Center director Charles Reagan Wilson is directing the 23rd Porter L. Fortune History Symposium, September 17-19, 2003, at the Yerby Center at the University of Mississippi. The topic is "The Environment and Southern History." This year’s meeting draws from recent scholarship on the topic and should contribute to a growing momentum of Southern environmental studies. 
     Historian Jack Temple Kirby, author of Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape and Society and Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960, will give the keynote address, based in his current research on a history of the Southern environment. (See Symposium schedule, below.) He will touch on the idea of a field of Southern environmental history and tell about Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the Florida writer whose understanding of the landscape of Cross Creek made her a prime iterary chronicler of the Southern environment. 
     Other presenters at the symposium include Mart Stewart, who will give an updated look at the climate and Southern history; Shepard Krech, who will look at the cultural meanings that emerge from Native Americans’ relationships with birds; Margaret Humphries, who will talk about disease and Southern history; Donald Davis, who will discuss the Appalachian Mountains; Timothy Silver, who will sketch  ideas on the Civil War and its impact on the environment; and Paul Sutter, who will give a case study of conservation and its ironic meanings in the case of one Georgia state park.
     Ted Steinberg, historian at Case Western Reserve University, will give a final commentary at the symposium. The author of Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History and Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America, Steinberg promises to put the South’s story in national perspective. 
     For more information, e-mail Charles Reagan Wilson at crwilson@olemiss.edu or visit the history symposium website at www.olemiss.edu/depts/history/symposium.

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