Bodies and Souls
...Waking in Mississippi. This sixty-minute video about race relations in her hometown has been shown across the country, including a special screening at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis,...
Changing Places, Changing Lives
...illuminates how changing places and populations shifted the dynamics between workers and their owners. Walter Johnson writes brilliantly about the processes of social reassembly that began among forced migrants while...
Enslaved Labor and Building the Smithsonian: Reading the Stones
...1850, centered on the Fugitive Slave Law, Congress in September 1850 prohibited the slave trade within the District of Columbia. Slavery itself continued in the District until April 16, 1862,...
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
...political football. Promotional infographic illustrating the making of Boyhood, 2014. © IFC Films. In times of economic crisis, many pundits and politicians choose to blame our problems on a degraded...
Documenting Migrants: An Interview with Charles D. Thompson
...He wasn't glowing with his review, but he wasn't negative either. He then went on to say, "Why didn't you tell about that illegal immigrant down in West Lake that...
"Aint that Something?"
Review Since the late nineteenth century, Appalachia has been exploited, sensationalized, or deeply romanticized across literature, art, and popular culture. The "local color" authors after the Civil War depicted stereotypes...
"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...
Trying the Dark: Mammoth Cave and the Racial Imagination, 1839–1869
...500 lamps, burners and torches" to allow Brewer to capture the caverns with an unprecedented fidelity and realism. Such illumination opposes what the pamphlet describes as the limited perspective of...