Alabama A Guide To The Deep South

Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town

With the exception of oceans, boundaries are artificial, man-made divisions of geography that many times make little sense and sometimes no sense at all. For example, why does the northern boundary of Minnesota protrude into Canada? Why does West Virginia have two panhandles? Why do Pennsylvania and Delaware have a common boundary that is a circle segment? Why do the boundaries of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah consist entirely of lines of latitude and longitude? The answers to these questions and many more can be found in this book, which explains why and how state boundaries are placed where they are. It begins with an introduction that provides general information about boundary placement, colonial boundaries, formation of territories, surveying and Supreme Court rulings. The 50 states are divided into ten regions (New England, Mid-Atlantic, Upper South, Lower South, Great Lakes, North Central, South Central, Rocky Mountain, West, and Noncontiguous). The text for each state begins with an overview of that state’s boundaries that becomes more specific as its different boundaries are considered. The appendices include interesting facts about each state, citizen and state nicknames, and dates territories were created and states entered the Union. Richly illustrated with 138 maps.

Out of print for years and after thousands of copies sold, NewSouth brings an important resource for young readersThe World of Southern Indiansback into print.

In the midst of the Great Depression, Americans were nearly universally literate--and they were hungry for the written word. With an eye to this market and as a response to unemployment, Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration created the Federal Writers' Project. They produced the Project's American Guides, an impressively produced series that set out not only to direct travelers on which routes to take and what to see throughout the country, but also to celebrate the distinctive characteristics of each individual state. The series unintentionally diversified American literary culture's cast of characters--promoting women, minority, and rural writers--while it also institutionalized the innovative idea that American culture comes in state-shaped boxes.

An anthology of critical writings that explores the intersections of race, theater, and performance in America.

In the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration--unwilling to antagonize a powerful southern congressional bloc--refused to endorse legislation that openly sought to improve political, economic, and social conditions for African Americans. Instead, as historian Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff shows, the administration recognized and celebrated African Americans by offering federal support to notable black intellectuals, celebrities, and artists. Sklaroff illustrates how programs within the Federal Arts Projects and several war agencies gave voice to such notable African Americans as Lena Horne, Joe Louis, Duke Ellington, and Richard Wright, as well as lesser-known figures. She argues that these New Deal programs represent a key moment in the history of American race relations, as the cultural arena provided black men and women with unique employment opportunities and new outlets for political expression. Equally important, she contends that these cultural programs were not merely an attempt to appease a black constituency but were also part of the New Deal's larger goal of promoting a multiracial nation. Yet, while federal projects ushered in creativity and unprecedented possibilities, they were also subject to censorship, bigotry, and political machinations. With numerous illustrations, Black Culture and the New Deal offers a fresh perspective on the New Deal's racial progressivism and provides a new framework for understanding black culture and politics in the Roosevelt era.

They were black and white, young and old, men and women. In the spring and summer of 1961, they put their lives on the line, riding buses through the American South to challenge segregation in interstate transport. Their story is one of the most celebrated episodes of the civil rights movement, yet a full-length history has never been written until now. In these pages, acclaimed historian Raymond Arsenault provides a gripping account of six pivotal months that jolted the consciousness of America. The Freedom Riders were greeted with hostility, fear, and violence. They were jailed and beaten, their buses stoned and firebombed. In Alabama, police stood idly by as racist thugs battered them. When Martin Luther King met the Riders in Montgomery, a raging mob besieged them in a church. Arsenault recreates these moments with heart-stopping immediacy. His tightly braided narrative reaches from the White House--where the Kennedys were just awakening to the moral power of the civil rights struggle--to the cells of Mississippi's infamous Parchman Prison, where Riders tormented their jailers with rousing freedom anthems. Along the way, he offers vivid portraits of dynamic figures such as James Farmer, Diane Nash, John Lewis, and Fred Shuttlesworth, recapturing the drama of an improbable, almost unbelievable saga of heroic sacrifice and unexpected triumph. The Riders were widely criticized as reckless provocateurs, or "outside agitators." But indelible images of their courage, broadcast to the world by a newly awakened press, galvanized the movement for racial justice across the nation. Freedom Riders is a stunning achievement, a masterpiece of storytelling that will stand alongside the finest works on the history of civil rights.

How well do we know our country? Whom do we include when we use the word "American"? These are not just contemporary issues but recurring questions Americans have asked themselves throughout their history--and questions that were addressed when, in 1935, the Roosevelt administration created the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. Although the immediate context of the FWP was work relief, national FWP officials developed programs that spoke to much larger and longer-standing debates over the nature of American identity and culture and the very definition of who was an American. Hirsch reviews the founding of the FWP and the significance of its American Guide series, considering the choices made by administrators who wanted to celebrate diversity as a positive aspect of American cultural identity. In his exploration of the FWP's other writings, Hirsch discusses the project's pioneering use of oral history in interviews with ordinary southerners, ex-slaves, ethnic minorities, and industrial workers. He also examines congressional critics of the FWP vision; the occasional opposition of local Federal Writers, especially in the South; and how the FWP's vision changed in response to the challenge of World War II. In the course of this study, Hirsch raises thought-provoking questions about the relationships between diversity and unity, government and culture, and, ultimately, culture and democracy.

Fake history is not a harmless mistake of fact or interpretation. It is a mistake that conceals prejudice; a mistake that discriminates against certain kinds of people; a mistake held despite a preponderance of evidence; a mistake that harms us. Fake history is like the Zombies we see in mass media, for the fake fact, like the fictional Zombie, lives by turning real events and people into monstrous perversions of fact and interpretation. Its pervasiveness reveals that prejudice remains its chief appeal to those who believe it. Its effect is insidious, because we cannot or will not destroy those mischievous lies. Zombie history is almost impossible to kill. Some Zombie history was and is political, a genre of what Hannah Arendt called “organizational lying” about the past. Its makers designed the Zombie to create a basis in the false past for particular discriminatory policies. Other history Zombies are cultural. They encapsulate and empower prejudice and stereotyping. Still other popular history Zombies do not look disfigured, but like Zombies walk among us without our realizing how devastating their impact can be. Zombie History argues that, whatever their purpose, whatever the venue in which they appear, history Zombies undermine the very foundations of disinterested study of the past.

In the antebellum South, divorce was an explosive issue. As one lawmaker put it, divorce was to be viewed as a form of "madness," and as another asserted, divorce reduced communities to the "lowest ebb of degeneracy." How was it that in this climate, the number of divorces rose steadily during the antebellum era? In Families in Crisis in the Old South, Loren Schweninger uses previously unexplored records to argue that the difficulties these divorcing families faced reveal much about the reality of life in a slave-holding society as well as the myriad difficulties confronted by white southern families who chose not to divorce. Basing his argument on almost 800 divorce cases from the southern United States, Schweninger explores the impact of divorce and separation on white families and on the enslaved and provides insights on issues including domestic violence, interracial adultery, alcoholism, insanity, and property relations. He examines how divorce and separation laws changed, how married women's property rights expanded, how definitions of inhuman treatment of wives evolved, and how these divorces challenged conventional mores.

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