Interdisciplinary Studies: IDS 4371 - The American South in Popular Culture

STOP THE POUNDING HEART is a stunning portrayal of contemporary America and the insular communities that dot its landscape.

An award-winning documentary film about lynching in the American South. Filmed on-location at lynching sites in six states and bolstered by the memories and perspectives of descendants, community activists, and scholars, this unusual historical documentary seeks to educate even as it serves as a hub for action to remember and reflect upon a long-hidden past.

Based on a slave narrative by William and Ellen Craft. This dramatization of the Crafts' escape from slavery in 1848 follows their perilous journey from the Deep South to Philadelphia--where, on free soil, they were still to experience racial discrimination

FREEDOM RIDERS is the powerful harrowing and ultimately inspirational story of six months in 1961 that changed America forever. From May until November 1961, more than 400 black and white Americans risked their lives--and many endured savage beatings and imprisonment--for simply traveling together on buses and trains as they journeyed through the Deep South

Civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall's triumph in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision to desegregate America's public schools completed the final leg of an heroic journey to end legal segregation. For 20 years, during wartime and the Depression, Marshall had traveled hundreds of thousands of miles through the Jim Crow South of the United States, fighting segregation case by case, establishing precedent after precedent, all leading up to one of the most important legal decisions in American history.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow offers the first comprehensive look at race relations in America between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement.

Masculinity studies were born of an unexpected union of social and cultural history; the progeny now proliferate in various journals devoted to examinations of masculinity in myriad settings. Increasing numbers of essays and books assay the apparently interminable possibilities opened up by the use of gender as a category of analysis. The consequences, good and bad. of this proliferation are evident in the ten essays that make up Black and White Masculinity in the American South, 1800-2000.