A classic tale by Newbery Medalist Kate DiCamillo, America's beloved storyteller. One summer’s day, ten-year-old India Opal Buloni goes down to the local supermarket for some groceries – and comes home with a dog. But Winn-Dixie is no ordinary dog. It’s because of Winn-Dixie that Opal begins to make friends. And it’s because of Winn-Dixie that she finally dares to ask her father about her mother, who left when Opal was three. In fact, as Opal admits, just about everything that happens that summer is because of Winn-Dixie. Featuring a new cover illustration by E. B. Lewis.
When Latino migration to the U.S. South became increasingly visible in the 1990s, observers and advocates grasped for ways to analyze "new" racial dramas in the absence of historical reference points. However, as this book is the first to comprehensively document, Mexicans and Mexican Americans have a long history of migration to the U.S. South. Corazon de Dixie recounts the untold histories of Mexicanos' migrations to New Orleans, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina as far back as 1910. It follows Mexicanos into the heart of Dixie, where they navigated the Jim Crow system, cultivated community in the cotton fields, purposefully appealed for help to the Mexican government, shaped the southern conservative imagination in the wake of the civil rights movement, and embraced their own version of suburban living at the turn of the twenty-first century. Rooted in U.S. and Mexican archival research, oral history interviews, and family photographs, Corazon de Dixie unearths not just the facts of Mexicanos' long-standing presence in the U.S. South but also their own expectations, strategies, and dreams.
From the late nineteenth century through World War II, popular culture portrayed the American South as a region ensconced in its antebellum past, draped in moonlight and magnolias, and represented by such southern icons as the mammy, the belle, the chival
What can local histories of interracial conflict and collaboration teach us about the potential for urban equity and social justice in the future? Courtney Elizabeth Knapp chronicles the politics of gentrification and culture-based development in Chattanooga, Tennessee, by tracing the roots of racism, spatial segregation, and mainstream "cosmopolitanism" back to the earliest encounters between the Cherokee, African Americans, and white settlers. For more than three centuries, Chattanooga has been a site for multiracial interaction and community building; yet today public leaders have simultaneously restricted and appropriated many contributions of working-class communities of color within the city, exacerbating inequality and distrust between neighbors and public officials. Knapp suggests that "diasporic placemaking"—defined as the everyday practices through which uprooted people create new communities of security and belonging—is a useful analytical frame for understanding how multiracial interactions drive planning and urban development in diverse cities over time. By weaving together archival, ethnographic, and participatory action research techniques, she reveals the political complexities of a city characterized by centuries of ordinary resistance to racial segregation and uneven geographic development.
Focusing on the impact of the Savannah River Plant (SRP) on the communities it created, rejuvenated, or displaced, this book explores the parallel militarization and modernization of the Cold War-era South. The SRP, a scientific and industrial complex near Aiken, South Carolina, grew out of a 1950 partnership between the Atomic Energy Commission and the DuPont Corporation and was dedicated to producing materials for the hydrogen bomb. Kari Frederickson shows how the needs of the expanding national security state, in combination with the corporate culture of DuPont, transformed the economy, landscape, social relations, and politics of this corner of the South. In 1950, the area comprising the SRP and its surrounding communities was primarily poor, uneducated, rural, and staunchly Democratic; by the mid-1960s, it boasted the most PhDs per capita in the state and had become increasingly middle class, suburban, and Republican. The SRP's story is notably dramatic; however, Frederickson argues, it is far from unique. The influx of new money, new workers, and new business practices stemming from Cold War-era federal initiatives helped drive the emergence of the Sunbelt. These factors also shaped local race relations. In the case of the SRP, DuPont's deeply conservative ethos blunted opportunities for social change, but it also helped contain the radical white backlash that was so prominent in places like the Mississippi Delta that received less Cold War investment.
In 1891, when coal companies in eastern Tennessee brought in cheap convict labor to take over their jobs, workers responded by storming the stockades, freeing the prisoners, and loading them onto freight trains. Over the next year, tactics escalated to include burning company property and looting company stores. This was one of the largest insurrections in US working-class history. It happened at the same time as the widely publicized northern labor war in Homestead, Pennsylvania. And it was largely ignored, then and now. Dixie Be Damned engages seven similarly "hidden" insurrectionary episodes in Southern history to demonstrate the region's long arc of revolt. Countering images of the South as pacified and conservative, this adventurous retelling presents history in the rough. Not the image of the South many expect, this is the South of maroon rebellion, wildcat strikes, and Robert F. Williams's book Negroes with Guns, a South where the dispossessed refuse to quietly suffer their fate. This is people's history at its best: slave revolts, multiracial banditry, labor battles, prison uprisings, urban riots, and more. Neal Shirley grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and now lives in Durham, NC, where he is involved in several anti-prison initiatives and runs a small publishing project called the North Carolina Piece Corps. Saralee Stafford was born in the Piedmont of North Carolina. Her recent political work has focused on connecting the struggles of street organizations with those of anarchists in the area. She teaches gender-related health in Durham, North Carolina.
Rock & roll has transformed American culture more profoundly than any other art form. During the 1960s, it defined a generation of young people as political and social idealists, helped end the Vietnam War, and ushered in the sexual revolution. In Dixie Lullaby, veteran music journalist Mark Kemp shows that rock also renewed the identity of a generation of white southerners who came of age in the decade after segregation -- the heyday of disco, Jimmy Carter, and Saturday Night Live. Growing up in North Carolina in the 1970s, Kemp experienced pain, confusion, and shame as a result of the South's residual civil rights battles. His elementary school was integrated in 1968, the year Kemp reached third grade; his aunts, uncles, and grandparents held outdated racist views that were typical of the time; his parents, however, believed blacks should be extended the same treatment as whites, but also counseled their children to respect their elder relatives. "I loved the land that surrounded me but hated the history that haunted that land," Kemp writes. When rock music, specifically southern rock, entered his life, he began to see a new way to identify himself, beyond the legacy of racism and stereotypes of southern small-mindedness that had marked his early childhood. Well into adulthood Kemp struggled with the self-loathing familiar to many white southerners. But the seeds of forgiveness were planted in adolescence when he first heard Duane Allman and Ronnie Van Zant pour their feelings into their songs. In the tradition of music historians such as Nick Tosches and Peter Guralnick, Kemp masterfully blends into his narrative the stories of southern rock bands --from heavy hitters such as the Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and R.E.M. to influential but less-known groups such as Drive-By Truckers -- as well as the personal experiences of their fans. In dozens of interviews, he charts the course of southern rock & roll. Before civil rights, the popular music of the South was a small, often racially integrated world, but after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, black musicians struck out on their own. Their white counterparts were left to their own devices, and thus southern rock was born: a mix of popular southern styles that arose when predominantly white rockers combined rural folk, country, and rockabilly with the blues and jazz of African-American culture. This down-home, flannel-wearing, ass-kicking brand of rock took the nation by storm in the 1970s. The music gave southern kids who emulated these musicians a newfound voice. Kemp and his peers now had something they could be proud of: southern rock united them and gave them a new identity that went beyond outside perceptions of the South as one big racist backwater. Kemp offers a lyrical, thought-provoking, searingly intimate, and utterly original journey through the South of the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and '90s, viewed through the prism of rock & roll. With brilliant insight, he reveals the curative and unifying impact of rock on southerners who came of age under its influence in the chaotic years following desegregation. Dixie Lullaby fairly resonates with redemption.
This book explores the changing food culture of the urban American South during the Jim Crow era by examining how race, ethnicity, class, and gender contributed to the development and maintenance of racial segregation in public eating places. Significant legal changes later supported the unprecedented progress of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Buddhism in the United States is often viewed in connection with practitioners in the Northeast and on the West Coast, but in fact, it has been spreading and evolving throughout the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. In Dixie Dharma, Jeff Wilson argues that region is crucial to understanding American Buddhism. Through the lens of a multidenominational Buddhist temple in Richmond, Virginia, Wilson explores how Buddhists are adapting to life in the conservative evangelical Christian culture of the South, and how traditional Southerners are adjusting to these newer members on the religious landscape. Introducing a host of overlooked characters, including Buddhist circuit riders, modernist Pure Land priests, and pluralistic Buddhists, Wilson shows how regional specificity manifests itself through such practices as meditation vigils to heal the wounds of the slave trade. He argues that southern Buddhists at once use bodily practices, iconography, and meditation tools to enact distinct sectarian identities even as they enjoy a creative hybridity.
In the years following World War I, the New Orleans French Quarter attracted artists and writers with its low rents, faded charm, and colorful street life. By the 1920s Jackson Square had become the center of a vibrant if short-lived bohemia. A young William Faulkner and his roommate William Spratling, an artist who taught at Tulane University, resided among the "artful and crafty ones of the French Quarter." In Dixie Bohemia John Shelton Reed introduces Faulkner's circle of friends -- ranging from the distinguished Sherwood Anderson to a gender-bending Mardi Gras costume designer -- and brings to life the people and places of New Orleans in the Jazz Age. Reed begins with Faulkner and Spratling's self-published homage to their fellow bohemians, "Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles." The book contained 43 sketches of New Orleans artists, by Spratling, with captions and a short introduction by Faulkner. The title served as a rather obscure joke: Sherwood was not a Creole and neither were most of the people featured. But with Reed's commentary, these profiles serve as an entry into the world of artists and writers that dined on Decatur Street, attended masked balls, and blatantly ignored the Prohibition Act. These men and women also helped to establish New Orleans institutions such as the Double Dealer literary magazine, the Arts and Crafts Club, and Le Petit Theatre. But unlike most bohemias, the one in New Orleans existed as a whites-only affair. Though some of the bohemians were relatively progressive, and many employed African American material in their own work, few of them knew or cared about what was going on across town among the city's black intellectuals and artists. The positive developments from this French Quarter renaissance, however, attracted attention and visitors, inspiring the historic preservation and commercial revitalization that turned the area into a tourist destination. Predictably, this gentrification drove out many of the working artists and writers who had helped revive the area. As Reed points out, one resident who identified herself as an "artist" on the 1920 federal census gave her occupation in 1930 as "saleslady, real estate," reflecting the decline of an active artistic class. A charming and insightful glimpse into an era, Dixie Bohemia describes the writers, artists, poseurs, and hangers-on in the New Orleans art scene of the 1920s and illuminates how this dazzling world faded as quickly as it began.
