The Center and History Department Launch An Ignite Campaign for the Charles Reagan Wilson Fund In honor of Dr. Wilson’s retirement in May 2014 and long career supporting and guiding students, we created the Charles Reagan Wilson Graduate Student Support Fund, which will provide financial support for graduate students engaged in research in southern history. …
In 1973 the Memphis State Tigers reached the finals of the NCAA basketball tournament. Though they lost to UCLA, they inspired a civic myth. With each victory, the city’s enthusiasm ballooned, with paeans to stars Larry Finch, Ronnie Robinson, and Larry Kenon, as well as coach Gene Bartow. Politicians upheld the team as a vehicle of interracial unity, supposedly healing the scars from Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968. This myth has elements of truth, as basketball provided common ground across lines of race and class. Yet it hides as much as it reveals. Success in basketball smoothed over Memphians’ anxieties about the university, the city, and the future of race relations. The story of this season thus illuminates how sports can not only foster racial progress, but also obscure racial divisions.
Music of the South Symposium:Defining and Presenting Tradition in Southern Music – Wednesday, April 6, 2016 This spring’s Music of the South Symposium will investigate the creation and performance of the South’s various traditional music forms. The one-day symposium, “Defining and Presenting Traditional Music,” sponsored by the Center, Living Blues magazine, and the Blues Archive, …
A new display at Rowan Oak features William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech. Southern Studies graduate students Amanda Malloy and Katie Gill designed and installed the display. English graduate student Sarah Altenoff provided technical assistance on the project.
By being able to succinctly develop her communication and presentation skills, Amanda Malloy, a second-year Southern Studies MA student, won the University of Mississippi’s Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition. She will go on to the regional competition in Charlotte, North Carolina, in February as part of the Conference for Southern Graduate Schools.
Clothing and Fashion in Southern History February 22 – 23, 2016 The Center will host a symposium on Clothing and Fashion in Southern History on February 22 – 23. The symposium will convene scholars from the fields of history and cultural studies who will contribute essays to a forthcoming book on the subject. The scholars …
by Kelley Norris Scott Barretta, writer and researcher for the Mississippi Blues Trail and an adjunct instructor in sociology and anthropology at the University of Mississippi, has lived in the state for sixteen years, but his blues journey began long before his arrival here. A multidecade musical odyssey has led Barretta to receiving the Mississippi …
Here, second year graduate student Mary Blessey shares an audio project and original photographs from the 2015 3rd Eye Music Festival in Jackson, MS.
Alum Katie King to Screen Film at Atlanta History Center Katie King (M.A. 2015) made a documentary film, The Sweet Auburn Curb Market, as part of her studies while in the graduate program at the Center. Katie will screen the film at the Atlanta History Center this Thursday, February 4 at 7pm. A panel discussion with …
Aligning with the tradition of Southern Gothic, Jaime Johnson’s Untamed articulates humankind’s capacity to decay as a marker of our identity. Set in the swamps and woods of Mississippi and Louisiana, natural places where one encounters life and death, growth and decay, Untamed depicts the fictitious story of a feral woman and her companions.