Issue 102: Fall 2018

What history gets saved, and why, and by whom? These questions drive several of the pieces in our Fall issue, which features cover art by Kerry James Marshall. Kelsey Norris reports on a historic-preservation conflict as it plays out in Nashville at the site of a Union fort built by freedmen and slaves. Tess Taylor travels to Virginia to learn about the poet Anne Spencer, an activist and contemporary of Hughes, Hurston, and Du Bois—a writer little known despite her accomplishment as the first African-American woman to be featured in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Will Bostwick visits the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project at Baylor University and ponders the relevance of gospel—a music central to the civil rights movement—in our contemporary age of resistance. Elsewhere in the issue, Tom Piazza rides shotgun with John Prine in a 1977 Coupe de Ville. Beth Macy, author of Dopesick, profiles Robert Gipe and his change-making art in Appalachia. And Nick Tabor shares the fascinating story of Orthodox Christianity in the South.