Atlanta has been a city on the move throughout its history, restless, seeking distinction and grandeur, and ever reinventing itself in the process. Far from destroying the railhead community of 10,000 during the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman unleashed a relentless spirit of enterprise and civic boosterism that continues today. It is hard to »
“Some observers have trumpeted the South as the last stronghold of faithful Christian witness; H. L. Mencken dismissed it as ‘the bunghole of the United States, a cesspool of Baptists, a miasma of Methodism, snake-charmers, phony real-estate operators, and syphilitic evangelists.’” Truisms are sometimes true. And if anything has seemed self-evident to interpreters of the »
“Plantations dominated the southern economy by the 1770s, and those who controlled them had decisively shaped the region’s economic course, and, perhaps, destiny.” Questions relating to the distinctiveness of the American North and South have intrigued historians and the public for generations. In fact, these questions and broader related controversies have proven among the most »
“These images chronicle a century of tradition.” The Gullahs are descended from African slaves taken to work on the cotton and rice plantations of the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Isolated until recently from white and even other African American influences, the Gullahs developed a distinctive creole language and preserved many West African »
“I figured I’d better wait awhile to see if y’all would settle down and get back to doing what you do best: aggravating people, but not insulting them.” It turns out that it would have been easier to quit the Mafia. We’re referring to our attempt to place a little time and distance between our »
Essay
“‘I need a monkey driving a car, one hen laying eggs, two cuckoos, a fairy with a flower, one climbing panda, one cock crowing at dawn, and whatever we’ve got in the way of a Jupiter’s fire or a thunder blast or a big bear.’” This condensed excerpt first appeared in Vol. 10, No. 1 »
“This is a world in complete turmoil — a civilization falling to pieces — and one seldom so strongly presented in Civil War films. And yet, in the end, there is a regeneration of southern family and community.” In 1961 the Library of Congress published a filmography of nearly nine hundred motion pictures produced since »
University Press of America, 2003 Roman Catholicism has historically played a minor role in the life of the Old North State. North Carolina’s first known Catholic family dates only from 1775, the first parishes were not established until 1829, and on the eve of the Civil War the Catholic population totaled just six hundred. North »
“It has been more than seven years since the publication of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, and it has become nothing short of a phenomenon.” It has been more than seven years since the publication of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, and it has become nothing short of a phenomenon. The paperback edition continues to sell, the »
University of North Carolina Press, 2005University of Georgia Press, 2005Duke University Press, 2004 Between 1763 and 1767 Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon led an expedition to survey the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland. During the slave debates leading up to the Civil War, the so-called Mason and Dixon Line became the unofficial northern border of »
“South Carolina cannot boast a Civil War reenactment on the scale of those held at Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, or other famous battle sites, yet since the mid-1990s it has played host to one of growing size and reputation.” In the late 1990s, when journalist Tony Horwitz traveled the South in his quest to understand the »
University of North Carolina Press, 2004 At one time more than a few eyebrows would have been raised at the idea of an intellectual history of the Old South stretching into a second volume. (And we are not talking about an unportly second volume here.) The Old South used to be seen as a place »