Reading Charles Reagan Wilson’s “Judgment & Grace in Dixie”

Few things define Southern culture like our habit of transposing religion onto anything from government policies and business models to baby names and decorated tote-bags. Whether somebody dies, travels, or takes a math test…

Myths are the truths we live by.

The American South has been called a land of myth by more historians, literary critics, sociologists…

Reagan at Neshoba, August 1980

Reagan was a product of the SoCal branch of Republican Party, but his…

Reading Jack Temple Kirby’s “The Countercultural South”

If the rural worlds were lost in 1960, then what came next?

In his 2009 obituary in The New York Times, Jack Temple Kirby was described as “a historian who decried…

“I mean, what am I supposed to write about?”

In my role as a high school writing teacher, I’ve heard the question hundreds of times and tried to help students struggling with this age-old quandary. So when I was wording the theme for Nobody’s Home, designing a subject for other people to write…

Five Historians and Journalists on the Modern South

“The civil rights legislation also created a ‘crisis of victory.’ As King pointed out, the civil rights movement had dealt largely with surface issues- the right to drink a cup of coffee, to vote, to compete with whites for jobs. As…

Narratives, Old and New

We make our choices based on what we believe to be true, and the social and political forces that want our support know that . . .