The Sunsphere, World’s Fair Site, and Neyland Stadium are Knoxville landmarks of pride and passion, history and culture. But anyone who has resided in this mid-sized southern city knows that it derives its unique glow not so much from its locale but from its people— the ones who built it and stayed true to it over the years.
In East Tennessee Newsmakers, Georgiana Vines pays tribute to some remarkable individuals and their contributions to Knoxville and the history, civic and cultural life, and politics of East Tennessee. Some personalities linked with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park are part of the blend. While many of these profiles celebrate personal achievement and local renown, the true narrative is found in the tapestry as a whole.
Presenting the narrative in five parts—Political Notes, UT Spotlights, Media Sparks, Park Personalities, and About Town—Vines prefaces the stories with insight into her inspiration for the collection, discussing her career in journalism and how a Knoxville News Sentinel features series bloomed into the present book-length work on notable and interconnected Knoxvillians and other East Tennesseans. From political figures like Jimmy Duncan and Tipper Gore to well-known local personalities, including Sam Beall and Mary Lynn Majors, their stories and many more have here been updated and expanded into an impressively researched, entertaining, and valuable history of the colorful and dynamic city of Knoxville and the people who have made it so.
This volume presents the story of the Eastern Band of Cherokees during the nineteenth century. This group – the tribal remnant in North Carolina that escaped removal in the 1830’s – found their fortitude and resilience continually tested as they struggled with a variety of problems, including the upheavals of the Civil War and Reconstruction, internal divisiveness, white encroachment on their lands, and a poorly defined relationship with the state and federal governments. Yet despite such stresses and a selective adaptation in the face of social and economic changes, the Eastern Cherokees retained a sense of tribal identity as they stood at the threshold of the twentieth century.
Marking the fortieth anniversary of Charles Reagan Wilson’s classic Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920, this volume collects essays by such scholars as Carolyn Reneé Dupont, Sandy Dwayne Martin, Keith Harper, and Wilson himself to show how various aspects of the Lost Cause ideology persist into the present. The Enduring Lost Cause examines the lasting legacy of a belief system that sought to vindicate the antebellum South and the Confederate fight to preserve it. Contributors treat such topics as symbolism, the perpetuation of the Lost Cause in education, and the effects of the Lost Cause on gender and religion, as well as examining ways the ideology has changed over time.
The twelve essays gathered here help the reader understand the development of a cultural phenomenon that affected generations of southerners and northerners alike, arising out of the efforts of former Confederates to make sense of their defeat, even at the expense of often mythologizing it. From fresh looks at towering figures of the Lost Cause (to reexamining the role of African Americans in disseminating the ideology (in the form of a religious explanation for suffering), the essayists carefully analyze the tensions between the past and the present, true belief and commercialization, continuity and change. Ultimately the narrative of the Lost Cause persists worldwide, merging with American exceptionalism to become a pillar of the conservative wing of US politics, as well as a lasting cultural legacy. The Enduring Lost Cause provides a window into this world, helping us to understand the present in the context of the past.
“A welcome publication, this book will nicely supplement the other books that are now appearing in the field of African American archaeology.”
—Charles E. Orser Jr., Illinois State University
Over the last decade, the field of American historical archaeology has seen enormous growth in the study of people of African descent. This edited volume is the first dedicated solely to archaeology and the construction of gender in an African American context. The common thread running through this collection is not a shared definition of gender or an agreed-upon feminist approach, but rather a regional thread, a commitment to understanding ethnicity and gender within the social, political, and ideological structures of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American South.
Taken together, these essays represent a departure in historical archaeology, an important foray into the study of the construction of gender within various African American communities that is based in the archaeological record. Those interested in historical archaeology, history, women’s studies and African American studies will find this a valuable addition to the literature. Topics range from gendered residential and consumption patterns in colonial Virginia and the construction of identity in Middle Tennessee to midwifery practices in postbellum Louisiana. Contributors to this volume include Melanie Cabak, Marie Danforth, Garrett Fesler, Jillian Galle, Barbara Heath, Larry McKee, Patricia Samford, Elizabeth Scott, Brian Thomas, Larissa Thomas, Laura Wilkie, Kristin Wilson, and Amy Young.
Jillian E. Galle is project manager of the Digital Archaeological Archive of Chesapeake Slavery at Monticello. Amy L. Young is assistant professor at the University of Southern Mississippi.
In this captivating collection of twelve essays, a testament to a lifetime’s fascination with the outdoors and its myriad wonders, naturalist Stephen Lyn Bales examines a variety of flora and fauna that in one way or another can be described as “ephemeral”—that is, fleeting, short-lived, or transient.
Focusing on his native East Tennessee, Bales introduces us to several oddities, including the ghost plant, a wispy vascular plant that resembles a rooster’s tail and grows mainly in areas devoid of sunlight; the Appalachian panda, an ancestor of today’s red panda that wandered the region millions of years ago and whose fossil remains have only recently been discovered; and the freshwater jellyfish, a tiny organism that is virtually invisible except for those hot summer days when clusters of them bloom into shimmering “medusae,” sometimes by the thousands. Other essays consider such topics as the plight of the monarch butterfly, a gorgeous insect whose populations have dropped by 90 percent in only the last two decades; the reintroduction of the lake sturgeon, one of nature’s most primitive and seldom-seen fish, into the waters of the Tennessee Valley; and the surprising emergence of coyote-wolf and coyote-dog hybrids in the eastern states.
Written with insight, humor, and heart, Ephemeral by Nature is as entertaining as it is instructive. Along with a wealth of biological details—and his own handsome pen-and-ink drawings—Bales fills the book with delightful anecdotes of field trips, species-protection efforts, and those thrilling occasions when some elusive member of the natural order shows itself to us, if only for a brief moment.
Stephen Lyn Bales, senior naturalist at Ijams Nature Center in Knoxville, is the author of Natural Histories: Stories from the Tennessee Valley and Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 1935–1941, both published by the University of Tennessee Press.
Ethnocentrism in Its Many Guises gathers essays on a topic of urgent concern. Marjorie Snipes’s introduction chronicles the treatment of ethnocentrism within the discipline of anthropology. Christine Kovic decries the ethnocentrism codified in immigration law that has led to thousands of deaths at the US–Mexico border. Brandon Lundy’s and Kezia Darkwah’s ethnographic research among labor migrants in Cabo Verde demonstrates how communities undergoing immigration pressures react to outsiders in complex ways. Yeju Choi contends that Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission failed to heal the wounds inflicted by a century of cultural genocide because the process did not fully engage and respect the worldview of Aboriginal peoples. Using the example of Rapa Nui, Kathleen and Daniel Ingersoll note how we project and privilege our own values when we observe other cultures and historical periods. Ayla Samli argues that both the nutritionally deficient Standard American Diet and our federal supplemental nutrition programs are limited and ethnocentric. Michael Blum explains how the Wu-Tang Clan’s music can be understood as a site of resistance against American racism.
These papers were presented at the 2017 annual meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society (SAS) in Carrollton, Georgia.
A well-illustrated, holistic overview of how American domestic spaces have changed over four hundred years, Experiencing American Houses encourages readers to think creatively about houses in terms of their function as opposed to their appearance. This captivating volume helps the reader step into the lived experience of the evolving American house: understanding, for example, why a nineteenth-century dining room might include a bed or why the kitchen as we know it did not evolve until the turn of the twentieth century. By carrying her study from the colonial period to the present, Elizabeth Collins Cromley makes the domestic spaces of the past feel like vital precursors to today’s experience.
Beginning with cooking spaces, Cromley examines how multi-use areas consolidated into dedicated rooms for cooking, from fires on an earthen floor to sleek modern spaces with twenty first-century appliances. Next, the author looks at ways social class, income, and local custom framed which kinds of spaces became suitable for socializing and entertaining, and what they should be called: sitting room, drawing room, hall, living room, family room, or parlor. Distinct from cooking spaces, Cromley discusses eating spaces, which morphed from multi-use areas to separate dining rooms and back again. The author covers spaces for sleeping, health, and privacy, as well as circulation—the ways that we move through a house—analyzing the functions of such little-studied features as hallways, back doors, and staircases. Finally, Cromley takes on the evolution of storage, which began mainly because of the need to store and preserve food. Clothing closets grew from oddly shaped afterthoughts to generous walk-ins, while increases in material wealth led to the need for storage outbuildings.
This accessible volume, informed by up-to-date scholarship in vernacular architecture and disciplines far beyond it, provides students and readers necessary context to understand the development of the historic and contemporary houses they encounter.
A unique resource for students and professors alike, this book reveals the important practical, educational, and emotional benefits provided by college programs that allow students to help others through service work in inner-city classrooms, clinics, and other challenging environments. Filled with vivid first-person reflections by students, Experiencing Service-Learning emphasizes learning by doing, getting into the field, sharing what one sees with colleagues, and interpreting what one learns.
As the authors make clear, service-learning is not a spectator sport. It takes students “away from the routines and comfort zones of lecture, test, term paper, exam” and puts them into the world. Service-learning requires them to engage actively with cultures that may be unfamiliar to them and to be introspective about their successes and their mistakes. At the same time, it demands of their instructors “something other than Power-Point slides or an eloquently delivered lecture,” as no teacher can predict in advance the questions their students’ experiences will raise. In service-learning, students and teacher must act together as a team of motivators, problem solvers, and change agents.
While most of its personal vignettes come from service-learners who have worked as mentors in elementary schools, the book also includes a chapter in which coauthor Michele Gourley describes at length her experiences at a faith-based health clinic in Honduras. In offering such stories—along with a succinct introduction to basic concepts, an assessment of how service-learners can effect transformational change, and project examples—this text will not only prepare students for the adventures of service-learning but also aid professors and administrators tasked with developing service-learning courses and programs.
Robert F. Kronick is a professor of educational psychology and counseling at the University
of Tennessee–Knoxville and the author of Full Service Community Schools.
Robert B. Cunningham is a professor emeritus of political science at the University
of Tennessee–Knoxville. His books include Agendas and Decisions: How State Government
Executives and Middle Managers Make and Administer Policy, coauthored with Dorothy F. Olshfski. Michele Gourley is a physician and public health professional with a background in rural community health and state health policy.
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