“Whatever he grows up to be, there is a part of every preadolescent boy that loves to play soldier.” The South is changing, we all know that. Legalized Jim Crow, which once seemed monolithic and immovable, crashed and burned a generation ago and as many on all sides predicted at the time, change has seemed »

“‘I’m just here for the beer.'” It was in 1978 that “Redneck Riviera” first appeared in print. Probably. And in the New York Times no less. That was when Times reporter Howell Raines published a piece that told of how former University of Alabama and then pro-football quarterbacks Richard Todd and Kenny Stabler spent the »

“Images of a deflated inner tube dropped by the road, a wallet mired, its contents spilling into the mud, footsteps revealed in soft earth, and river-wet clothes wrung, wadded, and cast aside document ordinary things possessed with extraordinary associations of flight, hope, panic, determination, and fear.” Susan Harbage Page’s portfolio, Longing: Personal Effects from the »

“‘I’m going to get a blanket party tonight,’ he thought, fearing an infamous hazing ritual in which one group of cadets holds down a victim in bed, while another group pummels him. ‘Some guys are going to come in here and kick my ass.'” Joe Johnson was born in Palatka, Florida, and grew up fourteen »

“I tell the students: ‘Act like you’ve moved to a foreign country. Things, at times, will seem that odd to you. But in time you will learn to think of them as normal.'” What happens when people from different regions wind up living near one another? How does this play out in the South where, »

“The warden says fill and you fill it.” Photograph, 1983for Lola Bell When you and my grandmother both got old,and she could not bearthe empty house, and all your childrenwere gone as well, some nights the two of you crawled into her brass bed“like a pair of old spinsters,” your sistersays.

“Over on Roanoke Island, any number of homes in Manteo now stand on foundations they were not built upon, thanks to this man’s work. There was nothing he couldn’t move—why, I believe he once moved a small hotel!” Fifty or sixty years ago, my second cousin once-removed’s uncle by marriage, Uncle John Ferebee, was a »

“Civil War News, as the series came to be known, after its gazette-like report on the back of each card, offered images of brutality and mayhem sufficient to satisfy the most demanding boy’s bloodlust.” In New York in the early 1960s, when I was still not quite school age, I first learned what it means »

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009 Books are not to be judged by their covers, we are warned; but a blurb for this valuable political profile of the Reverend Billy Graham is provocative enough to warrant consideration. Has he been “the most important American religious figure of the twentieth century”? Such a claim would, almost by »

University of Illinois Press, 2008 Midway through Harlan County, USA, the 1976 Academy Award-winning documentary about a coal miners’ strike in eastern Kentucky, an old miner sits in a lawn chair panting for breath. The camera cuts to a doctor who patiently delivers the diagnosis: pneumoconiosis, the gradual destruction of the lungs caused by long-term »