A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY172 start with S start with S
Using thorough and stark statistics, Kennedy describes a South emerging from World War II, coming to grips with the racism and feudalism that had held it back for generations. He includes an all-out Who’s Who, based on his own undercover investigations, of the "hate-mongers, race-racketeers, and terrorists who swore that apartheid must go on forever." The first paperback edition brings to a new generation of readers Kennedy’s searing profile of Dixie before the civil rights movement.
A classic resource on the struggle for dominance in southern North America during the colonial period
This volume recounts the clashes and intrigues that played out over the landscape of the Old Southwest and across six decades as the Spanish, French, British, and ultimately Americans vied for control. Rivalry began soon after initial discovery, mapping, and exploration as the world powers, particularly England and France, competed for control of the lucrative fur trade in the Mississippi valley. The French attempted to establish trade networks stretching from the Atlantic Ocean inland to the Mississippi River and northward from ports on the Gulf of Mexico to the Ohio River. But they found the British already entrenched there.
Verner Crane guides us through this multinational struggle and navigates the border wars and diplomatic intrigues that played crucial roles in the settlement of the South by Euro-Americans. In his new introduction, Steven Hahn places the work in the context of its time, sketches its publication history, and provides biographical information on Crane.
W. J. Cash's 1941 observation that “there are many Souths and many cultural traditions among them” is certainly validated by this book. Although the Civil War and its “lost cause” tradition continues to serve as a cultural root paradigm in celebrations, both uniting and dividing loyalties, southerners also embrace a panoply of public rituals—parades, cook-offs, kinship homecomings, church assemblies, music spectacles, and material culture exhibitions—that affirm other identities. From the Appalachian uplands to the Mississippi Delta, from Kentucky bluegrass to Carolina piedmont, southerners celebrate in festivals that showcase their diverse cultural backgrounds and their mythic beliefs about themselves.
The ten essays of this cohesive, interdisciplinary collection present event-centered research from various fields of study—anthropology, geography, history, and literature—to establish a rich, complex picture of the stereotypically “Solid South.” Topics include the Mardi Gras Indian song cycle as a means of expressing African-American identity in New Orleans; powwow performances and Native American traditions in southeast North Carolina; religious healings in southern Appalachian communities; Mexican Independence Day festivals in central Florida; and, in eastern Tennessee, bonding ceremonies of melungeons who share Indian, Scots Irish, Mediterranean, and African ancestry. Seen together, these public heritage displays reveal a rich “creole” of cultures that have always been a part of southern life and that continue to affirm a flourishing regionalism.
This book will be valuable to students and scholars of cultural anthropology, American studies, and southern history; academic and public libraries; and general readers interested in the American South. It contributes a vibrant, colorful layer of understanding to the continuously emerging picture of complexity in this region historically depicted by simple stereotypes.
The first collection of its kind to examine tourism as a complicated and vital force in southern history, culture, and economics
Anyone who has seen Rock City, wandered the grounds of Graceland, hiked in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, or watched the mermaids swim at Weeki Wachee knows the southern United States offers visitors a rich variety of scenic, cultural, and leisure activities. Tourism has been, and is still, one of the most powerful economic forces in the modern South. It is a multibillion-dollar industry that creates jobs and generates revenue while drawing visitors from around the world to enjoy the region’s natural and man-made attractions.This collection of 11 essays explores tourism as a defining force in southern history by focusing on particular influences and localities. Alecia Long examines sex as a fundamental component of tourism in New Orleans in the early 20th century, while Brooks Blevins describes how tourism served as a modernizing influence on the Arkansas Ozarks, even as the region promoted itself as a land of quaint, primitive hillbillies. Anne Whisnant chronicles the battle between North Carolina officials building the Blue Ridge Parkway and the owner of Little Switzerland, who fought for access and advertising along the scenic highway. One essay probes the racial politics behind the development of Hilton Head Island, while another looks at the growth of Florida's
panhandle into a “redneck Riviera,” catering principally to southerners, rather than northern tourists.
Southern Journeys is a pioneering work in southern history. It introduces a new window through which to view the region's distinctiveness. Scholars and students of environmental history, business history, labor history, and social history will all benefit from a consideration of the place of tourism in southern life.
Clarifies the recent and dramatic development of party competition in the South
Southern politics has changed dramatically during the past half century. While new developments have touched virtually every aspect of the region's politics, change has been especially marked in the South's political party and electoral systems. Southern Parties and Elections explores the contemporary developments in party realignment and examines the relationship between regional party change and electoral behavior and the larger patterns in national politics.
The collection's first group of essays examines some of the key legal issues in contemporary southern politics: the legal battle over majority-minority districting, the electoral consequences of such districting, the practice-fairly widespread in the South-of separating presidential elections from state and local elections, and the connections between the electorate and party change.
The second section of essays focuses on nominations, elections, and partisan developments in the South, including the recent surge of voter participation in southern Republican primaries, the comparative importance of the South and selected states with large blocks of electoral votes in presidential election outcomes, and the southern contribution to patterns of voting in Congress. The final two chapters examine changes in southern state legislatures-one a case study of the Virginia General Assembly and the other an analysis of state legislatures in the region as a whole.
Collectively these essays add important pieces to the enduring puzzle of "southern politics."
Throughout its dramatic history, the American South has wrestled with issues such as poverty, social change, labor reform, civil rights, and party politics, and Flynt’s writing reaffirms religion as the lens through which southerners understand and attempt to answer these contentious questions. In Southern Religion and Christian Diversity in the Twentieth Century, however, Flynt gently but persuasively dispels the myth—comforting to some and dismaying to others—of religion in the South as an inert cairn of reactionary conservatism.
Flynt introduces a wealth of stories about individuals and communities of faith whose beliefs and actions map the South’s web of theological fault lines. In the early twentieth century, North Carolinian pastor Alexander McKelway became a relentless crusader against the common practice of child labor. In 1972, Rev. Dr. Ruby Kile, in a time of segregated churches led by men, took the helm of the eight-member Powderly Faith Deliverance Center in Jefferson County, Alabama and built the fledgling group into a robust congregation with more than 700 black and white worshippers. Flynt also examines the role of religion in numerous pivotal court cases, such as the US Supreme Court school prayer case Engel v. Vitale, whose majority opinion was penned by Justice Hugo Black, an Alabamian. These fascinating case studies and many more illuminate a religious landscape of far more varied texture and complexity than is commonly believed.
Southern Religion and Christian Diversity in the Twentieth Century offers much to readers and scholars interested in the South, religion, and theology. Writing with his hallmark wit, warmth, and erudition, Flynt’s Southern Religion and Christian Diversity in the Twentieth Century is a vital record of gospel-inspired southerners whose stories revivify sclerotic assumptions about the narrow conformity of southern Christians.
Southern Rivers, by award-winning nature writer and biologist R. Scot Duncan, is a thoroughly crafted exploration of the perilous state of the Southeast’s rivers and the urgent need to safeguard their vitality. The region’s rivers are the epicenter of North American freshwater biodiversity and are the top global hotspot for important aquatic animals including mussels, turtles, snails, crayfish, and fish, many of which have made important contributions to southern life and culture.
Centuries of commercial development have impaired the region’s river systems, sacrificing biodiversity and compromising the rivers’ ability to provide resources essential to human life: drinking water, waste disposal, irrigation, navigation, recreation, power production, and more. Now, increased heat and drought caused by climate change are lowering water levels. As such threats increase, it may seem necessary to choose between nature conservation and human needs, but Duncan persuasively demonstrates that this is a false choice. Conservation enhances human life.
In the same engaging voice of an expert friend that won over thousands of readers of his earlier book, Southern Wonder: Alabama’s Surprising Biodiversity, Duncan explains the task of managing southeastern rivers and how river water quality affects the daily lives of the millions who hold these historic waterways dear. He shows how managing rivers wisely can meet the needs of biodiversity and humanity both. With Americans increasingly anxious about the onset of climate change and the accelerating extinction crisis, Southern Rivers illuminates actionable solutions.
Lewis has organized this beautifully presented volume into twelve monthly chapters. She starts her year in April after the crystalline frosts of winter have thawed. Already a bobcat has stamped a padded paw print in the lush spring muds as crossvine blossoms of magenta and lemon beckon winged pollinators nearby. Walk with her into the months of summer, when trees leaf out into a cathedral of habitats for birds, insects, and small mammals. In language naturalists of any age will enjoy, Lewis explains marvelous compound eyes, called ommatidia, of iridescent dragonflies and the homey carpentry of beavers damming a creek. As colored reflections signal autumn, companionable songbirds migrate south while the last caterpillars of summer roll themselves into a leaf tent, or hibernaculum, to exist in diapause until next spring. In winter, Lewis admires nature at rest and rocks like chert, sought by Native Americans for arrowheads. Chert lies over bedrock of crenellated limestone, remnant of a time when an undersea Alabama reverberated with life preparing to emerge from the sea.
Southern Sanctuary provides a rich compendium of useful features. Lewis uses both common and Latin names for the insects, plants and flowers, fungi, fish, reptiles, and mammals thus enriching knowledge of botany and zoology. Her photos and descriptions make it easy for explorers of Southern Appalachian riparian habitats to use the book to identify species of plants and animals near their own homes. Rounding out this astonishing work are handy guides to additional resources, taxonomy and measurements, rainfall, soil types, and native trees.
Southern Sanctuary will be of value to educators and students, professional and amateur naturalists, hikers, birdwatchers, botanists, and ecologists. Infusing a wealth of useful information into an elegant design, it encourages an awareness of Alabama’s rich biodiversity. Marian Moore Lewis’s Southern Sanctuary is a new classic in the best tradition of nature writing.
Somers was fifty-eight years of age when he landed in America in the fall of 1870. His long-time newspaper career and his interest in social and economic matters had prepared him in a very special way to study the South, where the whole way of life had been so lately wracked by war. He was a keen and objective observer, modest and restrained in criticism and praise. On the whole he was optimistic for the future of the South. Although apparently a Southern sympathizer during the War, he was able to subordinate this sympathy and give a fair, detached, and balanced appraisal of economic life, politics and race relations. His interest in politics was confined in the main to their effect on the economic and social phases of the South's welfare.
Since his trip to America was not sponsored by “any Association, mercantile or political,” he was at liberty to record conditions as he saw them. Many of the accounts of conditions in the South in this period may be classified as promotional literature. State bureaus of immigration and agriculture, land companies, railroads and other interested groups hired agents to make favorable reports on cheap lands, on opportunities for industrial enterprise, deposits of minerals and the existence of other natural resources. They exaggerated economic opportunities and favorable political, cultural, and social conditions. Somers, on the other hand, was a true traveler, in the pay of no organization and with no axe to grind. He was particularly interested in economic and social matters: cotton and sugar culture, Negroes, railroads, natural resources, labor, industry, immigration and education. Since an analysis of the South’s economy was Somers’ major objective, his book made an extraordinarily valuable contribution to the history of the South during Reconstruction.
Thomas Prentice Kettell was an outstanding spokesman of that group of pre-Civil War Northerners who earnestly believed that it was possible to save their country from the horrors of a sectional conflict, who worked many years to prevent the threatened dissolution of the Union, but zealously supported the national government during the Civil War in the hope that military victory would achieve what thirty years of wrangling, negotiation, and compromise had failed to accomplish-namely the preservation of a united North and South. Most of this Northern group were linked by economic ties to the planters of the South. As merchants, shippers, and financiers they largely depended upon the cotton trade for much of their prosperity; hence they opposed governmental policies which they believed would disturb their connections with the South and the foundations on which their economic prosperity and well being rested. But the fact that their ideas and position were founded on selfish economic interests did not make their action dishonest or unpatriotic.
Southern Wealth and Northern Profits was favorably received in the South where Kettell’s free trade principles, sympathetic attitude toward slavery, and his interest in Southern economic development had long been known. Moderate Southerners hoped the book might be helpful toward a compromise that would prevent secession, whereas radicals hoped it would further the cause of secession.
This timely collection addresses the neglected state of scholarship on southern women dramatists by bringing together the latest criticism on some of the most important playwrights of the 20th century.
Coeditors Robert McDonald and Linda Rohrer Paige attribute the neglect of southern women playwrights in scholarly criticism to "deep historical prejudices" against drama itself and against women artists in general, especially in the South. Their call for critical awareness is answered by the 15 essays they include in Southern Women Playwrights, considerations of the creative work of universally acclaimed playwrights such as Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Lillian Hellman (the so-called "Trinity") in addition to that of less-studied playwrights, including Zora Neale Hurston, Carson McCullers, Alice Childress, Naomi Wallace, Amparo Garcia, Paula Vogel, and Regina Porter.
This collection springs from a series of associated questions regarding the literary and theatrical heritage of the southern woman playwright, the unique ways in which southern women have approached the conventional modes of comedy and tragedy, and the ways in which the South, its types and stereotypes, its peculiarities, its traditions-both literary and cultural-figure in these women's plays. Especially relevant to these questions are essays on Lillian Hellman, who resisted the label "southern writer," and Carson McCullers, who never attempted to ignore her southernness.
This book begins by recovering little-known or unknown episodes in the history of southern drama and by examining the ways plays assumed importance in the lives of southern women in the early 20th century. It concludes with a look at one of the most vibrant, diverse theatre scenes outside New York today-Atlanta.
Alabama ranks fifth in the nation in number of species of plants and animals found in the state, surpassed only by the much larger western states of California,Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. When all the species of birds, trees, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fishes, wildflowers, dragonflies, tiger beetles, and ants are tallied, Alabama harbors more species than 90 percent of the other states in the United States. Alabamais particularly rich in aquatic biodiversity, leading the nation in species of freshwater fishes, turtles, mussels, crayfish, snails, damselflies, and carnivorous plants. The state also hosts an exceptional number of endemic species—those not found beyond its borders—ranking seventh in the nation with 144 species. The state’s 4,533 species, with more being inventoried and discovered each year, are supported by no less than 64 distinct ecological systems—each a unique blend of soil, water, sunlight, heat, and natural disturbance regimes. Habitats include dry forests, moist forests, swamp forests, sunny prairies, grassy barrens, scorching glades, rolling dunes, and bogs filled with pitcher plants and sundews. The state also includes a region of subterranean ecosystems that are more elaborate and species rich than any other place on the continent.
Although Alabama is teeming with life, the state’s prominence as a refuge for plants and animals is poorly appreciated. Even among Alabama’s citizens, few outside a small circle of biologists, advocates, and other naturalists understand the special quality of the state’s natural heritage. R. Scot Duncan rectifies this situation in Southern Wonder by providing a well-written, comprehensive overview that the general public, policy makers, and teachers can understand and use. Readers are taken on an exploratory journey of the state’s varied landscapes—from the Tennessee River Valley to the coastal dunes—and are introduced to remarkable species, such as the cave salamander and the beach mouse. By interweaving the disciplines of ecology, evolution, meteorology, and geology into an accessible whole, Duncan explains clearly why Alabama is so biotically rich and champions efforts for its careful preservation.
Published in Cooperation with The Nature Conservancy
A close study of one region of Appalachia that experienced economic vitality and strong sectionalism before the Civil War
This book examines the construction of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad through southwest Virginia in the 1850s, before the Civil War began. The building and operation of the railroad reoriented the economy of the region toward staple crops and slave labor. Thus, during the secession crisis, southwest Virginia broke with northwestern Virginia and embraced the Confederacy. Ironically, however, it was the railroad that brought waves of Union raiders to the area during the war
William Balée is a world-renowned expert on the cultural and historical ecology of the Amazon basin. His new collection, Sowing the Forest, is a companion volume to the award-winning Cultural Forests of the Amazon, published in 2013. Sowing the Forest engages in depth with how, over centuries, Amazonian people and their cultures have interacted with rainforests, making the landscapes of palm forests and other kinds of forests, and how these and related forests have fed back into the vocabulary and behavior of current indigenous occupants of the remotest parts of the vast hinterlands.
The book is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Substrate of Intentionality,” comprises chapters on historical ecology, indigenous palm forests, plant names in Amazonia, the origins of the Amazonian plantain, and the unknown “Dark Earth people” of thousands of years ago and their landscaping. Together these chapters illustrate the phenomenon of feedback between culture and environment.
In Part 2, “Scope of Transformation,” Balée lays out his theory of landscape transformation, which he divides into two rubrics—primary landscape transformation and secondary landscape transformation—and for which he provides examples and various specific effects. One chapter compares environmental and social interrelationships in an Orang Asli group in Malaysia and the Ka’apor people of eastern Amazonian Brazil, and another chapter covers loss of language and culture in the Bolivian Amazon. A final chapter addresses the controversial topic of monumentality in the rainforest. Balée concludes by emphasizing the common thread in Amazonian historical ecology: the long-term phenomenon of encouraging diversity for its own sake, not just for economic reasons.
In The Spaces of Violence, James R. Giles examines ten contemporary American novels for the unique ways in which they explore violence and space as interrelated phenomena. These texts are Russell Banks’s Affliction, Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark and Child of God, Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle, Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Don DeLillo’s End Zone, Denis Johnson’s Angels, Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer, Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. A concluding chapter extends the focus to texts by Jane Smiley, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, and Chuck Palahniuk, who treat the destructive effects of violence on family structures.
Using Costa Rica as a example, Longley carefully examines the development of the successful relationship between a nonindustrialized country and the United States, revealing the complex forces at work in resistance and accommodation.
During World War II and the immediate postwar era, both the United States and Costa Rica experienced dramatic changes. The United States assumed world leadership and the accompanying responsibilities; Costa Rica encountered far-reaching difficulties that culminated in the Civil War of 1948 and the rise to power of José Figueres. Longley examines why the United States supported Figueres and emphasizes the history and role of Costa Ricans, primarily the figueristas, in maintaining good relations in such a difficult era. Figueres implemented economic and political nationalism, which produced domestic and international tensions, and in spite of its rejection of similar policies in Guatemala and Iran, the United States supported Figueres against domestic and foreign threats.
On December 11, 1954, Charles Patrick drove to downtown Birmingham to buy a Boy Scout uniform for his son. Christmas traffic around the downtown department stores was heavy, and Patrick circled unsuccessfully until at last a streetside spot opened up and he began to pull in. As he did so, he was cut off by a woman who ordered him out of the way, as she was the wife of a city police officer. Patrick pulled away, remarking, “Ma’am, he doesn’t own the streets of Birmingham.”
Normal low-level urban hassle? Not in 1954 Birmingham, when the woman was white and Patrick black. The woman reported to her husband that a black man had sassed her, and Patrick was summarily arrested, charged with disorderly conduct, and placed in a cell where he was beaten by the husband and another police officer.
Usually that would have been the end of it, but Patrick was not the sort of man to meekly endure an injustice. He found an attorney, went to court to fight the charges, and brought his assailants to justice--as whites, blacks, politicians and the press offered public support.
This book tells the story of Patrick’s quest for justice in segregated Alabama on the eve of the civil rights movement and represents a telling instance of the growing determination of African Americans to be treated fairly, part of the broadening and deepening stream of resolve that led to the widespread activism of the civil rights movement.
Thomas E. Nunnally’s fascinating volume presents essays by linguists who examine with affection and curiosity the speech varieties occurring both past and present across Alabama. Taken together, the accounts in this volume offer an engaging view of the major features that characterize Alabama’s unique brand of southern English.
Written in an accessible manner for general readers and scholars alike, Speaking of Alabama includes such subjects as the special linguistic features of the Southern drawl, the “phonetic divide” between north and south Alabama, “code-switching” by African American speakers in Alabama, pejorative attitudes by Alabama speakers toward their own native speech, the influence of foreign languages on Alabama speech to the vibrant history and continuing influence of non-English languages in the state, as well as ongoing changes in Alabama’s dialects.
Adding to these studies is a foreword by Walt Wolfram and an afterword by Michael B. Montgomery, both renowned experts in southern English, which place both the methodologies and the findings of the volume into their larger contexts and point researchers to needed work ahead in Alabama, the South, and beyond. The volume also contains a number of useful appendices, including a guide to the sounds of Southern English, a glossary of linguistic terms, and online sources for further study.
Language, as presented in this collection, is never abstract but always examined in the context of its speakers’ day-to-day lives, the driving force for their communication needs and choices. Whether specialist or general reader, Alabamian or non-Alabamian, all readers will come away from these accounts with a deepened understanding of how language functions between individuals, within communities, and across regions, and will gain a new respect for the driving forces behind language variation and language change.
When European explorers began their initial forays into southeastern North America in the 16th and 17th centuries they encountered what they called temples and shrines of native peoples, often decorated with idols in human form made of wood, pottery, or stone. The idols were fascinating to write about, but having no value to explorers searching for gold or land, there are no records of these idols being transported to the Old World, and mention of them seems to cease about the 1700s. However, with the settling of the fledgling United States in the 1800s, farming colonists began to unearth stone images in human form from land formerly inhabited by the native peoples. With little access to the records of the 16th and 17th centuries, debate and speculation abounded by the public and scholars alike concerning their origin and meaning.
During the last twenty years the authors have researched over 88 possible examples of southeastern Mississippian stone statuary, dating as far back as 1,000 years ago, and discovered along the river valleys of the interior Southeast. Independently and in conjunction, they have measured, analyzed, photographed, and traced the known history of the 42 that appear in this volume. Compiling the data from both early documents and public and private collections, the authors remind us that the statuary should not be viewed in isolation, but rather as regional expressions of a much broader body of art, ritual, and belief.
When William Jennings Bryan began a campaign to get evolution out of American schools in the 1920s, entomologist Martin Sullivan sought refuge from the tumult in his research. Although the theory of evolution provides the foundation for his scientific work, he prefers the careful methods of observation and classification to the passion of public debate. But when Martin takes a job teaching college biology in Seattle, he finds it increasingly difficult to retreat to the haven of science. His students are taking sides in the debate over whether religion and evolution can be reconciled. Socialists are using evolution to justify revolution. Politicians are citing Darwin in defense of anti-immigration laws. And Martin’s own colleagues are insisting that only eugenic reforms will save the world. As anti-evolution legislation spreads across the country and passions flare on all sides, the effort to apply science to marriage laws and mate choice even begins to touch the lives of those he loves. By the time the state of Tennessee puts John T. Scopes on trial for teaching evolution in the summer of 1925, Martin can no longer ignore the debates that surround him and must take a stand in the fight over the role of science in American society.
Although set a hundred years ago, The Species Maker wrestles with many issues that continue to confront scientists and science watchers in the present day. Kristin Johnson draws on her experiences in the classroom and extensive knowledge of the history of science to depict what it might have been like for a careful scientist to watch the heated debates over teaching evolution in the United States in the 1920s.
Visit www.thespeciesmaker.com for supplemental material including historical essays, links to online primary sources, a glossary, and guiding questions useful for the classroom or book clubs.
Before the Chickasaws were removed to lands in Oklahoma in the 1800s, the heart of the Chickasaw Nation was located east of the Mississippi River in the upper watershed of the Tombigbee River in what is today northeastern Mississippi. Their lands had been called "splendid and fertile" by French governor Bienville at the time they were being coveted by early European settlers. The people were also termed “splendid” and described by documents of the 1700s as “tall, well made, and of an unparalleled courage. . . . The men have regular features, well-shaped and neatly dressed; they are fierce, and have a high opinion of themselves.”
The progenitors of the sociopolitical entity termed by European chroniclers progressively as Chicasa, Chicaca, Chicacha, Chicasaws, and finally Chickasaw may have migrated from west of the Mississippi River in prehistoric times. Or migrating people may have joined indigenous populations. Despite this longevity in their ancestral lands, the Chickasaw were the only one of the original "five civilized tribes" to leave no remnant community in the Southeast at the time of removal.
Atkinson thoroughly researches the Chickasaw Indians, tracing their history as far back as the documentation and archaeological record will allow. He historicizes from a Native viewpoint and outlines political events leading to removal, while addressing important issues such as slave-holding among Chickasaws, involvement of Chickasaw and neighboring Indian tribes in the American Revolution, and the lives of Chickasaw women.
Splendid Land, Splendid People will become a fundamental resource for current information and further research on the Chickasaw. A wide audience of librarians, anthropologists, historians, and general readers have long awaited publication of this important volume.
A deft study of the evolving literary aesthetic of one of the first avant-garde black writers in America.
In Split-Gut Song, Karen Jackson Ford looks at what it means to be African American, free, and creative by analyzing Jean Toomer's main body of work, specifically, his groundbreaking creation Cane. When first published in 1923, this pivotal work of modernism was widely hailed as inaugurating a truly artistic African American literary tradition. Yet Toomer's experiments in literary form are consistently read in terms of political radicalism—protest and uplift—rather than literary radicalism.
Ford contextualizes Toomer's poetry, letters, and essays in the literary culture of his period and, through close readings of the poems, shows how they negotiate formal experimentation (imagism, fragmentation, dialect) and traditional African American forms (slave songs, field hollers, call-and-response sermons, lyric poetry). At the heart of Toomer's work is the paradox that poetry is both the saving grace of African American culture and that poetry cannot survive modernity. This contradiction, Ford argues, structures Cane, wherein traditional lyric poetry first flourishes, then falters, then falls silent.
The Toomer that Ford discovers in Split-Gut Song is a complicated, contradictory poet who brings his vexed experience and ideas of racial identity to both conventional lyric and experimental forms. Although Toomer has been labelled a political radical, Ford argues that politics is peripheral in his experimental, stream-of-consciousness work. Rather Toomer exhibits a literary radicalism as he struggles to articulate his perplexed understanding of race and art in 20th-century America.
This edition includes an introduction by Evans scholar Diane Roberts about the enduring relevance and legacy of St. Elmo as a work of literature as well as a reflection of gender roles and the seismic societal changes taking place in the United States in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Through a comprehensive study of changing pottery attributes, Saunders documents the clash of Spanish and Native American cultures in the 16th-century southeastern United States.
By studying the ceramic traditions of the Guale Indians, Rebecca Saunders provides evidence of change in Native American lifeways from prehistory through European contact and the end of the Mission period. The Guale were among the first southeastern groups to come into contact with Spanish and French colonists, and they adapted various strategies in order to ensure their own social survival. That adaptation is reflected, Saunders shows, in the changing attributes of pottery recovered on archaeological sites on the coasts of Georgia and Florida.
Saunders traces the evolution of Guale pottery from the late prehistoric Irene phase through the Mission period at the three archaeological sites. She uses both technological and stylistic attributes to monitor change, paying particular attention to changes in execution and frequency of the filfot cross—a stylized cross that is a symbol of Guale cosmology. The frequency of this symbol in different ceramic components, according to Saunders, is a measure of change in the worldview of the missionized Guale. Although the symbol abruptly changed after the first Spanish contact, it showed remarkable stability through the Mission period, suggesting that traditional craft training and production remained strong despite high mortality rates and frequent relocation.
Only after 1684, when the Guale were relocated to Amelia Island in present-day Florida, did the use of the cross motif decline, suggesting that the Guale who remained in Spanish territory may have conceived of their place in the cosmos differently from their forebears or their contemporaries who fled to the interior.
The Provincetown Players created a revolution in American theatre, making room for truly modern approaches to playwriting, stage production, and performance unlike anything that characterized the commercial theatre of the early twentieth century. In Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players, Jeffery Kennedy gives readers the unabridged story in a meticulously researched and comprehensive narrative that sheds new light on the history of the Provincetown Players. This study draws on many new sources that have only become available in the last three decades; this new material modifies, refutes, and enhances many aspects of previous studies.
At the center of the study is an extensive account of the career of George Cram Cook, the Players’ leader and artistic conscience, as well as one of the most significant facilitators of modernist writing in early twentieth-century American literature and theatre. It traces Cook’s mission of “cultural patriotism,” which drove him toward creating a uniquely American identity in theatre. Kennedy also focuses on the group of friends he calls the “Regulars,” perhaps the most radical collection of minds in America at the time; they encouraged Cook to launch the Players in Provincetown in the summer of 1915 and instigated the move to New York City in fall 1916.
Kennedy has paid particular attention to the many legends connected to the group (such as the “discovery” of Eugene O’Neill), and also adds to the biographical record of the Players’ forty-seven playwrights, including Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Floyd Dell, Rita Wellman, Mike Gold, Djuna Barnes, and John Reed. Kennedy also examines other fascinating artistic, literary, and historical personalities who crossed the Players’ paths, including Emma Goldman, Charles Demuth, Berenice Abbott, Sophie Treadwell, Theodore Dreiser, Claudette Colbert, and Charlie Chaplin. Kennedy highlights the revolutionary nature of those living in bohemian Greenwich Village who were at the heart of the Players and the America they were responding to in their plays.
A southern journalist campaigns for racial understanding during the
struggle over school desegregation in Virginia.
In 1958 the nation's attention was focused on Norfolk,
Virginia, where nearly ten thousand students were locked out of their schools.
Rather than comply with the desegregation mandate of Brown v. Board
of Education, Governor J. Lindsay Almond, supported by the powerful
political machine of Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr., had closed Norfolk's white
secondary schools.
Massive resistance to integration transformed Norfolk
into a civil rights arena. Although the process by which Norfolk's schools
were integrated was far from orderly, the transition was characterized
by debate, political maneuvering, and judicial action--not violence. Lenoir
Chambers, editor of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, conducted a five-year
editorial campaign supporting the peaceful implementation of the Court's
order. The Pilot was Virginia's only white newspaper to take this
position. Chambers was later awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials.
Utilizing a wide range of primary and secondary sources,
Standing before the Shouting Mob examines Chambers's campaign, explores
the influences that shaped his racial views, and places him within the
context of southern journalism. The book also provides a detailed analysis
of Virginia's massive resistance and Norfolk's school closing.
Featuring interviews from seventeen veteran submariners, Standing Watch: American Submarine Veterans Remember the Cold War Era offers the perspective of the submariners themselves—lending them a voice and paying homage to their service. Jonathan Li-Chung Leung provides an original glimpse into a world of unique challenges and characters, a life isolated and submerged, and a duty defined by the juxtaposition of monotonous routine and unparalleled excitement.
These personal accounts of life below the surface offer readers a front-row seat to close encounters with Soviet submarines and the naval blockade during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as an intimate understanding of daily life onboard the vessels, the culture of military discipline, and the religious-like fervor exercised in honoring traditions big and small. By applying first-hand perspectives to a larger thematic overview, this book uses authentic narratives to deliver a lively and colorful picture of the Silent Service.
Set against the backdrop of sobering geo-political disputes and their own role as the nation’s defenders against a seemingly ambiguous super-enemy, these veterans focus on their responsibilities and reflect on careers built on the simple axioms of pride and service. This invigorating and unalloyed account is an unprecedented addition to the existing literature on naval and military history.
Stars Fell on Alabama is truly a classic. The book enjoyed enormous popularity and notoriety when it was first published (it was a selection of The Literary Guild and also sold widely in Europe). It can be described as a book of folkways—not journalism, or history, or a novel. At times it is impressionistic; at other times it conveys deep insights into the character of Alabama. Carmer visited every region of the state, always accompanied by someone intimately familiar with the locality. The mosaic that emerges from the pages of his book portrays Alabama’s human landscape in all its variety, and it is a work essential to an understanding of Alabama and its culture.
This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores in-depth a topic previously neglected by scholars: John Steinbeck's early continuing preoccupation with ecology and marine biology and the effect of that interest on his writings. Written by scholars from various disciplines, the essays offer a dynamic contribution to the study of John Steinbeck by considering his writings from an environmental perspective. They reveal Steinbeck as a prophet that was ahead of his time and supremely relevant to our own.
The first scholarly assessment of Steinbeck’s bestselling travelogue Travels with Charley, published in 1962, a narrative that blurs the lines between nonfiction and fiction
A flamboyant personality and close friend of writers such as William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, Crane made telling impressions on his contemporaries. They often constitute the best assessments of Crane’s own personality and work. The 90 reminiscences gathered here offer a much-needed account of Crane’s life from a variety of viewpoints, as well as important information about the contributors themselves.
Hatzaad Harishon ("The First Step") was a New York-based, multiracial Jewish organization that worked to increase recognition and legitimacy for Black Jews in the sixties and seventies. In Stepping into Zion, Janice W. Fernheimer examines the history and archives of Hatzaad Harishon to illuminate the shifting definitions and borders of Jewish identity, which have critical relevance to Jews of all traditions as well as to non-Jews.
Fernheimer focuses on a period when Jewish identity was in flux and deeply influenced by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In 1964, white and Black Jews formed Hatzaad Harishon to foster interaction and unity between Black and white Jewish communities. They raised the question of who or what constitutes Jewishness or Jewish identity, and in searching for an answer succeeded—both historically and rhetorically—in gaining increased recognition for Black Jews. Fernheimer traces how, despite deep disagreement over definitions, members of Hatzaad Harishon were able to create common ground in a process she terms "interruptive invention": an incremental model for rhetorical success that allows different groups to begin and continue important but difficult discussions when they share little common ground or make unequal claims to institutional and discursive power, or when the nature of common ground is precisely what is at stake. Consequently, they provide a practical way out of the seemingly incommensurable stalemate incompatible worldviews present.
Through insightful interpretations of Hatzaad Harishon's archival materials, Fernheimer chronicles the group's successes and failures within the larger rhetorical history of conflicts that emerge when cultural identities shift or expand.
The history of Alabama has been told, but most often in terms of white men and their politics and economics. Now a more complex story of the state is emerging from the shadows of history in a new book that investigates the place of women from the perspective of race, class, and gender. Stepping Out of the Shadows, is a compilation of articles first presented at the 1990 Alabama Women’s History Forum in Birmingh, and edited by Mary Martha Thomas. The writers discuss the lives of women in antebellum Alabama and reexamine the roles of both black and white women as missionaries during Reconstruction, as reformers and suffrage leaders in the Progressive era, and as members of the state legislature in the 20th century.
Explores the impact of European colonization on Native American and Pacific Islander technology and culture
This is the first comprehensive analysis of the partial replacement of flaked stone and ground stone traditions by metal tools in the Americas during the Contact Era. It examines the functional, symbolic, and economic consequences of that replacement on the lifeways of native populations, even as lithic technologies persisted well after the landing of Columbus. Ranging across North America and to Hawai'i, the studies show that, even with wide access to metal objects, Native Americans continued to produce certain stone tool types—perhaps because they were still the best implements for a task or because they represented a deep commitment to a traditional practice.
Chapters are ordered in terms of relative degree of European contact, beginning with groups that experienced brief episodes of interaction, such as the Wichita-French meeting on the Arkansas River, and ending with societies that were heavily influenced by colonization, such as the Potawatomi of Illinois. Because the anthology draws comparisons between the persistence of stone tools and the continuity of other indigenous crafts, it presents holistic models that can be used to explain the larger consequences of the Contact Era.
Marvin T. Smith, of Valdosta State University has stated that, "after reading this volume, no archaeologist will ever see the replacement of lithic technology by metal tools as a simple matter of replacement of technologically inferior stone tools with their superior metal counterparts. This is cutting-edge scholarship in the area of contact period studies."
The Pulitzer prize-winning The Store is the second novel of Stribling’s monumental trilogy set in the author’s native Tennessee Valley region of north Alabama. The action begins in 1884, the year in which Grover Cleveland became the first Democratic president since the end of the Civil War; and it centers about the emergence of a figure of wealth in the city of Florence.
In The Store, Stribling succeeds in presenting the essence of an age through the everyday lives of his characters. In the New Yorker, reviewer Robert M. Coates compared Stribling with Mark Twain in his ability to convey the “very life and movement” of a small Southern town: “Groups move chatting under the trees or stand loitering in the courthouse square, townsfolk gather at political ‘speakings’ and drift homeward separately afterward; always, in their doings, one has the sense of a whole community surrounding them, binding them together.” Gerald Bullet wrote in The New Statesman and Nation that the novel “is a first-rate book…filled with diverse and vital characters; and much of it cannot be read without that primitive excitement, that eagerness to know what comes next, which is, after all, the triumph of the good story teller.”
Southern Presbyterian theologians enjoyed a prominent position in antebellum southern culture. Respected for both their erudition and elite constituency, these theologians identified the southern society as representing a divine, Biblically ordained order. Beginning in the 1840s, however, this facile identification became more difficult to maintain, colliding first with antislavery polemics, then with Confederate defeat and reconstruction, and later with women’s rights, philosophical empiricism, literary criticisms of the Bible, and that most salient symbol of modernity, natural science.
As Monte Harrell Hampton shows in Storm of Words, modern science seemed most explicitly to express the rationalistic spirit of the age and threaten the Protestant conviction that science was the faithful “handmaid” of theology. Southern Presbyterians disposed of some of these threats with ease. Contemporary geology, however, posed thornier problems. Ambivalence over how to respond to geology led to the establishment in 1859 of the Perkins Professorship of Natural Science in Connexion with Revealed Religion at the seminary in Columbia, South Carolina. Installing scientist-theologian James Woodrow in this position, southern Presbyterians expected him to defend their positions.
Within twenty-five years, however, their anointed expert held that evolution did not contradict scripture. Indeed, he declared that it was in fact God’s method of creating. The resulting debate was the first extended evolution controversy in American history. It drove a wedge between those tolerant of new exegetical and scientific developments and the majority who opposed such openness. Hampton argues that Woodrow believed he was shoring up the alliance between science and scripture—that a circumscribed form of evolution did no violence to scriptural infallibility. The traditionalists’ view, however, remained interwoven with their identity as defenders of the Lost Cause and guardians of southern culture.
The ensuing debate triggered Woodrow’s dismissal. It also capped a modernity crisis experienced by an influential group of southern intellectuals who were grappling with the nature of knowledge, both scientific and religious, and its relationship to culture—a culture attempting to define itself in the shadow of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods explores well-known Alabama food traditions to reveal salient histories of the state in a new way. In this book that is part history, part travelogue, and part cookbook, Emily Blejwas pays homage to fourteen emblematic foods, dishes, and beverages, one per chapter, as a lens for exploring the diverse cultures and traditions of the state.
Throughout Alabama’s history, food traditions have been fundamental to its customs, cultures, regions, social and political movements, and events. Each featured food is deeply rooted in Alabama identity and has a story with both local and national resonance. Blejwas focuses on lesser-known food stories from around the state, illuminating the lives of a diverse populace: Poarch Creeks, Creoles of color, wild turkey hunters, civil rights activists, Alabama club women, frontier squatters, Mardi Gras revelers, sharecroppers, and Vietnamese American shrimpers, among others. A number of Alabama figures noted for their special contributions to the state’s foodways, such as George Washington Carver and Georgia Gilmore, are profiled as well. Alabama’s rich food history also unfolds through accounts of community events and a food-based economy. Highlights include Sumter County barbecue clubs, Mobile’s banana docks, Appalachian Decoration Days, cane syrup making, peanut boils, and eggnog parties.
Drawing on historical research and interviews with home cooks, chefs, and community members cooking at local gatherings and for holidays, Blejwas details the myths, legends, and truths underlying Alabama’s beloved foodways. With nearly fifty color illustrations and fifteen recipes, The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods will allow all Alabamians to more fully understand their shared cultural heritage.
“The principal authority for the general treatment of the history of coal, and of iron and steel, in
Alabama is the work of Miss Ethel Armes. The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama is a comprehensive
and scholarly work portraying in attractive style the growth of the mineral industries in its
relation to the development of the state and of the South, in preparation of which the author spent
more than five years.”
—Thomas McAdory Owen, History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography
The Story of Food in the Human Past: How What We Ate Made Us Who We Are uses case studies from recent archaeological research to tell the story of food in human prehistory. Beginning with the earliest members of our genus, Robyn E. Cutright investigates the role of food in shaping who we are as humans during the emergence of modern Homo sapiens and through major transitions in human prehistory such as the development of agriculture and the emergence of complex societies.
This fascinating study begins with a discussion of how food shaped humans in evolutionary terms by examining what makes human eating unique, the use of fire to cook, and the origins of cuisine as culture and adaptation through the example of Neandertals. The second part of the book describes how cuisine was reshaped when humans domesticated plants and animals and examines how food expressed ancient social structures and identities such as gender, class, and ethnicity. Cutright shows how food took on special meaning in feasts and religious rituals and also pays attention to the daily preparation and consumption of food as central to human society.
Cutright synthesizes recent paleoanthropological and archaeological research on ancient diet and cuisine and complements her research on daily diet, culinary practice, and special-purpose mortuary and celebratory meals in the Andes with comparative case studies from around the world to offer readers a holistic view of what humans ate in the past and what that reveals about who we are.
The Story upon a Hill: The Puritan Myth in Contemporary American Fiction analyzes the work of several of the most important contemporary writers in the United States as reinterpreting commonplace narratives of the country’s origins with a keen eye on the effects of inclusion and exclusion that Puritan myths promote. In 1989, Ronald Reagan recalled the words of Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop, who imagined the colony as a “city upon a hill” for future nations to emulate. In Reagan’s speech, Winthrop’s signature rhetoric became an emblem of American idealism, and for many Americans, the Puritans’ New England was the place where the United States forged its original identity.
But what if Winthrop never gave that speech? What if he did not even write it? Historians cannot definitively answer these questions. In fact, no group that we refer to as American Puritans thought of themselves as Puritans. Rather, they were a group of dissident Christians often better defined by their disagreements than their shared beliefs.
Literary scholars interested in Anglo-American literary production from the seventeenth century through the present, historians, and readers interested in how ideas about Christianity circulate in popular culture will find fascinating the ways in which William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Marilynne Robinson repurpose so-called Puritan forms of expression to forge a new narrative of New England’s Congregationalist legacy in American letters. Works by Colson Whitehead, Paul Auster, Toni Morrison, and others are also considered. The Story upon a Hill raises a provocative question: if the Puritans never existed as we understand them, what might American history look like in that context?
Straight Outta Compton is about living large, living in the fast lane. It raps to its readers about being black, being born and raised in the L.A. ghetto, being so-called "Niggaz 4-Life," being sweet on black life (for those in it, the beat goes on). It focuses on the lives of two black men, Rooster and Clive-nem, who grow up together in Compton. He and Rooster split up, fall into rival gangs-the Bloods and the Crips-and being to hate each other. Clive has other problems besides Rooster-namely, Compton. He thinks that he's made a girl pregnant. He's involved with gangs.
Straight Outta Compton samples from all aspects of black life in its search to have its characters find what rapper Heavy D. would call a, "Peaceful Journey." It wasn't just written; it was mixed by a DJ, and the result is hyped!
Adapts Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque, as well as the latest in gender and psychoanalytic theory, to the major works of acclaimed southern writer Carson McCullers.
This innovative reconsideration of the themes of Carson McCullers's fiction argues that her work has heretofore suffered under the pall of narrow gothic interpretations, obscuring a more subversive agenda. By examining McCullers’s major novels—The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, and The Ballad of the Sad Café—Gleeson-White locates a radical and specific form of the grotesque in the author's fiction: the liberating and redemptive possibilities of errant gender roles and shifting sexuality. She does this by employing Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque, which is both affirming and revolutionary, and thereby moves McCullers's texts beyond the 'gloom and doom' with which they have been charged for over fifty years.
The first chapter explores female adolescence by focusing on McCullers's tomboys in the context of oppressive southern womanhood. The second chapter analyzes McCullers's fascinating struggle to depict homosexual desire outside of traditional stereotypes. Gleeson-White then examines McCullers's portrayals of feminine and masculine gender through the tropes of cross-dressing, transvestism, and masquerade. The final chapter takes issue with earlier readings of androgyny in the texts to suggest a more useful concept McCullers herself called "the hybrid." Underpinning the whole study is the idea of a provocative, dynamic form of the grotesque that challenges traditional categories of normal and abnormal.
Because the characters and themes of McCullers's fiction were created in the 1940s and 1950s, a time of tension between the changing status of women and the southern ideal of womanhood, they are particularly fertile ground for a modern reexamination of this nature. Gleeson-White's study will be valued by scholars of American literature and gender and queer studies, by students of psychology, by academic libraries, and by readers of Carson McCullers. Strange Bodies is a thoughtful, highly credible analysis that adds dimension to the study of southern literature.
Chronicles the history of battlefield air attack from 1911, when the airplane was first used in war, to the end of World War II.
A Strong and Steady Pulse: Stories from a Cardiologist provides an insider’s perspective on the field of cardiovascular medicine told through vignettes and insights drawn from Gregory D. Chapman’s three decades as a cardiologist and professor of medicine. In twenty-six bite-sized chapters based on real-life patients and experiences, Chapman provides an overview of contemporary cardiovascular diseases and treatments, illuminating the art and science of medical practice for lay audiences and professionals alike.
With A Strong and Steady Pulse, Chapman provides medical students and general readers with a better understanding of cardiac disease and its contributing factors in modern life, and he also provides insights on the diagnostic process, medical decision making, and patient care. Each chapter presents a patient and their initial appearance, described in clear detail as Chapman gently walks us through his evaluation and the steps he and his associates take to determine the underlying problem. Chapman’s stories are about real people dealing with life and death situations—including the physicians, nurses, medical students, and other team members who try to save lives in emergent, confusing conditions.
The sometimes hard-won solutions to these medical challenges combine new technology and cutting-edge research together with insights drawn from Chapman’s past experiences as an intern and resident in Manhattan during the AIDS epidemic, as a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University in the 1990s, and in practice in Nashville, Tennessee, and Birmingham, Alabama. Conditions addressed include the recognition and management of heart attack, heart failure, arrhythmia, valvular heart disease, cardiac transplantation, broken heart syndrome, hypertension, and the depression some people experience after a heart attack, as well as related topics like statin drugs, the Apple Watch ECG feature, and oral anticoagulants. Finally, the emergence of the COVID-19 virus and its disruption of normal hospital routines as the pandemic unfolded is addressed in an epilogue.
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
Within the general structure-and-process theme of this compendium, the authors have focused on either intrasite problems (those dealing with the formation and structure of a site, type of site, or type of feature) or intersite problems (those dealing with behavioral organization and process as developed from comparative site data). These papers, from a broad range of specialists, present a comprehensive study of southeastern archaeology.
Section I: Intrasite Structure and Formation Processes
Formation Processes for the Practical Prehistorian: An Example from the Southeast, J. Jefferson Reid
The Form, Function, and Formation of Garbage-filled Pits on Southeastern Aboriginal Sites: An Archaeobotanical Analysis, Roy S. Dickens Jr.
Feature Zones and Feature Fill: More Than Trash, Jack H. Wilson Jr.
Social Implications of Storage and Disposal Patterns, H. Trawick Ward
The Form and Function of South Carolina's Early Woodland Shell Rings, Michael B. Trinkley
A New Way of Looking at Old Holes: Methods for Excavating and Interpreting Timber Structures, Alexander H. Morrison II
Section II: Intersite Comparisons and Regional Chronology
Archaeology and the Archaic Period in the Southern Ridge-and-Valley Province, Jefferson Chapman
Intersite Assemblage Variability in the Lower Little Tennessee River Valley: Exploring Extinct Settlement Systems Through Probabilistic Sampling, R. P. Stephen Davis Jr.
Lithic Scatters in the South Carolina Piedmont, Veletta Canouts and Albert C. Goodyear III
Tradition and Typology: Basic Elements of the Carolina Projectile Point Sequence, Billy L. Oliver
Model and Sequence in the Maryland Archaic, Kit W. Wesler
Spheres of Cultural Interaction across the Coastal Plain of Virginia in the Woodland Period, Keith T. Egloff
Early Hopewellian Ceremonial Encampments in the South Appalachian Highlands, John A. Walthall
Deep Water and High Ground: Seventeenth-Century Settlement Patterns on the Carolina Coast, Stanley South and Michael O. Hartley
Epilogue: Joffre Lanning Coe: The Quiet Giant of Southeastern Archaeology, James B. Griffin
In 1733, General James Edward Oglethorpe officially established the colony of Georgia, and within three years had fortified the coast southward toward St. Augustine. Although this region, originally known as the provinces of Guale and Mocama, had previously been under Spanish control for more than a century, territorial fighting had emptied the region of Spanish missionaries, soldiers, and their Indian allies. Spanish officials maintained that the long history of Spanish authority over the territory guaranteed Spain the right to defy and repel the English intruders. By 1739, with diplomatic negotiations failing and the potential for war imminent, King Philip V requested that Don Manuel de Montiano, Governor of Spanish Florida, provide him with every document from both governmental and ecclesiastical sources that would demonstrate prior Spanish presence and control over the region. Original documents and translations were delivered within the year and safely filed for future use--then forgotten. With the outbreak of open war six months earlier, the diplomatic utility of the documents had passed.
For over 250 years, the documents languished safely in the Archive of the Indies in Seville until recognized, recovered, translated, and published by John Worth. Within this volume, Worth brings to light the history of the documents, provides complete translations and full explanations of their contents and a narrative exposition of the Spanish presence along the Atlantic coast never before fully understood. David Hurst Thomas provides an introduction that places Worth's translations and his historical overview into the context of ongoing archaeological excavations on the Georgia coast. With the publication of this volume, one of the least known chapters of Georgia history is finally examined in detail.
Using American, British, and Spanish documents, many previously unknown, Frank Owsley’s study establishes the Creek War and the struggle to control the Gulf borderlands as integral parts of the War of 1812. The war between the United States and a large part of the Creek nation is usually studied as local or regional history. These documentary sources, however, show the larger picture. They show Spain to have been a major influence in the Creek War and indicate the extent to which the British were aiding the Indians and using them to redirect American troops. On the other hand, Andrew Jackson, in charge of the American forces on the Gulf Coast, emerged from the conflict as a first-rate military commander. His victories on the Gulf gave the West a leader and aided in shifting political power from the eastern seaboard to the South and West.
Owsley concludes that the victories in the Gulf region were of sufficient magnitude to justify the claim that the War of 1812 was not a draw but a decisive American victory and that had there been a general of Jackson's caliber on the northern frontier, the United States might have had a clear-cut victory there.
As a result of the war, the United States held its claim on Louisiana, annexed the Mobile district, forced Spain out of Florida, and broke the power of the southern Indians, thus opening vast lands for settlement from the new nation on the eastern seaboard.
Connecting Cather's work to the southern literary tradition and the South of her youth
A diverse and experimental writer who lived most of her life in New York City, Willa Cather is best known for her depiction of pioneer life on the Nebraska plains. Despite Cather's association with Nebraska, however, the novelist's Virginia childhood and her southern family were deeply influential in shaping her literary imagination.
Joyce McDonald shows evidence, for example, of Cather's southern sensibility in the class consciousness and aesthetic values of her characters and in their sense of place and desire for historical continuity, a sensibility also evident in her narrative technique of weaving stories within stories and in her use of folklore. For McDonald, however, what most links Cather and her work to the South and to the southern literary tradition is her use of pastoral modes.
Beginning with an examination of Cather's Virginia childhood and the southern influences that continued to mold her during the Nebraska years, McDonald traces the effects of those influences in Cather's novels. The patterns that emerge reveal not only Cather's strong ideological connection to the pastoral but also the political position implicit in her choice of that particular mode. Further analysis of Cather's work reveals her preoccupation with hierarchical constructs and with the use and abuse of power and her interest in order, control, and possession. The Willa Cather who emerges from the pages of The Stuff of Our Forebears is not the Cather who claimed to eschew politics but a far more political novelist than has heretofore been perceived.
An exploration of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s narrative technique and unique vision of the world
The Style of Hawthorne’s Gaze is an unusual and insightful work that employs a combination of critical strategies drawn from art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and contemporary aesthetic and literary theory to explore Nathaniel Hawthorne’s narrative technique and his unique vision of the world. Dolis studies Hawthorne’s anti-technological and essentially Romantic view of the external world and examines the recurring phenomena of lighting, motion, aspectivity, fragmentation, and imagination as they relate to his descriptive techniques.
Enslaved Africans and their descendants comprised a significant portion of colonial Virginia populations, with most living on rural slave quarters adjacent to the agricultural fields in which they labored. Archaeological excavations into these home sites have provided unique windows into the daily lifeways and culture of these early inhabitants.
Explores how the suburban imaginary, composed of the built environment and imaginative texts, functions as a resource for living out the “good life”
Starting with the premise that suburban films, residential neighborhoods, chain restaurants, malls, and megachurches are compelling forms (topos) that shape and materialize the everyday lives of residents and visitors, Greg Dickinson’s Suburban Dreams offers a rhetorically attuned critical analysis of contemporary American suburbs and the “good life” their residents pursue.
Dickinson’s analysis suggests that the good life is rooted in memory and locality, both of which are foundations for creating a sense of safety central to the success of suburbs. His argument is situated first in a discussion of the intersections among buildings, cities, and the good life and the challenges to these relationships wrought by the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The argument then turns to rich, fully-embodied analyses of suburban films and a series of archetypal suburban landscapes to explore how memory, locality, and safety interact in constructing the suburban imaginary. Moving from the pastoralism of residential neighborhoods and chain restaurants like Olive Garden and Macaroni Grill, through the megachurch’s veneration of suburban malls to the mixed-use lifestyle center’s nostalgic invocation of urban downtowns, Dickinson complicates traditional understandings of the ways suburbs situate residents and visitors in time and place.
The analysis suggests that the suburban good life is devoted to family. Framed by the discourses of consumer culture, the suburbs often privilege walls and roots to an expansive vision of worldliness. At the same time, developments such as farmers markets suggest a continued striving by suburbanites to form relationships in a richer, more organic fashion.
Dickinson’s work eschews casually dismissive attitudes toward the suburbs and the pursuit of the good life. Rather, he succeeds in showing how by identifying the positive rhetorical resources the suburbs supply, it is in fact possible to engage with the suburbs intentionally, thoughtfully, and rigorously. Beyond an analysis of the suburban imaginary, Suburban Dreams demonstrates how a critical engagement with everyday places can enrich daily life. The book provides much of interest to students and scholars of rhetoric, communication studies, public memory, American studies, architecture, and urban planning.
In this deeply researched and multifaceted study, Marco G. Meniketti demonstrates how the landscape of the small Caribbean island of Nevis preserves and reveals artifacts and evidence of the highly complex and interrelated seventeenth- to nineteenth-century “Atlantic Economy,” comprising early capitalist sugar production, the African slave trade, and European settlement.
Sugar Cane Capitalism and Environmental Transformation is based on twelve seasons of meticulous archaeological field work and documentary research. Although Nevis was once a bustling hub of the British colonial project, the emigration of emancipated slaves and abandonment by European planters left large swathes of Nevis vacant. Reclaimed by forests and undisturbed by later waves of economic development, the island—dotted with fascinating ruins, debris from the sugar industry, windmills, chimneys, and multistoried great house—provided Meniketti with an ideal subject for archaeological inquiry.
Through intensive archaeological and landscape surveys of multiple key plantation sites, Meniketti traces the development of Nevis from its initial European settlement in 1627 to its central role as a British mercantile hub and a laboratory and prototype of capitalist sugar cultivation. His nuanced analysis explains the backdrop of European political and economic rivalries, of which the colonial agro-industrial enterprises were the physical manifestations, and makes telling comparisons with Dutch and French archaeological sites. The work also compares and contrasts the adoption of capitalist modes of sugar production and socialization at wealthy and middling plantation sites.
Supported with a wealth of photos, tables, and maps, Sugar Cane Capitalism and Environmental Transformation offers a vital case study of one island whose environment and archaeological record illuminates the complex webs of Atlantic history.
This classic compendium of ancient Indian artifacts from the entire southeastern United States remains an indispensable reference source for professionals and enthusiasts alike.
From utilitarian arrowheads to beautiful stone effigy pipes to ornately-carved shell disks, the photographs and drawings in Sun Circles and Human Hands present the archaeological record of the art and native crafts of the prehistoric southeastern Indians. Painstakingly compiled in the 1950s by two sisters who traveled the eastern United States interviewing archaeologists and collectors and visiting the major repositories, Sun Circles and Human Hands is remarkable for its breadth of illustration of Indian-made artifacts and its comprehensive documentation. Although research over the last 50 years has disproven many of the early theories reported in the text—which were not the editors' theories but those of the archaeologists of the day—the excellent illustrations of objects no longer available for examination have more than validated the lasting worth of this popular book.
Broadly acclaimed when it first appeared, this new printing has the added value of Knight's foreword, which places the work in its proper context. Useful to museums, state and national parks, school libraries, gift stores, archaeological agencies, and private collections, Sun Circles and Human Hands is a rich pictorial survey accessible to anyone interested in early American Indian culture.
The last prehistoric cultures to inhabit the Middle Ohio Valley (ca. A.D. 1000–1650) are referred to as Fort Ancient societies, which exhibited a wide variety of Mississippian period characteristics. What is less well-known and little understood are the social processes by which Mississippian characteristics spread to Fort Ancient communities. Through a comprehensive study of SunWatch, one of the few thoroughly excavated Fort Ancient settlements, the author focuses on the development of village social structure within a broad geographic and temporal framework, recognizing border areas as particularly dynamic contexts of social change. As a fundamental study of social patterning of Fort Ancient villages, this work reveals the interrelationships of small social units in culture change and social structure development and provides a full reconsideration of the Mississippian dimensions of Fort Ancient societies and a model for future investigations of larger patterning in the lateprehistory of the region.
In this well-informed yet anxious age, public administrators have constructed vast cisterns that collect and interpret a meteoric shower of facts. Akhlaque Haque demonstrates that this pervasive use and increasing dependence on information technology (IT) enables sophisticated and well-intentioned public services that nevertheless risk deforming public policy decision-making and sees a contradiction inherent in a public that seeks services that require a level of data collection that in turn triggers fears of a tyrannical police state.
The author posits that IT’s potential as a tool for human development depends on how civil servants and citizens actively engage in identifying desired outcomes, map IT solutions to those outcomes, and routinize the applications of those solutions. This leads to his call for the development of entrepreneurs who generate innovative solutions to critical human needs and problems. In his powerful summary, he recaps possible answers to the question: What is the best way a public institution can apply technology to improving the human condition?
Engrossing, challenging, and timely, Surveillance, Transparency, and Democracy is essential reading for both policy makers as well as the great majority of readers and citizens engaged in contemporary arguments about the role of government, public health and security, individual privacy, data collection, and surveillance.
In Surviving Spanish Conquest: Indian Fight, Flight, and Cultural Transformation in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, Karen F. Anderson-Córdova draws on archaeological, historical, and ethnohistorical sources to elucidate the impacts of sixteenth-century Spanish conquest and colonization on indigenous peoples in the Greater Antilles. Moving beyond the conventional narratives of the quick demise of the native populations because of forced labor and the spread of Old World diseases, this book shows the complexity of the initial exchange between the Old and New Worlds and examines the myriad ways the indigenous peoples responded to Spanish colonization.
Focusing on Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, the first Caribbean islands to be conquered and colonized by the Spanish, Anderson-Córdova explains Indian sociocultural transformation within the context of two specific processes, out-migration and in-migration, highlighting how population shifts contributed to the diversification of peoples. For example, as the growing presence of “foreign” Indians from other areas of the Caribbean complicated the variety of responses by Indian groups, her investigation reveals that Indians who were subjected to slavery, or the “encomienda system,” accommodated and absorbed many Spanish customs, yet resumed their own rituals when allowed to return to their villages. Other Indians fled in response to the arrival of the Spanish.
The culmination of years of research, Surviving Spanish Conquest deftly incorporates archaeological investigations at contact sites copious use of archival materials, and anthropological assessments of the contact period in the Caribbean. Ultimately, understanding the processes of Indian-Spanish interaction in the Caribbean enhances comprehension of colonization in many other parts of the world. Anderson-Córdova concludes with a discussion regarding the resurgence of interest in the Taíno people and their culture, especially of individuals who self-identify as Taíno. This volume provides a wealth of insight to historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and those interested in early cultures in contact.
The poet Larry Eigner (1927–1996) was a key figure in New American poetry, which grew out of the Black Mountain School and San Francisco Renaissance, and a major influence on the Language poets. Eigner also had cerebral palsy as the result of an accident at birth. It is fortuitous that the poet lived his life in two locations vibrant in both poetics and disability activism. Except for brief periods attending camp and school, he lived with his parents in Swampscott, Massachusetts, until the age of 51. Later, he moved to Berkeley, California, at the height of the disability rights movement. In the 1950s, Eigner attended Camp Jened, which later became famous in the film Crip Camp.
Bartlett’s biography covers every significant phase of Eigner’s life: his childhood and young adulthood when he began typing poems with one finger on the manual typewriter that was a bar mitzvah gift; his first publications and the maturation of his poetic interests through correspondence with poets of the era; and after his move to Berkeley, the ever-expanding circle of friends, poets, caretakers, and collaborators he established there. The result is a deeply insightful account of an utterly distinctive voice whose influence widens and deepens with each new generation that encounters him.
From the late eighteenth century to early 1836, the heart of the Florida sugar industry was concentrated in East Florida, between the St. Johns River and the Atlantic Ocean. Producing the sweetest sugar, molasses, and rum, at least 22 sugar plantations dotted the coastline by the 1830s. This industry brought prosperity to the region—employing farm hands, slaves, architects, stone masons, riverboats and their crews, shop keepers, and merchant traders. But by January 1836, Native American attacks of the Second Seminole War, intending to rid the Florida frontier of settlers, devastated the whole sugar industry.
Although sugar works again sprang up in other Florida regions just prior to the Civil War, the competition from Louisiana and the Caribbean blocked a resurgence of sugar production for the area. The sugar industry would never regain its importance in East Florida—only two of the original sugar works were ever rebuilt. Today, remains of this once thriving industry are visible in a few parks. Some are accessible but others lie hidden, slowly disintegrating and almost forgotten. Archaeological, historical, and architectural research in the last decade has returned these works to their once prominent place in Florida’s history, revealing the beauty, efficiency of design, as well as early industrial engineering. Equally important is what can be learned of the lives of those associated with the sugar works and the early plantation days along the East Florida frontier
Judith Paterson was just nine years old in 1946 when her mother died of a virulent combination of alcoholism and mental illness at the age of 31. Sweet Mystery: A Book of Remembering is Paterson’s harrowing account of the memories of her mother, told with eloquence and understanding. Set largely in Montgomery, Alabama, the story plays out against a backdrop of relatives troubled almost as much by southern conflicts over race and class as by the fallout from a long family history of drinking, denial, and mental illness.
While rich in the details and flavor of small-town life in the South during the 1940s, Sweet Mystery transcends time and regionalism to evoke universal American themes. Ultimately, it confirms the damaging effects of early trauma on children as well as the innate and familial strengths that enable some children to survive, grow up, and heal.
Originally published in 1996 to critical acclaim in the national media, Sweet Mystery was called “a beautifully written, excruciating collision of form and emotion, joy and pain, willpower and self-examination, control and surrender” by the Washington Post. This edition contains a new afterword written by the author as well as a list of suggested readings.
A unique dataset for studying past social interactions comes from Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery that linked sites throughout much of the Eastern Woodlands but that was primarily distributed over the lower Southeast. Although connections have been demonstrated, their significance has remained enigmatic. How and why were apparently utilitarian vessels, or the wooden tools used to make them, distributed widely across the landscape?
This book assesses Woodland Period interactions using technofunctional, mineralogical, and chemical data derived from Swift Creek Complicated Stamped sherds whose provenience is fully documented from both mortuary mounds and village middens along the Atlantic coast. Together, these data demonstrate formal and functional differences between mortuary and village assemblages along with the nearly exclusive occurrence of foreign-made cooking pots in mortuary contexts. The Swift Creek Gift provides insight into the unique workings of gift exchanges to transform seemingly mundane materials like cooking pots into powerful tools of commemoration, affiliation, and ownership.
Maldon is an adjunct literature instructor at a prestigious East Coast university, with a deteriorating heart condition and no insurance. She finds herself caught between the demands of her job and the needs of her body, triggering economic and emotional strains that cause her to fantasize about taking her own life. But Maldon, who has pledged to safeguard her mother ever since their arrival in the US on a refugee ship from postwar Vietnam, has vowed to forgo suicide for as long as her mother is living.
In time, her heart worsens rapidly, and she ventures cross-country to a place called Cloud for the operation that may save her life. In Cloud, Maldon is joined by old friend planet Neptune, who is hermaphroditic, peculiar, and has agreed to accompany Maldon through the operation.
Swimming with Dead Stars is a hallucinatory meditation on the stars and planets, the precariousness of our existence, the cruel inequities of labor and healthcare, chickens and ice cream, and the grace that comes from enduring the physical and psychic pain wrought by pernicious social forces that enslave us all.
Syncopations is an analysis of the sustaining vitality behind contemporary American poetry from 1975 to the present day by one of the most astute observers and critics in the field. The 12 essays reflect Jed Rasula’s nearly 30 years of advocacy on behalf of “opening the field” of American poetry.
From the Beats and the Black Mountain poets in the 1950s and 1960s to the impact of language poetry, the specter of an avant-garde has haunted the administrative centers of poetic conservatism. But the very concept of avant-garde is misleading, implying organized assault. Incentives for change can be traced to other factors, including the increased participation of women, critical theory’s self-reflection, and a growing interest in the book as a unit of composition. Syncopations addresses these and other issues evident in the work of such poets and critics as Clayton Eshleman, Marjorie Perloff, Ronald Johnson, Clark Coolidge, Nathaniel Mackey, and Robin Blaser. Its chapters range in modes and include close readings, sociological analysis, philosophical-aesthetic meditations, and career appraisals.
By examining both exemplary innovators and the social context in which innovation is either resisted, acclaimed, or taken for granted, Rasula delivers an important conceptual chronicle of the promise of American poetry.
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