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Southern culture

Mississippi Kosher

May 19, 2015

As you drive in the summer toward Utica, Mississippi, the blacktop’s rising heat waves seem to melt away modernity. Jackson’s derelict retail sprawl ebbs, replaced by Southern countryside tropes—pine groves humming with cicadas, sunlit barns, f [...]

Alabama Goes Industrial

Alabama is not like any of the other southern states. It has, however, until the immediate present, accepted its social and economic philosophy from its sister commonwealths in Dixie. Two facts combine to make Alabama the best place to view the march [...]

Why the Southern Renaissance?

Why the Southern Renaissance ever occurred is still something of a mystery. All that is attempted here is an analysis of some explanations that have been offered by others and a few additional speculations. Before turning to the critical why, however, it is necessary to determine just what it is we are talking about. In the first place, we are stuck with a misnomer in the very word "renaissance." For neither in its literal sense nor in its classic historical usage is this French word really applicable to what happened in the South.

The House Slave

The first horn lifts its arm over the dew-lit grass
and in the slave quarters there is a rustling—
children are bundled into aprons, cornbread