Lisa Howorth has observed that southerners can be distinguished by what goes into their mouths and what comes out of them. Many of the questions on the twice-yearly Southern Focus Poll deal with one or another of these aspects of the South. In the spring of 1995, 907 residents of the southern states and 506 »
In “The Great Wagon Road,” published in the Spring 1997 issue of Southern Cultures, historian T.H. Breen told of his encounters and adventures while attempting to trace the route of the great migration of German and Scots–Irish settlers from lands north into the Carolinas. Breen’s essay set Michael Chitwood thinking…
To most, the “Greatest Show on Earth” means the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus. To me it meant the Dixie Classic, indisputably the greatest holiday basketball tournament ever played. For three days in late December in those long-ago 1950s—always the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday after Christmas—12,400 fans piled into N.C. State’s William Neal Reynolds »
“Aw, Mom! Do I have to? Can’t I stay out just a little longer?” The injustice of being called in to prepare for bed just as the fun was really starting has been replayed in countless yards across the South. Cicadas sing a goodnight lullaby that heralds the dolesome hour. Truding like the condemned to the scaffold, the child »
Neither the Dallas Cowboys nor the Atlanta Braves are exactly “America’s Team,” but both seem to have won the hearts of southerners. When the Fall 1995 Southern Focus Poll asked 801 residents of southern states and 481 other Americans “What is your favorite National Football League Team?” and “What is your favorite major league baseball »
Atlanta has been a city on the move throughout its history, restless, seeking distinction and grandeur, and ever reinventing itself in the process. Far from destroying the railhead community of 10,000 during the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman unleashed a relentless spirit of enterprise and civic boosterism that continues today. It is hard to »
By August 1802, the image of Thomas Jefferson had not yet been carved in stone, but it had at least been molded in wax. The likeness of the third president stood alongside twenty-four other famous figures on display in Georgetown. Adults handed over fifty cents to view the traveling exhibit; children paid half-price. Had this »
It is the winter of 1997, and Tiffany Cummings plies the South Robeson High School basketball court, watched by a reporter who has traveled from the state capital to the tiny town of Rowland just to see her play. Cummings is the Mustangs’ star scorer, with a soft touch that mesmerized her coach the first »
The southern poet and critic Donald Davidson asserted that the South of the 1920s “disproved the axiom that two bodies cannot occupy the same space.” An emerging urban society built upon the secular gospel of progress and innovation coexisted uneasily with an agrarian society wedded to a more traditional value system. The fondest dreams of »