by Harry L. Watson
“The South’s diversity not only has room for ‘High Culture,’ it also shelters a range of vernacular cultures that Mencken barely recognized. As a result, the meaning of ‘southern cultures’ is far more fluid and unpredictable than he and many others recognize.” I never knew my mother’s mother, a woman so distant from me that »
by Hal Crowther
“He was a verbal bully with a bully pulpit, more entertainer than sly persuader; in terms of reach and impact, a modern equivalent would be someone like Rush Limbaugh, although Mencken’s demographic share was predominantly young and intelligent while Limbaugh’s is old and stupid.” Forgive me if I date myself by exhuming H. L. Mencken. »
Picking Blackberries and Getting By after the Civil War
by Bruce E. Baker
Picking Blackberries and Getting By after the Civil War “Nineteenth-century newspaper accounts tell of snake attacks. Hornets, as my brother could tell you, can be a problem, and bears are not unheard of.” One day last year, at the end of July, I walked down to Runnymede, alongside the River Thames, and picked a mess »
Essay
Cowboy Troy's Hick-Hop and the Transracial Country West
by Adam Gussow
“[S]uch fiddling and dancing nobody ever before saw in this world. I thought they were the true ‘heaven-borns.’ Black and white, white and Black, all hugemsnug together; happy as lords and ladies, sitting sometimes round in a ring, with a jug of liquor between them . . .” —Davy Crockett (1834) “There ain’t nothing like »
by Peter Makuck
“After two pricey tickets for speeding on Highways 17 and 43, their endless billboards screaming like previews of a coronary, I had to slow down.” After two pricey tickets for speeding on Highways 17 and 43, their endless billboards screaming like previews of a coronary, I had to slow down.
by H. Gibbs Knotts,
Christopher A. Cooper
“We can place the South into three categories: ‘southern to the core,’ ‘pretty darn southern,’ and ‘sorta southern.'” Some states just don’t feel all that southern anymore. Take Virginia as an example. Virginia is the birthplace of Robert E. Lee and the capital of the Confederacy. Two hundred years ago there was little doubt that »
by Ali Colleen Neff
“In the deep peripheral ravines settled by the descendants of local sharecroppers, The Home of the Double-Headed Eagle shoots up from a long row of kudzu-covered shotgun shacks and cracked pavement to entangle passerby.” The Gibraltar of the Confederacy erupts gloriously from the southern tip-edge of the flat Delta flood plain to guard the lush »
by Gerald J. Prokopowicz
Simon & Schuster, 2008
by Seth Kotch
University of North Carolina Press, 2011
by Robert Hunt Ferguson
Wiley, 2009
