Businessman, politician, broadcasting personality, and newspaper publisher, Cas Walker (1902–1998) was, by his own estimation, a “living legend” in Knoxville for much of the twentieth century. Renowned for his gravelly voice and country-boy persona, he rose from blue-collar beginnings to make a fortune as a grocer whose chain of supermarkets extended from East Tennessee into Virginia and Kentucky. To promote his stores, he hosted a local variety show, first on radio and then TV, that advanced the careers of many famed country music artists from a young Dolly Parton to Roy Acuff, Chet Atkins, and Bill Monroe. As a member of the Knoxville city council, he championed the “little man” while ceaselessly irritating the people he called the “silk-stocking crowd.” 

This wonderfully entertaining book brings together selections from interviews with a score of Knoxvillians, various newspaper accounts, Walker’s own autobiography, and other sources to present a colorful mosaic of Walker’s life. The stories range from his flamboyant advertising schemes—as when he buried a man alive outside one of his stores—to memories of his inimitable managerial style—as when he infamously canned the Everly Brothers because he didn’t like it when they began performing rock ’n’ roll. Further recollections call to mind Walker’s peculiar brand of bare-knuckle politics, his generosity to people in need, his stance on civil rights, and his lifelong love of coon hunting (and coon dogs). The book also traces his decline, hastened in part by a successful libel suit brought against his muckraking weekly newspaper, the Watchdog. 

It’s said that any Knoxvillian born before 1980 has a Cas Walker story. In relating many of those stories in the voices of those who still remember him, this book not only offers an engaging portrait of the man himself and his checkered legacy, but also opens a new window into the history and culture of the city in which he lived and thrived. 

Featuring a variety of disciplinary perspectives and analytical approaches, Celluloid Chains is the most comprehensive volume to date on films about slavery. This collection examines works from not only the United States but elsewhere in the Americas, and it attests to slavery’s continuing importance as a source of immense fascination for filmmakers and their audiences.

Each of the book’s fifteen original essays focuses on a particular film that directly treats the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in the New World. Beginning with an essay on the Cuban film El otro Francisco (1975), Sergio Giral’s reworking of a nineteenth-century abolitionist novel, the book proceeds to examine such works as the landmark miniseries Roots (1977), which sparked intense controversy over its authenticity; Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde (1987), which raises questions about what constitutes a slavery film; Guy Deslauriers’s Passage du milieu (1999), a documentary-style reconstruction of what Africans experienced during the Middle Passage; and Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013), which embodies the tensions between faithfully adapting a nineteenth-century slave narrative and bending it for modern purposes.

Films about slavery have shown a special power to portray the worst and best of humanity, and Celluloid Chains is an essential guide to this important genre.

The “southern” – as much a Hollywood genre as the “western” – is the subject of The Celluloid South. For decades the film industry, to provide profit-making entertainment, offered the public movies that neither raised difficult issues nor offended a majority of the ticket-buyers. As a result, Hollywood romanticized the south, particularly the antebellum era, in hundreds of films like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gone With the Wind, Birth of a Nation, and Jezebel. During the 1920’s and especially the Depression, the “moonlight and magnolia” romances increased to such an extent that Hollywood has been struggling since the late forties to rid films of the traditional images of the “southern.”

In his exploration of the “southern,” Edward D.C. Campbell, Jr. examines the film plots and images – their social, literary, and historical origins, and their impact on the creation of a popular mythology of the south. The unrealistic but seemingly harmless characterizations of a planter society, and agricultural economy, and especially slavery have hindered the region’s self-assessment and warped the nation’s perspective on race.

Campbell looks beyond the productions themselves, however, to advertising techniques and the reactions of the viewers and reviewers in his examination of the “southern,” its popularity and its decline, and its influence of the public’s conception of history, contemporary conditions, and black/white relations.

The Celluloid South is not a study of film per se, but of film as a reflection of society and the ramifications inherent in popular entertainment. Readers interested in southern history, popular culture, or cinema studies, as well as movie fans, will find The Celluloid South a fascinating look at Hollywood’s development of the southern myth. Thirty-one film stills illustrate the text.

Toward the end of the American Civil War, the Confederacy faced manpower shortages, and the Confederate Army, following practices the Union had already adopted, began to recruit soldiers from their prison ranks. They targeted foreign-born soldiers whom they thought might not have strong allegiances to the North. Key battalions included the Brooks Battalion, a unit composed entirely of Union soldiers who wished to join the Confederacy and were not formally recruited; Tucker’s Regiment and the 8th Battalion Confederate Infantry recruited mainly among Irish, German, and French immigrants.

Though the scholarship on the Civil War is vast, Changing Sides represents the first entry to investigate Union POWs who fought for the Confederacy, filling a significant gap in the historiography of Civil War incarceration. To provide context, Patrick Garrow traces the history of the practice of recruiting troops from enemy POWs, noting the influence of the mostly immigrant San Patricios in the Mexican-American War. The author goes on to describe Confederate prisons, where conditions often provided ample incentive to change sides. Garrow’s original archival research in an array of archival records, along with his archaeological excavation of the Confederate guard camp at Florence, South Carolina, in 2006, provide a wealth of data on the lives of these POWs, not only as they experienced imprisonment and being “galvanized” to the other side, but also what happened to them after the war was over.

After a century of archaeological research in the Southeastern United States, there are still areas about which little is known. Surprisingly, one of these areas in the Appalachian Summit, which in historic times was inhabited by the Cherokee people whose rich culture and wide influence made their name commonplace in typifying Southeastern Indians. The culture of the people who preceded the historic Cherokees was no less rich, and their network of relationships with other groups no less wide. Until recently, however, the prehistoric cultural remains of the Southern Appalachians had received only slight attention.

Archaeological sites in the Appalachians usually do not stand out dramatically on the landscape as do the effigy mounds of the Ohio Valley and the massive platform mounds of the Southeastern Piedmont and Mississippi Valley. Prehistoric settlements in the Southern Appalachians lay in the bottomlands along the clear, rocky rivers, hidden in the folds of the mountains. Finding and investigating these sites required a systematic approach. From 1964 to 1971, under the direction of Joffre L. Coe, the Research Laboratories of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, conducted an archaeological project that was designed to investigate the antecedents of the historic Cherokees in the Appalachian Summit, and included site surveys over large portions of the area and concentrated excavations at several important sites in the vicinity of the historic Cherokee Middletowns.

One result of the Cherokee project is this book, the purpose of which is to present an initial description and synthesis of a late prehistoric phase in the Appalachian Summit, a phase that lasted from the beginnings of South Appalachian Mississippian culture to the emergence of identifiable Cherokee culture. At various points Professor Dickens draws these data into the broader picture of Southeastern prehistory, and occasionally presents some interpretations of the human behavior behind the material remains, however, is to make available some new information on a previously unexplored area. Through this presentation Cherokee Prehistory helps to provide a first step to approaching, in specific ways, the problems of cultural process and systemics in the aboriginal Southeast.

Born near Guntersville, Alabama, Catherine (Cassie) Fennell was nineteen when the Civil War began. Starting with her time at a female academy in Washington, DC, the diaries continue through the war’s end and discuss civilian experiences in Alabama and the Tennessee Valley. Fennell believed that by keeping a diary she made a small contribution to the war effort and history itself.

Fennell was fairly well off and highly educated, moving easily in very elite social circles. Most of her relatives were staunch Confederates, and the war took its toll, with multiple members of her family killed or captured. As Fennell recounts the consequences of war—the downward spiral of the family fortune, the withering of hope at news from the battlefront, and the general uncertainty of civilian life in the South—her diaries constitute one of the few contemporaneous records of north Alabama, including the shelling and burning of Guntersville, which has been poorly documented in the historiography of the Civil War. While the first diary is written as a private reflection, the war journals are well researched and rely on extensive familiarity with local newspapers and seem like they are intended for the eyes of later generations.

Ultimately, these diaries amount to a social history of the war years, in a specific region where scholars have recovered relatively few firsthand accounts, and editor Whitney Snow’s compilation adds to the now growing genre of women’s Civil War diaries. Insightful and engrossing, The Civil War Diaries of Cassie Fennell is a compelling portrait of a privileged young woman who suffered devastating losses for her ardent support of a Confederate nation.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Sarah Kennedy watched as her husband, D.N., left for Mississippi, leaving her alone to care for their six children and control their slaves in a large home in downtown Clarksville, Tennessee. D. N. Kennedy left to aid the Confederate Treasury Department. He had steadfastly supported secession and helped recruit local boys for the Confederate army. The Civil War Letters of Sarah Kennedy: Life under Occupation in the Upper South showcases the letters Sarah wrote to her husband during their time apart, offering readers an inside look at life on the home front during the Civil War through the eyes of a slave-owning, town-dwelling wife and mother.

Featuring fifty-two of Sarah Kennedy’s letters to her husband from August 16, 1862, to February 20, 1865, this important collection chronicles Sarah Kennedy’s personal struggles during the Civil War years, from periods of illness to lack of consistent contact with her husband and everything in between. Her love and devotion to her family is apparent in each letter, contrasting deeply with her resentment and harsh treatment toward her enslaved people as Emancipation swept through Clarksville. A useful volume to Civil War historians and women’s history scholars alike, The Civil War Letters of Sarah Kennedy pulls back the curtain on upper-middle-class family life and social relations in a mid-sized Middle Tennessee town during the Civil War and reveals the slow demise of slavery during the Union occupation.

Fourteen-year-old George Maguire was eager to serve the Union when his home state, Maryland, began raising regiments for the coming conflict. Too young to join, he became a “mascot” for the Fifth Maryland Infantry Regiment, organized in September 1861. Although he never formally enlisted or carried a weapon, Maguire recounts several pivotal events in the war, including the sea battle of the Monitor vs. Merrimac, Peninsula Campaign action, and the Battle of Antietam.

During middle age, Maguire recorded his memoir—one of the few from a Maryland unit—providing a distinctive blend of the adventures of a teenage boy with the mature reflection of a man. His account of the Peninsula Campaign captures the success of the mobilization of forces and confirms the existing historical record, as well as illuminating the social structure of camp life. Maguire’s duties evolved over time, as he worked alongside army surgeons and assisted his brother-in-law (a “rabid abolitionist” and provost marshal of the regiment). This experience qualified him to work at the newly constructed Thomas Hicks United States General Hospital once he left the regiment in 1863; his memoir describes the staffing hierarchy and the operating procedures implemented by the Army Medical Corps at the end of the war, illuminated with the author’s own sketches of the facility.

From the Pratt Street riot in Baltimore to a chance encounter with Red Cross founder Clara Barton to a firsthand view of Hicks Hospital, this sweeping yet brief memoir provides a unique opportunity to examine the experiences of a child during the war and to explore the nuances of memory. Beyond simply retelling the events as they happened, Maguire’s memoir is woven with a sense of remorse and resolve, loss and fear, and the pure wonderment of a teenage boy accompanying one of the largest assembled armies of its day.

Cedrick May’s The Collected Works of Jupiter Hammon offers a complete look at the literary achievements of one of the founders of African American literature. Born into slavery on the Lloyd plantation in 1711, Jupiter Hammon became the first African American writer to be published in the present-day United States at the age of forty-nine. It has been decades since a collection of Hammon’s work has appeared, and May’s intensive research has yielded two additional poems, adding new layers to his works and life that, until now, have gone unexplored.

The most comprehensive volume on Hammon’s works to date, The Collected Works of Jupiter Hammon carefully reconstructs the historical, political, social, and religious contexts that shaped his essays and poems throughout the late eighteenth century. This attentive reconstruction, which takes full account of Hammon’s prose works as well as his more well-known poetry, gives readers a radical re-reading of Hammon as a much more complex and intellectually curious commentator on his historical and political period, while providing ample evidence of his literary importance and artistic integrity. Cedrick May’s fresh presentation and insightful reevaluation of Hammon’s life and writings will change the way Hammon is studied and appreciated among literary scholars and readers alike. This edition will become the definitive one for many years to come.

Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula juts into Lake Superior, pointing from the western Upper Peninsula toward Canada. Native peoples mined copper there for at least five thousand years, but the industrial heyday of the “Copper Country” began in the late nineteenth century, as immigrants from Cornwall, Italy, Finland, and elsewhere came to work in mines largely run from faraway cities such as New York and Boston. In those cities, suburbs had developed to allow wealthier classes to escape the dirt and grime of the industrial center. In the Copper Country, however, the suburbs sprang up nearly adjacent to mines, mills, and coal docks.

Sarah Fayen Scarlett contrasts two types of neighborhoods that transformed Michigan’s mining frontier between 1875 and 1920: paternalistic company towns built for the workers and elite suburbs created by the region’s network of business leaders. Richly illustrated with drawings, maps, and photographs, Company Suburbs details the development of these understudied cultural landscapes that arose when elites began to build housing that was architecturally distinct from that of the multiethnic workers within the old company towns. They followed national trends and created social hierarchies in the process, but also, uniquely, incorporated pre-existing mining features and adapted company housing practices. This idiosyncratic form of suburbanization belies the assumption that suburbs and industry were independent developments.

Built environments evince interrelationships among landscapes, people, and power. Scarlett’s work offers new perspectives on emerging national attitudes linking domestic architecture with class and gender identity. Company Suburbs complements scholarship on both industrial communities and early suburban growth, increasing our understanding of the ways hierarchies associated with industrial capitalism have been built into the shared environments of urban areas as well as seemingly peripheral American towns.

Beginning with a comparison of the American acoustic guitar world in the early 1960s with that of today, then describing iconic performances at storied venues such as The Ark in Ann Arbor while meticulously researching the instrument’s top makers, Smith assembles a passion-filled and eye-opening history of that “cool wooden box” from the folk era through the pandemic. The author focuses on both the playing and making of the acoustic guitar, concluding that the instrument has been transformed in both aspects during the last sixty years. On the playing side, Smith examines the influences on, and the impact of, such guitarists as David Bromberg, Elizabeth Cotten, Paul Geremia, and Norman Blake. On the making side, the author takes the reader into the tradition-minded yet dynamic world of lutherie. He traces how the oldest, most revered companies whose reputations are based on legendary breakthroughs in lutherie, Gibson and Martin, have adapted as the new lutherie movement of innovative small-scale producers, exemplified by interviewees such as Michael Gurian, Bill Collings, Richard Hoover, and Dana Bourgeois, arose. Starting small and then growing exponentially, Taylor Guitars is a wholly different “player” in acoustic guitar building, and Smith compellingly tells its story. Finally, Cool Wooden Box considers the effects of globalization on the industry.

Clocking thousands of miles and hours of interviews with guitar makers, suppliers, and sellers, W. Rand Smith has created not only a detailed history of the acoustic guitar, but also a lasting tribute to an instrument he so clearly reveres.

Born in early 1812 in Crawfordville, Georgia, Alexander Stephens grew up in an antebellum South that would one day inform the themes of his famous Cornerstone Speech. While Stephens made many speeches throughout his lifetime, the Cornerstone Speech is the discourse for which he is best remembered. Stephens delivered it on March 21, 1861—one month after his appointment as vice president of the Confederacy—asserting that slavery and white supremacy comprised the cornerstone of the Confederate States of America. Within a few short weeks, more than two hundred newspapers worldwide had reprinted Stephens’s words.

Following the war and the defeat of the Confederacy, Stephens claimed that his assertions in the Cornerstone Speech had been misrepresented, his meaning misunderstood, as he sought to breathe new and different life into an oration that may have otherwise been forgotten. His intentionally ambiguous rhetoric throughout the postwar years obscured his true antebellum position on slavery and its centrality to the Confederate Nation and lent itself to early constructions of Lost Cause mythology.

In Cornerstone of the Confederacy, Keith Hébert examines how Alexander Stephens originally constructed, and then reinterpreted, his well-known Cornerstone Speech. Hébert illustrates the complexity of Stephens’s legacy across eight chronological chapters, meticulously tracing how this speech, still widely cited in the age of Black Lives Matter, reverberated in the nation’s consciousness during Reconstruction, through the early twentieth century, and in debates about commemoration of the Civil War that live on in the headlines today.

Audiences both inside and outside of academia will quickly discover that the book’s implications span far beyond the memorialization of Confederate symbols, grappling with the animating ideas of the past and discovering how these ideas continue to inform the present.

Emory Upton (1839–1881) was thrust into the Civil War immediately upon graduation from the United States Military Academy at West Point in May of 1861. He was wounded three times during the war.   He participated in nearly every major battle in the Eastern Theater including Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and Spotsylvania, where he led a prominent attack on entrenched Confederate positions—a signal of Upton’s brilliance as an officer and of his military creativity that foreshadowed his later work in revising the Army’s tactics. Upton was mustered out of service in 1866 and later named commandant of cadets at West Point, a position that carved a path for Upton to focus more on Army tactics and reforms.

Until now, the only lenses through which scholars could study Upton were two biographies published nearly a century apart but practically identical in scope and treatment. The two-volume Correspondence of Major General Emory Upton follows Upton through his enrollment at West Point to his extensive Army activities following the Civil War and contains the bulk of his wartime correspondence. Volume one, with Upton’s Civil War correspondence encompasses both larger battle details and day-to-day activities in the life of a soldier. His letters reveal a mercurial individual: a humorous person used to suffering and rejoicing, who could be flawed and brilliant, vain and humble.

These selected letters and reports, expertly annotated and gathered from repositories across the country, present a more complex, human Emory Upton. He is both the “clean, pure, and spotless” individual of biographies and the ambitious, yet flawed Army officer obsessed with his career. These volumes explore his trials and frustrations as well as his triumphs.

Salvatore G. Cilella Jr., now retired, was president of the Atlanta Historical Society. He is the author of Upton’s Regulars: The 121st New York Infantry in the American Civil War and Fund Raising for Small Museums in Good Times and Bad.

Emory Upton (1839–1881) was thrust into the Civil War immediately upon graduation from the United States Military Academy at West Point in May of 1861. He was wounded three times during the war.   He participated in nearly ever major battle in the Eastern Theater including Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and Spotsylvania, where he led a prominent attack on entrenched Confederate positions—a signal of Upton’s brilliance as an officer and of his military creativity that foreshadowed his later work in revising the Army’s tactics. Upton was mustered out of service in 1866 and later named commandant of cadets at West Point, a position that carved a path for Upton to focus more on Army tactics and reforms.

Until now, the only lenses through which scholars could study Upton were two biographies published nearly a century apart but practically identical in scope and treatment of Upton. The two-volume Correspondence of Major General Emory Upton follows Upton through his enrollment at West Point to his extensive Army activities following the Civil War and contains the bulk of Emory Upton’s wartime correspondence.  Volume two collects Upton’s foreign correspondence and observations on military tactics and Army reform. At the behest of U.S. Army Commanding General William T. Sherman, Upton was sent on a tour to study the armies of Asia and Europe, and more specifically the German army after conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War. This tour resulted in the publication of his monumental The Armies of Europe and Asia, which warned that the U.S. Army was woefully below the standards of European nations, and between Upton’s death in 1881 and the turn of the twentieth century, military policy was fiercely debated in both the military and popular press. Upton’s ideas on reform were often central to the arguments, and his letters and writings provoked a wide range of discussion over military and, inevitably, civilian issues.

These selected letters and reports, expertly annotated and gathered from repositories across the country, present a more complex, human Emory Upton. He is both the “clean, pure, and spotless” individual of Michie’s biographies and the ambitious, yet flawed Army officer obsessed with his career. These volumes explore his trials and frustrations as well as his triumphs.

Salvatore G. Cilella, now retired, was president of the Atlanta Historical Society. He is the author of Upton’s Regulars: The 121st New York Infantry in the American Civil War and Fund Raising for Small Museums in Good Times and Bad.