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Although he was a native of Bullock County, Alabama, Wade Hall -- teacher, writer, poet, critic, interviewer, folklorist, and documentarian -- spent most of his fifty-year career in Kentucky. But he was never emotionally far from his home as evidenced by his passion for collecting vintage Alabama postcards. In his lifetime he amassed tens of thousands, which he then graciously gave to the University of Alabama Libraries in a large bequest that also included rare books, quilts, folk art, letters and more. These postcards date from the late 1800s to the mid-20th century, and collectively offer a fascinating and diverse picture of the state -- of places beautiful and iconic, historic and scenic, and some just off the beaten track. The meaning of postcards that could be purchased as a travel souvenir or for mailing to family and friends is largely forgotten today, when cameras are commonplace and instantaneous communication with loved ones is routine. But the value of Hall's stunning collection cannot be missed. The some 400 cards featured in "Greetings from Alabama" are appealing and revealing of some scenes that are familiar and others that are rare. Many are of historic sites and panoramas that have all but disappeared. From Birmingham's Vulcan to Mobile's Bellingrath Gardens, from Black Belt cotton fields to Sand Mountain rock formations, from Enterprise's boll weevil monument to Huntsville's rockets, from Helen Keller's home to William Rufus King's resting place, from the state capitol to numerous county courthouses, the scenes preserved on Hall's postcards cards offer captivating glimpses of Alabama history.
On the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, award-winning author Frye Gaillard reflects on the war--and the way we remember it--through the lens of letters written by his family, including great-great grandfather, Thomas Gaillard, and Thomas's sons, Franklin and Richebourg, both of whom were Confederate officers. As Frye Gaillard explains in his deeply felt 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 and handed down by members his family, he confronted a far more sobering truth. "Oh, this terrible war," wrote 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, an admiration of the dashing generals who led our fighting men into battle, and whose heroism was undiminished by defeat. Oddly, mine was also the one of the first generations to view the Civil War through the lens of civil rights--to see, often quite reluctantly, connections and flaws in southern history that earlier generations couldn't bear to face."
Between 1853 and 1903, some 500 African Americans left the Chattahoochee Valley of Georgia and Alabama to start new lives in the West African Republic of Liberia. Most of the emigrants departed for Liberia during the uncertainty of the post-Civil War years of 1867 and 1868. Most sought safety and escape from a still-intact white supremacist society. The ready availability of land in Liberia also promised greater opportunities for prosperity there than in the South. Black nationalism and evangelical zeal motivated others. Liberia would be their "own" country and afford an opportunity to spread Christianity throughout Africa. The emigrant group was largely made up of families and included many children; consequently, the group was of a young average age. Most were farmers, but some tradesmen and clergymen also emigrated. All faced many hardships. Some returned to the United States; however most stayed, and a small number prospered. Although the Chattahoochee Valley emigration to Liberia was a disappointment to many, a resourceful few found escape and safety from a white supremacist society and their own land in their own country. Historical sources on this regional migration are limited, but the American Colonization Society (ACS), the primary sponsor of the Liberian emigration movement, recorded demographic data on the emigrants. Some emigrant correspondence was preserved in the journal of the ACS and in local newspapers of the period. From these sources, the history of this movement, the motivations and characteristics of the emigrant group, and the experience of the emigrants in Liberia can be developed.
Voices Beyond Bondage: An Anthology of Verse by African Americans of the 19th Century, a collection of 150 poems culled from bourgeoning black-owned newspapers of the era, offers a fresh perspective on African American life and identity. These poems are not the work of a few elite literary masters but poems penned mostly by everyday people people who were thoughtful, insightful, and compelled to verse despite being born into a world of fundamental inequity. Whether these authors were formally schooled or self-taught, whether they were slaves, free peoples, or the descendants of slaves, these African Americans put ink to paper and declared their passions in verse. This exciting new volume rekindles the voice of those who have been all but overlooked in American literature. It presents new literary territory that is waiting to be explored by lovers of poetry and scholars of the African American experience alike.
Tinsley Harrison doctor, teacher, researcher, editor, writer, and father was one of the most important medical figures of the 20th century. He edited the first five editions of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, regarded as a quintessential medical text. He traveled the world in his capacity as a teaching doctor, made significant contributions to scholarship, and served as the dean at three different medical schools. He was a titan of the field, an enormous presence central to the narrative of American medicine. No significant biography has been written about him until now. Author James Pittman knew Harrison well, studying with him in the 1950s and 1960s. Pittman spent six years interviewing Harrison at the end of his life. Those lengthy interviews, as well as interviews with Harrison's colleagues, family, and friends, form the bulk of this compulsively readable book. Pittman brings his own medical knowledge and his personal friendship with the subject to the fore in this beautifully written character study of one of science's great, if not best known, men. Harrison lived a long, exciting life. In these pages, readers will get a glimpse of the historical forces that shaped, and the advances that were shaped by, this incredible doctor.
Professor-Politician challenges common depictions of politics as a constant struggle of good-versus-evil and heroes-versus-villains, with "dirty politics" usually winning. The truth is that good government can prevail in Montgomery and Washington. Journalist Geni Certain recounts Glen Browder's civic adventures as one of Alabama's prominent scholars and public officials over the past half-century. This is a story of practical and reform politics told by someone specially positioned to comment on the Alabama government and American democracy. Certain interviewed knowledgeable people, researched public records, and scoured the Browder Collection at Jacksonville State University for this intriguing and inspiring biography of a civic-oriented leader.
In 1871 when the University of Alabama reopened after its destruction by Federal troops, Eugene Allen Smith returned to his alma mater as professor of geology and mineralogy. Until his death in 1927, this gifted man devoted his abundant energy and his stout heart to the welfare of the school and the state. After persuading the legislature to appoint him state geologist in 1873, he spent his summers enduring chills, fevers, and verbal abuse as he searched for industrial raw materials that could bring about better lives for destitute Alabamians. Traveling in a mule-drawn wagon, he recorded detailed observations, botanical and geological discoveries, and mineral analyses in his journal. He loaded the wagon with specimens for the university museum he dreamed of creating some day. He inventoried industries that had failed or been destroyed, judging whether they were worth salvaging. Interspersed with this information were pithy comments on people he met, frustrations he dealt with, historical notes, and poetic descriptions of rocks and creeks and mountains, giving a vivid picture of Alabama in transition. What he accomplished, against monumental odds, became the catalyst that transformed Alabama from an aimless and poverty-stricken agricultural state to an industrial giant to be reckoned with. How he accomplished what he did, with very little support and hardly any money, gave this diminutive and very human man a stature of mythic proportions in the history of the university and the state. The story of Little Doc, as told in Eugene Allen Smiths Alabama, is drawn from many sources: Smiths transcribed field notes, countless numbers of letters he received and the carbon copies of his replies, his published reports over a period of fifty years, wills, genealogical records, histories of the st
A Summary of the American Civil Rights Struggle from 1619 in Jamestown to 1965 in Selma
Former Alabama school superintendent Thomas Bobo's biography of teacher Thelma Smiley Morris, for whom the Morris Elementary School is named. "I recall Thelma Smiley Morris," writes Coretta Scott King in her foreword, "as one of Montgomery's finest citizens and a woman of great faith, dignity, and grace, who was devoted to her family, church, and community."
A brief biography of the Montgomery years of poet Sidney Lanier, considered by some the leading writer of the post-Civil War South. Lanier was a Georgian, but he spent two years after the war in Montgomery, Alabama, trying to restore his health after contracting tuberculosis while a POW. He also was principal of a school in nearby Prattville.
In this provocative essay, the authors explore how John Trumbull, famed painter of the American Revolutionary War period, came to make sketches of five Creek Indian leaders in New York in 1790. By chance, Trumbull was painting George Washington's portrait for the City of New York when a delegation of Creeks arrived to sign the Treaty of New York. Finding himself in the company of the Creeks, the artist seized the opportunity to draw them. While Drawing By Stealth tells the history of these iconic drawings of American Indians, it also provides details about the clothing and ornaments depicted and corrects a popular--but erroneous--theory that one of the images is of the leader of the Creek delegation to New York, Alexander McGillivray.
During "Freedom Summer" 1964, white college students from the North traveled to Mississippi to help with voter registration, living with black families and taking orders from battle-tested "field secretaries" of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Their story - one of personal conflict, confrontational politics, communal living, interracial sex, and idealism put to the test of violent opposition - changed America forever. The Children Bob Moses Led blends fiction and fact to recreate the year between the "I-have-a-dream-we-shall-overcome" optimism of the March on Washington and the debacle of the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. The alternating voices of Bob Moses, the charismatic and enigmatic leader of the Mississippi Summer Project, and Tom Morton, a fictional white college student who has volunteered to teach in a Freedom School and to help register black voters, shape this vibrant novel and give insight into the private lives and public events that brought blacks and whites together and turned idealism into reality.
First published in 1970, The New South Creed has lost none of its usefulness to anyone examining the dream of a "New South"-prosperous, powerful, racially harmonious-that developed in the three decades after the Civil War, and the transformation of that dream into widely accepted myths, shielding and perpetuating a conservative, racist society. Many young moderates of the period created a philosophy designed to enrich the region-attempting to both restore the power and prestige and to lay the race question to rest. In spite of these men and their efforts, their dream of a New South joined the Antebellum illusion as a genuine social myth, with a controlling power over the way in which their followers, in both North and South, perceived reality.
Reflecting times of untrammeled faith and religious values, Martha Dickson's Anchors of Faith gives a pictorial overview of 145 mostly late-nineteenth-century wooden churches located in southern Alabama, Mississippi, and throughout Florida. The churches featured, which span over a hundred years of history, embody the indomitable religious spirit of their builders. Anchors of Faith is more than just a pictorial encyclopedia, however. The author's descriptions and photos provide detailed information about both the architecture of these houses of worship and the related history, from the founding of these institutions to their current state.Among the jewels featured in Anchors of Faith, Dickson traces the Presbyterian Church of Union Church, Mississippi all the way back to its Gaelic-speaking Scottish Presbyterian immigrants from North Carolina. The author tells the story of the modest start of the East Hill Baptist Church Chapel in Tallahassee, whose congregation formed itself by meeting in one another's houses due to World War II. The distinctive details of the unusual "house of cards"-like facade of Hatchechubbee United Methodist Church in Hatchechubbee, Alabama, and the Carpenter Gothic style of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Merritt Island, Florida reveal the architectural uniqueness of some Southern places of worship.From Greek Revival to Victorian Gothic, Dickson helps add to the understanding of religious faith in the rural South through the architecture and history of its many surviving wooden churches.
The life and work of painter Clark Walker have had their effects on Montgomery, Alabama. Based on a series of conversations with Foster Dickson when the two men were neighbors, this book uses Walker's life and art as prisms to look at creativity, relationships, the ways of seeing, the nature of community, and the meaning of everything. Dickson writes: "Through the course of our talks, a discrepancy showed up here and there. I didn't quibble about them. None of our memories are perfect, not mine, not Clark's, not anybody's. As time passes, memories fade and distort themselves, causing the shreds of untruth to weave themselves into the fabric. Sometimes our thoughts on an event will wrap themselves around the facts of the events and blur them, even to ourselves. It really makes no difference whether some things were not true or just so long ago that they were difficult to pin down . . . I didn't sit down with Clark Walker to pick his life apart, get down to the ultimate truth of it, or get his movements pinned down to specific dates. I sat down with Clark Walker to let him talk, which, thankfully, he did."
Through Others' Eyes is a collection of twenty-seven published accounts of Montgomery, Alabama, covering 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 stagecoach, 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 Others' Eyes is a companion volume to The Very Worst Road: Travellers' Accounts of Crossing Alabama's Old Creek Indian Territory, 1820-1848.
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