“As a place where Black and Green were in perpetual contact, the Atlantic South furnishes an ideal case study in how these peoples moved with, against, and around one another.”This article appears in the Spring 2012 issue of Southern Cultures. The full issue is also available as an ebook.Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at C...

Bryan Giemza challenges the myth of the solitary genius, both in scientific and humanistic endeavors, and demonstrates how Cormac McCarthy is the exceptional figure whose work allows and encourages us to interrogate the marriage of the sciences and humanities.Drawing from previously unsurfaced archival connections as well as a range of primary sources and interview subjects, including those close to McCarthy, Giemza places McCarthy's work within contemporary scientific dis...

In this comprehensive study, Bryan Giemza retrieves a missing chapter of Irish Catholic heritage by canvassing the literature of American Irish writers from the U.S. South.Beginning with the first Irish American novel, published in Winchester, Virginia, in 1817, Giemza investigates nineteenth-century writers contending with the turbulence of their time -- writers influenced by both American and Irish revolutions, dramatists and propagandists of the Civil War, and memoirists of the L...

Much of American popular culture depicts the 1930s South either as home to a population that was intellectually, morally, and physically stunted, or as a romantic, sentimentalized haven untouched by the nation’s financial troubles. Though these images stand as polar opposites, each casts the South as an exceptional region that stood separate from American norms. Reassessing the 1930s South brings together historians, art critics, and literary scholars to provide a new social and c...

Grounded in critical theory, southern studies, archival methodologies, and anticolonial thought, Record, Document, Archive illuminates how the U.S. South is made knowable through the acts, objects, and systems that produce records, documents, and archives. Rather than treating “the South” as a fixed geography or predetermined object of study, this innovative, forward-thinking collection reframes region as an ontological and epistemological project shaped by—and resistant to—Euroce...

In an era defined by information overload and polarized discourse, Sowing the West Texas Wind brings together a diverse array of scholars, scientists, journalists, and legal experts to examine the rise of misinformation and its real-world impacts. The scope goes from the deeply local to the national and global to understand how trust is won and lost. With a focus on the last decade’s most defining crises—including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate disinformation, and election interfe...

Studies of the Irish presence in America have tended to look to the main corridors of emigration, and hence outside the American South. Yet the Irish constituted a significant minority in the region. Indeed, the Irish fascination expresses itself in southern context in powerful, but disparate, registers: music, literature, and often, a sense of shared heritage. Rethinking the Irish in the American South aims to create a readable, thorough introduction to the subject, establishing ...

Studies of the Irish presence in America have tended to look to the main corridors of emigration, and hence outside the American South. Yet the Irish constituted a significant minority in the region. Indeed, the Irish fascination expresses itself in Southern context in powerful, but disparate, registers: music, literature, and often, a sense of shared heritage. Rethinking the Irish in the South aims to create a readable, thorough introduction to the subject, establishing new groun...

A Depression-era comic masterpiece, E. P. O'Donnell's The Great Big Doorstep centers on the Crochets, a Cajun family who live in a ramshackle house between the levee and the Mississippi River. The Crochets dream of one day owning a stately plantation befitting the magnificent cypress doorstep they have salvaged from the river and proudly display outside their humble home.The memorable characters in this novel have their own concerns: the patriarch, Commodo, is full of wild bravado ...