Ancient avenues of live oaks. Family traditions. Heirloom furniture. Historic roots. A sense of place. The familiar catalogue of clichés about the stability, indeed, the immobility ofsouthern life comes easily to mind. Ever since the days of the plantation romances, southerners have been widely imagined as stationary in time and space, passing up the hubbub »
If the truth be known, many southern Republicans are pinching themselves as the 1998 election approaches, amazed at and wondering about the extent of their success. Consider recent Republican accomplishments in the formerly Democratic “Solid South.” Republicans hold eighty-two of the U.S. House seats in the thirteen-state South, up from forty-four in 1990. The Democrats »
“But, whoever suggests that the political southernization of America has come to pass must also reckon with what has come to pass in southern politics.” The elections of 1992, 1994, and 1996 have given commentators plenty of evidence to assert that American politics has been thoroughly “southernized.” President Clinton is from Arkansas, Vice President Gore »
Southern Cultures: So, how did you get interested in this business of Black Confederates? Tony Horwitz: I kept hearing about them wherever I went while researching my book. “Black Confederates” has become something of a mantra in certain southern circles. At Sons of Confederate Veterans meetings, there would be talk of erecting a monument to »
For many of us, the process of self-government has become so dispiriting that politics itself has become a term of reproach, and aspirants to public office outdo one another in denunciations of the government they wish to join. William Faulkner prefaced Requiem for a Nun with an evocative story about the origins of civic justice »
“‘We sell the world to buy fire . . . our way lighted by burning men.’” The name of Wendell Berry first came to my attention about forty years ago. I was then a student at the University of Virginia and a part-time employee of Noonday Book Shop, where a book called November Twenty-Six Nineteen »
Artists and critics long have considered the South to be a territory whose character and ethos depend, perhaps more than any other region in this country, upon sense of place. Former AP and UPI photographer Dan Sears, whose work we first published in our Fall 2000 issue, has logged hundreds of miles over the course »
“On a recent road trip from Atlanta to Auburn, Alabama — once the heartland of the land of cotton — I did not see a single cultivated field and scarely even a pasture.” “The heart of the southerner has been in his land,” reflected Howard Odum in his magisterial Southern Regions of the United States. »
Each year we marshal the troops for another subscription drive in order to bring Southern Cultures to a larger audience, and often during these efforts we encounter the war stories of subscribers who have been burned before when they’ve tried out a new read. Ed Talley from Arkansas wrote just after signing up with us »
My students last summer had never heard of Jim Crow. U.S. Government is not an area in which I can claim expertise, but when I applied for a summer job with Duke University’s Talent Identification Program—a camp for academically gifted middle- and high-school students—someone in hiring thought my few years’ study of American history and »
Although songs of social protest had deep roots in the American South, the Gastonia strike marked one of the first labor conflicts in the region that produced a large repertoire of protest songs written specifically for the occasion. On 25 August 1929 Margaret Larkin attended an outdoor strike rally near Mount Holly, a textile-mill town »
Because Germans have been in the South for over 250 years, they have blended more completely into southern culture than, say, Germans in Pittsburgh or Detroit. While a great deal has been made about Celtic and English influences in southern culture, less attention has been paid to other significant European influences. Most especially, German culinary »