I
grew up in a mill village in South Carolina, in back of a cotton mill not unlike
the one you see to the left, with the large tinted windows ablaze at night. Factories
fascinated me, and whenever the family was out riding and I spied one I hadn't
seen before I'd insist that my father drive us around it. I especially loved the
back of the mill, with its smokestacks, boilers, and coal siloes.
It's thus oddly appropriate that I've devoted my career to studying the
industrialization of the South. Not a terribly lucrative way to spend one's
time, but I've fortunately gotten Vanderbilt
University to help pay the bills, in return for the opportunity to teach
the history of the American South. I teach for other reasons than to feed a
habit, of course; having grown up in the South at the end of the Jim Crow era,
listening to tales of the South of mules and poverty at the kitchen table, I'm
aware of the rush of change, and even more of the gulf separating my own experience
and that of my students. I see my task as bridging both of those gulfs, of showing
the depths that lie beneath the too-glossy surface of the modern urban-suburban
South.
This task I see as especially important because the past shapes the present in ways not readily visible to those not aware of it. For all the complaints about the "disappearing South," it hasn't so much disappeared as simply changed--for better and for worse . As this photograph shows, the floor of the mill shown above is now empty, but it ran over ninety years, and the way of life it created shaped the lives of generations of southerners, in ways that continue to haunt the South of skyscrapers and suburbs.
Teaching
and research isn't all I do. I'm a (too infrequent) cyclist, and a choral singer
(with, among other groups, the Nashville
Symphony Chorus), with a particular interest in the old shaped-note, or
fasola
tradition of the rural South. I am an elder (currently inactive) at Trinity
Presbyterian Church in Nashville, a congregation of the Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.). Finally, I occasionally indulge longtime enthusiams for
southern culture of various sorts, but especially mountain-derived music such
as "old-time" and bluegrass
music.
Here's an up-to-date Curriculum Vitae.