The N-Word Manifesto: Interpreting Mark Twain via an Inspiration ‘Made in Germany’

How often during one's lifetime might they find themselves laughing at just having heard the “Other” calling them, nigger? Nonetheless, in the fall of 2007, seven years ago to be exact, a most profound encounter inspired me as none other had. I was called by an old contact at the Together Temp service in Charlottenburg and offered a chance to work as a Teacher Assistant at the Helmuth James von Moltke Schule in Berlin.After a couple of interviews and the clearance of a police background check, I reported to Frau Miller that first week in October of 2006, optimistic that I was the right guy for the job. Frau Miller was certified by the state to teach art classes, yet due to the shortage of Germans who qualified as English teachers, she'd dared to take on the challenge of teaching English to the 4th and 5th graders at the middle school

Short Story, Beginnings to 1900

In an era when most American literature came from the North, the South distinguished itself most notably in the short story, producing two of its foremost authorities in Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain, as well as one of its best-known characters in Uncle Remus. Through the short story, furthermore, southerners led in the development of two important American genres: Southwestern humor and local color. The hundreds of stories in this rich tradition cover a range of characters and landscapes, from madmen ensconced in gothic mansions to saucy backwoodsmen romping over the frontier, and the best early southern stories share a brilliance of form and style

Stories of Today: Rebecca Harding Davis’ Investigative Fiction

Long before her son, Richard Harding Davis, became a star reporter, Rebecca Harding Davis worked for the Wheeling Intelligencer in her home state of Virginia. Throughout a writing career that spanned ive decades and produced hundreds of stories, novels, and articles, she retained an interest in journalism. Beginning with an 1861 story, "Life in the Iron-Mills," she used fiction to report on current events. Later works, such as Put Out of the Way, an exposé of the system for institutionalizing the supposedly insane, and John Andross, a study of the effects of the Whiskey Ring on an individual, constituted a distinctive literary form: investigative fiction. Her work in this genre anticipated the major achievements of several other American writers, including Stephen Crane, Upton Sinclair, Truman Capote, and Tom Wolfe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Biographical entry for Edgar Allan Po

Benjamin Franklin

Biographical entry for Benjamin Frankli

Flight into Fancy: Poe’s Discovery of the Right Brain

"Phrenology is no longer to be laughed at," Edgar Allan Poe wrote in an 1836 review of Phrenology, and the Moral Influence of Phrenology. "It is no longer laughed at by men of common understanding. It has assumed the majesty of science; and, as a science, ranks among the most important which can engage the attention of thinking beings" (Essays and Reviews 329). Poe, of course, counted himself among these "thinking beings" and continued to be engaged by phrenology, which located various "faculties" such as "amativeness" and "cautiousness" in different parts of the brain

When the lights go down: why do people still go to the movies?

This study explored why individuals still attend movie showings in a theater environment when so many alternatives are available in the digital age. The goals of this paper were to understand the behavior of movie-going using theoretical research, qualitative interviewing, and ethnographical observation. A total of eighteen subjects were interviewed in three North Carolina cities: Winston-Salem, Lexington, and Charlotte. It was determined that movie-going is based on cultural geography, time, and population. Subsequently, the literature and field data strongly suggest that movie-going culture and fandom carries different meanings for each individual. Since movie-going has often been attributed as a unique social experience, each subject was asked to expound on how the movie-going experience differed from that of in-home digital alternatives such as Netflix, Hulu, and illegal pirating. Nostalgia, social solidarity, escapism, and even religious behavior were reoccurring motivations for the participating moviegoers in this study

How the Mind Turns Language into Meaning

Book Revie

Anne Moody (1940-)

As the author of the autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody is one of the best-known writers of the civil rights movement

Hodding Carter (1907-1972)

One of the most prominent Southern newspaper editors of his era, Hodding Carter, Jr., crusaded against Louisiana politician Huey Long and racial discrimination. A recipient of a 1946 Pulitzer Prize for his journalism, Carter also distinguished himself as a writer, earning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1945 and publishing numerous books of history, biography, fiction, and poetry