Brushes with War
...Oil on Canvas by Winslow Homer. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession Number 22.207. Edging past Homer's iconic sniper, visitors to the DC venue had plenty to see—a display of sixty...
Three Black Towns: An Excerpt from Black Landscapes Matter
Excerpt After the end of the Civil War, recently freed Black people endeavored to create their own communities. During Reconstruction, and with newfound access to political and economic power, Black...
Georgia Slavery, Georgia Freedom
Review From colonial founders' initial resistance to slavery to antebellum whites' embrace of it, Watson W. Jennison's Cultivating Race charts the first hundred years of Georgia's Anglo, African, and Native American...
Unquiet Emmett Till
Review Emmett Till continues to torment our imaginations. How could two (and almost certainly more) grown men, veterans, over six feet tall, see a fourteen year old kid as such...
Reckoning with Enslavement
Excerpt Georgetown, April 2017 It was early morning when I crossed the Francis Scott Key Bridge from Virginia into Georgetown. College spires loomed in the distance, gray in the dawn...
Haiti and the Fear of Insurrection: A Review of The Slaveholding Crisis
Review Warning the governor of Kentucky that the white South stood on the brink of destruction in 1860, secession commissioner Stephen F. Hale wrote that Lincoln's election "inaugurates all the...
The Law and the Mississippi Basin: A Review of Mississippi River Tragedies
Review The present system of flood control in the Mississippi Valley is a compromise resulting from a long and complicated interplay among interest groups. The current solution to the problem...
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...
"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...