University of Georgia Press, 2000;University of Alabama Press, 2000 When it came to writing southern history a generation ago, cities were places up north. The “true” South was embodied in the small town, the plantation or farm, and those who inhabited these timeless places. Not so any more. Books on the urban South are becoming »
Harvest Books, 2004 Jim Carrier’s Traveler’s Guide to the Civil Rights Movement begins the reader’s tour not in Birmingham or Selma or the Mississippi Delta. Starting instead with the Declaration of Independence in Washington, D.C., Carrier anchors his trail of civil rights struggle in the defining foundations of “civil rights” in this country. This keen »
“There are times when you come upon a scene and everything is right. It tells a story. It has a center of interest. It has emotion. It has people in it who are beautiful people–and I don’t mean Hollywood beautiful.” Billy E. Barnes is one of America’s most widely published photographers. His pictures have appeared »
“‘When I came to, I was laying on the seat of a car and my sister was leaning over me. I thought she was crying. I could feel her warm tears spilling down on my face. But they weren’t tears. She was bleeding because someone had hit her upside the head. And the next day »
University of Virginia Press, 2006 As a native South Carolinian who spent summers in Columbia visiting his grandparents, the first thing I think of when someone mentions Fort Jackson is sweltering heat. As a historian who studies the American South, the second thing I think of is journalist Lee Nichols’s 1953 peek inside a barracks »
“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 »
Oxford University Press, 1995. To take a frontier place and show how it became something that it was not originally, something “southern,” is what Christopher Morris’s Becoming Southern purports to do. The place is Warren County, Mississippi, one of the most “southern” places in the nation on the eve of the Civil War. It was »
ILR Press, 1994 This modest little book makes a big contribution to our understanding of the complex relationship between the civil rights and labor movements during the 1950s and 1960s. In particular it challenges the contention, voiced by some practitioners of the “new labor history,” that the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial »
University of Missouri Press, 1992 Southern Stories, a collection of ten essays published over the past fifteen years, provides a dazzling platform for the elegant skills of Professor Faust in intellectual and cultural history. Evenly balanced in their treatment of the antebellum and Civil War South and the gendered realities of men and women, the »
Our parents stayed during the civil war.Don’t say we escaped, just that we too failed.We left Beirut on the verge of collapse& revolution. That clearing of hope,where would we be without it? Ask Ziad,who put the city on a stage & laughedat its slow ways of killing us with pillsor memory. So many of us »
Scholars Eric Savoy and Robert Martin describe American Gothic as a “discursive field in which a metonymic national ‘self’ is undone by the return of its repressed Otherness.” In What Has Been Will Be Again (2020–2022), photographer Jared Ragland underscores the significance not only of his art form but of place as an important contributor »
How Plantation Fiction Fixed Ghost Stories to Black Americans
by Alena Pirok
In 1890 The Richmond Times declared that Virginia had developed “uncanny mania.” The symptom was simple: residents’ ability and willingness to “tell more ghost stories than those of any other state.” The mania quickly spread to every neighborhood, each having its own “story of the supernatural, its haunted houses, its lonely road” with “strange sights »
