In My Black Country, Alice Randall outlines the inclination of Music Row institutions to discount Black writers and their insistence on erasure of Black artists, particularly women, in the genre. Randall will appear in Nashville at Parnassus Books on April 12 and at City Winery, as part of “An Evening with Black Opry,” on April 25.
Tennessee State University historian Michael Bertrand reflects on the complicated history of race, rock ‘n’ roll, and the South. Southern History Remixed compels readers to contemplate the meaning of our everyday actions, behaviors, and consumer choices — including the music we listen to.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Most Americans are familiar with the landmark civil-rights case Brown v. Board of Education. Less known is United States v. Lynd, the 1962 trial that paved the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Count Them One by One: Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote is an account of the groundbreaking trial that put Hattiesburg, Mississippi, at the center of the civil-rights debate. Written by Gordon A. Martin, Jr., one of the Justice Department attorneys in the case, the book uses oral history, legal commentary, and first-person reportage to put readers on the front row of a trial that forever changed the nature of race relations in Mississippi and the South.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In Liberty and Union, Rhodes College professor Timothy S. Huebner brings together an enormous body of scholarship on the secession crisis, Civil War, and Reconstruction, compelling us to reconsider what we think we know about the era.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: In Why We Argue (and How We Should), Vanderbilt University philosophy professors Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse set ground rules for the kind of productive, democratic disagreement that they say is fundamental to a civil life.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: “Pick a thing up, study it, shake it, skip it across a still surface to see how much felt and lively life got baked into it,” writes Lorrie Moore in her collection, See What Can Be Done: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary.
