Yellowhammer Press

We have few rules about what can and cannot go on the site, but one rule is hard and fast: no Confederate flags anywhere, ever.  While we broke that rule slightly with the last post, it’s a choice we made when starting this blog.  Too often, discussions of Southern life and culture veer wildly off [...]

Unless you live under a rock, you’re at least dimly aware that Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol was released recently.  Brown kicked off the esoteric conspiracy craze in 2003 with The Da Vinci Code, a book so unbearably, ploddingly awful that AO Scott of the NY Times called it “Dan Brown’s best-selling primer on how [...]

Grady McWhiney ruffled feathers.  McWhiney (late, 2006) produced controversial scholarship about the development of the Southern psyche and its roots in a much-vaunted Celtic ancestry.  With fellow historian Forrest McDonald, McWhiney authored what would come to be known as the Celtic Thesis — simply put, that unlike the rest of America’s inhabitants, Southerners are (or [...]

We caved. Follow us on Twitter, if you like.

“Dangerous” is not how one is likely to describe The Queen Family: Appalachian Tradition and Back Porch Music.  The short documentary (< 30 minutes) chronicles a rural North Carolina family whose roots in mountain music reach centuries into the past, and even across the Atlantic.  92 year-old Mary Jane Queen, the charmingly lucid matriarch of [...]

Reading about the South with any measure of objectivity is hard, if not damn near impossible.  No other region in American history has been so heavily politicized or saddled with so much historical and semiotic baggage as the Deep South.  There are few places, even in academia (or perhaps especially in academia) where one can [...]