The Poetics of Rescue and Resilience: A Conversation with Jericho Brown on The Selected Shepherd
...and edited two poetry anthologies [The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (2004) and Lyric Postmodernisms (2008)]. Courtesy of The University of Pittsburgh Press. Shepherd met his partner, Robert Philen, in Ithaca,...
Mississippi Delta
...of cheap labor, on which Delta plantations depended. By 1910, tenants operated ninety-two percent of Delta farms, and ninety-five percent of those tenants were African American. New ethnic groups also...
Enslaved Labor and Building the Smithsonian: Reading the Stones
...from the stone quarries. —Zbigniew Herbert, "Classic."1Zbigniew Herbert, Collected Poems, 1956–1968 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 141. Thanks to Allen Tullos for suggesting this apt quote. Carol M. Highsmith, Smithsonian Institution...
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...
CDC in the Pandemic's Wake
...vivid examples of the consequences of ignorance come from the history of diseases."1Peter Burke, Ignorance: A Global History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 189. COVID-19 is a current case...
Making Space: A Review of Robert Paulett's An Empire of Small Places
...experiences. The book concludes with an overview of the American Revolution's dissolution of the trade that led to revised concepts of American geography. With little or no deerskin trade, new...
On Native Ground: Indigenous Presences and Countercolonial Strategies in Southern Narratives of Captivity, Removal, and Repossession
...in which Kazin never, by "Native," means American Indian writing from any region of the Americas. My new book project, On Native Southern Ground, sets out to demonstrate that the...
Blues in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley
...America; one document tells of a black fife and drum corps playing for a Confederate regiment."29Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York: The New Press,1993), 333. "Every...
Along the Ulcofauhatche: Of Sorrow Songs and "Dried Indian Creek"
...The elders knew that nearly all Muscogee (Creek) had been forced off the local lands around the time of the founding of Newton County, traveling to Alabama and points west,...
COVID-19: Lessons in Ignorance
...of Coronavirus on the Way We Live (New York: Little, Brown Spark 2020); Scott Gottlieb, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic (New...