A Real American Horror Story: On Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave
...elements to call into question the American variation on the desire to be terrorized by the supernatural, the psychosadistic, and the patently absurd. Our history is laced with horrors we...
Somewhere Like Real Life: On Richard Linklater's Boyhood
...scene is a handheld Super 8 shot of young people drinking and carousing on a cliff above the river while the popular African big-band standard "Skokiaan" plays. The camera doesn't...
Enslaved Labor and Building the Smithsonian: Reading the Stones
...building under Brown's supervision during his absences from Washington. Yet, Brown, whose parents were free residents of Washington City, was clearly apprehensive of local slave merchants, who often kidnapped free...
Still Digging Our Own Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle over Black Lung Disease
...monthly payments can mean the difference between destitution and modest survival.4This estimate of the number of black lung beneficiaries is extrapolated from data on the number of claims filed each...
Blues in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley
...songs for us, but both were superb."12George Mitchell, liner notes for the Revival Records LP George Henry Bussey and Jim Bunkley. Jim Bunkley interview. Recorded in Geneva, Georgia, 1969. Bunkley discusses...
An Excerpt from Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History
...however, something unexpected happened. An African American named Brenda Ethridge stepped up to the microphone. She introduced herself as a descendant of Aunt Grace, the first slave owned by Chang...
University of Texas Press and Southern Spaces Katrina Bookshelf Series Collaboration
...was nearly emptied of life. If measured by the number of lives it claimed, Katrina does not qualify as the worst disaster in our history. But it was far and away...
The Makers of the Sacred Harp
...In the case of the “revival spiritual songs” that began to appear in great numbers in 1840s tunebooks, including The Sacred Harp, Steel speculates that some may have had their...
States' Rights Resurgent: The Attack on the Voting Rights Act
...the United States, due process and equal protection of the laws, House apportionment based on "the whole number of persons," and citizens' right to vote without regard to "race, color,...
Just a number, Old Bryce Hospital Cemetery, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 2007