Africana Archives: Making Art at the Schomburg
...of a national network of what anthropologist St. Clair Drake used to call the "vindicationist school" of black intellectuals. Responding to what I have called the reigning unwisdom of the...
A Real American Horror Story: On Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave
...most notorious gadfly, is the most prominent and caustic critic of McQueen's nearly universally lauded film. White's opinions aren't frivolous and uniformed, and it isn't simple trolling when he calls...
New Histories of Environmental Activism: A Review of Rethinking the American Environmental Movement
...nature preservation. This builds on important recent work in nineteenth-century environmental history, such as Catherine McNeur's Taming Manhattan and Carl Zimring's Clean and White, and buttresses the argument for long...
Trying the Dark: Mammoth Cave and the Racial Imagination, 1839–1869
Mandeville Thum, Mouth of the Cave, Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, 1876–1877. Introduction Geologically, Mammoth Cave is a network of underground caverns in central Kentucky believed to be the world's largest cave...
The Tulip Quilt [ca 1880]
"Made by Mary Louisa Snoddy Black—‘The Tulip’ design. Cousin Theresa Snoddy helped quilt it." History: The Tulip was one of the most popular appliqué patterns in the Carolina upcountry during...
Somewhere Like Real Life: On Richard Linklater's Boyhood
...scene is a handheld Super 8 shot of young people drinking and carousing on a cliff above the river while the popular African big-band standard "Skokiaan" plays. The camera doesn't...
Documenting Migrants: An Interview with Charles D. Thompson
...about immigration policy. One woman in Cary, North Carolina, who had never done anything like this before, gave me a check for two thousand dollars to carry to Don Candelario....
"Aint that Something?"
...fill of Canard County," fifteen-year-old Dawn Jewell proclaims in the opening cartoon panel of Trampoline (1). Canard County is a fictional county in Eastern Kentucky. It's rural, poor, and white....
Mississippi Delta
...appeared in the region in this period, including Chinese, Jews, Italians, and Syrians. Top, Side view of Malmaison, historic home of Greenwood Leflore, Carroll County, Mississippi, ca. 1923. Photograph by...
"We're Almost There": The Drive-By Truckers' Art of Place
...most recent book, Everything But the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), examines the making of coffee house and public culture in contemporary America....