In Varina, Charles Frazier portrays the first lady of the Confederacy as a reluctant witness
…war resembles recent post-apocalyptic fiction in which military violence combines with ecological catastrophe to destroy all remnants of civilization. Pockets of survivors band together in secluded enclaves, their paranoia a…
Exploring the idea of an American national literature, Jason Richards finds a complex play of imitations
…New World sought to be different from Europeans in the Old World, but they also wanted to promote white racial purity against Native peoples and enslaved Africans. Richards shows how…
In a new essay collection, Aram Goudsouzian and Charles W. McKinney Jr. consider race relations in the Bluff City
…to its relative calm before and during the civil-rights era. “Violence perpetrated against black Memphians begat political organization and incremental increases in political power,” McKinney writes. “Black people from all…
A historian considers Taylor Branch’s The King Years
All three colossal volumes in Taylor Branch’s narrative history of the civil-rights movement contain the same subtitle: “America in the King Years.” A subsequent book, a slim collection of excerpts…
Marc Perrusquia’s new book considers the double life of Memphis photographer Ernest Withers
…Presley, civil-rights icons like Martin Luther King Jr. Withers was the first black man to ride the newly integrated Montgomery buses. He dined at Jimmy Carter’s White House. All the…
Mary Ellen Pethel’s Athens of the New South credits Nashville colleges for the city’s post-war prosperity
…education. “[T]he story of Nashville is linked to the city’s mutually beneficial relationship with local colleges and universities,” Pethel writes. Prior to the Civil War, the University of Nashville was…
