch of us boys found »
Every year I make at least two trips to visit my parents in Ste. Genevieve (pop. 4,411), a predominantly Catholic, mining and farming town in southeastern Missouri. Until it recently closed, my favorite place to hang out while I was home was at the O.K. Corral, a local watering hole where proprietor Wally Bauman served »
“By the last tune, singers have indeed made ‘heaven’s portals ring.’” In 1921 Herbert McNeill Poteat, professor of Latin at Wake Forest University, had heard enough: the abominable condition of southern hymnody must be corrected. Despite the large number of edifying denominational hymnals, he complained, the singing public seemed bent on supporting a horde of »
Although the southern mother doesn’t have the national fame of her Jewish counterpart, she has been celebrated locally in novels, verse, folklore, and song. And when we’re referring specifically to a southern mother, the word that comes to mind is “Momma” (or “Mama”). With the possible exceptions of “Maw,” stereotypically linked to the mountain South, »
Photo by Peter A. Coclanis
“Two friendships lead to an understanding of black culture and broaden a southern progressive’s view of race.” In the 1920s southern sociologists Howard Odum and Guy Johnson saw folklore and race-relations studies as ways to practice Christian good will toward their fellow human beings, but their “good wishes” did not preclude stereotyping the subjects of »
Art
All the time I was growing up in Statesville, I never went to an art museum. There was none; the weekly art teacher in public schools contented herself with the color wheel and the hope of proportionate good likenesses. What hung in my own home were not paintings but illustrations: Columbus’s three ships, that wolf »
“But perhaps the greatest discovery for me was the city of Raleigh itself.” In 1962 I entered North Carolina State in engineering. I had attended Emory College at Oxford, Georgia, for one year, but since I did not have a high school diploma, State ranked me as a freshman. I was a farm boy from »
Memoir
Each year our elementary school class took a field trip to the North Carolina Museum of Art. To prepare us for our visit, the board of education sent us a roving arts ambassador, a trained cultural cheerleader. To our fifth-grade class this person arrived in the form of one Mrs. Kingman. This was a woman »