Something True about Louisiana: HBO's True Detective and the Petrochemical America Aesthetic
...reimagining a New Orleans broken by flood and evacuation; True Blood, swamp-and-vampire melodrama full of bodies and camp and carnivalesque violence; and True Detective, a show that might fall under...
A Real American Horror Story: On Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave
...Epps. Viewers numbed by years of cheap thrills need a film like this to remind them that horror is real and persistent, especially if you try to ignore it. About...
New Histories of Environmental Activism: A Review of Rethinking the American Environmental Movement
...of Washington Press, 2012). Sergeants using a DDT sprayer, August 15, 1951. Photograph by Flickr user otisarchives4. Creative Commons license CC BY 2.0. The core of Spears's book centers on...
Trying the Dark: Mammoth Cave and the Racial Imagination, 1839–1869
...flannel "costumes"—coats and trousers for the men, and for the ladies petticoats, bloomers, and "stuffed skull-caps"—that were meant to protect heads from painful bumps against the cave ceiling. Tourists would...
The Tulip Quilt [ca 1880]
...large single tulip motif. Each tulip blossom has five points and is attached to a stem having two small leaves. Compared with other appliquéd floral patterns, these "Carolina" Tulip quilts...
Somewhere Like Real Life: On Richard Linklater's Boyhood
...his own camera into the river below. When he commits his absurd act, our perspective flips end-over-end as well, ejecting us from the film. Slacker's fragmentation and abrupt conclusion reminds...
Documenting Migrants: An Interview with Charles D. Thompson
..."illegal," I am using it because they did. But, the audience, I knew, would also include people like David Caulkett of FLIMEN (FLoridians for IMmigration ENforcement) and John Parsons. Some...
"Aint that Something?"
...drinking water, caused flash floods, forced people to leave their ancestral homes, and cut jobs (since mining companies have mechanized, they need fewer miners). Despite the loss of jobs and...
Mississippi Delta
...reaction to flooding, which continued to disrupt the agricultural economy. Delta people lived through eleven major floods between 1858 and 1922, but the 1927 Mississippi River flood was the worst...
"We're Almost There": The Drive-By Truckers' Art of Place
...into the modern era by the cheap electricity and federal intervention of the New Deal's Tennessee Valley Authority. (There are two TVA songs in the Truckers catalogues.)2The two songs are...