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The Bulletin compiles news from in and around the US South. We hope these posts will provide space for lively discussion and debate regarding issues of importance to those living in and intellectually engaging with the US South.
- As a follow up to our Open Access Week blog post, we are sharing this one-hour webcast from the blog of the Association of Research Libraries which features attorneys and advocates involved in the recent Authors Guild v. HathiTrust case summarizing the ruling and its implications for libraries.
- In Florida, recently enacted changes to the early voting schedule have altered the ways in which African American churches organize their early voting campaigns. According to Susan Saulny of The New York Times, these campaigns to get "souls to the polls" were energized by the decision to eliminate six days of early voting which was legislated by the Republican State Legislature and signed into law by Republican Governor Rick Scott. While the reduction in early voting was enacted in order to prevent voter fraud, some African Americans in Florida feel that the changes target African American voters, who turned out at twice the rate of white voters in 2008 when President Barack Obama won the state.
- In a recent review essay, Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker surveys works which he considers to be part of a "renaissance of geographic history." Gopnik argues that new works in the field ask future historians to consider how space and place retain some primacy in historical narratives, which will force them to "make more modest claims for abstract ideas and modern machines than [they] like to." He suggests that such modesty will allow for more nuanced examinations of the interplay between "big" ideas and individual places. It is this connection between local agricultural knowledge and "big" ideological shifts regarding sustainability in agriculture which the authors of our two featured Southern Spaces essays explore. Charles D. Thompson, Jr. describes the local conditions for the growth of sustainable agriculture in Cuba in "Visions for Sustainable Agriculture in Cuba and the United States: Changing Minds and Models through Exchange," and Brian C. Campbell uncovers how local traditions of biodiversity rooted in place persisted despite technological advancements in farming in "'Closest to Everlastin'': Ozark Agricultural Biodiversity and Subsistence Traditions."