Old/New South

Old/New South

Don Sturkey doesn’t shoot many photos anymore. He owns a cheap digital camera, but hasn’t mastered all its functions. Sturkey’s career ended before digital photography arrived. But what a career it was. For nearly 40 years at The Charlotte Observer, Sturkey took...
Rethink Stereotypes of the South

Rethink Stereotypes of the South

“Why do so many people think the South is so bad?” one of my international students asked me this winter on the first day of a class I taught about Southern history and culture. “I think it’s pretty great here.” Lacking a good reply, “me too” was all I could muster....
Southern Discomfort

Southern Discomfort

For a century after losing the Civil War, the South was America’s own colonial backwater—“not quite a nation within a nation, but the next thing to it,” W. J. Cash wrote in his classic 1941 study, “The Mind of the South.” From Tyler, Texas, to Roanoke, Virginia,...
Rethink Stereotypes of the South

Guns a Loaded Issue in South

When President Obama said in his State of the Union address that “This time is different,” referring to his push for tighter gun-control laws, he wasn’t just whistling Dixie. Analysts seeking insight into the gun debate need look no further than the land of cotton,...