Shades of Violence: Jim Crow Justice and Black Resistance in the Depression-Era South
Review In 1931, an all-white jury in Birmingham, Alabama, sentenced Willie Peterson to death for a mysterious attack that left two white women dead and a third critically injured. The...
Retelling Virginia's Migration History
Review Photographer unknown, Unidentified miners from southwest Virginia, 1930s. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Amid the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, numerous US cities and states are reexamining their...
Watching the Surface for a Sign
Readings Patrick Phillips reads "Brass Knuckles." Poem text Patrick Phillips reads "The Chimney." Poem text. Patrick Phillips reads "The Flood." Poem text Patrick Phillips reads "Heaven." Poem text Patrick Phillips reads an excerpt...
St. Catherines Island Flyover
Video and Essay One of the barrier islands along the Georgia coast of the Atlantic Ocean, St. Catherines has an extraordinary ecological and settlement history. First inhabited more than four...
Crossing Over: Sustainability, New Urbanism, and Gentrification in Austin, Texas
Greetings from Austin Greetings From Austin, Capitol of Texas. Photograph by Flickr user mirsasha (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). In July of 2011 Bon Appétit named Franklin Barbecue of Austin, Texas, the...
Remnants of Flannery
Flannery O'Connor's place in American literature is undisputed. A master of the short story, her The Complete Stories (1971) was voted the "favorite" of the sixty fiction winners of the...
The Black Civil Rights Movement on the Border
Review Lawrence Aaron Nixon, born in Marshall, Texas, in 1883—as Will Guzmán chronicles in Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands—grew to manhood at a time when whites in the Lone...
Changing Places, Changing Lives
Review An odd thing has happened on the way to the antebellum American past. Capitalism reigns; cotton is king; and work and workers are no longer studied together. Instead, slaves...
You Can't Eat Coal, and Other Lessons from Appalachian Women's History
Blog Post The activism of Appalachian women who took up the fight for justice in the 1960s and 1970s pulsed outward from a core ethic of care. Caregiving animated their...
Dirty Little Story
Essay Map of Fish Trap Hollow and northeastern Mississippi, 2012. ©OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA. The visitors are from Virginia, a state that simply sounds clean. There are two young children and a...