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Essay BUY ACCESS

Front Porch: Winter 2018

by Harry Watson
“All the South’s cultural strands have continuity with whatever came before, and all of them have changed to meet new conditions. That’s how we can recognize something called the South from one generation to another.” Culture is a creative process, but that’s not always how we think about it. We tend to see culture as »
Essay

Tasting New Orleans

How the Mardi Gras King Cake Came to Represent the Crescent City

by Anthony J. Stanonis, Rachel Wallace
In November 2016, the New Orleans Zephyrs announced a name change after fans of the minor league baseball team submitted over three thousand suggestions to a rebranding contest. “Our goal was to give the baseball fans of New Orleans a team and identity they can call their own,” said Zephyrs President Lou Schwechheimer. “New Orleans »
Art

Southern Lens

Elevating the Ordinary

by Melissa Gwynn
The following works were included in the exhibition People Get Ready: Southern Lens at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. The images coalesce around an untitled photograph from William Eggleston’s series The Democratic Forest. This photograph captures Eggleston’s “democratic” perspective that engaging imagery could be found in any subject at nearly every turn »
Music

W. C. Handy and the “Birth” of the Blues

by Adam Gussow
This article has been condensed from a longer essay that first appeared in the Winter 2018 Issue. Access the entire essay via Project Muse (link below). It was W. C. Handy, as much as anybody, who was responsible for gifting us with the mythology of Mississippi as ground zero for the blues. Virtually every blues »
Photo Essay

Scattered and Sacred

by John Oliver Hodges
I made these pictures with a 4×5 Horseman studio camera during the Reagan years of 1984 to about 1988, when I was fresh into pictures. View cameras have bellows and expose larger negatives than handheld cameras. The Horseman I used was designed for studio work, as opposed to other view cameras made for the field, »
Essay BUY ACCESS

Race and Reconciliation on the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad

by William Sturkey
“A line of hope for some, the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad became, for others, a legendary site of death and cruelty, a place where modernization and opportunity clashed with archaic traditions and racial oppression.” An old railroad track runs through the Mississippi Piney Woods to the Gulf of Mexico, timeworn and unnoticed, but riddled »
Essay BUY ACCESS

We Are Here

Powwow and Higher Education in North Carolina

by Meredith L. McCoy
“‘[Powwow is] how we stand up.’” At 7:00 a.m., the first students arrive at the gym. Sleepy but excited, they begin setting up, making sure there are chairs for dancers and tables for vendors, organizations, and T-shirts. Finally, it’s powwow weekend. It will be hours until the singers and dancers show up, but the vendors »
Poetry BUY ACCESS

first meeting

by Délana R. A. Dameron
Some women suffer themselves foolstrying to hold a man who floats between them like driftwood;whose happy tongue slicks his catfish back; who constrictshis lover’s bones as if a black rat snakewhile holding out magnolia blossom & eucalyptus branch offerings—except for Annie who is strong as a water oak; evergreen as pine. Bounty Everlasting: Poetry from »
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