River-cane baskets woven by the Chitimachas of south Louisiana are universally admired for their beauty and workmanship. Recounting friendships that Chitimacha weaver Christine Paul (1874-1946) sustained with two non-Native women at different parts of her life, this book offers a rare vantage point into the lives of American Indians in the segregated South. Mary Bradford (1869-1954) and Caroline Dormon (1888-1971) were not only friends of Christine...

For as long as the United States owed its prosperity to a New World plantation complex, from colonial settlement until well into the twentieth century, the toxic practices associated with its permutations stimulated imaginary solutions to the contradiction with the nation's enlightenment ideals and republican ideology. Ideals of liberty, democracy, and individualism could not be separated from a history of forcible coercion, oligarchic power, and...

This book traces the origin and development of several propositions, tropes, types, clichés, and ideas commonly associated with the U.S. South-for example, that it has been shaped by a warm climate; that its people are hospitable and enjoy a slower pace of life; that it is characterized by localist tendencies and possesses a distinctive sense of place. Approaching these propositions as memes-that is, group-forming replicators-Scott Romine argues...