Michael Bertrand examines how rock ‘n’ roll united and divided Southerners across the color line
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.
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Crystal Wilkinson on her new culinary memoir, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts
Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, a food memoir by former Kentucky Poet Laureate Crystal Wilkinson, offers a banquet of voices, memories, imagination, and archival photographs. Wilkinson will appear at The Bookshop in Nashville on February 2 and Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on February 3.
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Gordon A. Martin revisits United States v. Lynd, the civil rights case that forever changed the South
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.
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Historian Timothy S. Huebner discusses how a “culture of constitutionalism” shaped the Civil War era
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.
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Vanderbilt philosophers Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse discuss their handbook for political disagreement
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.
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Lorrie Moore’s See What Can Be Done is a window into a lively mind
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.
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