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Vol. 11, No. 1: Spring 2005

  //  spring 2005

Have you ever made a valentine for Eudora Welty? What did the Rebels do in the wake of 9-11? Where’s the hottest Civil War reenactment in the South? Does the Sacred Heart of Jesus ever visit Death Row? Are we all Southerners here?

Table of Contents
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Front Porch: Spring 2005

by Harry L. Watson
“Southern identity is a moving target. Its meaning keeps changing and so do those who claim it.” Who is a southerner? There have been many answers to this question, but until most recently they have all had something in common. Writing in 1928, Georgia-born historian Ulrich B. Phillips famously proclaimed that “a common resolve, indomitably »

Southerners All?

by Larry J. Griffin, Ranae Jo Evenson, Ashley B. Thompson
“Exactly who is a southerner, exactly who wishes to be a southerner, and who is thought to have the right to claim southern identity are now highly uncertain.” For most of its history, the South, in the unforgettable words of southern-born Yale historian U. B. Phillips, was “a white man’s country,” and so “southerners”—the possessors, »

South to Death

by Earl Higgins
“Those who are given the power by law to exercise mercy become too intoxicated, overwhelmed by the power to end life; they can no longer grant the mercy advocated by the scriptural teachings they purport to follow. Matthew 5:7, for example, instructs, ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.'” Driving across the South, »
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Rebels in the Wake of 9-11: Homecoming Weekend in Oxford, Mississippi, October 2001

by Katy Vinroot O'Brien
“The usual terrain of southern homecoming celebrations—cheerleaders rah-rahhing, smartly clad members of the homecoming court soaking up the crowd, mothers and babies at parade’s edge, hastily built fraternity floats—contrast with markers of heightened national pride and sudden, uncomfortable transformation.” Grief, fear, pride, love, sympathy, courage, anger, hate. The attacks of 9-11 provoked a mix of »
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“Bartram’s Trail” and “Pawley’s Island Shakedown”

by Thorpe Moeckel
“There’s no horizon, / no line on the Atlantic. . .” Bartram’s Trail To follow Bartram’s trail upstream, past Tugaloo, to cross the Chattooga River at Earl’s Ford, to go up the Warwoman Valley, up past the cascades & bridalveils of Finney Creek, up along the Continental Divide between Rabun Bald & Hickory Knob, is »
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A Valentine for Miss Welty

by Ann Taylor Peden
“Thank you, heart lady.” I was about five years old—and being dragged along on another of a series of errands that generally didn’t hold much interest for me. But this trip held promise. We were going to one of my favorite places . . . the bookstore. And for some reason my mom seemed to »
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Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, by Michael B. Montgomery and Joseph S. Hall (Review)

by Michael Chitwood
The University of Tennessee Press, 2004 For Appalachians of a certain generation, the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English is not a reference work. It’s memoir. While I grew up watching Gilligan’s Island and American Bandstand, I also heard, repeatedly, the story of how my father was made fun of when asked for his merchandise to »
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The Social Origins of the Urban South: Race, Gender, and Migration in Nashville and Middle Tennessee, 1890-1930, by Louis M. Kyriakoudes (Review)

by Tom Hanchett
University of North Carolina Press, 2003 One of the biggest stories in the South of a century ago was the mass migration from farms to cities. The movement had begun with the creation of railroads in the mid-nineteenth century, maturing into a full-fledged network by the 1890s. Rail junctions became hotbeds of economic opportunity, and »
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