Essay
“As we witness their labor and listen to the rising voices of women, we see resolute strength, vigilance, outrage, art, and agency.” On the occasion of this special issue focused on women—thanks to our whip-smart guest editor, historian Jessica Wilkerson—I am grateful for the virtual women’s community I access online in these continued months of »
Essay
“We all struggle with interior storms in these challenging times. Strength lies in action and solidarity.” This extraordinary Snapshot: Climate issue marks the beginning of a year and more of contemplation—and celebration—of the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of Southern Cultures and the Center for the Study of the American South in 1993. The issue’s »
Fiction
As our editorial team looks forward to more relaxed reading time over the holidays, we’ve (temporarily) put down new submissions to recommend a few of our favorite books this past year. Though we have enjoyed a number of contemporary best-of-list reads (and have more stacked up on our bedside tables besides), you’ll find a mix »
Use Southern Cultures in the classroom Southern Cultures is a prime source for southern food scholarship. Three special issues devoted to food studies and regular contributions on foodways demonstrate the journal’s methodological strengths—oral history, ethnography, archival-based research. The following selections demonstrate the power of food to illuminate the nuances of social and cultural history in »
Executive EditorAyşe Erginer Art Director & Deputy EditorEmily Wallace Managing EditorAnnie Lubinsky Associate EditorIrene Newman Assistant EditorWalker Livingston Contributing EditorScott Schomburg Poetry EditorsGabrielle Calvocoressi & Destiny Hemphill Music EditorAaron Smithers Founding EditorsJohn Shelton Reed & Harry Watson Print DesignHudd Byard Print ProductionSam Dalzell Web DeveloperJames White Center for the Study of the American SouthBlair LM »
“It is about the aesthetic of Bourbon drinking in general and in particular of knocking it back neat . . . The joy of Bourbon drinking is not the pharmacological effect of C2H5OH on the cortex but rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in »
“Although the same cottontails flourished across the region, Chatham County turned its rabbits into something like a regional brand, recognized throughout the South and along the eastern seaboard. By the end of the nineteenth century, Siler City had become the de facto rabbit capital of the Southeast.” The Eastern cottontail rabbit thrived in the edges »
Music
On a sticky June Sunday in 1959, two people meet each other outside an eastern Kentucky hamlet called Daisy. A twenty-seven-year-old college grad living in New York City, the grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants, wants to experience the Great Depression, and he is listening for music that might work like time travel. The other man, »
Essay
In today’s food and beverage world, the adjective craft often signifies more than technique or ingredients: it points to scale, agency, and audience, to small-batch creations just inventive enough to attract discriminating publics. Trace the word back, though, and its meanings broaden. As archaeologist and historian Alexander Langlands explains it, the Old English cræft referred »
Essay
Mark Twain hated Sir Walter Scott. He blamed Scott for the Civil War, accusing him of infecting the South with the “Sir Walter disease,” brought on by the “sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.” Before the war and beyond the South’s defeat into the heyday of the »
Music
This essay is excerpted from the Winter 2017 issue (vol. 23, no. 4). To read the essay in full, access via Project Muse (link at bottom). Nothing much would have been stirring in the sleepy little hamlet of Bethel Springs as Carl Perkins passed through. The bustling McNairy County seat, five miles farther south, was »