An Unflinching Look: An Interview with Photographer Benjamin Dimmitt
Bransford: Before we talk about An Unflinching Look: Elegy for Wetlands, can you talk about your personal history with the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge? And then describe the Refuge in...
The Pursuit of Health: Colonialism and Hookworm Eradication in Puerto Rico
Public Health Crossings Top, Colonel Bailey K. Ashford, ca. 1893. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Image is in public domain. Bottom, William H. Hunt, Governor of Puerto Rico, 1901–1904. Courtesy of...
Africana Archives: Making Art at the Schomburg
Howard Dodson, Making Art at the Schomburg: Africana Archives as Sites of Art Making (Part 1 of 3), 2014. Art making has been a critical aspect of the human experience...
Separate and Unequal Schools: The Past Is Future
Introduction On the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in the nation’s public schools, the states of the southern US are pushing to reestablish...
From Arkansas with Love: Evangelical Crisis Management and Southern (White) Gospel Music
The Best of the Martins, 2011. Gaither Gospel Series DVD cover. © Slanted Records and The Martins. For the past forty years or so, "southern gospel" has named a professional...
Jim Crow Journeys: An Excerpt from Traveling Black
Excerpt: "Jim Crow Journeys" The humiliations involved in traveling Jim Crow began before Black travelers even boarded their trains. By the beginning of the 1890s the proliferation of separate car...
Wild Notes: A Review of Dawoud Bey’s Elegy
Introduction One night in the spring of 2006, I found myself on the edges of Richmond, Virginia’s Shockoe Bottom neighborhood with a group of reluctant adolescents from my church youth...
The Shenandoah Valley
The Shenandoah Valley Edward Beyer, Digital Restoration of "Harper's Ferry from Jefferson Rock" from Album of Virginia: Illustrations of the Old Dominion, 1858. The Shenandoah Valley's history marks it as...
Lyle Saxon and the WPA Guide to New Orleans
Essay Canal Street, Separating the Old from the New City, from the WPA Guide to New Orleans. Reminders of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal are hard to miss in many American...
New Shades o'Death Creek
Excerpt Set in West Virginia, this excerpt from Giardina's novel of time-space travel, Fallam's Secret (2003), evokes the physical and emotional landscapes of mountaintop removal in the southern Appalachians. On...