THIS issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review marks the completion of fifty years of publication. In April 1925, under the founding editorship of James Southall Wilson, the VQR first appeared as "a national journal of discussion published in the South ...peculiarly concerned with themes growing out of the life and problems of the people of the South and especially cordial to the work of able Southern writers, yet ...in no sense a magazine of a section." Its aim, now as then, is to be "liberal but reasonable; open to the discussions of all topics and to all stimulating and engaging points of view."

Through fifty years, in a changing world, the Virginia Quarterly has held steadily to its purpose as a journal of independent thought. This anniversary number has been planned with the view of including only authors whose work has appeared in the magazine before and for whom we hold a special and high regard. The contributors represent many diversified and even conflicting points of view and manners of expression. Yet each has had a share in the VQR's past as well as in its present.

"The Great Re-Awakening" is by Harry S. Ashmore, who since 1967 has been a Senior Fellow and Executive Vice-Président of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California. In 1955, when he wrote "An Epitaph for Dixie" for the thirtieth anniversary number, he was editor of the Arkansas Gazette and in the forefront of the Little Rock school integration controversy.