Searcy County Livestock Auction
...sold only cattle—as many as three thousand steers a day from up to a hundred miles away. As business dwindled—and only months after I documented it in 2009—Simpkins decided to...
Reckoning with Enslavement
...the United States, rose to address the descendants. He wore a plain black business suit and Roman clerical collar. With an air of earnestness, he spoke slowly, like a pastor...
Still Digging Our Own Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle over Black Lung Disease
...York: Free Press, 1951). Parsons's conceptualization of the sick role was neither class nor historically specific. For coal miners, as for other workers, the preeminent requirement of their class position...
How I Shed My Skin
...Algonquin Books. The transformations from sixth to seventh grade, from lackadaisical Mr. Vaughn's class to the precise Mrs. Ferguson, from foe to friend of black classmates, helped expose southern white...
Coop Co-Op: Agrarian Ideals, City Codes, and the Backyard Chicken Movement
...Endless Amusement," on topics ranging from local laws and coop design to breed selection and health issues. The class was over-enrolled, and it had a waiting list. And so it...
Transcript of "When I Say 'Steal,' Who Do You Think Of?": Part Two
...in the class at the top that enforces inequality and reaps the benefit from our work? If we are divided from each other, the injustices continue—the unequal distribution of wealth,...
Revisiting Flaherty's Louisiana Story
...vision of Louisiana in the documentary classic Louisiana Story. The making of that Louisiana story follows Flaherty's standard format. He created "narrative documentaries," what we might call today "docudramas." But...
"Aint that Something?"
...Fiction Since 1878: "Appalachia in the national geographic imaginary . . . has largely remained an essentialist vision of the region—white, rural, poor or working-class mountain people with highly specific...
Local Color
...harnessing the genre's equal potential for irony to expose the blindness or self-serving motives of the master class. Local Color became America’s first national literature of race. It also became...
A Woman's Work: Jim Crow Modernity and the Remaking of the Carceral State
Review There's a gripping scene in Arthur Jafa's award-winning film, Dreams Are Colder Than Death, in which he pairs the image of a small group of African American boys acrobatically...