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...
Gold Records in Deep Space
The more that traces of American roots music are turned into prized relics, the more lifeless the music becomes. Only by acknowledging roots music's ephemeral and fragile qualities do its...
"This is Not Dixie:" The Imagined South, the Kansas Free State Narrative, and the Rhetoric of Racist Violence
Introduction Emporia, Kansas, 1909 Library of Congress American Memory Archive The South "is as much a fiction, a story we tell and are told, as it is a fixed geographic...
The X-Codes: A Post-Katrina Postscript
The X-Codes: A Post-Katrina Postscript Dorothy Moye, Upper Ninth Ward house with "KEN" marking from private contractor, 2009. It was a late afternoon in June 2006, and I was lost...
A City Divided
Introduction In spite of increasing animosity between workers and elites, blacks and whites, through the turn of the century, Atlanta's residential landscape remained curiously heterogeneous in terms of race and...
Voting Rights and Southern Legislatures Post-Shelby County v. Holder
Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., June 7, 2009. Photograph by Mark Fischer. Courtesy of Mark Fischer. As our bulletins have previously reported, legislatures in a number of southern states...
"Out Yonder on the Road": Working Class Self-Representation and the 1939 Roadside Demonstration in Southeast Missouri
Introduction In the early morning hours of January 10, 1939, more than fifteen hundred men, women and children piled their meager belongings along US Highways 60 and 61 in the...
Toxic Knowledge: A Review of Baptized in PCBs
Review In 2001, lifelong Anniston, Alabama, resident Ruth Mims was called to testify in a lawsuit against the multinational corporation Monsanto. Monsanto had owned and operated a chemical manufacturing facility...
Ungesund: Yellow Fever, the Antebellum Gulf South, and German Immigration
Introduction During the antebellum era, New Orleans became the second largest port of US immigration after New York City, leading hundreds of thousands of Germans to begin new lives at...
Routes of Reconciliation: Visiting Sites of Cultural Trauma in the US South, Northern Ireland, and South Africa
Introduction During the summer of 2008, I travelled to Northern Ireland and South Africa as part of "Race, Religion, and Reconciliation," a project which brought together three faculty members and...