Symbols are forms, sensory forms, physical forms seen, heard, and touched that express less tangible ideas, feelings, and values or opinions.

“When they’re dead you like them all,” pronounced John, one of my former coworkers in Georgia.

James L. Peacock is the Kenan Professor of Anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill. His most recent book is Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World.

My father was an engineer who never told stories; he was, matter of fact, like his mother, Minerva, and his cousin Jimmy Carter, another engineer. On the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day he...

Prefaces are rarely read or remembered unless they are manifestos, which this is not. The guiding editors of our “magazine” invited me to introduce the first issue, explaining something...