Our summer issue is hot off the presses! Read it in print, online through Project Muse, and in various e-book formats.
In this issue, Lindsay Byron tells the story of a northern bride, forcibly institutionalized in the Alabama State Hospital for the Insane by her physician husband because she was “unwilling or unable to perform the brand of femininity compulsory for a woman of her class and race.” You can read Scott Huffard’s account of North Carolina train wrecks, ghost trains, and the capitalist gospel of the New South. Natalie Minik’s photo essay “Teenage Pastime” documents Georgia Piedmont adolescents’ “enthusiastic confirmation” of the culture they come from, or their “bold rejection of the culture they grew out of.” Mark A. Johnson explains how the 1909 Memphis mayoral election demonstrates W. C. Handy’s line that “the best notes made the most votes,” even though political music often continued the tradition of exploited black labor.
Bill Koon commemorates the “rituals of surreptitious drinking” made necessary by dry counties, blue laws, and other alcohol restrictions in the South. Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts chronicle how the once-Democratic South experienced a gradual “partisan realignment” into a Republican stronghold, revealed most extensively through representation in state legislatures. And Donna Tolley Corriher shares some fascinating “snippets” from her research into the history of her West Virginia coal mining family.
You can also enjoy poetry by Todd Boss; book reviews by Fred Hobson, Michael McCollum, and Brian Grabbatin; and a short recollection by JL Strickland on the southern custom of “sitting up with the dead.” Happy reading!