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]
...the Spartanburg Herald on May 19, 1875, offered "Singer's celebrated sewing machines, the cheapest and the best sewing machine, for sale on easy terms." In the same issue, McK. Johnstone...
Somewhere Like Real Life: On Richard Linklater's Boyhood
...for cheap melodrama, but the point gets across: Mason loves and respects his father, but he isn't about to pretend that the past didn't play out the way it did...
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...
"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
...Rust's partner Marty replies, "Stop saying shit like that, it's unprofessional."9Cary Joji Fukunaga, "The Long Bright Dark," True Detective (HBO, January 12, 2014), Episode 1. In the eight episodes of...
A Real American Horror Story: On Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave
...12 Years a Slave "torture porn" in his City Arts review, likening it to the Saw franchise and the—quite literally—execrable Human Centipede. 12 Years a Slave does depict slavery as...
The Civil War and Emancipation 150 Years On
...latest technology: Princess phones played recorded messages and elaborate electric maps traced troop movements. A Mercury space capsule proudly perched nearby, an incongruous and yet resonant symbol of the unified...
Congregation
...from the car, take away the generator, the air conditioner, whatever there was to be had. He watched his phone for a signal, watched the sky for signs of a...
Love and Death at Second-Line
...car in the Quarter. Cell phones came out, some calling 911, others telling what happened. Word of mouth was that Joe the bar owner had shot the man for selling...