The Bulletin compiles news from in and around the US South. We hope these posts will provide space for lively discussion and debate regarding issues of importance to those living in and intellectually engaging with the US South.

Some important William Faulkner archival material is going up for auction in New York. Considered one of the most significant literary figures in the United States in the twentieth century, much of Faulkner's work centered on the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. Sotheby's announced on March 28, 2013 that the prolific author's Nobel Prize medal could end up being sold for over two million dollars. Other items to be auctioned include the first draft of Faulkner's Nobel speech, unpublished letters from Faulkner to his wife, Estelle, and an early unpublished story. According to Reuters, some of the items were found on the Faulkner family's Virginia property. According to an article in The New York Times, the Faulkner family hopes that a public institution will end up purchasing the material.

A recent poll commissioned by Democrats reveals that Atlanta's political landscape is deeply divided. The poll results portray Atlanta as divided into three sections that vote very differently: the South Side, Middle Atlanta, and the North Side. South Side voters tend to be Democrats and members of racial and ethnic minorities; Middle Atlanta is split along ethnic and ideological lines; while North Side voters are more conservative and are generally white. The blog "Blogging While Blue: News & Views from a Few Spirited Georgia Democrats" declared that the poll is important because Atlanta elections are typically decided by Middle Atlanta, with its "multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-ideology, and multi-partisan" makeup. This is because voters on the North and South Sides generally cancel one another out, leaving Middle Atlanta the decider in metropolitan elections.

Reverberations of Olmsted's designs are surfacing today in Druid Hills, a suburban space that exists as a borderland, literally "outside the city", but not quite in the country. Having lived in major metropolitan areas, small towns, and rural communities, I did not initially realize that we had moved to "the suburbs." In my mind, Atlanta was one big mass of city and I had prepared myself for an urban jungle. However, while we live one mile from the Atlanta city limits, my new neighborhood hosts a variety of wildlife, including chipmunks, rabbits, foxes, owls, and hawks, not to mention large wooded areas that provide habitat for the band of coyotes whose presence is testing the limits of Olmsted's bucolic vision. Often associated with rural and western spaces, coyotes have been migrating eastward for the past century and now occupy increasingly contested territory in major metropolitan areas, including Atlanta. A 2012 New York Times article noted that "the urban coyote problem has come to Atlanta at last."

In response to increased coyote sightings and several coyote/pet skirmishes, the Druid Hills Civic Association sponsored a community meeting on January 29, 2013, to discuss the concept of coexistence. As the term implies, humans and coyotes exist in shared territories, confounding distinctions we sometimes draw between human and animal worlds. Central to the concept of coexistence is modifying the behavior of both human and animal, requiring an ongoing effort to sustain a dialogue-of-sorts with another species. In essence, coexistence asks us to take coyotes seriously as participants in a community defined by all living beings that inhabit it—plant, human, and animal-life alike.

The parish hall of the Church of the Epiphany was packed, as concerned neighbors, and at least one intrigued graduate student, gathered to hear three speakers representing a spectrum of professional backgrounds and perspectives. Chip Elliott, an animal trapper with over ten years of experience in the Atlanta metro area, promoted both education and trapping as important measures to maintain a critical balance between humans and coyotes. While Elliott endorsed trapping as a successful mechanism for coyote control, he acknowledged that the practice would not eliminate the population. Instead, Elliott presented trapping as a controlled human response intended to "put fear" into increasingly bold coyote communities. Dr. Chris Mowry, a biologist at Berry College, provided insight into contemporary research on urban coyote populations, prefacing his presentation with the admission that, "We don't understand the coyote in Atlanta very well." Mowry's presentation highlighted the need for more research on the urban coyote phenomenon and introduced the Metro Atlanta Coyote Project. A collaboration that Mowry spearheads with Zoo Atlanta and the Fernbank Science Center, the Metro Atlanta Coyote Project studies behaviors and activity patterns of urban coyotes in order to develop more effective management strategies of these populations. Mary Paglieri of the Little Blue Society for Human-Animal Conflict Resolution concluded the evening's presentations. As a professional tracker, Paglieri emphasized the concept of "just balance," which weighs human and animal needs as equally important parts of a larger ecosystem. Paglieri described the coyote's ability to adapt to most human behaviors and responses, requiring a sustained "management co-existence program" that responds to coyote's "natural instincts," as opposed to "aberrant behaviors" the animals learn from contact with humans.

From the outset of the meeting, it was clear that meeting attendees had strong feelings about what the moderator identified as the "coyote matter." As such, many of the questions revealed tensions between ideals of human compassion and their application. In a moment of levity, a Druid Hills resident asked whether peeing on a trapped coyote might deter it from establishing territory in human spaces, enabling it to be released into the neighborhood, as opposed to euthanizing it according to state law. While the question resulted in laughter, it highlighted one of the central concerns in the room: Can we demarcate space and establish identifiable boundaries that coyotes both recognize and respect? As all three speakers agreed that coyotes will maintain a permanent presence in the Druid Hills landscape, it is apparent that we need to learn how to speak across the human-animal divide. The coyote matter provides an opportunity to reflect on the limitations of distinctions we draw between oppositional binaries such as rural/urban, domesticated/wild, human/animal that have profound implications for our understanding of the spaces we inhabit. As a new resident of Druid Hills, the neighborhood coyotes challenge me to consider Olmsted's vision of a "country" neighborhood within the Atlanta landscape and to look across the boundaries of my comfort zone, identifying opportunities for meaningful coexistence with both humans and animals in the suburban wild.

The Bulletin compiles news from in and around the US South. We hope these posts will provide space for lively discussion and debate regarding issues of importance to those living in and intellectually engaging with the US South.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation continues to re-open murder cases stemming from the civil rights era that had initially been shelved as "cold cases." A recent New York Times article describes the cold-case initiative, which was launched in 2006, as an effort to provide closure to both victims' families and the general public. The initiative was written into law in 2008 when Congress passed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, although the impact of this legislative agenda has been limited due to both budgetary constraints and lack of prosecutorial resources. Today, approximately twenty cold cases remain open and unresolved. While one re-opened case has resulted in a successful prosecution, the remainder of the 112 cases investigated as a part of the initiative have been closed.

Two teenage defendants in a controversial rape trial held in Steubenville, Ohio, were found guilty on Sunday, March 17, and sentenced to serve time at a juvenile detention facility until their twenty-first birthdays. Located in one of Ohio's thirty-two Appalachian counties, news outlets have described Steubenville as both an impoverished town in the Rust Belt of Ohio and as an industrial Appalachian city, tacitly connecting the crime to longstanding regional stereotypes. The case has garnered national attention due to both the severity of the crime and the defendants' use of social media to record and publicize their actions.

The Project on Fair Representation, a conservative advocacy group that supports litigation challenging racial and ethnic classifications in state and federal courts, filed the complaint Lepak vs. City of Irving in 2010. Responding to a redistricting plan that numerically impacted the weight of individual votes in one Irving district, the case highlights ambiguity in the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 that outlawed discriminatory voting practices, but which did not clarify whether "one person one vote" requires districts to be measured by number of people or by number of eligible voters. A recent New York Times article describes the potential implications of a Supreme Court decision to define districts by voting eligibility, especially in communities with high numbers of ineligible voters. The Supreme Court is scheduled to decide whether to hear this case in the coming weeks.

The Bulletin compiles news from in and around the US South. We hope these posts will provide space for lively discussion and debate regarding issues of importance to those living in and intellectually engaging with the US South.

On March 3, 2013, doctors announced that a baby born in rural Mississippi had been "functionally cured" of HIV infection. The case is groundbreaking because the mother did not undergo prenatal care to prevent her baby’s infection. The baby, now two-and-a-half years old, received antiretroviral drugs thirty hours after birth. The baby continued to undergo treatment for eighteen months; the mother then stopped giving the child medication. Five months later, the mother returned with the baby and, upon performing tests, doctors discovered no trace of HIV in the baby. As The New York Timesreported, transmission of HIV from mother to baby is rare in the United States, about two hundred cases per year, as mothers generally receive prenatal care to prevent transmission. This is the second reported case of a person cured of HIV. The first was a middle-aged male named Timothy Brown, who was cured in 2007 as a result of bone-marrow transplant from a "donor genetically resistant to HIV infection." The New York Times also stated that, if this practice is demonstrated to work with other newborns, it will be widely recommended for use around the world.

Marco McMillian, an openly gay African American mayoral candidate in Clarksdale, Mississippi, was found murdered on Wednesday, February 27, 2013. The body of the Democratic candidate was discovered near the base of the Mississippi River after having been missing for a day. The next day, a suspect named Lawrence Reed was arrested. While the victim's family claims that the murder was "not a random act of violence," officials are not investigating the murder as a hate crime. As the Chicago Tribune reported, McMillian was "one of the first viable, openly gay" candidates in the state.

Lauren Bock, 196-86, Gdansk Airport, Poland, 2012. The song on page 196 in The Sacred Harp is titled "Alabama"; the song on page 86, "Poland." This fortuitous image, spotted on the side of a taxi at the Gdansk airport signified for disembarking singers both the physical distance some of them had traveled to attend Camp Fasola Europe and the Poland Sacred Harp Convention, and the metaphorical space Sacred Harp singing itself had traveled to make these events possible.

Ties between Sacred Harp singing and specific places have long been a part of the musical form. These connections are even indexed in The Sacred Harp songbook. Composers of many Sacred Harp songs chose titles referring to the towns, counties, and US states where the composers lived or visited. Still others named tunes for distant countries and continents, perhaps seeking to imbue their music with a sense of mystery or exoticism by associating it with a far-off place. Like these composers, European Sacred Harp singers have related songs to place in cases where their titles have coincided with the names of European cities and countries where Sacred Harp singing now occurs. Singers such as Cath Saunt and Fynn Titford-Mock of Norwich in the United Kingdom frequently lead a song in The Sacred Harp titled "Norwich," a sprightly fuging tune named by its composer D. P. White in 1850 for a community in Taylor County, Georgia. And the song "Poland," named for the European nation in 1783 by Massachusetts composer Timothy Swan, unsurprisingly became something of a theme song for the events this September, sung by visiting singers just after arriving in Gdansk, by Polish singers themselves at numerous occasions, and by David Ivey, director of Camp Fasola, as an expression of thanks at the Poland Convention.1

In November, I remarked that "many new singers," such as those in Europe, associate authentic, traditional Sacred Harp practice "with prominent singing families from Alabama, Georgia, and Texas who have long histories of Sacred Harp participation." While this association has led to a tendency in the United States for new singers to "imagin[e] this locus of tradition . . . as 'southern,'" in Europe, teachers at Camp Fasola, and new European singers alike used a wide range of place names to refer to Sacred Harp singing's source. For many, "southern" sufficed as a term with the capacity to both generalize Sacred Harp singing's historical roots and evoke a "white, rural South" as the imagined home of this style of singing. Yet numerous others referred to "American Sacred Harp singing," relying on this broader term to associate Sacred Harp singing with the authenticity, folkloricity, and exoticism that the term "southern" carries for audiences in the United States.

Other singers explicitly associated the practices of Sacred Harp singing with particular places and time periods. P. Dan Brittain—a teacher at Camp Fasola Europe from Harrison, Arkansas who began singing Sacred Harp in 1970 as a military band director stationed at Fort McPherson, Georgia—explicitly framed his singing school as teaching the style of Sacred Harp singing practiced in West Georgia in the early 1970s. Other singing teachers such as Ivey, originally from Henagar, Alabama, and Judy Caudle, from Eva, Alabama, taught aspects of Sacred Harp singing they described as associated with their families and localities.

A key concern of European singers was how they should negotiate between their interest in emulating these practices associated with regional singing traditions and their desire to adapt Sacred Harp singing to their European locales. Camp instructors encouraged these students to learn about and adopt practices long-associated with Sacred Harp singing, yet also seemed to view "tradition" as something that could change, evolve, and develop around Sacred Harp singing in its new European homes. Singers were also aware of the potential for these conventions and Camp Fasola Europe to shape practices in European Sacred Harp singing places for years to come.

At the end of one of his classes, Brittain—who has four compositions in The Sacred Harp, three of which were already popular among several groups of European singers—described rediscovering a draft of his song "Novakoski," a version different than the one he published in The Sacred Harp. His draft began slowly in 2/2 time before switching to a brisker 4/4 at the start of the song's fuging section. The published version, however, is in 4/4 throughout, which in The Sacred Harp indicates a moderate tempo (itself different from the version Brittain submitted, which was in 2/2 throughout and intended to be sung slowly). The time change in Brittain's draft translates into music notation an oral tradition associated with two other Sacred Harp songs which, though notated in 4/4, are sung with a slow plain section leading to a brisker fuging section.

Brittain noted he had never heard "Novakoski" sung with this change in tempo, and the class of singers immediately asked to sing the song that way. The singers were delighted with the result, and Brittain decided he was happy to have the song sung in either fashion. During the remainder of Camp Fasola, "Novakoski," sung with a time change, was a popular leading choice for campers—and was a frequent topic of discussion among campers in the evening, some of whom half-jokingly spoke of the incident as the beginning of a new "local tradition." This process was cemented the next weekend at the Poland Convention when an Irish singer stood before the class, called out the page number, and asked to sing the song "Poland style." As Sacred Harp singing continues to spread, singers are finding ways to create new local traditions drawing on conceptions of their practices as tied to the histories of broad geographical expanses such as the "South" and "America," and to specific times and places, from West Georgia in the 1970s, to Poland today.

Singers at Camp Fasola Europe sing "Novakoski" by P. Dan Brittain "Poland style," switching to a quicker tempo at the start of the fuging section, as Brittain had notated the song in an early manuscript copy. Chmielno, Poland, September 18, 2012. Audio recording by Jesse P. Karlsberg.

1. "Poland" was so popular in in the years after its publication that residents of two Maine communities subsequently named their towns after "Poland" and another tune by Swan titled "China"—leading to the incorrect yet common assertion that both songs were named after the Maine towns, not the European and Asian countries.

This series of photographs by Arthur Rothstein depicts men and women in canning and packing plants in Winter Haven and Fort Pierce, Florida. While photographs of agricultural work appear throughout the Library of Congress's Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives Collection, I thought that these images of Floridian workers packing and canning grapefruits and oranges were dramatically different than other, more nostalgic images of small farmers in the US South during the 1930s. Arthur Rothstein seems to have taken a particular interest in migrant workers during his time in Winter Haven and Fort Pierce,Florida in 1937.