Robert Penn Warren’s 1964 interviews with civil-rights activists get an updated look
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.
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Karida Brown explores the way ideas of home have shaped an oft-overlooked population
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.
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Exploring the idea of an American national literature, Jason Richards finds a complex play of imitations
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.
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Julia C. Duin turns up a sordid tale at the fringes of American religion
With ln the House of the Serpent Handler Julia C. Duin depicts the lives of the faithful in Appalachian serpent-handling churches, charting the tragic fall of one its leading lights.
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Scholars ponder Let Us Now Praise Famous Men on its seventy-fifth anniversary
In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at 75, a transatlantic group of scholars reconsiders James Agee’s classic Depression-era account of three Alabama sharecropping families and the problem of representing them in words and images.
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Timothy B. Tyson updates the story of Emmett Till’s murder
In The Blood of Emmett Till, Timothy B. Tyson retells the story of a fourteen-year-old boy’s brutal murder in Mississippi, how it inspired a movement, and why his life and death still resonate today.
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