Abstract: This essay draws attention to a recurring pattern within American reactionary thought that imagines university professors as subversive threats to the culture and morality of the nation. Two stories from the University of Florida illustrate this pattern: In 1911, historian Enoch Marvin Banks became the object of censure when he published an academic article that argued slavery was a cause of the Civil War. In 1959, geographer Sigismond Diettrich became known to state operatives when he was coerced by investigators to confess to his participation in sexual acts with men. In narrating the stories of Banks and Diettrich—both of whom the University of Florida forced to resign because of these controversies—the article argues that the shifting terrains of the culture wars do not provide firm foundations from which to reform and improve universities.
Abstract: This essay focuses on New Orleans’s first and only beach for Black citizens, Lincoln Beach. It tells a particular story about Louisiana’s legal and governing aims under Jim Crow between the 1880s and 1960s. It argues that the Orleans Levee Board, the government agency that created Lincoln Beach, developed the land in the name of public interest as an economic bet on the success of segregation in the city. Additionally, the article looks at Lincoln Beach as a unique place to examine leisure in New Orleans and Louisiana, with geographic and legal realities that highlight the failures of segregation. Through focusing on memories, laws, and the land itself as evidence, this project reconstructs Lincoln Beach as a place of cultural significance for Black New Orleanians, tracing its little-known history alongside state neglect and dispossession.
Abstract: In this nonfiction essay, the author—a gay man who grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, in the early 1990s— reflects on a paradox: He grew up feeling closeted and utterly alone even though the man who styled his family’s hair for years was openly gay. In middle age, the writer contacted his former hairdresser and interviewed him. What emerges is an article that reflects on the very different experiences of two gay men who both graduated from Tallahassee’s Leon High School (one in 1967, the other in 1995) as well as an exploration of why the writer did not allow the hairdresser to become a queer mentor to him at a time when he needed such a mentor desperately. Topics covered include masculinity, social class, gay nightlife, gay relationships, and the effects of homophobia.
Abstract: This essay examines the meaning of home in New Orleans amid converging pressures of climate change, federal retreat from science, insurance crisis, and deepening social dislocation. Moving between personal narrative and policy analysis, it argues that the story of New Orleans is not adequately captured by the language of climate migration. Instead, the central question is one of power: who retains the ability to choose how and whether to remain, and who is forced out. Drawing on federal funding cuts to scientific institutions, the destabilization of disaster preparedness infrastructure, and escalating insurance costs following reforms to the National Flood Insurance Program, the essay traces how the erosion of public institutions and financial protections transforms staying into an increasingly precarious act. Ultimately, the essay contends that choosing to remain amid systemic unraveling is a form of devotion and resistance.
Abstract: This essay is an appreciation of the distinctive character and appeal of Jimmy Carter, the thirty-ninth President of the United States. It begins with the author, a UNC-Chapel Hill undergraduate, encountering the presidential candidate by accident in UNC’s student union, and continues with impressions of Carter through the years—as campaigner, as chief executive, as post-presidential humanitarian. In lively anecdotal prose, this piece explores their shared experiences, as southerners and Southern Baptists and lovers of poetry and music; it also explores the author’s experiences as a child obsessed with American presidents, and subsequently as a lifelong yellow-dog Democrat, all by way of trying to figure out: What was it about Carter that made him so different from politicians before and, especially, after him?
Abstract: This essay uses the account of the author’s family migration from northern Alabama to Chicago in the 1930s to consider how adequately archival materials help Black Americans find information about themselves and are subsequently able to ground their family histories into larger narratives. It considers how professional archival practices play a part in the existence and discoverability of Black family records while also showing a vibrant tradition of Black self-documentation. In moving from the South and West Sides of Chicago to Alabama over several decades and centuries, the essay follows the author as she confronts the relative scarcity of records of everyday people during the Great Migration and delves into the complexity of Black American lineage and Black archival records in the wake of enslavement.
Abstract: A conversation took place between three generations of Black women in the country music business who are committed to creating and sustaining equitable pathways for country artists, fans, and members of the music business. Their shared dedication to fighting for collective rather than personal struggles is one that echoes other historic civil rights and liberation movements. Their labor and perspectives offer visions for an alternative imagination that emphasizes communal well-being, providing lessons that reach far beyond country music. In a post– Cowboy Carter moment, when mainstream conversations have again been renewed about the past and present Black presence in country music, their joint, multigenerational experiences speak to what has and has not changed in Nashville, the center of the country music industry, over the past several decades, and where hope rests for the future of Black country music.
Abstract: This interview features Tammy Greer in conversation with Mariah Hernandez Fitch, discussing Southeastern Indigenous knowledge, cultural restoration, and environmental balance. Centered on Nanih Bvlbancha, a ceremonial mound built with soil from around the world, the dialogue honors ancient practices of community and reciprocity. Greer critiques the Western mindset of domination over nature and offers Indigenous teachings rooted in cocreation, sustainability, and respect for all beings. Reflecting on Hurricane Katrina and climate change, Greer explains how Indigenous worldviews offer essential guidance in times of crisis. At its heart, this dialogue is a call to restore balance with the land, each other, and ourselves.
Abstract: Country music, or hillbilly music, developed a visual identity in parallel with its musical identity in the 1920s and 1930s, and overalls were adopted by performers in alignment with the hillbilly image. Though they were worn to signify rusticity and traditionalism, overalls were in fact the product of accelerating, sophisticated manufacturing enterprises, in much the same way hillbilly music was interconnected with emergent technologies and modern media culture. Overalls helped construct the hillbilly costume but also connected to the lived experiences of performers and audiences through materiality, fabrication, and function. Connections between overalls, the Southeast, and its workers and musicians ran deep and were embedded beyond the everyday or the stereotype. Overalls were central to the visual and material landscape of the nascent genre and shaped perceptions of musicians, rural life, and country music's complicated relationship to modernity.
Abstract: Bill Danoff, Taffy Nivert, and John Denver's iconic "Take Me Home, Country Roads" has had a meaningful impact on listeners and continues to have staying power. The song's real significance is its key role in perpetuating constructed myths not only about country music but also about Appalachia, especially in the ways it has been repurposed by and for West Virginians. Drawing on the song's history, music industry distribution, and rhetorical significance, the author argues that "Country Roads" is flexible in both genre and meaning. It is general in calling forth a sense of imagined and idealized place but specific when applied to West Virginia by West Virginians. An anthem and cultural artifact, "Country Roads" is more than a song: for West Virginians, it has become and remains a symbol of identity, positivity, power, and resistance.
