Permit me a moment to thank all who read and subscribe. To those who've tossed their hard-earned dollars into the digital tip jar, I raise a glass in your honor. Your generosity does not go unnoticed. Though there is no paywall to peek behind, you have chosen to support my work, and for that, I am deeply grateful.
I never swore to pen a certain number of essays each month or stick to some ironclad schedule, but I’m glad for what I’ve managed to get out. If the Lord sees fit, I’ll keep on going.
In Afghanistan, the second half of my deployment I was a machine gunner. Not that it matters much now, but in the first half, I was the platoon’s RTO, sending up SITREPs (situational reports). So here’s my current one:
Thanks to my paid subscribers, I’ve purchased several books I plan to archive because I can’t find digital editions of them on any of my go-to sites.
A Vanderbilt Miscellany 1919-1944, edited by Richmond Croom Beatty, was published by Vanderbilt University in 1944. I have a very special copy that I’ll write about, but I needed a copy that’s easier to digitize.
A Manual for Dialect Research in the Southern States.
Books From Chapel Hill, 1922-1997: A Complete Catalog of Publications From the University of North Carolina Press. I have a digital copy from Internet Archive, but it is such a low-quality scan that I decided to do it myself.
The UNC Press book leads into a large project I’m working on about Southern academic presses that will eventually expand into all Southern book publishers. I’ve downloaded lists from the Library of Congress of the works of the University presses and will turn them into something easier to digest. So, expect essays on the subject eventually.
At the moment, I possess a Google doc that’s several hundred pages long, containing only the table of contents for every issue of the Journal of Southern History, along with an accompanying CSV. It irks me to think that I might be laboring over something that already exists, but I can’t locate it (UPDATE: I just found Constellate through JSTOR. GAME CHANGER. Although, it doesn’t provide the name of the book being reviewed like my method. Still valuable. Also going to play with MARC files and a few others.). Sure, JSTOR has the contents, but have you ever tried to copy and paste that into a document? Allow me to illustrate.
I take that text on the right and run it through a Notepad ++ macro I made that turns it into:
and then I send it over to the chatGPT monster and it spits out a CSV:
Why am I doing this? An astute question. I suppose I just have to. One day, I or one of the “data guys” might delve into it, visualizing trends in Southern scholarship or tracking the march through institutions as certain buzzwords become more frequent. I will also be doing this for the Mississippi Valley Historical Review and other Southern periodicals. Once I’ve completed the Journal of Southern History I will share it.
I received great feedback on a recent X/Twitter post, so I’m putting together something on Southern language/dialect or whatever.
I have a few rare book purchases I want to share and connect a few Southern dots that will lead to filled shelves across the land.
Cheers!