Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Aram Goudsouzian

Stuck to the Bones

Margaret A. Burnham examines racist violence in the Jim Crow South

In By Hands Now Known, Margaret Burnham tells an intimate, large-scale, and tragic story of racial violence in the American South from 1920 to 1960. Burnham will be at Novel in Memphis on October 13 and at the 2022 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 14-16.

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When the Looking Changes

Critic and author Teju Cole thinks about photography and politics

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Teju Cole is the photography critic at The New York Times Magazine and the author of Blind Spot, a collection of photographs accompanied by brief pieces of writing. 

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Faction Jackson

David S. Brown places Andrew Jackson in the partisan politics of his time

In The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson, biographer David S. Brown explains the world that shaped the seventh president of the United States, while illustrating how Jackson’s brand of raucous, divisive politics changed the new American nation.

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Sex, God, and Politics

By recounting historic debates over sex and morality, R. Marie Griffith explains our political divides

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In Moral Combat, Chattanooga native R. Marie Griffith tells the history of the twentieth-century United States through religious debates over issues of sex and morality, exploring such topics as birth control, sex education, LGBT rights, and sexual harassment.

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The Two Souths

Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker explain how Southern politics shaped the modern United States

In The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance, Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker see two traditions in the modern political history of the South, with clashing implications for the state of American democracy.

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Freedom and Fries

Marcia Chatelain explains how McDonald’s intersects with the history of the civil rights movement

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning history Franchise, acclaimed historian Marcia Chatelain explains how the story of McDonald’s intersected with the civil rights movement. Chatelain will discuss the book at a virtual event hosted by the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis on February 8.

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