got enough to put together one issue.
“A lot of academic papers can’t go in a
popular direction, but some can,” Watson
said. “Those have been the ones we’ve
been looking for, like Michael Montgomery on the Southern accent, or pieces
about the Confederate flag. Many of these
turn out to be not so specialized that they
would appeal to an academic journal —
the editors there might say, ‘Well, this is not
brand-new, so we’re not going to publish
it.’ But it’s not going to go into Harper’s,
either. So the author will say, ‘OK, how can
I in effect do a think piece that intelligent
academics would read outside their specialties? Southern Cultures would be a good
place to put that.’
That’s where we
have evolved. It’s not
exactly what we
thought we would
do when we started,
but it works out
pretty well.”
A look at the
contributors to the
anthology turns up
some of the top
scholars of the South:
Reed, the late C.
Vann Woodward ’ 37
(PhD), Drew Gilpin
Faust and Charles
Reagan Wilson,
among others. But
the journal also has
been home to
younger scholars,
such as Blain
Roberts ’00 (MA,
’05 PhD), who con-
tributed the piece on
tobacco queens. Wat-
son said he had heard about Roberts’
research in the area when she was a UNC
graduate student a few years ago and asked
her to submit an article.
“It was one part of a chapter in my dissertation,” said Roberts, now an assistant
history professor at California State University at Fresno. “I probably spent several
weeks revising it because the dissertation
had much broader themes, but I was still
thrilled to be published there. Southern
Cultures is almost one of a kind in the field
because it fills a void for people like me. I
especially liked that it was research rooted
in images. Being able to feature the images
so prominently was really important.”
Her piece, “A New Cure for Brightleaf
Tobacco: The Origins of the Tobacco
Queen during the Great Depression,”
ended up winning the Southern Association for Women Historians’ A. Elizabeth
Taylor Prize for “the best article published
during the preceding year in the field of
Southern women’s history.” Says Roberts:
“That shows you how seriously the journal
is taken by academia now.”
Southern Cultures’ success means that
the journal doesn’t have to solicit manuscripts so vigorously, Watson says, and it
even pays — $250 for an article. As for its
readership, he estimates it to be “about
1,000 academic subscribers and 2,000
nonacademic subscribers. The latter are the
folks who also might subscribe to The New
Yorker or Harper’s.”
Watson adds: “We always have people
who start up a subscription thinking the
magazine is going to be the Journal of
Confederate Studies, and when it turns out
not to be that they get mad and leave.
There are also a lot of people who don’t
realize that an academic piece is different.
But we’ve been able to keep our subscriptions up.”
He said theme issues, such as the
tobacco issue and the now-annual music
issues, have become popular. Later this year,
the journal will probe the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina.
“We have always wanted to do more
contemporary things. [Deputy Editor]
Dave Shaw said, ‘Look, we have the third
anniversary coming up. We’ve got to do a
Katrina issue.’ So we’re running several
pieces and a photo essay from someone
who just approached us out of the blue.
We’re very excited to do this issue, because
to us, the South is not just past tense.”
— Tim Warren
Briefly noted
Divine Hierarchies: Class in Religion &
Religious Studies (UNC Press, 2007) by
Sean McCloud ’00 (PhD). An interdisciplinary argument for reinserting class into the
study of religion.
Governors Speak (University Press of
America Inc., 2007) by Jack D. Fleer ’ 65
(PhD). Examines careers of five recent
N.C. governors and compares their performances in office with governors in
other states.
Tilt 68 (Water Tower Books, 2007) by
Sarah Colton ’ 71. A novel chronicling a
young Southern woman’s quest for freedom in the late 1960s, all within the context of the pill, the Civil Rights movement,
Vietnam and drug culture.
