Enslaved Labor and Building the Smithsonian: Reading the Stones
...Smithsonian Institution Archives. On Jan. 15, 1850, either the white gardener and florist John Howlett or Jonathan Clark were compensated for the labor (one half day each) of "two colored...
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]
...large single tulip motif. Each tulip blossom has five points and is attached to a stem having two small leaves. Compared with other appliquéd floral patterns, these "Carolina" Tulip quilts...
Somewhere Like Real Life: On Richard Linklater's Boyhood
...gawking tourists, all staples of premiers up at Grauman's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard.1We should all refuse to call Grauman's Chinese Theater, with its famed footprints of the stars out...
"Aint that Something?"
...drinking water, caused flash floods, forced people to leave their ancestral homes, and cut jobs (since mining companies have mechanized, they need fewer miners). Despite the loss of jobs and...
Mississippi Delta
...reaction to flooding, which continued to disrupt the agricultural economy. Delta people lived through eleven major floods between 1858 and 1922, but the 1927 Mississippi River flood was the worst...
"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...
New Histories of Environmental Activism: A Review of Rethinking the American Environmental Movement
...of Washington Press, 2012). Sergeants using a DDT sprayer, August 15, 1951. Photograph by Flickr user otisarchives4. Creative Commons license CC BY 2.0. The core of Spears's book centers on...
Trying the Dark: Mammoth Cave and the Racial Imagination, 1839–1869
...flannel "costumes"—coats and trousers for the men, and for the ladies petticoats, bloomers, and "stuffed skull-caps"—that were meant to protect heads from painful bumps against the cave ceiling. Tourists would...
A Real American Horror Story: On Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave
...and its auteur to garner several more golden statues. Just don't expect the drama to be confined to the movie itself. When McQueen went up to receive his honor at...