Essay
BUY ACCESS
by Harry Watson
“Aunt Caroline called my brother and me over to her rocker and pressed into our hands two copies of a grey-bound pamphlet, one for each of us. A tiny red, white, and blue Battle Flag accented its cover, just below the title: ‘Some Things for which the South Did Not Fight in the War Between »
Essay
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Co. Aytch and the Confederate Sensibility of Loss
by Edward John Harcourt
“Just as any man had ‘as much right to make a dictionary as Mr. Webster,’ he had as much right to write a history of the war as any Confederate general.” The Confederate undead have a way of rising, zombie-like, to haunt the American landscape,” the journalist Tony Horwitz wrote recently in the Washington Post following the »
Essay
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Finding Historical Meaning in Confederate Memorial Hall
by John Bardes
“The museum offers no chronological or thematic organization. Without context, its objects drift in ether, detached and baffling.” In May of 2017, as the world watched mammoth cranes in New Orleans lower a sixteen-foot-tall likeness of Robert E. Lee from a sixty-foot-tall marble column, few took note of the stately brick building behind the warring »
Photo Essay
by Rachel Boillot
Down in the valley,Valley so lowHang your head overHear the wind blow Down in the valley,Walking between,Telling our storyHere’s what it sings. ”Down in the Valley,” ballad collected by Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (1927) Reflective, mysterious moments of pause punctuate portraits of musicians and artists in the Cumberland Plateau, highlighting the vacuum of time »
Essay
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The Ford Campaign and the Challenge of Jimmy Carter's Southernness
by Zachary J. Lechner
“With much on the line—but virtually nothing to lose—Ford undertook a halting, intermittently bold, and ultimately ill-fated campaign to undermine Carter’s regional credibility.” America’s bicentennial was supposed to be a year of triumphant celebration. Although the nation could look back proudly on its founding, the present looked grim. Americans, after all, were still reeling from »
Music
by Shawn Pitts
This essay is excerpted from the Winter 2017 issue (vol. 23, no. 4). To read the essay in full, access via Project Muse (link at bottom). Nothing much would have been stirring in the sleepy little hamlet of Bethel Springs as Carl Perkins passed through. The bustling McNairy County seat, five miles farther south, was »
Food
Remembering Jean Mihalyka
by Bernard L. Herman
Our foraging friends on Occohannock Neck, Malcolm and Carol, assured us that there was a summer moment in which field corn achieved perfection for the plate—and then as quickly reverted to the unpalatable starches desired for animal feed. To prove their assertion, they invited us for a supper anchored with cold smoked venison, grilled fish, »
Essay
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Contested Landscapes and Latinization in Greater Orlando
by Simone Delerme
“[The 65th Infantry Memorial] continues to be one of the most important symbols of Osceola County’s Latinization and a significant political victory for some of the South’s newest residents.” The phone call about the park came one afternoon in February 2011. Michael, a retired resident of Buenaventura Lakes (bvl), a majority–Puerto Rican suburb twenty miles »
Poetry
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by Emilia Phillips
I need to start being honestwith my constituents—the mirror and hemlock, the just barely partedblinds and, behind them, my naked body in its easy laborsof making coffee and sighing heavily.I dare someone to accidentally glimpse my nudepantomime of minding my own business. Sometimes I’ve got to be angry to be inthe mood for being angry. »
