Front Porch

Sam Davis–Bill Marsh statue, by E. T. Wickham, Palmyra, Tennessee. Photographed by Tom Rankin, 1984.

With this issue, Southern Cultures turns twenty-five years old. It's a source of wonder to recall a distant meeting with friends and supporters in John Shelton Reed's old office at the Institute for Research in Social Science (now the Odum Institute) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There, a tiny group of us screwed up our courage (and craziness) and decided to start a new journal about the South. It was our conceit that this place still mattered in a hyper-connected world, and that there would always be something new to say about the American South. To emphasize diversity, we settled on a plural name. Coached, supported, and published by our neighbors at Duke University Press, we cobbled together an inaugural 1993 issue and then launched volume 1, number 1, the following year, which we now claim as our real birth date. Eventually, we found a permanent home with the University of North Carolina Press. We are deeply grateful to both of our publishers; without their help, encouragement, and especially their patience during our rookie years, we wouldn't have made it half this far.

For most of the last quarter decade, "Front Porch" has been our introduction to our readers. Looking back to our very first iteration, I see that we editors—John Reed and I—vowed to model the journal on an old-fashioned front porch. We offered to provide a "face to the world" for the brand new Center for the Study of the American South, "a place to mingle" and "to bring talkers together who may have been talking too separately." Going further, we declared, "We want this journal to reflect on what southern cultures share, as well as what divides them, to bring together people who may have been talking past each other, to create a front porch atmosphere that leads to uncommon conversation." Twenty-five years later, it's probably not our place to say exactly how well we've kept those early promises, but we did start some good conversations and contributed to many more. In our inaugural issue, for example, Catherine Bishir presented a pathbreaking (and prize-winning!) critical essay on Confederate memorials, and look where that conversation has gone. Other contributors have opened up or added to innovative discussions on southern food, music, fiction, memory, politics, environments, and a host of other important topics. As Pogo, the cartoon possum from the Okefenokee, once said, "I is quietly proud." So are we.

We've changed, as well, of course, and those changes, too, come with thanks. After founding editor John Reed retired happily, we were grateful to have the vision, rigor, and reflection that Larry J. Griffin and Jocelyn R. Neal brought to the journal in their tenures as co-editor and Dave Shaw as Executive Editor. Marcie Cohen Ferris has joined me in the tradition of dual editorship for the last five years with grace, insight, and ever-fresh perspectives. Through thick and thin, our ever-cheerful, wise, funny, efficient, and endlessly imaginative editors Ayse Erginer, Emily Wallace, and Emma Calabrese have kept us on an even keel with their indispensable combination of lift and ballast.

Throughout our founding generation, the members of our editorial board were veterans of southern scholarship who brought plenty of wisdom along with their gravitas. In another anniversary change, we've now expressed our profound gratitude to these dear friends, given them a well-earned rest, and recruited a new generation of advisers. We eagerly look forward to working with these torchbearers of new southern scholarship. As the last grizzled veteran of our earliest days, I am deeply grateful to all these wonderful colleagues for their comfort, their inspiration, and their priceless hard work, now, in the past, and in the future. And, needless to add, we are likewise grateful to our readers and contributors, who keep on lending us their eyes, ears, and voices. All these folks...