The Past Is Not Dead
The Past Is Not Dead

Author: Douglas B. Chambers

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2012-07

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 1617033049

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The Past Is Not Dead is a collection of twenty-one literary and historical essays that will mark the 50th anniversary of the Southern Quarterly, one of the oldest scholarly journals (founded in 1962) dedicated to southern studies. Like its companion volume, Personal Souths, The Past Is Not Dead features the best of the work published in the journal. Essays represent every decade of the journal's history, from the 1960s to the 2000s. Topics covered range from historical essays on the French and Indian War, the New Deal, and Emmett Till's influence on the Black Panther Party to literary figures including William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers. Important regional subjects like the Natchez Trace, the Yazoo Basin, the Choctaw Indians, and Mississippi blues are given special attention. Contributors range from noted literary critics such as Margaret Walker Alexander, Virginia Spencer Carr, Susan V. Donaldson, James Justus, and Willie Morris to scholars of African-American studies such as Robert L. Hall and Manning Marble and historians including John Ray Skates, Martha Swain, and Randy Sparks. Collectively, the essays in this volume enrich and illuminate our understanding of southern history, literature, and culture.

The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861
The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861

Author: Jonathan Daniel Wells

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780807855539

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With a fresh take on social dynamics in the antebellum South, Jonathan Daniel Wells contests the popular idea that the Old South was a region of essentially two classes (planters and slaves) until after the Civil War. He argues that, in fact, the region h

The Sum of Trifles
The Sum of Trifles

Author: Julia Ridley Smith

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2021-11-01

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0820360422

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When Julia Ridley Smith’s parents died, they left behind a virtual museum of furniture, books, art, and artifacts. Between the contents of their home, the stock from their North Carolina antiques shop, and the ephemera of two lives lived, Smith faced a monumental task. What would she do with her parents’ possessions? Smith’s wise and moving memoir in essays, The Sum of Trifles, peels back the layers of meaning surrounding specific objects her parents owned, from an eighteenth-century miniature to her father’s prosthetics. A vintage hi-fi provides a view of her often tense relationship with her father, whose love of jazz kindled her own artistic impulse. A Japanese screen embodies her mother’s principles of good taste and good manners, while an antebellum quilt prompts Smith to grapple with her family’s slaveholding legacy. Along the way, she turns to literature that illuminates how her inheritance shaped her notions of identity and purpose. The Sum of Trifles offers up dark humor and raw feeling, mixed with an erudite streak. It’s a curious, thoughtful look at how we live in and with our material culture and how we face our losses as we decide what to keep and what to let go.