“I once listened attentively as a native New Yorker explained the South to some newcomers more recent than he. ‘What made this place possible was the invention of air conditioning,’ he pronounced. ‘Before that, nobody could live here.'” I once listened attentively as a native New Yorker explained the South to some newcomers more recent »

“When Lee surrendered at Appomattox, there were already 1,800 Union dead from First Manassas buried in his wife’s rose garden.” As Robert E. Lee lay dying on the morning of October 12, 1870, some 16,000 Union soldiers moldered in their graves outside the front doors of Arlington House. The Lees’ beloved family home had been »

“‘Alcohol undermines the health, enfeebles the will, makes the mind coarse and the tongue vulgar, brings discord to the family, deprives children of their rights, lowers the standard of morals, corrupts politics, fills prisons and asylums with human wrecks, mocks religion and ruins immortal souls.'” On a recent trip to Pittsburgh, I was struck by »

“For years I had wanted to visit Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, that battlefield where the direction of the nation’s history changed, the center of more than a century of memorialization. Yet, no amount of reading prepared me for its effect.” When I was growing up in Lexington, Kentucky, one of the most powerful objects in that small, »

“It’s a kind of monster, cobbled from parts of other creatures—” On Being Asked to Pray for a VanMy evangelical brethren have let me know,via the quarterly fundraising letter,that they can’t get the gospel aroundbecause their van has given up the ghost.God in the machine, help them.

“Although I had been around chitlins from time to time all through my childhood, I always considered the actual eating of them as a spectator sport. In the first place, they stank.” Chitlins, as all the world knows, are guts—specifically, the small intestines of pigs, cleaned and scrubbed through several changes of cold water with »

“I stood on the back porch and gazed across the fresh spring grass toward the squat little outhouse nestled at the edge of the meadow, behind the old chicken coop. All outdoor toilets are not the same, and ours has some unusually fine qualities.” I flushed with excitement. After generations of anticipation, the house finally »

University of North Carolina Press, 2010 Anne Mitchell Whisnant begins her book with her own memories and early experiences of the Blue Ridge Parkway, and I shall begin this review likewise: In my case, the year was 1958. With my wife, our two sons aged 6 months and 3½ years, and a newly granted degree »