Alabama History: Time Periods/Events

Also available as an eBook.

This is a modern edition. Pickett's original work was first published in 1851.

The two works reprinted in this volume represent the pinnacle of the career of one of the most remarkable American archaeologists of the early 20th century, Clarence Bloomfield Moore. Moore's "Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Black Warrior River" (1905) and "Moundville Revisited "(1907) brought the Moundville site in Alabama to the attention of the scholarly world in dramatic fashion by offering a splendid photographic display and expert commentary on its artifactual richness. Moore was the leading southeastern specialist of his day and the most prolific excavator of southern sites during the early part of the 20th century. Today Moore gives the impression of having been everywhere, having excavated everything, and having published on all of it. "Moundville Expeditions" contains facsimile reprints of these two classic works, along with a new scholarly introduction by one of the leading authorities on the Moundville archaeological site. Once again these rare materials on Moundville are available both for scholars and for a general audience.

This book deals with the prehistory of the region encompassed by the present state of Alabama and spans a period of some 11,000 years--from 9000 B.C. and the earliest documented appearance of human beings in the area to A.D. 1750, when the early European settlements were well established. Only within the last five decades have remains of these prehistoric peoples been scientifically invest

Covering 19 years of excavations, this volume provides an invaluable collection of Moore's pioneering archaeological investigations along Alabama's waterways. In 1996, The University of Alabama Press published The Moundville Expeditions of Clarence Bloomfield Moore, which covered a large part of Moore's early archaeological expeditions to the state of Alabama. This volume collects the balance of Moore's Alabama expeditions, with the exception of those Moore made along the Tennessee River, which will be collected in another, forthcoming volume focusing on the Tennessee basin. This volume includes: Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Alabama River (1899); Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Tombigbee River(1901); a portion of Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Northwest Florida Coast (1901); The So-Called "Hoe-Shaped Implement" (1903); Aboriginal Urn-Burial in the United States (1904); A Form of Urn-Burial on Mobile Bay (1905); Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Lower Tombigbee River (1905); Certain Aboriginal Remains on Mobile Bay and on Mississippi Sound (1905); a portion of Mounds of the Lower Chattahoochee and Lower Flint Rivers (1907); a portion of The Northwest Florida Coast Revisited(1918). Craig Sheldon's comprehensive introduction focuses both on the Moore expeditions and on subsequent archaeological excavations at sites investigated by Moore. Sheldon places Moore's archaeological work in the context of his times and against the backdrop of similar investigations in the Southeast. Sheldon discusses practical matters, such as the various assistants Moore employed and their roles in these historic expeditions. He provides brief vignettes of daily life on the Gopher and describes Moore's work habits, revealing professional and personal biographical details previously unknown about this enigmatic archaeologist.  

Representing the synthesis of approximately ten years of archaeological research along the central Tombigbee River, this book offers new theoretical and interpretive contributions to the study of human activity in the Tombigbee River Valley from 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1450. The authors have devised a new taxonomic approach that allows them to portray cultures as they gathered momentum and peaked in their potential as social, economic, and political structures. The data acquired for this study are from the massive cultural resource management program that accompanied the construction of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway.

This edition is a reprint.

This edition is a reprint of the original published in 1897.

This is a reprint of the original edition published in 1876.

Also available as an eBook.

Andre Penicaut, a carpenter, sailed with Iberville to the French province of Louisiana in 1699 and did not return to France until 1721. The book he began in the province and finished upon his return to France is an eyewitness account of the first years of the French colony, which stretched along the Gulf Coast from Florida to Texas and in the Mississippi Valley from the Balize to the Illinois country. As a ship carpenter, Penicaut was chosen as a member of several important expeditions: he accompanied Le Sueur up the Mississippi River in 1700 to present-day Minnesota, and he went with Juchereau de St. Denis on the first journey from Mobile to the Red River and overland to the Rio Grande, to open trade with the Spaniards in Mexico. Penicaut helped to build the first post in Louisiana, at Old Biloxi, and the second post on the Mobile River. Penicaut was at his best when describing the lives and social customs of the Indians of the region. He saw them in realistic terms, showing no prejudice toward their native habits. Neither were his French colleagues cast in heroic or villainous molds--though their accomplishments must strike modern readers as truly epic. When first published, Fleur de Lys and Calumet was a major stimulus to scholarship in the field. This new edition will be welcomed by a new generation of scholars and readers interested in the colonial history of the Deep South and the Mississippi Valley.

Also available as an eBook.

Also available as an eBook.

In the nineteenth century, the people of Alabama relied on newspapers to learn about the world outside their own hometowns. Prior to the 1890s, the technology did not exist to economically publish photographs in newspapers, so some publishers employed artists to draw and engrave images of places, events, and people. Many of these engraved illustrations, which accompanied news stories, poems, and short fiction, are impressive for their detail and artistic quality. From the 1850s to the 1890s, more than 250 engraved images of Alabama were published in national and international illustrated newspapers. Alabama Illustrated contains nearly 50 of those illustrations from five nineteenth-century newspapers such as Harper's Weekly. These striking black-and-white images depict city and country scenes of everything from politics and civil war to agriculture, industry, entertainment, and everyday life, providing readers passionate about history and art a unique insight into Alabama's rich cultural past.

First published in 1989 by The University of Alabama Press, Poor but Proud was met with critical acclaim and awarded the 1990 Lillian Smith prize in nonfiction, as well as being named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book. This new paperback version will make the classic work available for general readers, bookstores, and classrooms. Wayne Flynt addresses the life experiences of poor whites through their occupations, society, and culture. He explores their family structure, music, religion, folklore, crafts, and politics and describes their attempts to resolve their own problems through labor unions and political movements. He reveals that many of our stereotypes about poor whites are wildly exaggerated; few were derelicts or "white trash." Even though racism, emotionalism, and a penchant for violence were possible among poor whites, most bore their troubles with dignity and self-respect - working hard to eventually lift themselves out of poverty. The phrase "poor but proud" aptly describes many white Alabamians who settled the state and persisted through time. During the antebellum years, poor whites developed a distinctive culture on the periphery of the cotton belt. As herdsmen, subsistence farmers, mill workers, and miners, they flourished in a society more renowned for its two-class division of planters and slaves. The New Deal era and the advent of World War II broke the long downward spiral of poverty and afforded new opportunities for upward mobility.  

This is a reprint of the original edition published in 1876.

Also available as an eBook.

This case study in cultural mythmaking shows how antebellum Alabama created itself out of its own printed texts, from treatises on law and history to satire, poetry, and domestic novels.   Early 19th-century Alabama was a society still in the making. Now Philip Beidler tells how the first books written and published in the state influenced the formation of Alabama's literary and political culture. As Beidler shows, virtually overnight early Alabama found itself in possession of the social, political, and economic conditions required to jump start a traditional literary culture in the old Anglo-European model: property-based class relationships, large concentrations of personal wealth, and professional and merchant classes of similar social, political, educational, and literary views. Beidler examines the work of well-known writers such as humorist Johnson J. Hooper and novelist Caroline Lee Hentz, and takes on other classic pieces like Albert J. Pickett's History of Alabama and Alexander Beaufort Meek's epic poem The Red Eagle. Beidler also considers lesser-known works like Lewis B. Sewall's verse satire The Adventures of Sir John Falstaff the II, Henry Hitchcock's groundbreaking legal volume Alabama Justice of the Peace, and Octavia Walton Levert's Souvenirs of Travel. Most of these works were written by and for society's elite, and although many celebrate the establishment of an ordered way of life, they also preserve the biases of authors who refused to write about slavery yet continually focused on the extermination of Native Americans.   First Books returns us to the world of early Alabama that these texts not only recorded but helped create. Written with flair and a strong individual voice, it will appeal not only to scholars of Alabama history and literature but also to anyone interested in the antebellum South.

This is a modern edition. Pickett's original work was first published in 1851.

Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USX-NONEX-NONEMicrosoftInternetExplorer4 The history of the Vine and Olive Colony in Demopolis, Alabama, has long been clouded by romantic myths. The notion that it was a doomed attempt by Napoleonic exiles in America to plant a wine- and olive-growing community in Alabama based on the ideals of the French Revolution, has long been bolstered by the images that have been proliferated in the popular imagination of French ladies (in Josephine-style gowns) and gentlemen (in officer's full dress uniforms) lounging in the breeze on the bluffs overlooking the Tombigbee River while sturdy French peasants plowed the rich soil of the Black Belt. Indeed, these picturesque images come close to matching the dreams that many of the exiles themselves entertained upon arrival.   But Eric Saugera's recent scholarship does much to complicate the story. Based on a rich cache of letters by settlement founders and promoters discovered in French regional archives, Reborn in America humanizes the refugees, who turn out to have been as interested in profiteering as they were in social engineering and who dallied with schemes to restore the Bonapartes and return gloriously to their homeland.   The details presented in this story add a great deal to what we know of antebellum Alabama and international intrigues in the decades after Napoleon's defeat, and shed light as well on the other, less glamorous refugees: planters fleeing from the revolution in Haiti, whose interest was much more purely agricultural and whose lasting influence on the region was far more durable.

Also available as an eBook.

This is a reprint of the original edition published in 1919.

Available as an eBook.

This is a reprint of the original edition published in 1876.

Thesis/dissertation

Carolina Planters on the Alabama Frontier: The Spencer-Robeson-McKenzie Family collects the papers of Elihu Spencer, a fourth-generation New Englander, and his family and Southern decendents, to form a history of the American nation from the point of view of planters and those they held in slavery. The documents in this volume are accounts of a privileged world that was afflicted by constant loss and despair. The families lived as isolated, landed gentry in a society where medical treatment had hardly evolved since the Middle Ages. The papers together form a dramatic narrative of early Americans from the mid-eighteenth century to the harsh years after the Civil War. They created their new society with courage and imagination and tenacity, while never recognizing their own moral blind spot regarding the holding of human beings in slavery. It brought about the collapse of their world--poignantly expressed in these letters.

This is a reprint of the original edition published in 1876.

Also available as an eBook.

In the summer of 1860, more than fifty years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the UnitedStates as slaves. Timothy Meaher, an established Mobile businessman, sent the slave ship, the Clotilda , to Africa, on a bet that he could "bring a shipful of niggers right into Mobile Bay under the officers' noses." He won the bet. This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women. After emancipation, the group reunited from various plantations, bought land, andfounded their own settlement, known as African Town. They ruled it according to customary African laws, spoke their own regional language and, when giving interviews, insisted that writers use their African names so that their families would know that they were still alive. The last survivor of the Clotilda died in 1935, but African Town is still home to a community of Clotilda descendants. The publication of Dreams of Africa in Alabama marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.

This case study in cultural mythmaking shows how antebellum Alabama created itself out of its own printed texts, from treatises on law and history to satire, poetry, and domestic novels.   Early 19th-century Alabama was a society still in the making. Now Philip Beidler tells how the first books written and published in the state influenced the formation of Alabama's literary and political culture. As Beidler shows, virtually overnight early Alabama found itself in possession of the social, political, and economic conditions required to jump start a traditional literary culture in the old Anglo-European model: property-based class relationships, large concentrations of personal wealth, and professional and merchant classes of similar social, political, educational, and literary views. Beidler examines the work of well-known writers such as humorist Johnson J. Hooper and novelist Caroline Lee Hentz, and takes on other classic pieces like Albert J. Pickett's History of Alabama and Alexander Beaufort Meek's epic poem The Red Eagle. Beidler also considers lesser-known works like Lewis B. Sewall's verse satire The Adventures of Sir John Falstaff the II, Henry Hitchcock's groundbreaking legal volume Alabama Justice of the Peace, and Octavia Walton Levert's Souvenirs of Travel. Most of these works were written by and for society's elite, and although many celebrate the establishment of an ordered way of life, they also preserve the biases of authors who refused to write about slavery yet continually focused on the extermination of Native Americans.   First Books returns us to the world of early Alabama that these texts not only recorded but helped create. Written with flair and a strong individual voice, it will appeal not only to scholars of Alabama history and literature but also to anyone interested in the antebellum South.

John Tyler Morgan (1824-1907) was a major figure in regional and national politics during a crucial era in southern history. A leader in Alabama politics for almost fifty years, Morgan was first and foremost a southern nationalist who labored tirelessly to liberate the South from outside domination. In tracing Morgan's career, this book, his first comprehensive biography, also illuminates the processes by which Alabama and other southern states decided for secession and later opposed Reconstruction. Morgan's fear of northern and Republican threats to southern liberties, honor, and racial codes led first to his emergence as William L. Yancey's chief secessionist lieutenant and then to service in the Confederate cavalry. Similar motives prompted his active campaign against Reconstruction. As Alabama's U.S. senator from 1877 until his death, Morgan was one of the "Redeemers" who controlled the post-Reconstruction South. The senator's responses to Gilded Age domestic issues aggressively promoted sectionalism, agriculture, white supremacy, and black disfranchisement. In foreign policy, too, Alabama's colorful "ambassador" sought to benefit his "country", the South. Urging expanded exports of southern raw materials and the addition of southern senators and congressmen from new states to be carved out of the nation's island empire, Morgan became the south's foremost territorial and economic imperialist and the principal proponent of a Nicaragua canal.

Josiah Gorgas was best known as the highly regarded Chief of Confederate Ordnance. Born in 1818, he attended West Point, served in the U.S. Army, and later, after marrying Amelia Gayle, daughter of a former Alabama governor, joined the Confederacy. After the Civil War he served as president of The University of Alabama until ill health forced him to resign. His journals, maintained between 1857 and 1878, reflect the family's economic successes and failures, detail the course of the South through the Civil War, and describe the ordeal of Reconstruction. Few journals cover such a sweep of history. An added dimension is the view of Victorian family life as Gorgas explored his feelings about aspects of parental responsibility and transmission of values to children--a rarely documented account from the male perspective. His son, called Willie in the journals, was William Crawford Gorgas (1854-1920), who was noted for his fight to control yellow fever and who became surgeon general of the United States. In his foreword to the volume, Frank E. Vandiver states: "Wiggins has done much more than present a well-edited version of Gorgas's diaries and journals; she has interpreted them in full Gorgas family context and in perspective of the times they cover. . . . Wiggins informs with the sort of editorial notes expected of a careful scholar, but she enlightens with wide knowledge of American and southern history. . . . Josiah Gorgas was] an unusually observant, passionate man, a 'galvanized Rebel' who deserves rank among the true geniuses of American logistics."

This book is a biography of Alabama native John Forsyth Jr. and documents his career as a southern newspaper editor during the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods. From 1837 to 1877 Forsyth wrote about many of the most important events of the 19th century. He used his various positions as an editor, Civil War field correspondent, and Reconstruction critic at the MobileRegister to advocate on behalf of both the South and the Democratic Party.   In addition, Forsyth played an active role in the events taking place around him through his political career, as United States Minister to Mexico, state legislator, Confederate Peace Commissioner to the Lincoln administration, staff officer to Braxton Bragg, and twice mayor of the city of Mobile.  

Also available as an eBook.

Respectable and Disreputable describes how Montgomerians spent their increasing leisure time during the four decades preceding the Civil War. Everyday activities included gambling, drinking, sporting, hunting, and voluntary associations -- military, literary, self-improvement, fraternal, and civic. The book also includes seasonal activities -- religious and national holidays, fairs, balls, horse racing, and summering at mineral springs. Commercial entertainment, which became more prominent in the late antebellum period, included theater, opera, circuses, and minstrel shows. Historian Jeffrey Benton describes not only those everyday, seasonal, and commercial activities, but also shows how antebellum society debated the moral and philosophical questions of how leisure time should be spent. Woven throughout the book are comparisons between Montgomery and other cities and towns in antebellum America. Although the United States may have been increasingly divided economically, on rural-urban experiences, and of course on the issue of slavery, it seems that antebellum Americans -- at least those living in or with easy access to urban areas -- shared very similar leisure time activities.

This is a reprint of the original edition published in 1919.

Available as an eBook.

Through Others' Eyes includes descriptions of traveling to and from Montgomery, but it focuses on the travelers' descriptions of Montgomery itself. The twenty-eight published accounts between 1825 and 1861 were written by Americans and Europeans with a variety of backgrounds. A few are as objective as can reasonably be expected considering the short durations of the writers' visits. Some are prone to display their preconceptions and prejudices. Most exaggerate-they had to make their books marketable. The accounts are sometimes insightful or incredulous, often humorous and colorful, always giving the reader a vicarious experience of being there. For most of its forty-year antebellum history, Montgomery was a frontier river town. These accounts of it do not reveal moonlight and magnolias, but a rather coarse culture. The touring authors don't mince words about slavery; after all, their readers expected commentary about the most peculiar of Southern institutions. However, the writers' diverse views of slavery are as complicated and contradictory as was the institution itself. Together, these accounts sketch a fascinating world populated by individuals and with customs that would have inspired Charles Dickens had he overcome his prejudices and ventured further south than Richmond in 1842. The "Epilogue" provides a description of the first capital of the Confederacy.

From 1936 to 1938, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP), a part of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, hired writers, editors, and researchers to interview as many former slaves as they could find and document their lives during slavery. More than 2,000 former slaves in 17 states were interviewed. With Weren't No Good Times, John F. Blair, Publisher, continues its Real Voices, Real History(tm) series with selections from 46 of the 125 interviews now archived in the Libraryof Congress that were earmarked as interviews with Alabama slaves. Also included is an excerpt from Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom, a memoir written by Louis Hughes. This selection reveals a different aspect of the Alabama slavery experience, because Hughes was hired out by his master to work at the Confederate salt works during the Civil War. Alabama was a frontier state. From the beginning, its economy was built on cotton and slavery. That its laws were fashioned to accommodate both becomes obvious when related through the experiences of Alabama's slaves. A year after it obtained statehood, Alabama had a slave population of 41,879, as compared to 85,451 whites and 571 free blacks. By 1860, the slave population had swelled to 435,080, while there were 536,271 whites and 2,690 free blacks. When emancipation came to the slaves, Alabama's slave owners lost an estimated $200 million of capital. These narratives will help readers understand slavery by hearing the voices of the people who lived it.

IWilliam Lowndes Yancey (1814-63) was one of the leading secessionists of the Old South. In this first comprehensive biography, Eric H. Walther examines the personality and political life of the uncompromising fire-eater. Born in Georgia but raised in the North by a fiercely abolitionist stepfather and an emotionally unstable mother, Yancey grew up believing that abolitionists were cruel, meddling, and hypocritical. His personal journey led him through a series of mentors who transformed his political views, and upon moving to frontier Alabama in his twenties, Yancey's penchant for rhetorical and physical violence was soon channeled into a crusade to protect slaveholders' rights. Yancey defied Northern Democrats at their national nominating convention in 1860, rending the party and setting the stage for secession after the election of Abraham Lincoln. Selected to introduce Jefferson Davis in Montgomery as the president-elect of the Confederacy, Yancey also served the Confederacy as a diplomat and a senator before his death in 1863, just short of his forty-ninth birthday. More than a portrait of an influential political figure before and during the Civil War, this study also presents a nuanced look at the roots of Southern honor, violence, and understandings of manhood as they developed in the nineteenth century.

"A delight for any student of the Civil War". -- The Courier

Carolina Planters on the Alabama Frontier: The Spencer-Robeson-McKenzie Family collects the papers of Elihu Spencer, a fourth-generation New Englander, and his family and Southern decendents, to form a history of the American nation from the point of view of planters and those they held in slavery. The documents in this volume are accounts of a privileged world that was afflicted by constant loss and despair. The families lived as isolated, landed gentry in a society where medical treatment had hardly evolved since the Middle Ages. The papers together form a dramatic narrative of early Americans from the mid-eighteenth century to the harsh years after the Civil War. They created their new society with courage and imagination and tenacity, while never recognizing their own moral blind spot regarding the holding of human beings in slavery. It brought about the collapse of their world--poignantly expressed in these letters.

Christopher McIlwain's Civil War Alabama is a landmark book that sheds invigorating new light on the causes, the course, and the outcomes in Alabama of the nation's greatest drama and trauma. Based on twenty years of exhaustive research that draws on a vast trove of primary sources such as letters, newspapers, and personal journals, Civil War Alabama presents compelling new explanations for how Alabama's white citizens came to take up arms against the federal government.   A fledgling state at only forty years old, Alabama approached the 1860s with expanding populations of both whites and black slaves. They were locked together in a powerful yet fragile economic engine that produced and concentrated titanic wealth in the hands of a white elite. Perceiving themselves trapped between a mass of disenfranchised black slaves and the industrializing and increasingly abolitionist North, white Alabamians were led into secession and war by a charismatic cohort who claimed the imprimatur of biblical scripture, romanticized traditions of chivalry, and the military mantle of the American Revolution.   And yet, Alabama's white citizens were not a monolith of one mind. McIlwain dispels the received wisdom of a white citizenry united behind a cadre of patriarchs and patriots. Providing a fresh and insightful synthesis of military events, economic factors such as inflation and shortages, politics and elections, the pivotal role of the legal profession, and the influence of the press, McIlwain's Civil War Alabama illuminates the fissiparous state of white, antebellum Alabamians divided by class, geography, financial interests, and political loyalties.   Vital and compelling, Civil War Alabama will take its place among the definitive books about Alabama's doomed Confederate experiment and legacy. Although he rigorously dismantles idealized myths about the South's "Lost Cause," McIlwain restores for contemporary readers the fervent struggles between Alabamians over their response to the epic crisis of their times.

This edition is a reprint of the original work published in 1905.

With this superbly written, meticulously researched, and concisely argued study, Rogers has helped deepen our understanding of the Confederate civilian experience. Drawing from a wealth of historic documents and personal papers, William Warren Rogers, Jr., provides a fascinating and detailed political, economic, social, and commercial history of Montgomery from 1860 to 1865. His account begins with an examination of daily life in the city before the war began-how slaves outnumbered whites, how an unvarnished frontier atmosphere prevailed on the streets despite citizens' claims to refinement, how lush crops of corn and cotton grew in fields right up to the city limits, and how class divisions were distinct and immovable. Rogers arranges his material topically, covering the events that led to the decision for secession and Montgomery's heady days as the Confederacy's first capital; the industrialization of the city's war effort as it became a hub of activity and served as a military post; the city's business patterns and administration as it attempted to promote the Confederacy and defend itself from federal forces; and the plight of the small group of Unionists who inhabited Montgomery through the war. Rogers concludes with chapters examining the situation in Montgomery as the Confederacy unraveled and the city fell to Union troops. The Montgomery experience offers a microcosm of life on the Confederate home front and demonstrates that citizens generally experienced the same hopes, deprivations, and tragedies that other Southerners did at this time. Rogers's well-written, comprehensive history of the wartime city makes an original contribution to Civil War homefront and community studies that should appeal to general readers and scholars alike.

In the summer of 1860, more than fifty years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the UnitedStates as slaves. Timothy Meaher, an established Mobile businessman, sent the slave ship, the Clotilda , to Africa, on a bet that he could "bring a shipful of niggers right into Mobile Bay under the officers' noses." He won the bet. This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women. After emancipation, the group reunited from various plantations, bought land, andfounded their own settlement, known as African Town. They ruled it according to customary African laws, spoke their own regional language and, when giving interviews, insisted that writers use their African names so that their families would know that they were still alive. The last survivor of the Clotilda died in 1935, but African Town is still home to a community of Clotilda descendants. The publication of Dreams of Africa in Alabama marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.

Also available as an eBook.

Josiah Gorgas was best known as the highly regarded Chief of Confederate Ordnance. Born in 1818, he attended West Point, served in the U.S. Army, and later, after marrying Amelia Gayle, daughter of a former Alabama governor, joined the Confederacy. After the Civil War he served as president of The University of Alabama until ill health forced him to resign. His journals, maintained between 1857 and 1878, reflect the family's economic successes and failures, detail the course of the South through the Civil War, and describe the ordeal of Reconstruction. Few journals cover such a sweep of history. An added dimension is the view of Victorian family life as Gorgas explored his feelings about aspects of parental responsibility and transmission of values to children--a rarely documented account from the male perspective. His son, called Willie in the journals, was William Crawford Gorgas (1854-1920), who was noted for his fight to control yellow fever and who became surgeon general of the United States. In his foreword to the volume, Frank E. Vandiver states: "Wiggins has done much more than present a well-edited version of Gorgas's diaries and journals; she has interpreted them in full Gorgas family context and in perspective of the times they cover. . . . Wiggins informs with the sort of editorial notes expected of a careful scholar, but she enlightens with wide knowledge of American and southern history. . . . Josiah Gorgas was] an unusually observant, passionate man, a 'galvanized Rebel' who deserves rank among the true geniuses of American logistics."

On the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War, award-winning author Frye Gaillard reflects on the war--and the way we remember it--through letters written by his family, including his great-great grandfather and his two sons, both of whom were Confederate officers. As Gaillard explains in his introductory essay, he came of age in a Southern generation that viewed the war as a glorious lost cause. But as he read through letters collected by members of his family, he confronted a far more sobering truth. "Oh, this terrible war," wrote his great-great-grandfather, Thomas Gaillard. "Who can measure the troubles--the affliction--it has brought upon us all?" To this real-time anguish in voices from the past, Gaillard offers a personal remembrance of the shadow of war and its place in the haunted identity of the South. "My own generation," he writes, "was, perhaps, the last that was raised on stories of gallantry and courage . . . Oddly, mine was also the one of the first generations to view the Civil War through the lens of civil rights--to see . . . connections and flaws in Southern history that earlier generations couldn't bear to face."

This book is a biography of Alabama native John Forsyth Jr. and documents his career as a southern newspaper editor during the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods. From 1837 to 1877 Forsyth wrote about many of the most important events of the 19th century. He used his various positions as an editor, Civil War field correspondent, and Reconstruction critic at the MobileRegister to advocate on behalf of both the South and the Democratic Party.   In addition, Forsyth played an active role in the events taking place around him through his political career, as United States Minister to Mexico, state legislator, Confederate Peace Commissioner to the Lincoln administration, staff officer to Braxton Bragg, and twice mayor of the city of Mobile.  

When This Evil War Is Over is a collection of Civil War correspondence exchanged between members of the James Carrington Francis family of Jacksonville, Calhoun County, Alabama.  Six of the seven Francis brothers served in the Confederate army, as did their uncle, four servants, and other kinsmen, and all twelve members of the immediate family of Dr. James Carrington Francis and Amy Ingram Francis—as well as several members of their extended family—are represented in this volume. While the letters refer to the war and the brothers’ military service, they also shed light on this family’s struggle to survive the profound cultural, economic, and political upheaval that ensued. In addition to the correspondence itself, the editor includes a thoroughly researched  introduction that provides an overview of the Francis family history before, during, and after the war, which sheds light on the historical context in which the letters were written. Also included are endnotes that document and elucidate figures and events that receive passing reference in the letters, a genealogical chart of the Francis family, and photographs of each family member.  The editor includes maps of the Virginia, Georgia, and Carolinas settings, which allow the reader to follow the progress of Francis family members during the Civil War campaigns in which they participated.

IWilliam Lowndes Yancey (1814-63) was one of the leading secessionists of the Old South. In this first comprehensive biography, Eric H. Walther examines the personality and political life of the uncompromising fire-eater. Born in Georgia but raised in the North by a fiercely abolitionist stepfather and an emotionally unstable mother, Yancey grew up believing that abolitionists were cruel, meddling, and hypocritical. His personal journey led him through a series of mentors who transformed his political views, and upon moving to frontier Alabama in his twenties, Yancey's penchant for rhetorical and physical violence was soon channeled into a crusade to protect slaveholders' rights. Yancey defied Northern Democrats at their national nominating convention in 1860, rending the party and setting the stage for secession after the election of Abraham Lincoln. Selected to introduce Jefferson Davis in Montgomery as the president-elect of the Confederacy, Yancey also served the Confederacy as a diplomat and a senator before his death in 1863, just short of his forty-ninth birthday. More than a portrait of an influential political figure before and during the Civil War, this study also presents a nuanced look at the roots of Southern honor, violence, and understandings of manhood as they developed in the nineteenth century.

"These letters from a yeoman farmer in the Confederate Army to his wife in Coosa County, Alabama, will be of interest to historians not only for the light shed upon the life of the Confederate soldier, but also for frequent allusions to rural life and the operation of the farm in Cotton's absence. He enlisted at Pinckneyville, Alabama, on April 1, 1862, and was paroled at Talladega on May 25, 1865.  During the intervening years he saw action in Tennessee and Kentucky, in the Dalton-Atlanta campaign, briefly again in Tennessee, then in Georgia against the forces of Sherman, moving finally into South Carolina.... These letters constitute an authentic record of a typical Confederate soldier's experience," ---Journal of Southern History

Art, History, Women's history, American Impressionism

Carolina Planters on the Alabama Frontier: The Spencer-Robeson-McKenzie Family collects the papers of Elihu Spencer, a fourth-generation New Englander, and his family and Southern decendents, to form a history of the American nation from the point of view of planters and those they held in slavery. The documents in this volume are accounts of a privileged world that was afflicted by constant loss and despair. The families lived as isolated, landed gentry in a society where medical treatment had hardly evolved since the Middle Ages. The papers together form a dramatic narrative of early Americans from the mid-eighteenth century to the harsh years after the Civil War. They created their new society with courage and imagination and tenacity, while never recognizing their own moral blind spot regarding the holding of human beings in slavery. It brought about the collapse of their world--poignantly expressed in these letters.

This edition is a reprint of the original work published in 1905.

In the summer of 1860, more than fifty years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the UnitedStates as slaves. Timothy Meaher, an established Mobile businessman, sent the slave ship, the Clotilda , to Africa, on a bet that he could "bring a shipful of niggers right into Mobile Bay under the officers' noses." He won the bet. This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women. After emancipation, the group reunited from various plantations, bought land, andfounded their own settlement, known as African Town. They ruled it according to customary African laws, spoke their own regional language and, when giving interviews, insisted that writers use their African names so that their families would know that they were still alive. The last survivor of the Clotilda died in 1935, but African Town is still home to a community of Clotilda descendants. The publication of Dreams of Africa in Alabama marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.

John Tyler Morgan (1824-1907) was a major figure in regional and national politics during a crucial era in southern history. A leader in Alabama politics for almost fifty years, Morgan was first and foremost a southern nationalist who labored tirelessly to liberate the South from outside domination. In tracing Morgan's career, this book, his first comprehensive biography, also illuminates the processes by which Alabama and other southern states decided for secession and later opposed Reconstruction. Morgan's fear of northern and Republican threats to southern liberties, honor, and racial codes led first to his emergence as William L. Yancey's chief secessionist lieutenant and then to service in the Confederate cavalry. Similar motives prompted his active campaign against Reconstruction. As Alabama's U.S. senator from 1877 until his death, Morgan was one of the "Redeemers" who controlled the post-Reconstruction South. The senator's responses to Gilded Age domestic issues aggressively promoted sectionalism, agriculture, white supremacy, and black disfranchisement. In foreign policy, too, Alabama's colorful "ambassador" sought to benefit his "country", the South. Urging expanded exports of southern raw materials and the addition of southern senators and congressmen from new states to be carved out of the nation's island empire, Morgan became the south's foremost territorial and economic imperialist and the principal proponent of a Nicaragua canal.

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This book is a biography of Alabama native John Forsyth Jr. and documents his career as a southern newspaper editor during the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods. From 1837 to 1877 Forsyth wrote about many of the most important events of the 19th century. He used his various positions as an editor, Civil War field correspondent, and Reconstruction critic at the MobileRegister to advocate on behalf of both the South and the Democratic Party.   In addition, Forsyth played an active role in the events taking place around him through his political career, as United States Minister to Mexico, state legislator, Confederate Peace Commissioner to the Lincoln administration, staff officer to Braxton Bragg, and twice mayor of the city of Mobile.  

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Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Alabama Afternoons is a collection of portraits of many remarkable Alabamians, famous and obscure, profiled by award-winning journalist and novelist Roy Hoffman. Written as Sunday feature stories for the Mobile Press-Register with additional pieces from the New York Times, Preservation, and Garden & Gun, these profiles preserve the individual stories--and the individual voices within the stories--that help to define one of the most distinctive states in the union.   Hoffman recounts his personal visits with writer Mary Ward Brown in her library in Hamburg, with photographer William Christenberry in a field in Newbern, and with storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham and folk artist Charlie "Tin Man" Lucas at their neighboring houses in Selma. Also highlighted are the lives of numerous alumni of The University of Alabama--among them Mel Allen, the "Voice of the Yankees" from 1939 to 1964; Forrest Gump author Winston Groom; and Vivian Malone and James Hood, the two students who entered the schoolhouse door in 1963. Hoffman profiles distinguished Auburn University alumni as well, including Eugene Sledge, renowned World War II veteran and memoirist, and Neil Davis, the outspoken, nationally visible editor of the Lee County Bulletin.   Hoffman also profiles major and minor players in the civil rights movement, from Johnnie Carr, raised in segregated Montgomery and later president of the Montgomery Improvement Association; and George Wallace Jr., son of the four-time govern∨ to Teresa Burroughs, a Greensboro beautician trampled in the march over the Edmund Pettus Brid≥ and Diane McWhorter, whose award- winning book explores the trouble- filled Birmingham civil rights experience. Juxtaposed with these are accounts of lesser-known individuals, such as Sarah Hamm, who attempts to preserve the fading Jewish culture in Eufaula; Edward Carl, who was butler and chauffeur to Bellingrath Gardens founder Walter Bellingrath in Theodore; and cousins William Bolton and Herbert Henson, caretakers of the coon dog cemetery in Russellville.   Hoffman's compilation of life stories creates an engaging and compelling look into what it means to be from, and shaped by, Alabama. "Alabama Afternoons," he writes in the introduction, "is a small part of the even bigger question of what it means to be an American." Read an article about domestic lives by Roy Hoffman in the New York Times here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/25/garden/25Domestic.html

In Alabama Getaway Allen Tullos explores the recent history of one of the nation's most conservative states to reveal its political imaginary--the public shape of power, popular imagery, and individual opportunity. From Alabama's largely ineffectual politicians to its miserly support of education, health care, cultural institutions, and social services, Tullos examines why the state appears to be stuck in repetitive loops of uneven development and debilitating habits of judgment. The state remains tied to fundamentalisms of religion, race, gender, winner-take-all economics, and militarism enforced by punitive and defensive responses to criticism. Tullos traces the spectral legacy of George Wallace, ponders the roots of anti-egalitarian political institutions and tax structures, and challenges Birmingham native Condoleezza Rice's use of the civil rights struggle to justify the war in Iraq. He also gives due coverage to the state's black citizens who with a minority of whites have sustained a movement for social justice and democratic inclusion. As Alabama competes for cultural tourism and global industries like auto manufacturing and biomedical research, Alabama Getaway asks if the coming years will see a transformation of the "Heart of Dixie."

"Chapters are organized by topic - politics, the economy, education, African Americans, women, the military, sport, religion, literature, art, journalism - rather than chronologically, so the reader can digest the whole sweep of the century on a particular subject."

Anyone who enjoys reading about fascinating people will love this book, filled with the state's politicians, businesspeople, and everyday characters. Included are Big Jim Folsom, George Wallace, Truman Capote, and other lesser known but equally intriguing Alabamians.

Protestant residents of the Bible Belt, mostly Anglo-Saxon in origin, form part of the most ethnically homogeneous region of the United States. Yet if ethnicity defines a group of racially and historically related people who share a common culture, Southern poor whites obviously are a distinct group. Poor whites have been isolated from mainstream white Southern culture and have been in turn stereotyped by the dominant culture (as rednecks and Holy Rollers), discriminated against, and misunderstood. In their isolation, they have developed a unique subculture and defended it with a tenacity and pride that puzzles and confuses the larger society. Written twenty-five years ago, this book was one scholar's attempt to understand these people and their culture. For this new edition, Wayne Flynt has provided a new introduction and an up-to-date bibliography. Book jacket.

This work argues that the Ku Klux Klan remained active during the 1930s and 1940s when it was presumed dormant. The author also examines how the Klan's opponents during the Depression and war years saw it as an impediment to attracting outside investment to the state.

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Between 1890 and 1920, middle-class white and black Alabama women created many clubs and organizations that took them out of the home and provided them with roles in the public sphere. Beginning with the Alabama Woman's Christian Temperance Union in the 1880s and followed by the Alabama Federation of Women's Clubs and the Alabama Federation of Colored Women's Clubs in the 1890s, women spearheaded the drive to eliminate child labor, worked to improve the educational system, upgraded the jails and prisons, and created reform schools for both boys and girls. Suffrage was also an item on the Progressive agenda. After a brief surge of activity during the 1890s, the suffrage drive lay dormant until 1912, when women created the Alabama Equal Suffrage Association. During their campaigns in the 1915 and 1919 to persuade the legislature to enfranchise women, the leaders learned the art of politics--how to educate, organize, lobby, and count votes. Women seeking validation for their roles as homemakers and mother demanded a hearing in the political arena for issues that affected them and their families. In the process they began to erase the line between the public world of men and the private world of women. These were the New Women who tackled the problems created by the industrialization and urbanization of the New South. By 1920 Alabama women had created new public spaces for themselves in these voluntary associations. As a consequence of their involvement in reform crusades, the women's club movement, and the campaign for woman suffrage, women were no longer passive and dependent. They were willing and able to be rightful participants.Thomas's book is the first of its kind to focus on the reform activities of women during the Progressive Era, and the first to consider the southern woman and all the organizations of middle-class black and white women in the South and particularly in Alabama. It is also the first to explore the drive of Alabama women to obtain the vote. The development of political power among southern women progressed slowly. Demolishing as it did the myth of the "Southern Lady." Traditionally confined to the domestic sphere, southern women had no experience in public decision making and were discouraged from attaining the skills necessary for participation in public debate. The division of women by race and class further impeded their political education. But through their participation in so-called women's issues--child labor laws, temperance, and educational reform--women gained experience in influencing political leaders. Black and white women's clubs provided the framework for state-wide lobbying.Only in the wake of their success with domestic issues tackled through club organizations and temperance unions did women dare seek the right to vote. They learned how to wield political power through acceptable "ladylike" avenues, and it was this experience that led to their long but eventually successful drive for woman suffrage. The New Woman eventually found a way to replace the Southern Lady.

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There has been much scholarship on how the U.S. as a nation reacted to World War I, but few have explored how Alabama responded. Did the state follow the federal government's lead in organizing its resources or did Alabamians devise their own solutions to unique problems they faced? How did the state's cultural institutions and government react? What changes occurred in its economy and way of life? What, if any, were the long-term consequences in Alabama? The contributors to this volume address these questions and establish a base for further investigation of the state during this era.  Contributors: David Alsobrook, Wilson Fallin Jr., Robert J. Jakeman, Dowe Littleton, Martin T. Olliff, Victoria E. Ott, Wesley P. Newton, Michael V. R. Thomason, Ruth Smith Truss, and Robert Saunders Jr.

Send the Alabamians recounts the story of the 167th Infantry Regiment of the WWI Rainbow Division from their recruitment to their valiant service on the bloody fields of eastern France in the climactic final months of World War I. To mark the centenary of World War I, Send the Alabamians tells the remarkable story of a division of Alabama recruits whose service Douglas MacArthur observed had not "been surpassed in military history." The book borrows its title from a quip by American General Edward H. Plummer who commanded the young men during the inauspicious early days of their service. Impressed with their ferocity and esprit de corps but exasperated by their rambunctiousness, Plummer reportedly exclaimed: In time of war, send me all the Alabamians you can get, but in time of peace, for Lord's sake, send them to somebody else! The ferocity of the Alabamians, so apt to get them in trouble at home, proved invaluable in the field. At the climactic Battle of Croix Rouge, the hot-blooded 167th exhibited unflinching valor and, in the face of machine guns, artillery shells, and poison gas, sustained casualty rates over 50 percent to dislodge and repel the deeply entrenched and heavily armed enemy. Relying on extensive primary sources such as journals, letters, and military reports, Frazer draws a vivid picture of the individual soldiers who served in this division, so often overlooked but critical to the war's success. After Gettysburg, the Battle of Croix Rouge is the most significant military engagement to involve Alabama soldiers in the state's history. Families and geneologists will value the full roster of the 167th that accompanies the text. Richly researched yet grippingly readable, Nimrod T. Frazer's Send the Alabamians will delight those interested in WWI, the World Wars, Alabama history, or southern military history in general. Historians of the war, regimental historians, military history aficionados, and those interested in previously unexplored facets of Alabama history will prize this unique volume as well.

This is a reprint of the original published in 1934. Also available as an eBook.

With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that madeAll Over But the Shoutin’a national bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an unlettered roofer who kept food on his family’s table through the worst of the Great Depression; a moonshiner who drank exactly one pint for every gallon he sold; an unregenerate brawler, who could sit for hours with a baby in the crook of his arm.

In telling Charlie’s story, Bragg conjures up the backwoods hamlets of Georgia and Alabama in the years when the roads were still dirt and real men never cussed in front of ladies. A masterly family chronicle and a human portrait so vivid you can smell the cornbread and whiskey,Ava’s Manis unforgettable.

On March 25, 1931, Alabama police detained nine young African AMerican men at a railroad stop not far from Scottsboro.  In the process, they encountered two white women --  who promptly accused the young men of raping them.  Soon after, all-white juries found the nine youths guilty and eight of them were sentenced to death.  Although many Americans were outraged by the injustices of the case, the loudest voices raised in protest were those of members of the American Communist Party. Many white Communists spoke out, but black Communists took the lead in organizing public protests and legal responses.  As this surprising book makes clear, they were acting at the direction of the Communist International  (Comintern), which had directed them to address the "Negro problem."  Now, with the opening of formerly inaccessible Communist party archives, this collection of primary documents reveals the little-known but major roles played by black Communists in the case of "the Scottsboro Boys."

An engaging account of one woman's overcoming the Depression and small town mores. Viola Goode Liddell's short memoir tells the story of her return to Alabama in search of a husband and a new life. Thirty years old and recently divorced, Liddell comes back to her home state--with her young son--determined to survive, during the depths of the Depression. Liddell narrates the obstacles she faces as a single mother in the 1930s Deep South with self-deprecating humor and a confessional tone that reveal both her intelligence and her unapologetic ambitions. Unable to earn, borrow, or beg enough money to support herself and her child, Liddell uses her family connections to secure a teaching position in Camden, Alabama. Even though an older sister's status within the community helps her land the job, Liddell is warned that she must be very careful as she navigates the tricky social terrain of small town life, particularly when it comes to men. A commentary on the plight of women of the time is woven into the narrative as Liddell recounts her experience of being refused a loan at the local bank by her own brother-in-law. Despite all the restrictions on her behavior and the crushing reality that she has become "the biggest nuisance in the family" because of her past, Liddell cheerfully and successfully builds a new life of respectability and hope.  

343.53 C323S Ala.

A vivid account of the Scottsboro Boys case-the alleged crimes, their legal aftermath, and their immediate and enduring social significance.

These compelling accounts of hard times and hard work reveal human courage, dignity, and resilience from a generation that endured the Great Depression. One achievement of the 1930s Federal Writers' Project was its ambitious collection of life histories based on interviews with southern workers and farmers. For Up before Daylight James Seay Brown chose 28 of the more than 100 accounts from throughout Alabama as a rich sampling--from the Tennessee Valley to the Gulf Coast and from cities as well as rural regions. First published in 1982, Up before Daylight is now available in a reprint edition containing a revised preface by the editor and a new foreword by Alabama historian Wayne Flynt.

Also available as an eBook.

Available as an eBook.

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"Montgomery in the Good War" is a richly textured account of a southern city and its people during World War II. a Using newspaper accounts, interviews, letters, journals, and his own memory of the time, Wesley Newton reconstructs wartime-era Montgomery, Alabama--a sleepy southern capital that was transformed irreversibly during World War II. a The war affected every segment of Montgomery society: black and white, rich and poor, male and female, those who fought in Europe and the Pacific and those who stayed on the home front. Newton follows Montgomerians chronologically through the war from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima as they experience patriotism, draft and enlistment, rationing, scarcity drives, and the deaths of loved ones. His use of small vignettes based on personal recollections adds drama and poignancy to the story. a "Montgomery in the Good War" is an important reminder that wars are waged at home as well as abroad and that their impact reverberates well beyond those who fight on the front lines. Those who came of age during the war will recognize themselves in this moving volume. It will also be enlightening to those who have lived in times of relative peace. "

Many documentaries, articles, museum exhibits, books, and movies have now treated the subject of the Tuskegee Airmen, the only black American military pilots in World War II. Most of these works have focused on their training and their subsequent accomplishments during combat. This publication goes further, using captioned photographs to trace the Airmen through the various stages of training, deployment, and combat in North Africa, Italy, and over occupied Europe. Included for the first time are depictions of the critical support roles of nonflyers: doctors, nurses, mechanics, navigators, weathermen, parachute riggers, and others, all of whom contributed to the Airmen's success. In words and pictures, this volume makes vivid the story of the Tuskegee Airmen and the environments in which they lived, worked, played, fought, and sometimes died.

Few states have as colorful a political history as Alabama, especially in the post-World War II era. During the past six decades, the state played a central role in the civil rights movement, largely moved away from its earlier farm-based economy and culture, and transitioned from a relatively moderate-progressive Democratic Party politics to today's hard-core conservative Republican Party domination. Moving onto and off Alabama's electoral stage during all these transformations have been some of the most interesting figures in 20th-century American government and politics. Swirling around these elected officials in the Heart of Dixie are stories, legends, and jokes that are told and retold by political insiders, journalists, and scholars who follow the goings-on in Washington and Montgomery. In Alabama, it seems, politics is not only a blood sport but high entertainment. There could be no better guide to this colorful history than political columnist and commentator Steve Flowers.

Anne McCarty Braden is a southern white woman who made a dramatic break with her native, segregationist culture in the years just following World War II to commit her life to the causes of racial and social justice. One of the few white people, particularly from the South, to join the southern black freedom movement in its nascent years in the 1950s, Braden became a role model and inspiration for the thousands of young white people that joined the mass movement a decade later. Braden stands nearly alone among other women of her race, class, region, and generation in her dedication to social change. Born in 1924, Braden came of age after the women's rights and social reform crusades of the early part of the 20th century, and after the young activist women of the 1960s launched the civil rights, student, and women's liberation movements. Yet Braden's life has intersected on some level with most of the great social movements of her lifetime, and represents a central link that connects the southern protest movements of the 1930s and 1940s to the mass civil rights movement of the 1960s.

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The autobiography of the civil rights leader and colleague of Martin Luther King, Jr., completed a year before his death.

The story of a black attorney who was born in Selma, Alabama, and continues the civil rights struggle there.

Winner of the 2010 Clinton Jackson Coley Award for the best book on local history from the Alabama Historical Association Early in 1966, African Americans in rural Lowndes County, Alabama, aided by activists from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), established an all-black, independent political party called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO). The group, whose ballot symbol was a snarling black panther, was formed in part to protest the barriers to black enfranchisement that had for decades kept every single African American of voting age off the county's registration books. Even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, most African Americans in this overwhelmingly black county remained too scared even to try to register. Their fear stemmed from the county's long, bloody history of whites retaliating against blacks who strove to exert the freedom granted to them after the Civil War. Amid this environment of intimidation and disempowerment, African Americans in Lowndes County viewed the LCFO as the best vehicle for concrete change. Their radical experiment in democratic politics inspired black people throughout the country, from SNCC organizer Stokely Carmichael who used the Lowndes County program as the blueprint for Black Power, to California-based activists Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, who adopted the LCFO panther as the namesake for their new, grassroots organization: the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. This party and its adopted symbol went on to become the national organization of black militancy in the 1960s and 1970s, yet long-obscured is the crucial role that Lowndes County“historically a bastion of white supremacy”played in spurring black activists nationwide to fight for civil and human rights in new and more radical ways. Drawing on an impressive array of sources ranging from government documents to personal interviews with Lowndes County residents and SNCC activists, Hasan Kwame Jeffries tells, for the first time, the remarkable full story of the Lowndes County freedom struggle and its contribution to the larger civil rights movement. Bridging the gaping hole in the literature between civil rights organizing and Black Power politics, Bloody Lowndes offers a new paradigm for understanding the civil rights movement.

Birmingham served as the stage for some of the most dramatic and important moments in the history of the civil rights struggle. In this vivid narrative account, Glenn Eskew traces the evolution of nonviolent protest in the city, focusing particularly on the sometimes problematic intersection of the local and national movements. Eskew describes the changing face of Birmingham's civil rights campaign, from the politics of accommodation practiced by the city's black bourgeoisie in the 1950s to local pastor Fred L. Shuttlesworth's groundbreaking use of nonviolent direct action to challenge segregation during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1963, the national movement, in the person of Martin Luther King Jr., turned to Birmingham. The national uproar that followed on Police Commissioner Bull Connor's use of dogs and fire hoses against the demonstrators provided the impetus behind passage of the watershed Civil Rights Act of 1964. Paradoxically, though, the larger victory won in the streets of Birmingham did little for many of the city's black citizens, argues Eskew. The cancellation of protest marches before any clear-cut gains had been made left Shuttlesworth feeling betrayed even as King claimed a personal victory. While African Americans were admitted to the leadership of the city, the way power was exercised--and for whom--remained fundamentally unchanged.

"Carry Me Home is a dramatic account of the civil rights era's climactic battle in Birmingham, as the Movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., brought down the institutions of segregation." ""The Year of Birmingham," 1963, was one of the most cataclysmic periods in America's long civil rights struggle. That spring, King's child demonstrators faced down Commissioner Bull Connor's police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches for desegregation - a spectacle that seemed to belong more in the Old Testament than in twentieth-century America. A few months later, Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated with dynamite, bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and killing four young black girls. Yet these shocking events also brought redemption: They transformed the halting civil rights movement into a national cause and inspired the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished legal segregation once and for all." "Diane McWhorter, the daughter of a prominent white Birmingham family, captures the opposing sides in this struggle for racial justice. Tracing the roots of the civil rights movement to the Old Left and its efforts to organize labor in the 1930s, Carry Me Home shows that the Movement was a waning force in desperate need of a victory by the time King arrived in Birmingham. McWhorter describes the competition for primary among the Movement's leaders, especially between Fred Shuttlesworth, Birmingham's flamboyant preacher-activist, and the already world-famous King, who was ambivalent about the direct-action tactics Shuttlesworth had been practicing for years." "Carry Me Home is the product of years of research in FBI and police files and archives, and of hundreds of interviews, including conversations with Klansmen who belonged to the most violent klavern in America. John and Robert Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, George Wallace, Connor, King, and Shuttlesworth appear against the backdrop of the unforgettable events of the civil rights era - the brutal beating of the Freedom Riders as the police stood by; King's great testament, his "Letter from Birmingham Jail"; and Wallace's defiant "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door." This book is a classic work about this transforming period in American history."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"When it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can't sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, 'This is not right.'" - Claudette Colvin On March 2, 1955, an impassioned teenager, fed up with the daily injustices of Jim Crow segregation, refused to give her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Instead of being celebrated as Rosa Parks would be just nine months later, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin found herself shunned by her classmates and dismissed by community leaders. Undaunted, a year later she dared to challenge segregation again as a key plaintiff inBrowder v. Gayle, the landmark case that struck down the segregation laws of Montgomery and swept away the legal underpinnings of the Jim Crow South. Based on extensive interviews with Claudette Colvin and many others, Phillip Hoose presents the first in-depth account of an important yet largely unknown civil rights figure, skillfully weaving her dramatic story into the fabric of the historic Montgomery bus boycott and court case that would change the course of American history. Claudette Colvin is the 2009 National Book Award Winner for Young People's Literature and a 2010 Newbery Honor Book.

With this bold offering from two decades of research, J. Mills Thornton III presents the story of the civil rights movement from the perspective of community-municipal history at the grassroots level. Thornton demonstrates that the movement had powerful local sources in its three birth cities--Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. There, the arcane mechanisms of state and city governance and the missteps of municipal politicians and civic leaders--independent of emerging national trends in racial mores--led to the great swell of energy for change that became the civil rights movement.

Shortly after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Ku Klux Klan--determined to keep segregation as the way of life in Alabama--staged a resurgence, and the strong-armed leadership of governor George C. Wallace, who defied the new civil rights laws, empowered the Klan's most violent members. As Wallace’s power grew, however, blacks began fighting back in the courthouses and schoolhouses, as did young southern lawyers like Charles "Chuck” Morgan, who became the ACLU’s southern direct∨ Morris Dees, who cofounded the Southern Poverty Law Center; and Bill Baxley, Alabama attorney general, who successfully prosecuted the bomber of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and legally halted some of Wallace’s agencies designed to slow down integration.   Fighting the Devil in Dixie is the first book to tell this story in full, from the Klan’s kidnappings, bombings, and murders of the 1950s to Wallace running for his fourth term as governor in the early 1980s, asking forgiveness and winning with the black vote.

The original book on the renowned Freedom quilters of Gee's Bend. In December of 1965, the year of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, a white Episcopal priest driving through a desperately poor, primarily black section of Wilcox County found himself at a great bend of the Alabama River. He noticed a cabin clothesline from which were hanging three magnificent quilts unlike any he had ever seen. They were of strong, bold colors in original, op-art patterns--the same art style then fashionable in New York City and other cultural centers. An idea was born and within weeks took on life, in the form of the Freedom Quilting Bee, a handcraft cooperative of black women artisans who would become acclaimed throughout the nation. "The author expertly weaves the history, the hardships of poor blacks in a downtrodden racist society and the economics of the long struggle to become self-sufficient. Callahan proves she can handle a complex, multi-charactered, significant piece of Southern history." --Atlanta Constitution

This concise guidebook gives a brief overview of the 1961 Freedom Rides, a crucial moment in American history in which an interracial group traveled across the South to protest segregated transportation. The Freedom Rides and Alabama focuses on the Freedom Riders? experiences in Alabama, from the firebombing of their bus in Anniston to surviving beatings in Birmingham. A large portion of this book describes the riders? arrival in Montgomery, including the violent white mob that greeted them and the ensuing mass meeting at First Baptist Church, where leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Shuttlesworth spoke. This volume puts the Freedom Rides in historical context and is published in conjunction with the Alabama Historical Commission to celebrate the opening of a Montgomery museum at the site of the Greyhound station where the Freedom Riders arrived on their journey south, dedicated to the history of the Freedom Rides on the occasion of their fiftieth anniversary.

Virginia Foster Durr was a monumental champion for civil rights. A white southerner who returned to Alabama in 1951 after twenty years in Washington, she was horrified to revisit the racism of her childhood. She wrote hundreds of letters - humorous, sharp and observant - to her friends up north, among them Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, Hugo Black and C. Vann Woodward. Published on the 100th anniversary of Durr's birth, her letters offer a distinctive glimpse into the day-to-day battles for racial justice at a pivotal moment in American history.

In 1955, the majority of Montgomery's Jews confounded Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., by ignoring the Bus Boycott. Northern Jews were his staunchest allies, but the Montgomery Jewish community was locked in a painful ambivalence, torn between applying the torah's ethic of justice and wanting to protect their homes and businesses. The Hand of Esau illuminates why some responded positively to the demand for social justice while others vehemently opposed it. How the community dealt with this tension is the story of their Southern experience. The arrival of Jewish immigrants in Montgomery in the 1830s began a saga that eventually took on almost biblical proportions, a tale of the second son's struggle to outfox his elder brother, the designated heir, while desperately trying to maintain family peace: the story of Jacob and Esau writ large.

On Sunday, March 7, 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. and six hundred followers set out on foot from Selma, Alabama, bound for Montgomery to demand greater voting rights for African Americans. As they crossed the city?s Edmund Pettus Bridge, state and local policemen savagely set on the marchers with tear gas and billy clubs, an event now known as ?Bloody Sunday? that would become one of the most iconic in American history.   King?s informal headquarters in Selma was the home of Dr. Sullivan and Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson and their young daughter, Jawana. The House by the Side of the Road is Richie Jean?s firsthand account of the private meetings King and his lieutenants, including Ralph David Abernathy and John Lewis, held in the haven of the Jackson home.   Sullivan Jackson was an African American dentist in Selma and a prominent supporter of the civil rights movement. Richie Jean was a close childhood friend of King?s wife, Coretta Scott King, a native of nearby Marion, Alabama. Richie Jean?s fascinating account narrates how, in the fraught months of 1965 that preceded the Voting Rights March, King and his inner circle held planning sessions and met with Assistant Attorney General John Doar to negotiate strategies for the event.   Just eight days after Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson made a televised addressed to a joint session of Congress on Monday, March 15. Jackson relates the intimate scene of King and his lieutenants watching as Johnson called the nation to dedicate itself to equal rights for all and ending his address with the words: ?We shall overcome.? Five months later, Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act on August 6.   The major motion picture Selma now commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In it, Niecy Nash and Kent Faulcon star as Sullivan and Richie Jean Jackson among a cast including Oprah Winfrey, Tom Wilkinson, and Cuba Gooding Jr. A gripping primary source, The House by the Side of the Road illuminates the private story whose public outcomes electrified the world and changed the course of American history.

Civil rights lawyer Solomon S. Seay, Jr. chronicles both heartening and heartbreaking episodes of his first-hand struggle to achieve the actualization of civil rights. Tempered with wit and told with endearing humility, Seay's memoir Jim Crow and Me: Stories from My Life as a Civil Rights Lawyer gives one pause for both cultural and personal reflection.With an eloquence befitting one of Alabama's most celebrated attorneys, Seay manages to not only relay his personal struggles with much fervor and introspection, but to acknowledge, in each brief piece, the greater societal struggle in which his story is necessarily framed. Jim Crow and Me is more than just a memoir of one man's battle against injustice--it is an accessible testament to the precarious battle against civil injustice that continues even today.

From 1936 to 1957, in letters published in Alabama's major daily newspapers, essays, and private correspondence, Juliette Hampton Morgan made some of the most insightful observations on record about Montgomery's racial crises. Mary Stanton traces the development of Morgan's moral conscience amid details about her childhood and education, as well as her family, which included a politically ambitious father and a strong-willed mother and grandmother. Morgan backed her words with action. As a New Deal Democrat, she worked to abolish the poll tax and establish a federal antilynching law. She rarely hesitated to appear in integrated settings and, years before the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, she was regularly confronting bus drivers over their mistreatment of black riders. Morgan's letters had consequences: she and the newspapers that published them were vilified and threatened. Although the trustees of the Montgomery Public Library, where Morgan worked, resisted pressure to fire her, a cross was burned in her yard, and friends, neighbors, former students, and colleagues shunned her. This biography, which acknowledges the vital work of a civil rights advocate at the local level, demonstrates the costs of speaking out in a highly conformist society. Morgan took her own life at age forty-three. No one who reads her story can easily dismiss the effects of the rebukes and isolation she endured because of her stand against racism.

"Steeped in the lively cadences of black speech and the art of storytelling, Leaving Pipe Shop is one woman's reclamation of her family's history and ultimately her own. Clear-eyed, yet with feeling and delicacy, Deborah E. McDowell offers this moving and textured meditation on the ties of kin and the claims of memory." "More than a simple coming-of-age story, Leaving Pipe Shop is an evocation of growing up black in the South on the eve of the tumultuous sixties, a portrait of a culture in transition, of a Southern world in the throes of political and economic change. Here is the debut of a rich and powerful voice in American memoir."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, which ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, has always been vitally important in southern and black history.  With the publication of this book, the boycott becomes a milestone in the history of American women as well. "This autobiographical account of the creation of the boycott is the most important document on that highly significant episode since Martin Luther King's own version, Stride Towards Freedom.   I feel certain that scholars and students will refer to this unique historical source for generations to come." --J. Mills Thornton, University of Michigan "This valuable first-hand account of the historic Montgomery Bus Boycott, written by an important, behind-the-scenes organizer, evokes the emotional intensity of the civil rights struggle.  It ought to be required reading for all Americans who value their freedom and the contribution of black women to our history." --Coretta Scott King "A sharply remembered addition to the literature on what has become an event of mythic proportions, and a sound primer for those interested in community organizing.  The author is scrupulously honest, modest, and gives unsung heroes much deserved praise." --Kirkus "This fascinating memoir provides new evidence on the origins and sustaining force of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56)." --Anthony O. Edmonds, Library Journal "There's no substitute for this intimate memoir; it provides an immediacy and graphic intensity never before available." --Marge Frantz, San Jose Mercury News "This powerful memoir is a milestone in the history of that boycott and in the American Civil Rights Movement." --American History Illustrated "This absorbing study may become a minor classic in the literature of the Montgomery bus boycott. . . . Garrow correctly states in his Foreword that this book is the most important participant-observer account of the Montgomery protest available to students and scholars of the black freedom movement. . . . This straightforward, sensitive memoir is must reading for students of the civil rights movement.  It is a powerful commentary on how a woman and the group she led rose up to throw off an injustice thrust upon them.  When Jo Ann Robinson and other Montgomery women decided no longer to play the role of contented black Southerners, they gave blacks everywhere renewed hope, and they helped to create a national leader who took them closer to the promised land." --Jimmie L. Franklin, The Alabama Review "In an absorbing, first-hand narrative, the dignified and unassuming Robinson focuses on the role of the Women's Political Council (WPC) and details the WPC's plans to engineer a boycott months before the heralded arrest of Rosa Parks. . . .  The value of this primary source will endure long after many best-selling, secondary accounts of national politics during this period have disappeared." --Keith D. Miller and Elizabeth Vander Lei, Explorations in Sight and Sound  

In the 1950s and '60s, Montgomery, Alabama, was ground zero for many of the major events central to the civil rights movement in this country. Yet there was also a gentler side of the city that is rarely revealed within the pages of history texts. This book takes a thought-provoking, even-handed look at those days from the perspective of a typical white kid growing up in Montgomery during that era. The end result is a greater appreciation for those times, along with a clearer insight into the city's unique and colorful past.The author recalls with fondness the casual neighborliness that existed within his community, the freedom that children enjoyed to roam and play, and the slower pace of life that prevailed. He recalls the popular hangouts for older teens and the legendary "Big Bam Shows" of the period. Because he was a star athlete at Goodwyn Junior High and then at Lee High School, the author also opens a window into the years when sports competition at Montgomery's white high schools was at its peak, when state football championships were decided at Cramton Bowl before as many as 25,000 cheering fans. "The world was changing rapidly, but still it was such a simpler, more innocent time to grow up. How fortunate I was to have come along during that era," he writes.

A narrative history of the civil rights movement in Tuskegee, Alabama, home to an unusually large professional class of African Americans capable of challenging the authority of white conservatives.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pastored the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama from 1954 to 1960. Within months of his arrival there, Rosa Parks, a young seamstress, refused to yield her seat to a white man on a segregated Montgomery bus. Her arrest sparked the formation of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956. The young Rev. King was elected leader of this epic struggle which ushered in the nonviolent direct action phase of the Civil Rights movement.This unique book records the testimonies of Rev. King's congregation. They present a view of Brother Pastor Dr. King as we have never seen him before, as he rapidly rose to international prominence as one of the greatest leaders of the modern era.

In "Rosa Parks, " "the best of the new generation of American historians" (Stephen Ambrose) brilliantly examines an American heroine in the context of the tumultuous time of the Civil Rights movement.

On June 11, 1963, in a dramatic gesture that caught the nation's attention, Governor George Wallace physically blocked the entrance to Foster Auditorium on the University of Alabama's campus. His intent was to defy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, sent on behalf of the Kennedy administration to force Alabama to accept court-ordered desegregation. After a tense confrontation, President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and Wallace backed down, allowing Vivian Malone and James Hood to become the first African Americans to enroll successfully at their state's flagship university. That night, John F. Kennedy went on television to declare civil rights a "moral issue" and to commit his administration to this cause. That same night, Medgar Evers was shot dead. In The Schoolhouse Door, E. Culpepper Clark provides a riveting account of the events that led to Wallace's historic stand, tracing a tangle of intrigue and resistance that stretched from the 1940s, when the university rejected black applicants outright, to the post-Brown v. Board of Education era. We are there in July 1955 when Thurgood Marshall and lawyers at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund win for Autherine Lucy and "all similarly situated" the right to enroll at the university. We are in the car with Lucy in February 1956 as university officials escort her to class, shielding her from a mob jeering "Lynch the nigger," "Keep 'Bama white," and "hit the nigger whore." (After only three days, these demonstrations resulted in Lucy's expulsion.) Clark exposes the many means, including threats and intimidation, used by university and state officials to discourage black applicants following the Lucy episode. And he explains how University of Alabama president Frank Anthony Rose eventually cooperated with the Kennedy administration to ensure a smooth transition toward desegregation. We also witness Robert Kennedy's remarkable face-to-face plea for Wallace's cooperation and the governor's adamant refusal: "I will never submit voluntarily to any integration in a school system in Alabama." As Clark writes, Wallace's carefully orchestrated surrender would leave the forces of white supremacy free to fight another day. And the Kennedys' public embrace of the civil rights movement would set in motion a political transformation that changed the presidential base of the Democratic party for the next thirty years. In these pages, full of courageous black applicants, fist-shaking demonstrators, and powerful politicians, Clark captures the dramatic confrontations that transformed the University of Alabama into a proving ground for the civil rights movement and gave the nation unforgettable symbols for its struggle to achieve racial justice.

"Sheyann Webb was eight years old and Rachel West was nine when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived in Selma, Alabama, on January 2, 1965, to organize peaceful demonstrations to protest discriminatory voting laws. Selma, Lord, Selma is their firsthand account of the events of the turbulent winter of 1965 - events that changed the lives of all Alabamians and of all Americans. From 1975 to 1979 journalist Frank Sikora conducted interviews with Sheyann and Rachel, which he wove into this poignant story of fear and courage, heartbreak, and determination."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Anne McCarty Braden is a southern white woman who made a dramatic break with her native, segregationist culture in the years just following World War II to commit her life to the causes of racial and social justice. One of the few white people, particularly from the South, to join the southern black freedom movement in its nascent years in the 1950s, Braden became a role model and inspiration for the thousands of young white people that joined the mass movement a decade later. Braden stands nearly alone among other women of her race, class, region, and generation in her dedication to social change. Born in 1924, Braden came of age after the women's rights and social reform crusades of the early part of the 20th century, and after the young activist women of the 1960s launched the civil rights, student, and women's liberation movements. Yet Braden's life has intersected on some level with most of the great social movements of her lifetime, and represents a central link that connects the southern protest movements of the 1930s and 1940s to the mass civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The sources of Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s phenomenal and prophetic impact on life in America and beyond have never been adequately understood. In this path-breaking volume, Lewis Baldwin traces King's vision and activism not to his formal philosophical and theological development but directly to his roots in Southern black culture, where King spent most of his 39 years. King's appropriation of the Bible, Gandhi, American participatory democracy, Boston personalism, and the theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and the Social Gospel makes sense, Baldwin argues, only against his visceral and abiding identification with black culture and the black Christian tradition. Working directly with the trove of King's sermons, speeches, and unpublished papers, Baldwin has reconstructed the pain and joy, the defeat and triumph King experienced in his formative family relationships, in the black church, in his childhood and education, in his marriage and children, in segregated black Atlanta, and in his leadership of America's civil rights movement. Baldwin's through research and engaging writing finally give us what King had but Scholars have missed: the sense of place that grounded his vision of the "beloved community."

In the early 1950s, Rosa Parks--who was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, and worked as a seamstress most of her life--became active in the American Civil Rights Movement and worked as a secretary for the Montgomery branch of the NAACP. She also attended the Highlander Folk School, an education center for workers' rights and racial equality. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Parks refused to obey a public bus driver's orders to give up her seat in the colored section of the bus to a white man. She was arrested, tried, and convicted for disorderly conduct. Partially in response to her arrest, Martin Luther King, Jr., then a relatively unknown Baptist minister, led the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott, which forced the public transportation authority to end the practice of racial segregation on public buses. This event helped spark many other protests against segregation. Meanwhile, in 1956, Parks's case ultimately resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that segregated bus service was unconstitutional. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Rosa Parks' brave act of civil disobedience. The Montgomery Advertiser presents a tribute to Ms. Parks and the impact her stand against inequality had on civil rights, illustrated with rich stories and stunning photos from the archives of the Advertiser. The newspaper began publication in 1829 and was called the Planter's Gazette. It became the Montgomery Advertiser in 1833. By the turn of the century, the Advertiser was a major voice in Alabama. In 1903, R.F. Hudson, a young Alabama newspaperman, joined the staff of the Advertiser. He helped to lead the paper toward financial success, and by 1924 he owned 10% of the stock. In 1935, he bought itoutright and five years later he bought The Alabama Journal, a competitor. In 1963, the newspapers were purchased by Carmage Walls as the largest property in his growing list of Southern newspapers. Following the sale of papers to Multimedia, in 1968, this diversified communications company continued to upgrade the quality of the newspaper by adding skilled personnel and modern publishing equipment. In December 1995 Gannett Corporation merged with Multimedia. Together, the Advertiser and Journal have garnered more Pulitzer Prizes than have all other newspapers in Alabama combined.

The heroism of those involved in the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott is presented here in poignant detail. The untold stories of those whose lives were forever changed by the boycott are shared, along with a chilling glimpse into the world of the white council members who tried to stop them.

For centuries ringing bells have signaled the welcome of the Christian church to all who would hear its gospel. At certain times and in certain places, however, prejudice has led the church to limit its welcome to its own kind. The Southern white church during the civil rights movement fell victim to racial prejudice and its bells rang a welcome only for those who supported the segregated status quo. Donald E. Collins tells the story of the Alabama-West Florida Methodist Conference and its reactions to the civil rights movement.Part memoir and part historical analysis, Collins reflects on white Methodists' struggle to come to terms with their consciences in the face of racial change and the standards of Christianity's universal gospel. With events in Alabama during the civil rights movement as backdrop, Collins tells the story of the challenge that confronted the Methodist church during those stormy years. From the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-1956 to the Selma march in 1965 and beyond, this narrative describes those struggles for change against the forces of resistance. Based on Collins's own experiences and those of the more than 55 Methodist ministers that he interviewed, this moving story is told with pride, pain, sorrow, and hope.

In 1955, when the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, author Bob Graetz was the young white pastor of a black Lutheran Church in Montgomery. His church and his home were in the black community and he and his wife among the few whites who supported the boycott. Their church and home were both bombed; their lives were threatened often. But Graetz never wavered, and his Montgomery experiences, recounted in rich detail here, shaped a long ministerial career that always emphasized equality and justice issues no matter where his call took him. In addition to Graetz's boycott memoirs, this book includes provocative chapters on white privilege, black forgiveness, and the present-day challenges for human and civil rights.

Even forty years after the civil rights movement, the transition from son and grandson of Klansmen to field secretary of SNCC seems quite a journey. In the early 1960s, when Bob Zellner's professors and classmates at a small church school in Alabama thought he was crazy for even wanting to do research on civil rights, it was nothing short of remarkable. Now, in his long-awaited memoir, Zellner tells how one white Alabamian joined ranks with the black students who were sitting-in, marching, fighting, and sometimes dying to challenge the Southern "way of life" he had been raised on but rejected. Decades later, he is still protesting on behalf of social change and equal rights. Fortunately, he took the time, with co-author Constance Curry, to write down his memories and reflections. He was in all the campaigns and was close to all the major figures. He was beaten, arrested, and reviled by some but admired and revered by others. The Wrong Side of Murder Creek, winner of the 2009 Lillian Smith Book Award, is Bob Zellner's larger-than-life story, and it was worth waiting for.

In Alabama Getaway Allen Tullos explores the recent history of one of the nation's most conservative states to reveal its political imaginary--the public shape of power, popular imagery, and individual opportunity. From Alabama's largely ineffectual politicians to its miserly support of education, health care, cultural institutions, and social services, Tullos examines why the state appears to be stuck in repetitive loops of uneven development and debilitating habits of judgment. The state remains tied to fundamentalisms of religion, race, gender, winner-take-all economics, and militarism enforced by punitive and defensive responses to criticism. Tullos traces the spectral legacy of George Wallace, ponders the roots of anti-egalitarian political institutions and tax structures, and challenges Birmingham native Condoleezza Rice's use of the civil rights struggle to justify the war in Iraq. He also gives due coverage to the state's black citizens who with a minority of whites have sustained a movement for social justice and democratic inclusion. As Alabama competes for cultural tourism and global industries like auto manufacturing and biomedical research, Alabama Getaway asks if the coming years will see a transformation of the "Heart of Dixie."

Alabama: The Making of an American State is itself a watershed event in the long and storied history of the state of Alabama. Here, presented for the first time ever in a single, magnificently illustrated volume, Edwin C. Bridges conveys the magisterial sweep of Alabama's rich, difficult, and remarkable history with verve, eloquence, and an unblinking eye.   From Alabama's earliest fossil records to its settlement by Native Americans and later by European settlers and African slaves, from its territorial birth pangs and statehood through the upheavals of the Civil War and the civil rights movement, Bridges makes evident in clear, direct storytelling the unique social, political, economic, and cultural forces that have indelibly shaped this historically rich and unique American region.   Illustrated lavishly with maps, archival photographs, and archaeological artifacts, as well as art works, portraiture, and specimens of Alabama craftsmanship--many never before published--Alabama: The Making of an American State makes evident as rarely seen before Alabama's most significant struggles, conflicts, achievements, and developments.   Drawn from decades of research and the deep archival holdings of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, this volume will be the definitive resource for decades to come for anyone seeking a broad understanding of Alabama's evolving legacy.

Few states have as colorful a political history as Alabama, especially in the post-World War II era. During the past six decades, the state played a central role in the civil rights movement, largely moved away from its earlier farm-based economy and culture, and transitioned from a relatively moderate-progressive Democratic Party politics to today's hard-core conservative Republican Party domination. Moving onto and off Alabama's electoral stage during all these transformations have been some of the most interesting figures in 20th-century American government and politics. Swirling around these elected officials in the Heart of Dixie are stories, legends, and jokes that are told and retold by political insiders, journalists, and scholars who follow the goings-on in Washington and Montgomery. In Alabama, it seems, politics is not only a blood sport but high entertainment. There could be no better guide to this colorful history than political columnist and commentator Steve Flowers.

"The Ten Commandments Judge" tells his story, including his pledge before his election, his refusal to obey an order by the Federal District Court, and why he believes this issue is the most crucial of all political questions.

Alabama Trivia is the who, what, when, where and how book of Alabama. Filled from cover to cover with interesting questions and answers of well-known and not so well-known facts about the colorful state of Alabama. This book is designed to provide hours of entertainment and education concerning the history, culture, people and places of this fascinating state. They're all here! Great for home, office, classroom use, parties and gift-giving. Plus Alabama Trivia is readily adaptable for use with trivia format games.

The great state of Alabama celebrates its bicentennial in 2019. In anticipation, writer and history editor Horace Randall Williams takes a look back at the events, places, and people that have shaped the Heart of Dixie from the times of the first Native Americans to the arrivals of today's most recent immigrants. In 100 insightful vignettes, readers will discover little-known details about the state's geophysical characteristics, key dates in history, significant people, and interesting places to visit. Some like Rosa Parks and Helen Keller are household names, but others like Ned Cobb and Clifford Durr will be revelations to most. Similarly, Alabama's role in Civil War and Civil Rights is well known, but the state's rank as the world leader in a type of fossil or as the birthplace of two of the fastest men on the planet are less known facts. From the Freedom Rides to NASCAR, from peanuts to prosthetics, Alabama has many surprises. Come along for a stroll through Sweet Home Alabama