The jpg is shamelessly stolen from Kevin Levin at Civil War Memory via Mark Grimsley at Blog Them Out of the Stone Age. It reminds me of the triptych of Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis that glared relentlessly at me 35 years ago, when I was first doing research at Emory University's Special Collections. They seemed to know that I would challenge the maleness, the whiteness, even the southern-ness of the field. All of which is to recommend two up-coming conferences that benefit from those transformations.

The first is the 19th Annual Meeting of the Southern Intellectual History Circle. Penn's Steven Hahn's opening address at Harvard this evening on"Maroons and the Emancipation Process in the United States" is free and open to the public. Meetings tomorrow and Saturday require registration, but they'll feature a star-studded cast, including Homi Bhabha, Jane Dailey, Drew Gilpin Faust, Glenda Gilmore, Matt Guterl, Jacquelyn Hall, Tera Hunter, Stephen Kantrowitz, James Kloppenberg, Michael O'Brien, Barbara Savage, and others. I'd give my eye-teeth to be there.

But Southern Studies comes South next month with a second conference at Emory. Michigan's Matt Lassiter and Emory's Joe Crespino have put together a conference on"The End of Southern History? Integrating the Modern South and the Nation" on the 23rd and 24th of March. It will feature keynote addresses by John Egerton and former President Jimmy Carter. Its speakers include Cliopatria's contributing editor James Cobb, Jane Dailey, Grace Hale, Jacquelyn Hall, Kevin Kruse, Charles Payne and others. That one will be close enough to home that I can walk to it.