Today was graduation here in Chapel Hill. This is almost the conclusion of my twentieth year in teaching (I still have some essay questions to read). I'm astonished at how quickly those years have gone by — and by all sorts of other things, like how much I have learned from my students; how much I continue to enjoy working with students; how much my teaching methods have changed; how much my research interests have expanded (and in some ways how some of those interests have remained stable). Perhaps it's time for a trivia question from my past. Today's trivia question combines an early twentieth-century courthouse and a Confederate monument — so it has a couple of my interests. Where is it? I don't think I'm making this too easy by saying that I've done title searches in this courthouse.
Progressive Era Courthouse Trivia, III
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I believe it's the Hale County Courthouse in Greensboro, AL. In 1936 outside this courthouse, James Agee & Walker Evans met three sharecroppers who became the subjects of their influential book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
You are, as always, correct. It's the Hale County Courthouse in Greensboro, Alabama. I have some photographs of the Greensboro Cemetery, which I want to put up soon. I adore that town.
Thanks for mentioning Agee and Evans. Walker Evans took a lot of photographs in Greensboro — one of these days I need to blog some about that and perhaps about Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, too.
I've up a couple of posts over the years on Walker Evans: http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2009/12/the-latest-on-walker-evans-and-james-agee.html
And here's something about an Evans photograph used by the New York Review of Books http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2008/03/09/
In fact, I've been blogging so long I've even forgotten about some of my posts, like this one about a NY Times travel section piece on following the path of Evans: http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2009/04/on-the-path-of-walker-evans.html
As long as I'm writing about Greensboro, I should mention Guy Hubbs' outstanding book Guarding Greensboro: http://books.google.com/books/about/Guarding_Greensboro.html?id=YeJQv1K3YbIC