In late September, I drove from Mississippi across north Alabama for a meeting in Atlanta of archivists, historians, and others. We were consulting about the possibilities of launching an Internet-based archive of Southern history and culture. This exciting project is coordinated by SOLINET, the Southeastern Libraries Network, and it promises to extend the study of the American South into a new region--the worldwide web. The Center is pleased to be a part of the effort to make sources for researching the South more accessible.

The Center has special interests in using technology through media for educational purposes. Our Southern Culture Catalog is being updated, and its listing of films, videos, and other materials will soon be available on the web. Center staff are assembling curriculum materials for some of the films to promote their use in educational institutions. This past summer Professors Kathryn McKee and Ted Ownby taught the fifth Southern Studies Teachers Institute, making use of some of these film resources as teaching devices.

The fall is always the season for conferences, and the theme of the 1999 Porter L. Fortune Jr. History Symposium, cosponsored by the Center and the Department of History, was "The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights Era." It brought together the usual distinguished assemblage, including two scholars from English universities: Richard King, of Nottingham, and Tony Badger, of Cambridge. Ted Ownby, associate professor of History and Southern Studies, directed the symposium, which included sessions on poor people's ideologies of reform, the competing traditions of liberalism that affected the civil rights movement, the segregationist argument, conservative intellectual traditions, the role of nationalism, and theological viewpoints. The presence of such civil rights activists as Lawrence Guyot in the audience further enlivened the symposium and suggested the continuing relevance of its theme.

In late October the Center hosted the second Southern Foodways Symposium, which brought together more than 80 registrants and a lively group of program participants who examined the theme of creolization. The program included a catfish cooking and lunches in the University Grove, as well as lectures and panels that stressed the multiethnic contributions to distinctive Southern eating traditions. Everyone left satisfied, but eager to know more through the newest Center-sponsored publication, the cookbook A Gracious Plenty, published this fall by Putnam.

Autumn can be a melancholy season, and we acknowledge that mood in noting that two members of our Center Advisory Board, Phil Sprague and John Tigrett, passed away since our last newsletter. We appreciate their contributions to making the Center what it is, a place that builds on its academic and research programs to reach out to the broader community interested in knowing about our region. We will miss them.