About the Contributors

Daniel Anderson's poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, Raritan, The Southern Review, and other magazines. In 1997, he was winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize for his collection January Rain, published by Story Line Press.

Larry Powell earned his Ph.D. at the University of Florida and currently is an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His research interests include political communication and baseball. He is the author of Bottom of the Ninth: An Oral History on the Life of Harry "The Hat" Walker, published by Writer's Showcase Press in 2000.

John Shelton Reed, who recently retired from university life, was the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology and the director of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among his recent books is 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South, written with his wife, Dale Volberg Reed. He is coeditor of Southern Cultures.

Jerry Rodnitzky was educated at the Universities of Chicago and Illinois and currently is professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author of Minstrels of the Dawn: The Folk-Protest Singer as a Cultural Hero and Feminist Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of a Feminist Counterculture and coauthor of Jazz-Age Boomtown.

Thomas A. Tweed is Zachary Smith Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Science, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author or editor of five books, including Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami, which won the American Academy of Religion's 1998 Award for Excellence.

Harry L. Watson is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and director of UNC's Center for the Study of the American South. His publications include Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America, published by Hill & Wang in 1990. He also is coeditor of Southern Cultures.

Trent Watts received a Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Chicago and currently teaches history at James Madison University. A native Mississippian, he wrote the foreword to the University of Georgia Press's 1996 reissue of John Faulkner's novel of depression-era Mississippi, Men Working. His grandparents took him to the Neshoba County Fair for the first time when he was five years old.

Stephen J. Whitfield holds the Max Richter Chair in American Civilization at Brandeis University, where he has taught since 1972. He also has served as a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Catholic University of Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium, and the Sorbonne. His publications include A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till and In Search of American Jewish Culture.