Essay
Mildred “Mama Dip” Council passed away on May 20, 2018, at the age of 89. This is a condensed and edited excerpt from her oral history with the Southern Oral History Program, conducted by Donna Clark in 1994. Listen to the full interview at sohp.org. When a great oak falls to the earth, we feel »
Food
Traveling down to the Gulf in Louisiana is like watching intricate sand patterns dissolve in the tide, land slowly giving way to water. Water is everywhere: along the side of the road, under the overpass, hanging in the sky. Three of us were together in a car hurtling by this watery landscape. Emily Roehl, an »
Film
The most shocking moment in Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) looks at first like an abstract painting. An organic shape, small and shiny and pinkish white, sits on a dark, rough ground. Even after an enormous disembodied finger pokes into the frame, the visual alone remains indecipherable. Previous scenes have shown striking miner Lawrence Jones lying »
On the occasion of my retirement from the University of Mississippi in 2014, I knew I had to talk about the South, the topic I have spent my career studying, pondering, writing about, and teaching. The more I thought about what to present in a final, university-wide lecture, my personal journey seemed relevant, for I »
Essay
In the cotton counties along the river in Mississippi, where there are three black skins for every white one, the gentlemen are afraid. But not of the Negroes. Indeed, the gentlemen and the Negroes are afraid together. They are fearful of the rednecks . . .who in politics and in person are pressing down upon »
“The last time I kissed him he only had on half a shirt. He has a wonderful chest. I am really crazy about him now + have the funniest feeling in me, all over.” Along with talent and energy, Elvis brought a sexual charisma into the music business that his colleagues did not possess. Certainly »
“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 »
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