Chapter 16

Empowering People for the Long Haul

Stephen Preskill revisits the story of Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School

By Peter Kuryla | May 5, 2021

Stephen Preskill’s Education in Black and White revisits the history of the Highlander Folk Center and its longtime director Myles Horton. The author weaves the stories of several activist-educators who, as they learned together at Highlander, imagined possibilities for participatory democratic life. Preskill will discuss the book at a virtual event hosted by Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 12.

Skin Deep

Nell Irvin Painter talks with Chapter 16 about The History of White People, the relationship between sex and beauty, and the necessity of the Black Lives Matter movement

By Peter Kuryla | July 6, 2020

Prior to her 2015 lecture at Rhodes College, historian Nell Irvin Painter talked with Chapter 16 about how the concept of race entered human consciousness, why notions of beauty are so inextricably linked to sex, and how contemporary readers should accommodate for historical wrong-headedness.

Seeing the Extraordinary in the Ordinary

William Eggleston’s photographs illuminate Southern spaces in surprising ways

By Peter Kuryla | January 29, 2020

The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston, collects 55 of the artist’s works from the 1960s through the 1980s. Primarily everyday scenes from the South during a transitional period in the region’s history, Eggleston’s photographs make the ordinary extraordinary or even dreamlike, capturing time and place but not without significant historical allusions.

Revisiting the Movement

Robert Penn Warren’s 1964 interviews with civil-rights activists get an updated look

By Peter Kuryla | April 17, 2019

With Free All Along: The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Interviews, editors Stephen Drury Smith and Catherine Ellis encourage a new community of readers to revisit the ideas and experiences of civil-rights activists and thinkers during the movement’s height.

Black in Appalachia

Karida Brown explores the way ideas of home have shaped an oft-overlooked population

By Peter Kuryla | October 10, 2018

In Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia, Karida L. Brown recovers the remarkable story of how black Appalachians defined themselves and their home in the coal-mining towns of Kentucky during the broad middle of the twentieth century. Brown will appear at the 2018 Southern Festival of Books, held in Nashville October 12-14.

Love and Theft

Exploring the idea of an American national literature, Jason Richards finds a complex play of imitations

By Peter Kuryla | April 20, 2018

In Imitation Nation: Red, White, and Blackface in Early and Antebellum US Literature, Rhodes College professor Jason Richards brings theoretical sophistication to close readings of some well-known and not so well-known texts in American literature, showing the complexities of cultural imitation before the Civil War.

Meharry Medical College (The Campus History Series)

By Sandra Martin Parham
Arcadia Publishing
128 pages
$21.99

“Originally founded in 1876 as a department of Central Tennessee College, Meharry Medical College was granted a separate charter of incorporation in 1915. … By the mid-20th century, Meharry Medical College graduated approximately half the black doctors in the United States.”

-from the publisher