Conflict and the Senses: A Review of The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege
...each analyzed through a different sensory modality, while at the same time noting shifts in the salience of certain sensations as the event unfolded. The effect is captivating, and generative...
Closer to the Ground: A Conversation with Ann Pancake
...a plain-spoken accuracy that makes them seem suddenly exceptional."1Elizabeth Judd, "Books in Brief," New York Times, August 12, 2001. Six years after Given Ground came Pancake's first novel, Strange as...
"The Ohio River Was Not the River Jordan": A Review of Matthew Salafia's Slavery's Borderland
...urged him to remain on free ground and in effect liberate all of those under his charge, but he refused; that earned him the further trust of his new Kentucky...
Southwestern Humor: The Beginning of "Grit Lit"
...narrator barely has a toehold here, for the chief narrative duties fall to Sut Lovingood himself, an illiterate, unemployed (and unemployable) descendant of William Byrd’s 18th century Lubberlanders. Sut's dialect...
Going South, Coming North: Migration and Union Organizing in Morristown, Tennessee
...a linked series of sections. "Going South" takes up the mobility of industrial capital, reporting efforts by Tennessee workers in the 1990s to exert counter-pressure on employers who moved production...
Wherein the South Differs from the North: Naming Persons, Naming Places, and the Need for Visionary Geographies
...it had begun, with a consideration of the meaning and effects of Grant's having changed his name. Stein's "Grant" begins: Grant in his very early life was under obligation to...
Flit Lit in the Sweet Sunny South
Review When I saw a note about Chuck Thompson's new book, Better Off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession, I had to take a look. From the title...
Inside Poor Monkey's
Introduction Poor Monkey's sits in a cotton field in Bolivar County, west of the town of Merigold on the Hiter farm, land worked by members of the same family for...
Seeds of Rebellion in Plantation Fiction: Victor Séjour's "The Mulatto"
...corrupting effects of slavery. "The Mulatto" family tree and frame narrative structure. Illustration courtesy of the author. Séjour's character, Antoine, a proud, imposing, elderly slave raconteur, creates a narrative that...
Mother Jones: Back in Alabama
Blog post Mother Jones died ninety years ago, but she was back in Alabama this July. It was not her first visit to the state. She came to Birmingham and...