http://www.southernspaces.org Southern Spaces is a peer-reviewed, online journal exploring the real and imagined places of the American South and their connections with the wider world. We welcome submissions from scholars, photographers, and visual artists in such areas as geography, southern studies, regional studies, African American, Native, and American Studies, women's studies, LGBTQ studies, and public health. Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:56:15 GMT ListGarden Program 1.3.1 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2009/spears/1a.htm Ellen Spears examines the ongoing struggle to create a memorial honoring the Freedom Riders during the 1961 bus bombing in Anniston, Alabama. Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:56:13 GMT http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2009/webb/1a.htm Clive Webb revisits the 1958 bombing of the Atlanta Reform Temple, when militant white supremacists expressed their resistance to segregation and civil rights by dynamiting the most prominent symbol of Jewish life and culture in Atlanta. While members of white radical groups like the National States Rights Party hoped the blast would ignite a full-scale race war against Jews and blacks in the South, it instead served to underscore support for Jews and liberal racial attitudes. Using archival material, including letters of support sent after the bombing and propaganda materials from the National States Rights Party, Webb examines the complex ways in which the bombing and its aftermath affected Atlanta's Jews, blacks fighting for civil rights, and segregationist southern whites. Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:55:33 GMT http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2009/bauer/1a.htm In this interview with Louisiana native Margaret D. Bauer, author Tim Gautreaux discusses a quarter century of his fiction writing. Resisting simplistic labels of "Cajun" and "southern," Gautreaux's storytelling reveals an intimate understanding of southern Louisiana's white, working-class people and culture. Often drawn from his own background, Gautreaux's characters are shaped by a range of experiences, from working on steamboats and fighting in world wars, to struggling in the 1980s oil bust. Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:53:11 GMT http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2009/giardina/1a.htm Set in West Virginia, this excerpt from Giardina's novel of time-space travel, <em>Fallam's Secret</em> (2003), evokes the physical and emotional landscapes of mountaintop removal in the southern Appalachians. Thu, 21 May 2009 15:15:53 GMT http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2009/wood/1a.htm Amy Louise Wood revisits an Operahouse lynching in Livermore, Kentucky. Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:52:59 GMT http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2009/white/1a.htm Arguing that "we cannot fully understand our system of governance or the economic world we have created without understanding how corporations have comandeered the political process in order to compete with each other," Richard White revisits the late nineteenth century railroad wars between Tom Scott and Colis P. Huntington. He discusses how these powerful and desperate men created strategies of finance, communication, and politics, as well as "friendship" networks in order to shape beneficial relationships with the federal government — practices that continue in the present. Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:55:26 GMT http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2009/phillips/1a.htm Patrick Phillips grew up in Forsyth County, Georgia, at the northern edge of the Atlanta metropolitan region. Recorded near the town of Cumming and along Lake Lanier, the poems presented here delve into family, place, conflict, and time's effects. Phillips finds mystery and ambivalence in childhood's physical and emotional landscapes, scratches the idyllic patina of family lore, and moves between the surfaces and depths of the natural world. Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:30:38 GMT http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2009/mcgehee/1a.htm Using murder mysteries to address what she saw as destructive, rather than progressive, forces coming from the city into the countryside of north Fulton County, Georgia, journalist and fiction writer Celestine Sibley (1914-1999) attempted to present the city of Atlanta and the region beyond it as antithetical. Sibley's once beloved city had come to represent the forces of greed and capitalism encroaching upon what she viewed as the rural simplicity and goodness of country living. However, these novels in effect reveal the two ideologically separate spatial entities as connected within the broader economic processes of late-twentieth-century urban sprawl and within broader historical patterns of race relations in the Atlanta metropolitan region. Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:39:47 GMT http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2009/horton/1a.htm James Oliver Horton explores how slavery is discussed at Arlington House, a National Park Service historic site and pre–Civil War home of the Custis-Lee family. Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:26:38 GMT http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2009/jones/1a.htm The four poems presented here highlight Rodney Jones's relationship to his hometown of Falkville, Alabama. For Jones, place-bound memories of youthful pleasures frame meditations on mortality and mystery. His teenage years as a football player and rock and roll band member are a starting point from which to measure the distance that time and experience have created between himself and the region in which he grew up. Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:15:37 GMT http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2008/hanson/1a.htm Part of a wave of local, post-WWII "barn dance"-style, country music shows, the <em>Tennessee Jamboree</em> radio program was modeled on earlier, nationally popular programs like Nashville's Grand Ole Opry and Chicago's National Barn Dance. The Tennessee Jamboree reimagined and reshaped the genre into a platform for local cultural expression. Drawing upon newly recovered broadcasts, interviews with <em>Jamboree</em> participants, and images from the Tennessee State Archive and Library, Bradley Hanson resituates the <em>Tennessee Jamboree</em> within several historical and cultural contexts that help to illuminate the expressive life of Lafollette, Tennessee, the broad sweep of regional broadcasting, and the incomplete chronicle of the barn dance genre. Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:32:04 GMT http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2008/bransford/1a.htm Steve Bransford's "Gold Records in Deep Space" traces the relationship between roots music and documentary film. Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:27:46 GMT Christine McCulloch Using letters from the Flannery O'Connor-Betty Hester collection, Christine McCulloch explores O'Connor's life at Andalusia, her farm outside Milledgeville, Georgia, as expressed through her commentary on its landscapes and characters. Supplemented by Nancy Marshall's photographs of Andalusia and excerpts from the letters housed at Emory's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, this essay suggests connections between Andalusia as a lived space and the imagined spaces that O’Connor created through her fiction. Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:20:15 GMT http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2008/conner/1a.htm In June 2008, Robin Conner and Paul Johnson drove from Atlanta, Georgia, to northern Virginia, exploring and documenting drive-in theaters. They discovered a range of outdoor theaters struggling to stay commercially viable. While two were defunct, one was revitalized through the creation of a non-profit. Many theaters were even thriving through well-designed appeal to audiences of hipsters, families, and moviegoers looking to consume nostalgia at the drive-in. In this photo essay, Conner and Johnson offer a brief history of drive-in theaters and illustrate their diversity across contemporary southern rural, urban, and suburban spaces. Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:22:13 GMT http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2008/howard/1a.htm John Howard's essay "John Yoshida in Arkansas, 1943" revisits a Japanese American concentration camp. Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:05:33 GMT