Vol. 15, No. 1: Spring 2009

Vol. 15, No. 1: Spring 2009

We’ve done the reading for you! This issue finds eight book reviews from new southern titles. Plus: W. E. B. DuBois and his essay for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an interview from the Southern Oral History Program, the architect for Duke University, poetry from a tobacco field, and more.

Front Porch: Spring 2009

by Harry L. Watson

"Did you know that W. E. B. Dubois was a favorite author of the United Daughters of the Confederacy? They didn't either, for they came to admire the outstanding African American intellectual under the cloak of invisibility."

The Discovery of an Architect: Duke University and Julian F. Abele

by William E. King

"In 1937, the English novelist Aldous Huxley was traveling through North Carolina by auto one hot summer day. He described 'a pleasant but unexciting land' when 'all of a sudden, astonishingly, a whole city of gray Gothic stone emerged from the warm pine forest.'"

Sundown Towns and Counties: Racial Exclusion in the South

by James W. Loewen

"In 1987, Oprah Winfrey broadcast her television show from Forsyth County, Georgia, which had expelled its black population seventy-five years earlier."

“Take Time to Appreciate” The Mississippi Delta Region, 1994–2002

by Bruce J. West

"A lush and exotic landscape--a setting encouraging and supporting heroic transformation--nurtures all endeavors."

Tobacco Mosaic: Lexicon and The Sharecroppers

by Davis McCombs

"He crouched in the shade of the barn, thinking and mumbling, and the wind ripped the words from his mouth . . ."

Having His Say: Memories from Lemuel Delany Jr.

by Kimberly D. Hill

"Periodically this jackass that y'all call Senator Jesse Helms was on the television talking about the outhouses that the colored folks had and laughing about the tubs that they had to bathe in."

How W. E. B. DuBois Won the United Daughters of the Confederacy Essay Contest

by Bruce E. Baker

Nearly a century ago W. E. B. DuBois won an essay contest sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy—or at least, DuBois's writing won the contest."

Holy Smoke by John Shelton Reed and Dale Voleberg Reed (Review)

by Fred Sauceman

University of North Carolina Press, 2008

Grounded Globalism by James L. Peacock (Review)

by Leon Fink

University of Georgia Press, 2007

Self-Taught by Heather Andrea Williams (Review)

by Robin Bernstein

University of North Carolina Press, 2007

Black, White & Olive Drab: Racial Integration at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and the Civil Rights Movement by Andrew H. Myers (Review)

by Alex Macaulay

University of Virginia Press, 2006

Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race by Jennifer Ritterhouse (Review)

by Clara Silverstein

University of North Carolina Press, 2006

Blues for New Orleans by Roger D. Abarahams, with Nick Spitzer, John F. Szwed, and Robert Farris Thompson (Review)

by Perry Kasprzak

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006

Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South by Anya Jabour (Review)

by Katy Simpson Smith

University of North Carolina Press, 2007

History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie edited by Gordon Harvey, Richard Starnes, and Glenn Feldman (Review)

by Charles W. Eagles

University of Alabama Press, 2006