A New Reader of the Old South: Major Stories, Tales, Slave Narratives, Essays, Travelogues, Poetry and Songs: 1820 – 1920

Pictured on this cover are the ruins of Windsor Mansion Plantation, which was built by slave labor from 1859-61, and burned to the ground in 1890. It’s iconic columns have long been a metaphor for the fall of the antebellum South, providing fodder for many photographers, notably Clarence John Laughlin, whose image is on the cover of Blanche McCrary Boyd’s The Redneck Way of Knowledge.

In writer and photographer Eudora Welty’s image, her shadow self-portrait prefigures Lee Friedlander’s series by at least twenty years.

Click here to view Welty’s photo in the collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.