Alabama History: Local & Regional History/Studies

A collection of essays and stories from the 1983 Alabama History and Heritage Festival. Includes the essay Romance and High Adventure by Harper Lee.

Auburn. The name resonates among generations who have studied, taught, or worked on the campus. No matter what the university has been formally named over the years-from East Alabama Male College to Alabama Polytechnic Institute-people have fondly called it Auburn since it was chartered in 1856. Professor George Petrie's Auburn Creed emphasizes the refrain "I believe," which the Auburn family of Plainsmen, Tigers, and War Eagles have embraced. In this fitting tribute to a landmark Southern institution, vintage photographs depict people, places, experiences, and traditions beloved by the Auburn community. Virtues such as loyalty, patriotism, service, and hard work have been encouraged on the campus from the school's inception. With a cooperative spirit, students and faculty alike applaud each other's successes in the classrooms and laboratories as well as in stadiums and on athletic fields. Numerous significant accomplishments in both academics and athletics are associated with Auburn and they are celebrated within these pages. Images of the campus as it has evolved over the years; memorable students, faculty, staff, and alumni; and unforgettable events have been gathered and preserved in this keepsake volume.

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Art, History, Women's history, American Impressionism

nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; American Jewish history has been criticized for its parochial nature because it has consisted largely of chronicles of American Jewish life and has often failed to explore the relationship between Jews and other ethnic groups in America. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; Rabbi Morris Newfield led Temple Emanu-El in Birmingham from 1895-1940 and was counted among the most influential religious and social leaders of that city.nbsp;Cowett chronicles Newfield's career and uses it as a vehicle to explore the nature of ethnic leadership in America.nbsp;In doing so he explores the conflicts with which Newfield struggled to help Jews maintain a sense of religious identity in a predominately Southern Christian environment.nbsp;Newfield's career also portrays the struggle of social welfare efforts in Alabama during the Progressive Era.nbsp;He recognized the need for Jews to develop bonds with other American ethnic groups.nbsp;Cowett portrays him as a mediator between not only Jew and Christian but also black and white, labor and capital, liberal and conservative--in short, within the full spectrum of political and social exchange in an industrial-based New south city.

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

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.

Condoleezza Rice has excelled as a diplomat, political scientist, and concert pianist.  Her achievements run the gamut from helping to oversee the collapse of communism in Europe and the decline of the Soviet Union, to working to protect the country in the aftermath of 9-11, to becoming only the second woman - and the first black woman ever -- to serve as Secretary of State.   But until she was 25 she never learned to swim.   Not because she wouldn't have loved to, but because when she was a little girl in Birmingham, Alabama, Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor decided he'd rather shut down the city's pools than give black citizens access.   Throughout the 1950's, Birmingham's black middle class largely succeeded in insulating their children from the most corrosive effects of racism, providing multiple support systems to ensure the next generation would live better than the last.  But by 1963, when Rice was applying herself to her fourth grader's lessons, the situation had grown intolerable.  Birmingham was an environment where blacks were expected to keep their head down and do what they were told -- or face violent consequences. That spring two bombs exploded in Rice's neighborhood amid a series of chilling Klu Klux Klan attacks.  Months later, four young girls lost their lives in a particularly vicious bombing.   So how was Rice able to achieve what she ultimately did?   Her father, John, a minister and educator, instilled a love of sports and politics.  Her mother, a teacher, developed Condoleezza's passion for piano and exposed her to the fine arts.  From both, Rice learned the value of faith in the face of hardship and the importance of giving back to the community.  Her parents' fierce unwillingness to set limits propelled her to the venerable halls of Stanford University, where she quickly rose through the ranks to become the university's second-in-command.  An expert in Soviet and Eastern European Affairs, she played a leading role in U.S. policy as the Iron Curtain fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated.  Less than a decade later, at the apex of the hotly contested 2000 presidential election, she received the exciting news - just shortly before her father's death - that she would go on to the White House as the first female National Security Advisor.    As comfortable describing lighthearted family moments as she is recalling the poignancy of her mother's cancer battle and the heady challenge of going toe-to-toe with Soviet leaders, Rice holds nothing back in this remarkably candid telling. This is the story of Condoleezza Rice that has never been told, not that of an ultra-accomplished world leader, but of a little girl - and a young woman -- trying to find her place in a sometimes hostile world and of two exceptional parents, and an extended family and community, that made all the difference.

This edition is a reprint of the original work published in 1892.

"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

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.  

A classic work on small community life in rural Alabama in the age before automobiles. Since its first publication in 1957, Horse and Buggy Days on Hatchet Creek has been a favorite of readers who have enjoyed the entertaining, highly readable account of a southern boy's life in the 1880s and 1890s. With a wry sense of humor and clear-eyed affection, Mitchell Garrett recalls growing up in a verdant valley of the Appalachian foothills in eastern Alabama. The Hatchet Creek community in Clay County was Garrett's whole world. Just three miles wide and six miles long, it contained everything small farmers needed for a susTa&iactue;noble way of life: arable land, fresh springs and flowing creeks, a grist mill, a post office, a school, a store, churches, a country doctor and apothecary, mules and horses. Times were hard but the hill people always ate well from their own gardens and larders. They entertained themselves with revivals, weddings, funerals, political parades, sorghum-makings, and Sacred Harp singings. When rambunctious boys and girls weren't picking cotton or doing daily chores, they skinny-dipped in the millpond; hunted for opossum, quail, and squirrel; fished for eels and goggle-eyed perch; and played party games called "paddle cat" and "grunts." Horse and Buggy Days on Hatchet Creek will capture the reader's imagination as it opens a window on the thriving culture of a bygone era. Mitchell Garrett's neighbors and kin-preachers, teachers, storekeepers, millers, housewives, and children-will live again in the pages of this classic tale.

Volumes 1- 4

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.

This is a reprint of the work originally published in 1933.

This remarkable collection of period photographs details day-to-day life and changing times in the Deep South. Draffus Lamar Hightower, 1899-1993, spent most of his life in Barbour County, Alabama. For many years he was the owner of a Chevrolet dealership, but he had another occupation as well. From his youth, he was fascinated with photography, and for fifty years he experimented with the craft both technically and artistically. Hightower, while participating fully in the 20th century, was also acutely aware of the passing of the heritage of the last one. From the early 1920s to the late 1960s, he made thousands of negatives of people, events, landscapes, objects, and buildings in Barbour County. His photographs are reminiscent of the documentary work of Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, and other great 20th-century American photographers. Hightower created an incredibly complete and vivid record of the life of a rural Alabama county during a period of profound change-documenting everything from birthday parties and political rallies to farm scenes and the demolition of historic buildings so that future generations would not forget the world of their forebears. In 1990, Michael Thomason, historian and photographic archivist, began the long process of reviewing Hightower's collection of photographs, interviewing family and friends, and salvaging and printing the negatives, which by that time had begun to deteriorate. Thomason restored and printed 195 photographs and prepared accompanying essays that not only reveal the technical details of Hightower's labor of love but also tell the story of the human and economic changes in Barbour County during this period.

Volumes 1 - 4

Volumes 1 - 4

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.

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication Anthropologists have long talked about chiefdoms as a form of sociopolitical organization, and for several decades Elman Service's description of chiefdoms has been widely accepted as definitive. Nevertheless, in the 1970s, scholars began to question whether all, or any, chiefdoms had the entire range of characteristics described by Service. Most of the questions focused on the (nonmarket) economic organization of these polities, and several contrasting economic models were suggested. None of the models, however, was comprehensively tested against actual chiefdom economies. This study examines the economic organization of the late prehistoric (A.D. 1000 to 1540) chiefdom centered at Moundville, Alabama. Rather than attempting to show that this case fits one or another model, the economic organization is determined empirically using archaeological data. The pattern of production and distribution of subsistence goods, domestic nonutilitarian goods, and imported prestige goods does not fit precisely any of the extant models. Because Moundville's economy was organized in a way that promoted stability, it may be no accident that Moundville was the dominant regional polity for several hundred years. This research opens a new field of archaeological investigation: the relationship between fine details of economic organization and large-scale political fortunes.  

Volume 1 - 4

Two volumes

Available as an eBook.

Volume 2

This institution is now known as the University of West Alabama.

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.

Winner of the 1993 Lillian Smith Book Award, sponsored by the Southern Regional Council, "Outside Agitator" tells the dramatic, largely forgotten story behind the 1965 killing of civil rights worker Jon Daniels in Lowndes County, Alabama, detailing the lives of the killer and the victim.

A true love affair in letters, in rural pre-WWII Alabama.

After twenty years in New York City, a prize-winning writer takes a "long look back" at his hometown of Mobile, Alabama. In Back Home: Journeys through Mobile, Roy Hoffman tells stories--through essays, feature articles, and memoir--of one of the South's oldest and most colorful port cities. Many of the pieces here grew out of Hoffman's work as Writer-in-Residence for his hometown newspaper, the Mobile Register, a position he took after working in New York City for twenty years as a journalist, fiction writer, book critic, teacher, and speech writer. Other pieces were first published in the New York Times, Southern Living, Preservation, and other publications. Together, this collection comprises a long, second look at the Mobile of Hoffman's childhood and the city it has since become. Like a photo album, Back Home presents close-up portraits of everyday places and ordinary people. There are meditations on downtown Mobile, where Hoffman's grandparents arrived as immigrants a century ago; the waterfront where longshoremen labor and shrimpers work their nets; the back roads leading to obscure but intriguing destinations. Hoffman records local people telling their own tales of race relations, sports, agriculture, and Mardi Gras celebrations. Fishermen, baseball players, bakers, authors, political figures--a strikingly diverse population walks across the stage of Back Home. Throughout, Hoffman is concerned with stories and their enduring nature. As he writes, "When buildings are leveled, when land is developed, when money is spent, when our loved ones pass on, when we take our places a little farther back every year on the historical time-line, what we have still are stories."

Cities of Silence is a richly illustrated, evocative study of five of Mobile's historic burial grounds: Magnolia Cemetery. Church Street Graveyard, Old Catholic, Sha'arai Shomayim, and Ahavas Chesed cemeteries. Through the use of historic photographs and maps as well as more than 70 contemporary black-and-white images by photographer Sheila Hagler, John Sledge thoroughly examines the development of these solemn spaces. Briskly paced and absorbing, Cities of Silence moves the reader through a world of mourning and ritual scarcely imaginable today. Sledge probes the meanings and practices of Victorian burials and jazz funerals and explains national trends in cemetery landscaping and funerary sculpture. Hagler's breathtaking photographs document the wealth of sophisticated cast iron and beautiful gravestone art characteristic of these cemeteries. Together they unearth a rich stock of legend and folklore associated with Mobile's hallowed grounds, including the stories of the Boyington Oak, grown from the grave of a falsely accused man, and the enigmatic Goddess of Magnolia, said to summon storms when attempts are made to move her. Mobile's cemeteries have been shaped by pestilence, war

This edition is a reprint.

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.

Europe's expansion into the New World during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries was a story of power alignment and cultural transmission as well as dramatic individual effort. Spain had her "conquistadores," France her "coureurs de bois," and England her sea dogs. Isolated from the authority of home governments, tempted by the abundance of gold, fur, and fish in the New World, these adventurers so vital to national policies of expansion developed their own personal creeds of conquest and colonization. Their individual exploits not only represent a humanistic theme essential in Europe's movement westward but heighten the analyses of cultural institutions of the era. It is within such a multidisciplinary light that one can experience the Gulf Coast adventures of Pierre LeMoyne d'Iberville.

Mardi Gras in Mobile began its carnival celebration years before the city of New Orleans was founded. In the 1700s, mystic societies formed in Mobile, such as the Societe de Saint Louis, believed to be the first in the New World. These curious organizations brought old-world traditions as they held celebrations like parades and balls with themes like Scandinavian mythology and the dream of Pythagoras. Today, more than 800,000 people annually take in the sights, sounds and attractions of the celebration. Historian and preservationist L. Craig Roberts, through extensive research and interviews, explores the captivating and charismatic history of Mardi Gras in the Port City.

This comprehensive new history of Mobile celebrates the rich heritage of Alabama's oldest city and commemorates the city's tricentennial from 1702 to the present. Alabama's oldest city from the period of European settlement was founded in 1702 by French naval officer Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville. Bienville named the settlement after the nearby Maubila Indians and situated it on the west side of the protected harbor now called Mobile Bay on the Gulf of Mexico. During the colonial period, Mobile was occupied successively by the French, British, and Spanish until it was seized by the Americans in 1813. From this point on, the city quickly evolved from a trading post into a prosperous river port, thanks to the cotton production of antebellum Black Belt plantations. After the defeat of the Confederacy, Mobile began to decline and Birmingham took over as the economic leader of Alabama. During World War II, Mobile experienced a second boom period as shipbuilding and defense industries expanded and flourished. At the turn of the 21st century, as it celebrates its tricentennial, Mobile remains an important American port city whoes economy has diversified to include oil, natural gas, and paper. Mobile: The New History of Alabama's First City reassesses Mobile's place in American history and celebrates its proud heritage. Recognized scholars of Mobile history have collaborated to produce a highly readable, richly illustrated narrative that showcases the great range of influences on this bustling maritime city. Published in cooperation with the Mobile Tricentennial Committee, this long-awaited book will be invaluable to historians and general readers alike as it documents and interprets the first 300 years of a great and vital American city.      

Excerpt from Mobile of the Five Flags: The Story of the River Basin and Coast About Mobile From the Earliest Times to the Present The book was undertaken at the request of the Board Of School Commissioners of Mobile County for use in the public schools, but I have endeavored to make its scope wide enough for general use also, since it is the only work covering the subject from the beginning. Many things and many men are omitted whom I would like to mention; but from the necessity of the case I have had to make a selection from the mass of facts available, and I have had to omit much that I would like to use. This applies especially to the period since the War, which is one of great economic interest, and yet difficult to handle now because the events and people are so close to us. For the last two decades I have tried to give tendencies rather than detailed facts. I have aimed at clearness rather than ornament in the style and the facts I hope are told so as to be readily under stood. With this object the book is divided into sections. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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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.  

"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 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.

A community of inquiry and pride in central Alabama. Creating Community explores how faculty members at Alabama State University, a historically black university in Montgomery, have been inspired by the legacy of African American culture and the civil rights movement and how they seek to interpret and extend that legacy through teaching, scholarship, and service. Authors describe a wide range of experiences from the era of segregation to the present day. These include accounts of growing up and going to college in Alabama, arriving in the South for the first time to teach at ASU, and the development of programs such as the National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African American Culture. Together, the essays present viewpoints that reflect the diverse ethnic, cultural, and academic backgrounds of the contributors and of the university.  

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.

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.

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.

Montgomery's history is like a thread that runs from its early buildings to important Civil War sites to civil rights landmarks. The current redevelopment theme, "City of Dreams," shows that present-day Montgomery is a continuation of that connecting thread.

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  

"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. "

Montgomery's first neighborhoods were nestled close to downtown for convenient shopping and working. In 1887, the electric trolley system made living beyond the city limits feasible. The first streetcar suburb, Highland Park, was developed the same year. Although Centennial Hill, Cottage Hill, the Garden District, and the Old Line Street neighborhoods existed before the trolley, it spurred their growth. Capitol Heights and Cloverdale incorporated as separate cities by 1908. Cloverdale Idlewild developed around the 1930s--by which time the automobile and bus line had replaced the trolley. Images of America: Montgomery's Historic Neighborhoods documents the changes from inner city to suburban residences and from mass transportation to the automobile. The images show the evolution of photography from formal, professional portraits to fun, family snapshots capturing birthday parties, pageants, pets, and everyday life. These compelling photographs also show how residents lived, worked, studied, worshipped, and played for over a century in Montgomery's historic neighborhoods.

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.

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.

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.

Through Other's Eyes is a collection of twenty-seven published accounts of Montgomery, Alabama, covered the thirty-six years between April 1825 and May 1861. With two exceptions, the stays in Montgomery were quite short. Each account is preceded by biographical information about the author. The accounts were written by both famous and obscure travelers--American and European political and military personages, ministers, gentlemen scientists, authors and periodical correspondents, lecturers, entertainers, and even by what were professional travelers. In general, they wrote for commercial reasons; travel books were popular in the nineteenth century. Besides the inevitable comments on the horrible state of accommodations and food, and the trials of travel by stage coach, steamboat, and railway, they commented on slavery, of course, but also on natural history, agriculture, gambling and drinking, Montgomery's hinterland, and Alabamians. The comments on the latter were both complimentary and not. Europeans and Americans tended to have differing opinions. Although the travelers' assessments were made hurriedly and tended to focus on differences rather than similarities--probably to promote sales--they do provide a captivating insight into antebellum Montgomery. Through Other's Eyes is a companion volume to The Very Worst Road: Travellers' Accounts of Crossing Alabama's Old Creek Indian Territory, 1820-1848.

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.

Volume 1 & 2

Volume 1

In 1954 gamblers and organized crime that controlled Phenix City, Alabama, arranged for the assassination of Alabama Attorney General-elect Albert Patterson. Patterson's murder followed in the wake of his efforts to clean up the small city on the Alabama-Georgia state line. The horrific assassination attracted national and international attention in the London Times and the New York Times, as well as magazines such as Time, Look, Life, Newsweek, and the Saturday Evening Post.In the first chronological narrative of these events ever published, Margaret Anne Barnes tells the true story of how economic hard times in the Depression led a mayor to barter immunity from prosecution to gamblers and gangsters in exchange for money to save the town from going into receivership. By mid-century the criminal element managed to buy or infiltrate every office of government in the city. When their control was absolute, no crime was beyond their commission, no citizen safe, and no constitutional right could be relied upon.Focusing her narrative on the roles key figures played in restoring Phenix City to stability, Barnes bases her work on interviews with surviving principals and investigators. She dramatically reconstructs the story as it unfolded using private papers, depositions, trial transcripts, and court records. This riveting narrative traces the contributing factors and the dramatic events in Phenix City. In the process the author shows how citizens' vigilance and exercise of the ballot can prevent similar suspensions of human rights and civil liberties from being repeated.

A provocative telling of "The Phenix City Story." On June 18, 1954, former state senator Albert Patterson, the Democratic Party's nominee for state attorney general, was shot to death as he left his law office in Phenix City, Alabama, infamous for its prostitution, gambling, bootlegging, and political corruption. Patterson had made cleanup of Phenix City his primary campaign promise. With millions of dollars in illegal income and hundreds of political and professional careers at stake, the question surrounding Patterson's murder was not why the trigger was pulled, but who pulled it. When Good Men Do Nothing is the definitive study of the Albert Patterson murder case. Alan Grady has mined the state's original murder case files; the papers of John Patterson, Albert's son; records from the Office of Alabama Attorney General (who directed the murder investigation); the case files of the Alabama Department of Toxicology and Criminal Investigation; National Guard reports; and more than 30 interviews with eyewitnesses and interested parties. Grady takes a complex story of multiple dimensions--a large cast of judicial, criminal, and political players; a web of alliances and allegiances; and a knotted sequence of investigative revelations and dead ends--and transforms it into a readable, incisive analysis of the powers and loyalties that governed, and corrupted to the core, the body politic of the state. Readers will be enthralled and educated by this authoritative account of the most compelling crime drama in Alabama during the 20th century.

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."

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.

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

Poetry

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

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

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.

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.

Nothing Fancy about Kathryn & Charlie is the true story of friendship between unlikely characters. Renowned Alabama journalist, author, and storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham and self-taught folk artist and Tin Man Charlie Lucas found common ground in tomato sandwiches, treasure hunting, and comb playing on the lawn of the Selma library. Their special bond has been beautifully captured in this tribute by author Kerry Madden-Lunsford and her artist daughter Lucy. In honor of Kathryn and Charlie, proceeds from Nothing Fancy will be donated to Kathryns beloved Selma-Dallas County Public Library.

Winner of the 1993 Lillian Smith Book Award, sponsored by the Southern Regional Council, "Outside Agitator" tells the dramatic, largely forgotten story behind the 1965 killing of civil rights worker Jon Daniels in Lowndes County, Alabama, detailing the lives of the killer and the victim.

This edition is a reprint of the original work published in 1879.

"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

This institution is now known as the University of Montevallo.

"Swimming and sex seemed a lot alike to me when I was growing up. You took off most of your clothes to do them and you only did them with people who were the same color as you. As your daddy got richer, you got to do them in fancier places." Starting with her father, who never met a whitetail buck he couldn't shoot, a whiskey bottle he couldn't empty, or a woman he couldn't charm, and her mother, who "invented road rage before 1960," Melissa Delbridge introduces us to the people in her own family bible. Readers will find elements of Southern Gothic and familiar vernacular characters, but Delbridge endows each with her startling and original interpretation. In this disarmingly unguarded and unapologetic memoir, she shows us what really happened in the "stew of religion and sex" that was 1960s Tuscaloosa. Whether telling of her father's circumspect "hunting trips," her mother's sudden, tempestuous moves across town in the middle of the night, or coming to terms with her own sexuality on the banks of the river, Delbridge is the real star of this entertaining memoir. Crackling with wit, frighteningly smart, both drop-dead funny and wrenchingly sad, "Family Bible" is a stunning personal history.

v. 1. 1818-1902.

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.

This institution is now known as Stillman College.

Available as an eBook.

The forty-year Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which took place in and around Tuskegee, Alabama, from the 1930s through the 1970s, has become a profound metaphor for medical racism, government malfeasance, and physician arrogance. Susan M. Reverby's Examining Tuskegee is a comprehensive analysis of the notorious study of untreated syphilis among African American men, who were told by U.S. Public Health Service doctors that they were being treated, not just watched, for their late-stage syphilis. With rigorous clarity, Reverby investigates the study and its aftermath from multiple perspectives and illuminates the reasons for its continued power and resonance in our collective memory.

Robert R. Taylor and Tuskegee interweaves the life of the first academically trained African American architect with his life's work -- the campus of Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. In this richly illustrated architectural history, the author delves into such questions of how a black boy born in North Carolina shortly after the Civil War could earn a professional architecture degree at MIT, and how he then used his design and administrative skills to further Booker T. Washington's agenda of community solidarity and, in defiance of strengthening Jim Crow, the public expression of racial pride and progress. The book also considers such issues as architectural education for African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, the white donors who funded Tuskegee's buildings, other Tuskegee architects, and Taylor's buildings elsewhere. Individual narratives of Taylor's Tuskegee buildings conclude the volume.

Available as an eBook.

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.

Also available as an eBook.

Volume 2

Volume 1, 3, & 4

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.  

This edition is a reprint of the original work published in 1888.

Available as an eBook.