"Our Country"—Benjamin E. Wise's William Alexander Percy
Review Benjamin Wise's book is a fiercely intelligent yet accessible biography of elite white Delta Mississippian William Alexander Percy (1885–1942), poet, pedagogue, patron of the arts, and author of the...
Opening at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
Tom Rankin, Delta Winter, Bolivar County, Mississippi, 2010. Tom Rankin is stepping down as the director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University after fifteen years of service....
Scales of Slavery on the Mason-Dixon Line: A Review of Gleanings of Freedom
...virtually unrecognizable to those accustomed only to seeing plantations in the Delta or Carolina Piedmont. Whereas in most other places—as the work of Jonathan D. Martin, Calvin Schermerhorn, and others...
Local Color
...that local color writing first articulated for American audiences. From William Faulkner in the Delta to Flannery O'Connor in middle Georgia to Lee Smith in the Appalachians, the South's best...
A Mind To Stay Here: Closing Conference Comments on Southern Exceptionalism
A Mind to Stay Here Part 2: Egerton compares his observations in The Americanization of Dixie with social conditions today Part 3: Egerton traces recent politics in the New South, noting how...
Flit Lit in the Sweet Sunny South
...of Art and Documentary Studies at Duke University. His books include Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta (University Press of Mississippi, 1993) and Local Heroes Changing America: Indivisible (Norton, 2000). Forthcoming books include A...
Mississippi as Metaphor State, Region, and Nation in Historical Imagination
Mississippi as Metaphor Part 2: Dr. Crespino discusses and suggests the limits of James Silver’s image of Mississippi as “the closed society” Part 3: Dr. Crespino traces the idea of Mississippi as...
Dixie Destinations: Rereading Jonathan Daniels's A Southerner Discovers the South
...Oscar Johnston, head of the immense cotton plantation empire owned by the British corporation Delta Pine and Land; William Mitch, organizer for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO); Charles F....
Reframing Resistance: A Review of Freedom Now!
...at Duke University. His books include Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre: Photographs of a River Life (Jackson: University...
Navigating Jim Crow: A Review of Adolph L. Reed's The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
...of the Arkansas Delta and New Orleans, moved back to the South where he grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas,and the Crescent City. Reed attended college in Chapel Hill, North...