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Doughfaces, Denzel & Racing against Racism: The Ed Ayers Interview, Part 2 of 3
Think the racial narratives of American political discourse are bad today? As Edward Ayers reveals in his latest book, The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America, it’s nothing new and it’s been worse. In the second part of my interview with my former professor, we talk about racial narratives →
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The Vicious State of Politics…Then: Ed Ayers on Heartlands-part 1 of 3
Edward Ayers is not only one of the nation’s preeminent interpreters of American History, he is a consummate storyteller and educator. Ayers is the Tucker Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. His latest book, The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America won →
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Two Big Reasons for Churches to Talk About Race
These are dangerous days to talk about race. If you try to raise the subject in polite company you’re likely to face some averted glances or rolling eyes. In impolite company, well, who knows? For some, talk of race is a pretext for a political agenda. For others, the failure to talk about race is →
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Your Civil War Is Too Easy: Looking for The Thin Light of Freedom with Ed Ayers
Who starts a story of the Civil War in the middle? By the time Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia marched up the Shenandoah Valley into Pennsylvania in July of 1863, the war had been going for more than two years. The twin Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg on the 4th of July usually mark →
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The Country We Live In: Race, Sin, and the Birthday of the UMC
Behind every discussion in American life is the question of race. At this stage in our history, with the long shadows cast by slavery, Jim Crow segregation, the struggle for civil rights, and last year’s gathering of white nationalists in Charlottesville, the impact of race is not something we can ignore if we want to →
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Shmoop on Huck Finn: Guest Blogger Jeanne Torrence Finley
My colleague Jeanne Torrence Finley has been writing about art and justice on her new blog Tell It Slant, (which you should definitely check out). Today she joins my defense of Huck Finn by discovering an oddly-named defender of satire in literature: When Alex wrote on February 18 (“In Praise of Uncomfortable Books: Huck and →
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In Praise of Uncomfortable Books: Huck & Harper Revisited
Huck and Harper are on the block again and I’m not comfortable with that. Then again, I think it’s high time we all got uncomfortable. In late 2016, as I was beginning Heartlands, I reflected on the controversy that was roiling Accomack County, Virginia where I live. Only that’s not strictly accurate. The decision by →
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The Most-Read of 2017: A Heartlands Retrospective
2017 began with a quaint and quixotic belief that one more blog might be helpful in addressing the Great Divide. Post-election I was casting about for a way to explore this strange, new world we all seemed to be living in. Were we really as divided as we seemed? Had we forgotten how to talk →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#3 Killers of the Flower Moon
The more I think about David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI the more I realize what a brilliant work of journalism it is. Grann doesn’t call attention to himself and never reaches too far into the ether to get at a larger point. He simply tells →
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Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#4 Wolf Whistle
If I told you there was a laugh-out-loud book about the murder of Emmett Till, the black teenager killed in Mississippi in 1955 after he allegedly whistled at a white woman, you’d call such a thing, at the least, in poor taste. Yet the late Lewis Nordan, who lived through that episode as a teenager →
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