“Imagine hanging out in Harvard Square wearing a sunbonnet stamped, ‘It’s a southern thing. You wouldn’t understand.'” On a sunny afternoon last spring, an ad hoc string band assembled outside our campus coffee shop. An overturned washtub laid down the beat, a gentle-eyed fiddler flourished away, and a rapt banjo picker hung soft streamers of »

“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.” On a sunny Saturday afternoon in early November 1927, »

“‘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.'” In the summer of 1936, when Walker Evans traveled with James Agee to Hale County, Alabama, »

“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.” Mention “The Delta” and vivid images come to mind of a dramatic, flat landscape etched by rows of cotton »

“. . .there’s now the death of Dale Earnhardt, Dale Earnhardt, Dale Earnhardt.” When Dale Earnhardt dies, I’m standing in Uncle Doc’s          kitchen, listening to the men put across the woe of the penalty of          NASCAR. 

“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?'” The incredible quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, true masterpieces of American folk art with their »

Louisiana State University Press, 2003 George Garrett’s presence turns dark rooms brighter than rainbows. He makes people smile, and for moments worry grinds slower and life seems more gift than burden. In George’s company scoffers become appreciators. The weary shake the creeping palsy of cynicism and return to desk and library invigorated. “What a friend »

University of Alabama Press, 2002 If all the South were Alabama and you read the most important book on the Civil Rights movement, it would be Mills Thornton’s Dividing Lines. Historians of the movement everywhere will have to conjure with it.

University of Virginia Press, 2003 “Economics? That was my worst subject.” How often those of us in the field have heard this lament. Or is it a reprimand? “Worst subject” probably means the speaker did not do well in the course, but it also often implies that they didn’t much like economics anyway. Too dry, »

University of North Carolina Press, 2003 Ella Baker remains a compelling figure because of her confidence in the capacities of ordinary citizens, because of her persistence, her rejection of dogmas and of hierarchies of race, class, education, and gender, because of her passionate commitment to developing leadership in others, because of her willingness to sublimate her »