“In The News” is published quarterly and provides a sampling of stories, articles, or reviews that reference or relate to beliefs, myths, and narratives in Southern culture since 1970.

“Anne Rice, New Orleans’ queen of Goth literature and champion of the city’s mystique, has died,” from NOLA.com (December 12, 2021)

“Part of what makes New Orleans such a great resource is the fact that it has this absolutely Southern Gothic haunted ambience,” [Rice] said. “I mean, it’s fantastic. People from the outside can see it more clearly. The place is positively spooky . . . in every regard.”

“‘A land of myth finally gets its flowers:’ TV series cast, crew band together to give story of Oscarville residents justice” from Forsyth County News (December 30, 2021)

“It wasn’t until a few years ago that he learned about Oscarville, a majority Black town that used to reside in northeast Forsyth County on a portion of the land that now makes up the bottom of the lake. Before the lake was built, much of the community was driven out of the county by white residents.”

“New light is shining on SC Gullah-Geechee stories, as told by documentary makers” from The Post and Courier (January 7, 2022)

“Sara, Simeon and I felt compelled to share this story because the narrative about Gullah Geechee communities is often a very flat narrative,” said Duvall. “What we are hoping to achieve by telling this story is to allow people to see the modernity, the futuristic, the living breathing culture that is Gullah Geechee people, a people that is much more than just food, language and cool tourist trinkets.”

“Martin Luther King, Jr.’s History Lessons” from The New Yorker (January 9, 2022)

“And aggregated lies can congeal into a counterfeit history of their own—the old Southern myths of the Lost Cause flutter the Confederate flags of today. ”

“The Jan. 6 Insurrectionists Begging for Pardons Sound an Awful Lot Like Confederate Soldiers” from Mother Jones (January 10, 2022)

“Trump’s lies about the insurrection were a remastering of the South’s ‘lost cause,’ a Confederate myth that the Civil War was not a battle for slavery but for ‘states’ rights’ against Northern aggressors, and that white enslavers were benevolent owners of Black human beings. The lost cause presented Confederates with an attractive concession: The South lost the war not because their position was morally repugnant but because the North had superior resources.”