BiblioVault - Books about Story

Of Mules and Mud

The Story of Alabama Folk Potter Jerry Brown

Jerry Brown, edited and with an introduction by Joey Brackner

University of Alabama Press, 2022

The life and times of Alabama folk potter Jerry Brown, as told in his own words

Born in 1942, Jerry Brown helped out in his father’s pottery shop as a young boy. There he learned the methods and techniques for making pottery in a family tradition dating back to the 1830s. His responsibilities included tending the mule that drove the mill that was used to mix clay (called “mud” by traditional potters). Business suffered as demand for stoneware churns, jugs, and chamber pots waned in the postwar years, and manufacture ceased following the deaths of Brown’s father and brother in the mid-1960s. Brown turned to logging for his livelihood, his skill with mules proving useful in working difficult and otherwise inaccessible terrain. In the early 1980s, he returned to the family trade and opened a new shop that relied on the same methods of production with which he had grown up, including a mule-powered mill for mixing clay and the use of a wood-fired rather than gas-fueled kiln.

Folklorist Joey Brackner met Brown in 1983, and the two quickly became close friends who collaborated together on a variety of documentary and educational projects in succeeding years—efforts that led to greater exposure, commercial success, and Brown’s recognition as a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts. For years, Brown spoke of the urge to write his life story, but he never set pen to paper. In 2015, Brackner took the initiative and interviewed Brown, recording his life story over the course of a weekend at Brown’s home. Of Mules and Mud is the result of that marathon interview session, conducted one year before Brown passed away.

Brackner has captured Jerry Brown’s life in his own words as recounted that weekend, lightly edited and elaborated. Of Mules and Mud is illustrated with photos from all phases of Brown’s life, including a color gallery of 28 photos of vessel forms made by Brown throughout his career that collectors of folk pottery will find invaluable.

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Of Whales and Dinosaurs

The Story of Singapore's Natural History Museum

Kevin Y. L. Tan

National University of Singapore Press, 2015

Singapore's collection of Southeast Asian animals–one of the world's largest–dates back to the old Raffles Museum, officially established in 1878.With the opening of the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum in 2015, the original Raffles Museum has "reincarnated" and the loop on its remarkable 127-year history has closed. Beneath the sleek exterior of today's modern museum building lies a saga of titanic struggles and changes. That the collections survived at all–through the multiple challenges of the nineteenth century, the disruption of World War Two, and its potential disintegration in the face of Singapore's modernization–is nothing short of miraculous. This book is not only an institutional history of the museum but also tells the story of frustrations, commitment and courage of the numerous individuals who battled officialdom, innovated endlessly and overcame the odds to protect Singapore's natural history heritage. The book features 108 historical photographs and natural history illustrations printed in full colour throughout.

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Old Orchard Farm

The Story of an Iowa Boyhood

Hugh Orchard

University of Iowa Press, 2010

“I have often wondered what city boys find to do for fun. All cluttered up with houses and laid out in streets with no horses or mules or dogs . . . it must be pretty dull.” That sums up Hugh Orchard’s philosophy—and makes Old Orchard Farm a delightful reading experience.

Return to an Iowa farm of the 1880s, seen through the impressionable eyes of a lively young boy. There in Des Moines County, not far from Burlington, Hugh Orchard grew up when the farm was the center of life in rural America. A broken binder was a major crisis. A violent prairie storm was a terrifying experience. A trip to the county seat town was a thrilling adventure.

There were peculiar neighbors, traveling peddlers, an excursion to the mill to grind wheat for bread, hunting expeditions for the prairie chicken and wild geese. Progressive farming in those bygone days meant that Hugh’s father had the first windmill, the first top buggy, and the first barbed wire fence. There was also the pricey purebred cow who refused to allow anyone to milk her. From these homely, everyday events, Orchard crafts engaging tales of long-ago days—when both America and agriculture were simple, innocent, and untroubled by the complexities of modern life.

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On Good Ground

The Story of the Sisters of Saint Joseph in St. Paul

Sister Helen Angela Hurley

University of Minnesota Press, 1951

On Good Ground was first published in 1951. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Besides providing a vivid yet scholarly account of a religious order, this book reflects much of the regional history of the area where the nuns have done their work. The order maintains the College of St. Catherine and numerous other institutions in Minnesota and North Dakota.

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Oral Patterns of Performance

Story and Song

Barre Toelken

Utah State University Press, 2003

To many Native American cultures, songs and stories are dramatic enactments of reality, and words bring reality into existence. In this chapter from his award-winning book, The Anguish of Snails, Toelken thoughtfully approaches a number of stories from Native American traditions, discussing how narratives can be touchstones of shared values among closely associated traditional people and how songs and stories go far beyond an evening's entertainment or "lessons” about life. A traditional narrative can be a culturally structured way of thinking and of experiencing the patterns that make culture real.

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Orphan Trains

The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed

Stephen O'Connor

University of Chicago Press, 2004

In mid-nineteenth-century New York, vagrant youth, both orphans and runaways, filled the streets. For years the city had been sweeping these children into prisons or almshouses, but in 1853 the young minister Charles Loring Brace proposed a radical solution to the problem by creating the Children's Aid Society, an organization that fought to provide homeless children with shelter, education, and, for many, a new family in the country. Combining a biography of Brace with firsthand accounts of orphans, Stephen O'Connor here tells of the orphan trains that, between 1854 and 1929, spirited away some 250,000 destitute children to rural homes in every one of the forty-eight contiguous states.

A powerful blend of history, biography, and adventure, Orphans Trains remains the definitive work on this little-known episode in American history.

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Our Own Image

A Story of a Maori Filmmaker

Barry Barclay

University of Minnesota Press, 2015

Acclaimed Maori filmmaker Barry Barclay’s Our Own Image relates the experiences of making his documentaries and his critically acclaimed feature-length film Ngati (1987), widely credited as the first fiction feature by a member of an indigenous community. Barclay details his views on the process of filmmaking within his own Maori community and discusses how his work differed from popular cinema, advocating for indigenous control, participation, and perspectives in media.

Our Own Image gives an in-depth depiction of the changes Barclay’s approach contributed to the field of documentaries, as well as displaying the respect for community Barclay brought to his filming technique. His insistence on letting people speak for themselves demonstrated authenticity to audiences, creating awareness of indigenous cinema in New Zealand and worldwide.

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