Co-sponsored Event: Sisters, Brothers, and Brotherhoodism: Redefining the Family in the Civil Rights Era with Ted Ownby

A 6 p.m. reception precedes a 7 p.m. talk and book reading by esteemed historian Ted Ownby, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. The event is co-presented with UNC-Chapel Hill’s Center for the Study of the American South. Ownby’s new book, Hurtin’ Words (UNC Press), “considers how a wide range of writers, thinkers, activists, and others defined family problems in the twentieth-century American South. Ownby shows that it was common for both African Americans and whites to discuss family life in terms of crisis, but they reached very different conclusions about causes and solutions. . . . Rather than attempting to define the experience of an archetypal ‘southern family,’ Ownby looks broadly at contexts such as political and religious debates about divorce and family values, southern rock music, autobiographies, and more to reveal how people in the South used the concept of the family as a proxy for imagining a better future or happier past.”

More information about this event is available via the Center for Documentary Studies.