I'm not sure that I'm quite as pessimistic as labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein about the early 21st century South. But he's certainly right about the attempt to reinstitute white supremacy. We used to call it the “New South.” That was the era after Reconstruction and...
the south
Gabriel Winant's long-form book review of Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. A brief excerpt: People, too, suffered the violence of abstraction. Over.
This is super cool. Old news, but I didn't know about it and I assume most of you didn't either. Folklorist Alan Lomax spent his career documenting folk music traditions.
Patterson Hood with a long essay on what has become his lasting statement, as much as he might not always be comfortable with it, the duality of the southern thing, particularly in the context of a South that is changing rapidly. The song begins at...
George Packer's comments on the terribleness of Southern politics has inspired a number of responses, most notably from Gary Wills. These discussions frustrate me though for a number of reasons..