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...
The Tulip Quilt [ca 1880]
...Southern mills produced primarily plain fabrics for most of the nineteenth century. The shirting Mary chose to back her quilt was a finer and comparatively more expensive fabric than the...
Somewhere Like Real Life: On Richard Linklater's Boyhood
...of America's most experimental filmmakers. Most people who've heard of Boyhood know that it's doing something unique, though not entirely unprecedented in the history of cinema. Shot for a few...
Documenting Migrants: An Interview with Charles D. Thompson
...Carolina and his return home to Durango, Mexico. Brother Towns examines the lives of migrant day workers and the receptions they receive moving between Jacaltenango, Guatemala, and Jupiter, Florida. In...
"Aint that Something?"
...more than five hundred mountains, encompassing more than one million acres of central and southern Appalachia" (Appalachian Voices). The mining has not only destroyed mountains and diverse forests, but ruined...
Mississippi Delta
...century later, writer Richard Ford called the Delta "the South's South." In the 1990s, historian James Cobb referred to it as the "most southern place on earth." Few other regions...
"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...
Something True about Louisiana: HBO's True Detective and the Petrochemical America Aesthetic
...of Louisiana with a type of cartographic character development relies more on the intensities of place than a sequence of defining moments. Rust and Marty, played by Matthew McConaughey and...
A Real American Horror Story: On Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave
...and its auteur to garner several more golden statues. Just don't expect the drama to be confined to the movie itself. When McQueen went up to receive his honor at...
Congregation
...diadem, the crown on a monument—a glory wreath. That is what I saw as I drove the flat land—down Highway 49—toward home. Up close now, beneath it, I see what...