Conflict and the Senses: A Review of The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege
Review Sensory history is an exciting new approach to writing history. It offers a fresh take on past perceptions. Sensing between the lines of written sources, the sensory historian recasts...
Closer to the Ground: A Conversation with Ann Pancake
Introduction As a child, Ann Pancake dreamed of escaping from West Virginia. Achieving this goal as a young adult, however, only served to strengthen her emotional and cultural bonds to...
"The Ohio River Was Not the River Jordan": A Review of Matthew Salafia's Slavery's Borderland
Review The Ohio River figures prominently in what are arguably the three most significant novels of American slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Toni Morrison's Beloved both feature...
Southwestern Humor: The Beginning of "Grit Lit"
Southwestern Humor Southwestern humor is perhaps the most intriguing of southern antebellum literary genres, for writers of this loose-knit "school," often contributors to sporting or gentlemen's magazines, abandoned the plantation...
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...
Wherein the South Differs from the North: Naming Persons, Naming Places, and the Need for Visionary Geographies
Essay No Southerner by origin, Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. "As I am an ardent Californian," she has Alice B. Toklas say in The Autobiography, "and as she...
Wanted eLove: Queer Square Spaces and the Revolution in Digital Intimacy
...Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan (New York: Routledge, 1997): 380–388. Martha Shelley's "Gay is Good," modeled after homophile activist Frank Kameny's earlier coining of that phrase, understood that "the worst...
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...
Documenting Migrants: An Interview with Charles D. Thompson
...tomorrow to talk about it." At lunch, he invited us to go to Jacaltenango and live in his house. We did, and that's how I began Brother Towns. When I...
Encountering COVID
...sleep, and let it go. Because I know that I have to go back tomorrow and do it again. About the Author Michelle Fishburne is a full-time digital nomad, splitting...