Voting Rights, the Supreme Court, and the Persistence of Southern History
...last four and a half decades of federal voting rights enforcement. For example, how many southern states have voluntarily enacted statutes and procedures that make voting more convenient for African...
"This is Not Dixie:" The Imagined South, the Kansas Free State Narrative, and the Rhetoric of Racist Violence
...its implications for the state's legacy. The Topeka Daily Capital ignored the dozens of racist mob killings stretching back to 1865 — including a burning-at-the-stake in 1867 — when it...
Opening Spaces: On Tolerance and the Possibility for Love
...All Strong: We Ranked All 50 from Fabulous to Failed," Politico Magazine, January 24, 2014, accessed February 3, 2014, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/states-of-our-union-are-not-all-strong-102547.html. The strongest state, Massachusetts, is ironically the most "fabulous" state,...
Hillside Refuge: Tornado Shelters in Northeast Mississippi
...number of reported tornadoes in the state each year is twenty-five, with sixty-two the highest number reported in a single year, and five the fewest. The average number of tornado-related...
Enslaved Labor and Building the Smithsonian: Reading the Stones
...the Peter slaves worked and lived. Standing near the Montevideo mansion are remnants of a stone slave quarters, in more recent years used as a youth hostel; we do not...
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...
Somewhere Like Real Life: On Richard Linklater's Boyhood
...of America's most experimental filmmakers. Most people who've heard of Boyhood know that it's doing something unique, though not entirely unprecedented in the history of cinema. Shot for a few...
"Aint that Something?"
..."racket." Most of the time Dawn stays with her grandmother, who is leading a grass-roots effort to petition the governor to stop the stripmining of Blue Bear Mountain, which rises...
Mississippi Delta
Essay Mississippi Delta region. Map by Stacey Martin, 2006. Sociologist Rupert Vance wrote in the 1930s of the "cotton obsessed, Negro obsessed" Mississippi Delta as "the deepest South." A half...
"We're Almost There": The Drive-By Truckers' Art of Place
...Rolling Stones, Dusty Springfield, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. The sounds of Hinton’s moment and Muscle Shoals’ moment are invoked in the very first song of Go-Go Boots. Part way through, “I...