Of the many diverse and worthwhile projects and ideas afloat in Southern Studies, this article will highlight four. The featured projects and ideas are comparable because each attempts to explain or connect with a particular community.

Graduate student Audrey Campbell, with the help of three Honors College undergraduates, is researching African American Pentecostal ministers in the South. She has conducted interviews with ministers in her family and with a female evangelist. In carrying out interviews, Campbell is examining and comparing vocational "calls" into the ministry. As a Baptist-turned-Pentecostal, she is raising the following questions: What draws people to Pentecostal churches?, How does the minister's style of preaching affect his congregation?, and How does a Pentecostal's view of the significance of everyday existence inform her social conscience?

Campbell answers some of these questions in her own life. She cites a "sense of joy" and "family bond" as main components of her attraction to the church. By attributing the intimacy of church relationships to the fostering of mutuality, Campbell says that in daily interactions "everybody is somebody." This sense of belonging, coupled with the belief that "Jesus came to break down barriers," is foundational to the church's stance on race relations. According to Campbell, the church makes "no distinction of persons." As a one-time outsider to Pentecostal religion, Campbell, who has now become an insider to this community, is inquisitively and respectfully probing what makes her faith different.

Through a new partnership with the Center, the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience hopes to encourage interest in the South's ethnic history. Museum scholars Hanna Griff and Mark I. Greenberg are preparing an exhibit showcasing immigrants, specifically eastern European Jews, who came to the South. With the assistance of Southern Studies graduate student Melissa McGuire, who is transcribing interviews, Greenberg plans to present the accounts of second- and third-generation immigrants from Alsace, France, in the exhibit Alsace to America: Discovering a Southern Jewish Heritage.

The exhibit intends to show the "human element" of immigration--the universal want for new opportunities and a better life--and the tremendous cultural exchange that followed immigration. Seeking to tell the unique ethnic story of Jewish immigrants, it will show how they brought their old world culture to the South, thereby enriching the region, while they were changed by and melded into their new community. Alsace to America opens in May at the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience and runs through August 31, 1998.

A course in environmental history taught this fall by Robbie Ethridge, McMullan Assistant Professor of Southern Studies and assistant professor of Anthropology, also examines a rich cultural exchange among members of a Southern community. The readings relate the effects of multiple cultures on the environment. Focusing on the social diversity of a precotton South, where Indians, whites, and blacks had almost 300 years of substantial interaction, the class examines the way in which one's cultural or racial history affected his method of land use. Ethridge concludes that as everyone participated in a market economy based on cotton, the prior cultural exchange was leveled.

Emphasizing distinctive elements of the South by analyzing the Delta community, the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies is restaging its Mississippi Delta Festival in Greenville, Mississippi, as the Greenville Folklife Festival. The festival will simulate the Smithsonian's production held this summer in Washington, D.C., with the added objective of developing for middle / junior high school students a learning program titled Discovering Our Delta. The program is intended to generate the students' interest in their region and to engage them in thinking about how knowledge is important in their lives. Targeting students at an age when they might lose interest in learning, Discovering Our Delta will attempt to combine motivation with inquiry, thereby fostering student research. Increased interest in learning will naturally benefit the region by producing a better-educated workforce.

Southern Studies graduate students Caroline Herring and Peter Slade are assisting with the festival's restaging. Herring, whose major graduate research has been on the Mississippi chapter of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, plans to pursue a folklore degree upon receiving her master's in Southern Studies. Slade, a resident of Oxford, England, is interested in music communities, particularly gospel musicians. Production of the festival begins in October 1997 with testing in April 1998 and final production in the summer of 1998. The educational program on the Delta community is expected to be introduced in schools during 1998-99.

Southern Studies faculty and students continue to learn about the unique aspects of the South. The connections that they make among and between Southern communities serve to enhance their understanding of the region as a whole. In many cases, their projects also contribute to the various communities they study.

Shawna Dooley