In another of our miniseries of rehearsals and evaluations of AI-produced scripts of conversations with famous dead Southerners, Mark Smith is joined by Professor Stephanie Y. Mitchem to talk about Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks. They discuss the famous incident on the Birmingham bus--which AI gets mostly right--the complexities of Parks's identity and activism, and all of the details and nuances that ChatGPT misses.

Mark Smith is joined by Ed Madden, former poet laureate of Columbia, SC, to talk about the role of poetry in recording the history and exploring the places of Southern cities.

Mark Smith asked ChatGPT to produce a scripted interview with the writer William Faulkner. Matt Simmons joins him to discuss that script, the work and background of the South's most famous writer, and the limits and promises of AI.

In this episode Emily Allen interviews Burgin Mathews, who is a writer, a radio host, and the founding director of the nonprofit Southern Music Research Center. He also published the book Magic City: How the Birmingham Jazz Tradition Shaped the Sound of America in 2023 with the University of North Carolina Press. 

Two Englishmen, our own Mark Smith and Dr. Clive Webb, Professor of Modern American History at the University of Sussex, sit down to discuss their very British perspectives on writing the history of the American South. What are the differences in American and British approaches to the topic? What challenges face the British academy and how Britons study the South? The two also discuss Dr. Webb's work, including Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights and Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era.

Emily Allen chats with Marvin McNeill about African American military bands, college marching bands, and brass bands in the South and beyond. McNeill, a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University, is Assistant Professor of Music and African American Studies at the Oxford College of Emory University.  In this conversation, he centers on the brass band Funky Dawgz, the TBC Brass Band, and the Morgan State University marching band.

Mark Smith is joined by Neil Kinghan, author of A Brief Moment in the Sun: Francis Cardozo and Reconstruction in South Carolina to discuss the life and legacy of one of the more fascinating forgotten figures in American history, the Reconstruction-era South Carolina politician and reformer Francis Cardozo.

Mark Smith is joined by Sarah Gardner of Mercer University to talk about the role the English playwright William Shakespeare played in the military, political, and interpersonal life of the American Civil War.

As conference champtionship season warms up, our new host Emily Allen speaks with musicologist Carrie Allen Tipton about her book From Dixie to Rocky Top: Music and Meaning in

Mark Smith sits down with Mercer University professor David A. Davis, author of the new book Driven to the Field: Sharecropping and Southern Literature, to discuss the development of sharecropping, a labor that shaped so much of the rural South, both black and white, for the 100 years after the Civil War, and its representation in Southern literature.