Essay
Dearly Beloveds, I am writing to you across a day I cannot predict. But maybe that is always true. You will receive this on a day shaped by the countless (and possibly still being counted) decisions that came before it. And that has also been true every day before this one. I am writing to you »
Photo Essay
Election Day is in the bag. Or dress. Or hat. As final votes are cast and tallied for the 2024 presidential election, photojournalist Kate Medley provides a dispatch from her work across the state of North Carolina covering the long election season, and gives us a glimpse of what’s in fashion across party lines. election »
Politics
North Carolina’s rural and low-income voters are expected to have a significant impact on this year’s presidential election, directly challenging the misconception that individuals in rural and low-income areas lack interest in politics or have minimal impact on electoral results. Their increased involvement reflects the efforts of local civic engagement organizations, which actively work with »
Politics
The following conversation took place on April 5, 2024, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of the thirtieth anniversary celebrations for the Center for the Study of the American South and Southern Cultures, and the launch of the journal’s special issue, The Vote, guest edited by Errin Haines. This conversation »
Essay
“The current iteration of voter suppression that has swept across the South has been met by renewed organizing efforts that remain determined to fully restore the Voting Rights Act and secure the promise of democracy.” The South has often served as the crucible for democracy, and in recent years, the COVID pandemic, new voting restrictions, »
Essay
“I think that white voters in the South are more nuanced than people think. I know that Black voters are more nuanced than folks think. And we have to begin to engage with the electorate in a different way because folks don’t want to engage with the South, but the South engages with you.” Courland »
Essay
“[The 2020 Democratic victory] was the culmination of a century and a half of efforts by Black citizens in Georgia to be able to vote, and the first election in the state’s history when the power of white conservatives and the presumption of white supremacy were decisively defeated.” Before the enactment of the Voting Rights »
Photo Essay
As Georgia poll workers came under fire for alleged election fraud in the 2020 presidential election, the accusations stood in stark contrast to my own experiences as a poll worker in North Carolina during the same election. I had signed myself up in response to the urgent plea for poll workers amidst the pandemic, when »
Essay
“‘Blocks for Freedom’ helped dozens of poor Black Mississippi women fight for the right to vote—not with marches and sit-ins but through making clothes, selling lunches, and hosting concerts.” In 1966, two women from drastically different backgrounds launched an innovative campaign to protect African American women’s voting rights in Mississippi. Oberia Holliday was a thirty-four-year-old »
Essay
“It is tempting to think of universal voting rights as one of the fundamental pillars of our country, but access to the vote has been hard fought and remains under attack.” The Voting Rights Act (VRA), which was signed into law on August 6, 1965, was a significant victory for the Civil Rights Movement, southern »
Essay
Three days after I turned eighteen, my mom, who was born in Jim Crow Florida, took me to register to vote at the same precinct where I grew up watching her vote. The experience taught me at an early age that voting was my birthright, something adults—and Black women in particular—did as good citizens. I »
Interview
Katharine Hayhoe is the Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy. She is also Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor and Endowed Chair in Public Policy and Public Law in the Public Administration program of the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University. Hayhoe has published over 125 peer-reviewed abstracts and publications and coauthored Downscaling Techniques for High-Resolution »