In this issue, we explore photographer Shellburne Thurber’s southern home with Lee Zacharias, visit a quilting bee in Gee’s Bend, Alabama with Nancy Scheper-Hughes, finish the last lap of the Daytona 500 with Adrian Blevins, and get political on the Auburn University football field with Andrew Doyle.
"Imagine hanging out in Harvard Square wearing a sunbonnet stamped, 'It's a southern thing. You wouldn't understand.'"
"President Spright Dowell of Alabama Polytechnic Institute, today's Auburn University, had raised admission standards and improved the professional qualifications of the faculty. . . . Yet this solid record was overshadowed by a raging public controversy sparked by the decline of the once-powerful Auburn football program."
"'I never really knew my mother very well and I think that I was trying to figure out who she was. Since she wasn't around anymore, the only things I could photograph were the places that she'd lived in.'"
"Throughout the nation food strongly defines ethnic and regional identity. But in the South, and especially in the Delta, a region scarred by war, slavery, and the aftermath of reconstruction and segregation, food is especially important."
". . .there's now the death of Dale Earnhardt, Dale Earnhardt, Dale Earnhardt."
"Something akin to a bitter culture war took place each time I would bring out a sample of those decidedly un-Yankee Gee's Bend quilts. 'They don't look right,' we were told. 'Who would want to sleep under something like this?'"
Louisiana State University Press, 2003
University of Alabama Press, 2002
University of Virginia Press, 2003
University of North Carolina Press, 2003