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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center for the Study of the American South will kick off its fall programming with a photography exhibit that opens Aug. 28 and a lecture on the antebellum South on Sept. 9.

The exhibit, “Holding Out and Hanging On: Surviving Hurricane Katrina,” will feature photographs by Thomas Neff, an art professor at Louisiana State University. He spent 45 days in New Orleans after the August 2005 tragedy, interviewing and photographing residents who did not leave the city in the face of the disaster.

Text accompanying his pictures will tell the stories of the confusion and suffering as well as persistence and strength of those who stuck it out. The exhibit, up through Sept. 30, will be free to the public from 2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Thursdays at the Love House and Hutchins Forum, 410 East Franklin St., the home of the center.

Neff will be available to discuss his work at a free meet-the-artist reception from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Aug. 28 at the Love House and Hutchins Forum.

The free public Sept. 9 lecture, “Breaking the Color Line: Changing Interpretations of Slave-Poor White Relations in the Old South” will be at 4 p.m. in the George Watts Hill Alumni Center on Stadium Drive.

The talk, by David Brown of the University of Manchester in England, will be the first of seven free public James A. Hutchins Lectures presented by the center, with support from the UNC General Alumni Association. The lectures honor the late Hutchins (1917-2002), a 1937 graduate of Carolina who spent much of his life fighting world hunger.

Brown, a lecturer in American studies, will present recent research suggesting that relations at the bottom of the social hierarchy in the antebellum South were less rigid and more complex than previously thought. Historians have tended to believe that upper-class whites were successful in securing the loyalty and cooperation of poor whites by appealing to their supposed shared racial superiority over blacks. Conventional wisdom held that despite mutually abject circumstances facing poor whites and the enslaved, the whites were hostile towards blacks, aggressively asserting their whiteness.

Newer findings suggest that poor whites and blacks – both enslaved and free – drank, stole, gambled, slept and ran away together, Brown attests, and the color line dividing white from black was permeable. 

Brown co-wrote “Southern Outcast: Hinton Rowan Helper and The Impending Crisis of the South” (Louisiana State University Press, 2006), a biography of a North Carolina abolitionist. He also co-wrote “Race in the American South: From Slavery to Civil Rights” (University Press of Florida, 2007). His research interests include the historical development of slavery, race and whiteness in North America and the American South, particularly the history of non-slaveholding whites and the American Civil War.

Other Hutchins lectures this semester, at 4 p.m. in the George Watts Hill Alumni Center except on Oct. 3 and Oct. 23, will be:

Sept. 23, “Eudora Welty: The Woman and the Myths.” Suzanne Marrs, an English professor at Millsaps College in Mississippi, will draw on her friendship with Welty and new biographical information. She believes that Welty was someone far more passionate and compelling than the contentedly cloistered “Miss Eudora” of myth. In fact, she was a woman whose openness to experience complemented her creative genius and enriched her personal life, according to Marrs.

Oct. 3, 4 p.m. Upendo Lounge, Student Academic Services Building off Manning Drive, “Brave Enemies, Cowpens, and the American Revolution.” Poet, novelist and short-story writer Robert Morgan, a Carolina alumnus, will discuss his work “Brave Enemies: A Novel of the American Revolution” (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2003). Morgan, the Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University, also will explore how historical fiction is created – by using known facts and historical figures to establish a background, and sometimes foreground, within which the fictional story unfolds.

Oct. 14, “The Black Indians of New Orleans.” Maurice Martinez, professor of instructional technology, foundations and secondary education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, will give an illustrated lecture about Mardi Gras Indians, who represent the genetic and cultural intermarriage of African Americans and American Indians. Martinez will look at the group’s costuming, sacred beliefs and Yoruba retentions. He also will screen his documentary, “The Black Indians of New Orleans.”

Oct. 23, 7:30 p.m., Wilson Library, “Tried By War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief.” Civil War historian James McPherson will analyze Lincoln’s steep learning curve as commander in chief, his relationships with his generals, the evolution of the North’s national and military strategies and the ebb and flow of victory and defeat during four years of war. McPherson will discuss Lincoln’s transition from a policy of conciliation to one of all-out war, the emergence of emancipation and the abolition of slavery as a war aim and the forging of a war-winning strategy.

Oct. 28, “Redefining the South.” David Houston, chief curator at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art at the University of New Orleans, will discuss rapidly expanding interest in the art of the Southeast. The Ogden, home to the largest collection of Southern art in the world, collects, conserves, exhibits, studies and interprets the art of the South within the context of the region’s history and culture.

Nov. 11, “The Emotional Impact of Jim Crow: Autobiographical Remembrances of Southern Race and Racism.” John Inscoe, a history professor at the University of Georgia, will explore the power of autobiographical descriptions of Southerners’ first encounters with race and racism. Inscoe will look at authors’ insights into their early observations, perceptions, and emotional reactions, as well as the psychological and emotional impact of Jim Crow.

Center for the Study of the American South Web site: http://www.uncsouth.org

Center contact: Nancy Gray Schoonmaker, (919) 962-0503, csasnancy@gmail.com
News Services contact: LJ Toler, (919) 962-8589

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