front cover of From Albert Salomon
From Albert Salomon
Essays on Social Thinkers
Robert Jackall
University of Tennessee Press, 2019
Albert Salomon (1891-1966) was an eminent German-Jewish sociologist. He studiedart history, religious history, and philosophy at Humboldt University in Berlin;philosophy at the University of Freiburg; and sociology at the University of Heidelberg. At Heidelberg, he studied under Max Weber, Georg Lukács, and Karl Mannheim. His fellow students included, among other great social thinkers, Hannah Arendt and Hans Speier. After obtaining his doctorate in sociology under Mannheim, he taught at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, but lost his job there when the Nazis came to power in January 1933. He received an offer from Alvin Johnson to teach at the University in Exile at the New School for Social Research and, with his family, migrated to New York City in early 1935.Over the years, Salomon taught many courses in the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at the New School, including seminars on Weber, Durkheim, the history of social thought, and Balzac as a sociologist. His students revered him for his breadth and depth of learning and his exacting standards. Later scholars, including the editors of From Albert Salomon: Essays on Social Thinkers, regard him as one of the most important interpreters of Western thought and as an exemplar of the great Jewish intellectual tradition.
[more]

front cover of From Joseph Bensman
From Joseph Bensman
Essays on Modern Society
Robert Jackall
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
Joseph Bensman (1922-1986), a renowned analyst of modern institutions, professions, and culture, was Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and at City College of New York. From Joseph Bensman: Essays on Modern Society brings together some of his finest work, often done in collaboration with colleagues such as Arthur J. Vidich, Robert Lilienfeld, Bernard Rosenberg, and Israel Gerver.

In the introduction to this volume, editors Robert Jackall and Duffy Graham identify Bensman’s trademark habits of mind: an analytical stance, fundamentally objective and dispassionate; a vigilant awareness of the reach and vitality of bureaucracy; an ability to discern intellectual problems in superficially unremarkable phenomena; attention to empirical detail and suspicion of theoretical abstractions; and appreciation of irony and unintended consequences.

Robert Jackall is Willmott Family Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Williams College. He is the author of Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers
and Street Stories: The World of Police Detectives, among other books. Duffy Graham is the author of The Consciousness of the Litigator.
[more]

front cover of The Spiritual Churches Of New Orleans
The Spiritual Churches Of New Orleans
Origins, Beliefs, And Rituals Of An African American
Claude F. Jacobs
University of Tennessee Press, 2001
The New Orleans Spiritual churches constitute a distinctive African-American belief system.  Influenced by Catholicism, Pentecostalism, Spiritualism, and Voodoo, the group is a New World syncretic faith, similar to Espiritismo, Santería, and Umbanda. The Spiritual Churches of New Orleans combines a historical account of the emergence of this religion with careful ethnographic description of current congregations.  At the same time, text and photographs eloquently convey the ecstasy at the heart of the Spiritual experience.

The Spiritual churches began in the 1920s as a women's movement.  Men later assumed leadership in an effort to legitimate the group within the New Orleans religious community and form associations with Spiritual churches elsewhere in the United States.

Unlike earlier researchers, who treated practices in the churches as expressions of black folk traditions, the authors see Spiritual ritual not as based on magic, but as the way the sacred is acted out within an African-American aesthetic.  During worship, members may be filled by the Holy Spirit, as in Pentecostal churches, or "entertain" spirits or spirit guides, as in Spiritualism or Voodoo.  Prophecy and healing are presented as the markers of this faith, and the Native American figure Black Hawk as a major symbol of empowerment.

Based on extensive interviews with church members, years of participant observation, and careful research in documentary sources, this book achieves rigorous conceptual clarity in a straightforward, engaging style.

The Authors: Claude F. Jacobs holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Tulane University.  He teaches at Oakland University.

Andrew J. Kaslow holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University.  He is a consultant to international organizations.
[more]

front cover of The Garage
The Garage
Automobility and Building Innovation in America's Early Auto Age
John A. Jakle
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
The garage—whether used for automobile storage, parking, repair, or sales—has been an American commonplace for so long that it is surprising how little attention it has drawn from scholars tracing the country’s architectural and cultural heritage. In this compellingly written and profusely illustrated book, John Jakle and Keith Sculle—two of the nation’s foremost experts on “Roadside America”—bring their analytical acumen and meticulous research skills to bear on the remarkably rich history of this overlooked feature of the U.S. landscape.
            Beginning with the days when only the wealthy could afford cars (and their chauffeurs doubled as mechanics), the authors show how blacksmiths and carriage repairmen quickly adapted to the increasing ubiquity of the automobile. Noting differences from region to region as well as between large cities and smaller population centers, they look at the growth of car dealerships, with their separation of service and sales floors, and the parallel rise of small, independent repair shops—businesses that have steadily disappeared from the national scene, though some of the buildings that once housed them have survived, refitted for other purposes. The domestic garage—first conceived as a detached structure, then integrated with the house itself—gets its own chapter. And throughout, the authors explore the various ways in which concerns with practicality, commerce, and aesthetics have dictated how garages were laid out and constructed and what services they offered.
            A worthy complement to the authors’ earlier collaborative studies of the gas station and the parking lot, The Garage will engage an eclectic audience of architectural and material-culture specialists, historic preservationists, antique car enthusiasts, local historians, and others fascinated by the impact of the automobile on early America and its legacy in the built environment of modern communities.
[more]

front cover of Remembering Roadside America
Remembering Roadside America
Preserving the Recent Past as Landscape and Place
John A. Jakle
University of Tennessee Press, 2011

The use of cars and trucks over the past century has remade American geography—pushing big cities ever outward toward suburbanization, spurring the growth of some small towns while hastening the decline of others, and spawning a new kind of commercial landscape marked by gas stations, drive-in restaurants, motels, tourist attractions, and countless other retail entities that express our national love affair with the open road. By its very nature, this landscape is ever changing, indeed ephemeral. What is new quickly becomes old and is soon forgotten.
            In this absorbing book, John Jakle and Keith Sculle ponder how “Roadside America” might be remembered, especially since so little physical evidence of its earliest years survives. In straightforward and lively prose, supplemented by copious illustrations—historic and modern photographs, advertising postcards, cartoons, roadmaps—they survey the ways in which automobility has transformed life in the United States. Asking how we might best commemorate and preserve this part of our past—which has been so vital economically and politically, so significant to the cultural aspirations of ordinary Americans, yet so often ignored by scholars who dismiss it as kitsch—they propose the development of an actual outdoor museum that would treat seriously the themes of our roadside history.
            Certainly, museums have been created for frontier pioneering, the rise of commercial agriculture, and the coming of water- and steam-powered industrialization and transportation, especially the railroad. Is now not the time, the authors ask, for a museum forcefully exploring the automobile’s emergence and the changes it has brought to place and landscape? Such a museum need not deny the nostalgic appeal of roadsides past, but if done properly, it could also tell us much about what the authors describe as “the most important kind of place yet devised in the American experience.”
 

John A. Jakle is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Keith A. Sculle is the former head of research and education at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. They have coauthored such books as America’s Main Street Hotels: Transiency and Community in the Early Automobile Age; Motoring: The Highway Experience in America; Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age; and The Gas Station in America.

[more]

front cover of At Home and Abroad
At Home and Abroad
Historicizing Twentieth-Century Whiteness in Literature and Performance
La Vinia Delois Jennings
University of Tennessee Press, 2009
Featuring new critical essays by scholars from Europe, South America, and the United States, At Home and Abroad presents a wide-ranging look at how whiteness-defined in terms of race or ethnicity-forms a category toward which people strive in order to gain power and privilege. Collectively these pieces treat global spaces whose nation building and identity formation have turned on biological and genealogical exigencies to whiten themselves.

Drawing upon racialized, national practices implemented prior to and during the twentieth century, each of the essays enlists literature or performance to reflect the sociopolitical imperatives that secured whiteness in the respective locations they study. They range from examinations of whiteness in the literature of Appalachia and contemporary Argentinean poetry to an analysis of performances memorializing the colonial experience in Italy and an exploration into the white rap music of Eminem and contemporary multiracial passing.

As the contributors show, literary and performance representations have the power to chronicle histories that reflect the behaviors and lived realities of our selves. Whether whiteness, in addition to its physical manifestation, presents itself as identity, symbol, racism, culture, social formation, political imposition, legal imposition, or pathology, it has been outed into the visible, even in national spaces where the term “whiteness” has yet to be translated and entered into the official lexicon.

The ten essays collected here provide powerful insights into where and how the race for biological and genealogical whiteness persists in various geopolitical realms and the ways in which Nordic whites, as well as ethnic whites and nonwhites, resecure its ascendance.

La Vinia Delois Jennings is professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her recent critical study Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa won the 2008 Toni Morrison Society Prize for Best Single-Authored Book on the Nobel laureate and Pulitzer-Prize winning author.
[more]

front cover of New Worlds of Violence
New Worlds of Violence
Cultures and Conquests in the Early American Southeast
Matthew Jennings
University of Tennessee Press, 2011

From the early 1500s to the mid-1700s, the American Southeast was the scene of continuous
tumult as European powers vied for dominance in the region while waging war on Native American communities. Yet even before Hernando de Soto landed his expeditionary
force on the Gulf shores of Florida, Native Americans had created their own “cultures of violence”: sets of ideas about when it was appropriate to use violence and what sorts of violence were appropriate to a given situation.

In New Worlds of Violence, Matthew Jennings offers a persuasive new framework for understanding the European–Native American contact period and the conflicts among indigenous peoples that preceded it. This pioneering approach posits that every group present in the Southeast had its own ideas about the use of violence and that these ideas changed over time as they collided with one another. The book starts with the Mississippian era and continues through the successive Spanish and English invasions of the Native South. Jennings argues that the English conquered the Southeast because they were able to force everyone else to adapt to their culture of violence, which, of course, changed over time as well. By 1740, a peculiarly Anglo-American culture of violence was in place that would profoundly influence the expansion of England’s colonies and the eventual southern United States. While Native and African violence were present in this world, they moved in circles defined by the English.

New Worlds of Violence concludes by pointing out that long-lasting violence bears long-lasting consequences. An important contribution to the growing body of work on the early Southeast, this book will significantly broaden readers’ understanding of America’s violent past.

Matthew Jennings is an assistant professor of history at Macon State College in Macon, Georgia. He is the author of “Violence in a Shattered World” in Mapping the Shatter Zone: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, edited by Robbie Ethridge and Sheri Shuck-Hall. His work has also appeared in The Uniting States, The South Carolina Encyclopedia, A Multicultural History of the United States, and The Encyclopedia of Native American History.

[more]

front cover of On Duty in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War
On Duty in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War
Correspondence and Reminiscences of the First Oregon Cavalry Regiment
James Robbins Jewell
University of Tennessee Press, 2018
From 1862 to 1865, twenty-six hundred miles away from the seat of the federal government in Washington, DC, the First Oregon Volunteer Cavalry Regiment offered aid to the Union cause in the American Civil War. The First Oregon Cavalry confronted a host of complex challenges unseen by their counterparts serving in a more traditional role in the East. Their battles were more often with Native Americans—and often more concerned with their own status in the territory than with the Civil War rending the nation—while searching for pro Confederate spies and sympathizers. However unsung during the war, the regiment carried out their responsibilities successfully, managing to expedite the development of the Pacific Northwest in the process. 

On Duty in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War introduces readers to the first regiment from the Pacific Northwest to serve the Union cause. James Robbins Jewell offers a glimpse into the lives of these soldiers, presenting their wartime letters to various northwesterners to share their experiences with loved ones at home. 

Complete with a series of reminiscences and excerpts from memoirs by First Oregon Cavalry officers and soldiers, On Duty in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War is the first collection of primary source materials from soldiers serving in this Far Western territory. Jewell’s first-rate collection enables readers to step directly into the Pacific Northwest of the early 1860s and experience the Civil War from a different perspective. 
 
[more]

front cover of New Fields of Adventure
New Fields of Adventure
The Writings of Lyman G. Bennett, Civil War Soldier and Topographical Engineer, 1861–1865
M. Jane Johansson
University of Tennessee Press, 2024
Lyman Gibson Bennett (1832–1904) had a curious mind and a keen sense of humor. He had an engineer’s mentality and a poet’s grasp of language, except for spelling. As a Union soldier, Bennett saw extensive service in the Trans-Mississippi Theater. A writer of considerable energy and intelligence, Bennett’s wartime diaries recount his diverse and wide-ranging military record, stretching geographically from the prairies of Illinois to the Rocky Mountains, while a postwar account details, among other things, his labors to recruit “Mountain Feds” in the Ozarks.

This volume provides the perspective of an individual who was both a topographical engineer—with extensive experience that spanned the country from Arkansas to the Overland Trail—and a common soldier. As a member of the Thirty-Sixth Illinois Infantry, Bennett provided one of the most detailed contemporary accounts of the pivotal Battle of Pea Ridge, March 7–8, 1862. By December 1863, Bennett was promoted to first lieutenant in the newly formed Fourth Arkansas Cavalry (US) and wrote an invaluable first-person account of guerrilla fighting in the Ozark mountains. Readers will delight in Bennett’s witty descriptions of the ankles (and even higher!) of ladies as they gathered their skirts to trek through the mud; his sometimes-cutting words about his fellow hospital patients; and his wry comments on that “exclusively southern institution,” the chigger. New Fields of Adventure will prove useful to scholars of the Ozarks, landscape studies, and the Civil War in the West.
[more]

front cover of City Behind Fence
City Behind Fence
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1942-1946
Charles W. Johnson
University of Tennessee Press, 1981
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was created by the U.S. government during World War II to aid in the construction of the first atomic bomb. Drawing on oral history and previously classified material, this book portrays the patterns of daily life in this unique setting.


[more]

front cover of The Power of Mammon
The Power of Mammon
The Market, Secularization, and New York Baptists, 1790–1922
Curtis D. Johnson
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

In The Power of Mammon, Curtis D. Johnson describes how the market economy and market-related forces, such as the media, politics, individualism, and consumerism, radically changed the nature of Baptist congregational life in New York State during three centuries. Collectively, these forces emphasized the importance of material wealth over everything else, and these values penetrated the thinking of Baptist ministers and laypeople alike. Beginning in the 1820s, the pastorate turned into a profession, the laity’s influence diminished, closeknit religious fellowships evolved into voluntary associations, and evangelism became far less effective. Men, being the most engaged in the market, secularized the more quickly and became less involved in church affairs. By the 1870s, male disengagement opened the door to increased female participation in church governance. While scientific advances and religious pluralism also played a role, the market and its related distractions were the primary forces behind the secularization of Baptist life.

The Power of Mammon is history from the ground up. Unlike many denominational histories, this book emphasizes congregational life and the importance of the laity. This focus allows the reader to hear the voices of ordinary Baptists who argued over a host of issues. Johnson deftly connects large social trends with exhaustive attention to archival material, including numerous well-chosen records preserved by forty-two New York churches. These records include details related to membership, discipline, finance, and institutional history. Utilizing statistical analysis to achieve even greater clarity, Johnson effectively bridges the gap between the particularity of church records and the broader history of New York’s Baptist churches.

Johnson’s narrative of Baptist history in New York will serve as a model for other regional studies and adds to our understanding of secularization and its impact on American religion.

[more]

front cover of Reelfoot Lake
Reelfoot Lake
Oasis on the Mississippi
Jim W. Johnson
University of Tennessee Press, 2023

Each year nearly a quarter million visitors come to Reelfoot Lake, also known as “The Earthquake Lake,” to enjoy its natural splendor. With its twenty-five thousand acres of shimmering water, haunting cypress swamps, and two-hundred-year-old lily marshes, the lake is rich in natural beauty and natural history. Yet, despite being one of the most unique lakes in the country—this natural body of water formed during the New Madrid earthquakes in the early nineteenth century—it is relatively understudied. Biologist and environmentalist Jim W. Johnson grew up on the lake and experienced its natural and cultural history firsthand. As a wildlife biologist, he spent much of his career managing Reelfoot and its surrounding area. Reelfoot Lake: Oasis on the Mississippi is part personal remembrance, part guidebook, and part cautionary tale on river and wetland ecology, conservation, and land management, written by an author intimately knowledgeable about the lake and life on it. By exploring Reelfoot’s ancient and recent history, Johnson illuminates the lives of generations of people who lived and thrived in the floodplain. For those looking to navigate the waters of the lake, this book will make travel through the bayous and canals much easier and more pleasurable. And its discussions about the lake’s ecology will bolster voices calling for the protection and preservation of Reelfoot and other wetlands like it.

Accompanied by stunning photography, Johnson’s book is sure to become a useful outdoor guide to Reelfoot Lake and will increase readers’ appreciation for wetlands.

[more]

front cover of Rivers Under Siege
Rivers Under Siege
The Troubled Saga of West Tennessee Wetlands
Jim W. Johnson
University of Tennessee Press, 2007
Rivers under Siege is a wrenching firsthand account of how human interventions, often well intentioned, have wreaked havoc on West Tennessee's fragile wetlands. For more than a century, farmers and developers tried to tame the rivers as they became clogged with sand and debris, thereby increasing flooding. Building levees and changing the course of the rivers from meandering streams to straight-line channels, developers only made matters worse. Yet the response to failure was always to try to subdue nature, to dig even bigger channels and construct even more levees-an effort that reached its sorry culmination in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' massive West Tennessee Tributaries Project during the 1960s. As a result, the rivers' natural hydrology descended into chaos, devastating the plant and animal ecology of the region's wetlands. Crops and trees died from summer flooding, as much of the land turned into useless, stagnant swamps.

The author was one of a small group of state waterfowl managers who saw it all happen, most sadly within the Obion-Forked Deer river system and at Reelfoot Lake. After much trial and error, Johnson and his colleagues in the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency began by the 1980s to abandon their old methods, resorting to management procedures more in line with the natural contours of the floodplains and the natural behavior of rivers. Preaching their new stewardship philosophy to anyone who might listen-their supervisors, duck hunters, conservationists, politicians, federal agencies-they were often ignored. The campaign dragged on for twenty years before an innovative and rational plan came from the Governor's Office and gained wide support. But then, too, that plan fell prey to politics, legal wrangling, self-interest, hardheadedness, and tradition. Yet, despite such heartbreaking setbacks, the author points to hopeful signs that West Tennessee's historic wetlands might yet be recovered for the benefit of all who use them and recognize their vital importance.

Jim W. Johnson, now retired, was for many years a lands management biologist with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. He was responsible for the overall supervision and coordination of thirteen wildlife management areas and refuges, primarily for waterfowl, in northwest Tennessee.
[more]

front cover of Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
First Fifty Years
Leland Johnson
University of Tennessee Press, 1994

front cover of Chasing the Wind
Chasing the Wind
Inside the Alternative Energy Battle
Rody Johnson
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
Over the past few decades, the vexing problems of climate change and finite resources
have ignited contentious global debates about alternative energy technologies. In this lucid,
balanced book, Rody Johnson investigates the development and deployment of one
such technology—wind power—and, in particular, the ways in which a heated battle over
that energy source played out in an Appalachian community.

Johnson’s wide-ranging account examines the history of wind power; its capacity and
output in comparison to such sources as fossil fuels, other renewables, and nuclear energy;
the infrastructural challenges of transmitting electricity from wind farms to end users;
global efforts to curb carbon emissions, including the Kyoto treaty; the role of public
policy, government subsidies, and tax breaks; and the differences and similarities between
wind power regimes in the United States and Europe.

Interwoven throughout this discussion is the compelling narrative of how, beginning
in 2005, the proposed construction of a wind farm along mountain ridges in Greenbrier
County, West Virginia, pitted locals against each other—a story that puts a human face on
the arguments about wind power’s promise of clean, renewable energy and its potentially
negative effects, including bird and bat kills, a disfigured natural landscape, and noise
pollution. Drawing on countless hours he spent attending public meetings and interviewing
those on both sides of the issue, Johnson not only pictures the Greenbrier County
struggle in illuminating detail but also makes valuable comparisons between it and similarly
pitched battles in another West Virginia county, where a wind farm had already been
built, and in Florida, where plans to erect beachside wind turbines next to a nuclear plant
faltered.

Concluding with a thoughtful, realistic assessment of a 2012 study suggesting that
the country has the capability of receiving 80 percent of its electrical generation from
renewables by 2050, Chasing the Wind makes a vital contribution to the ongoing dialogue
regarding America’s energy challenges and what is likely required to meet them.
[more]

front cover of Memoirs of Lieut.-General Winfield Scott
Memoirs of Lieut.-General Winfield Scott
Timothy D. Johnson
University of Tennessee Press, 2015
The remarkable military career of General Winfield Scott spanned fifty-three years, fourteen presidents, and six wars, both foreign and domestic. However, his lengthy service did not secure his rightful place among the nation’s pantheon of great military leaders. Instead, he is most often remembered as the aged, overweight, and sickly commanding general who was replaced by George McClellan at the beginning of the Civil War. Originally published in 1864, only two years before his death, Scott’s memoirs touch on many of the significant events of the early and mid-nineteenth century. This new edition of those remembrances, expertly edited by Timothy D. Johnson, showcases Scott’s rare strategic insights, battlefield prowess, and diplomatic shrewdness, restoring him to his proper place as arguably the most important American general to ever serve his country.

Scott joined the army in 1808, earned the rank of brigadier general in 1814, and was promoted to commanding general in 1841. During the Mexican-American War, he commanded one of the most brilliant military campaigns in American history and mentored the generation of officers who fought the Civil War, including Generals Grant, Lee, Longstreet, Beauregard, Jackson, and Meade. As a young general, he wrote the first comprehensive set of regulations to govern the army and pushed for the professionalization of the U.S. officer corps. Yet, he was ridiculed at the beginning of the war for his prescient prediction that the Civil War would be a prolonged conflict requiring extensive planning and superior strategic thinking.

With this edition, Johnson has merged Scott’s large two-volume memoir into a single, manageable volume without losing any of the original 1864 text. Extensive new annotations update Scott’s outdated notes and provide valuable illumination and context. Covering a wide range of events—from the famous 1804 duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton through the end of the Civil War—Scott’s extraordinary account reveals the general as a sometimes
egocentric but always astute witness to the early American republic.

Timothy D. Johnson, professor of history at Lipscomb University in Nashville, is the author of Winfield Scott: The Quest for Military Glory and A Gallant Little Army: The Mexico City Campaign. He is coeditor, with Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr., of A Fighter from Way Back: The Mexican War Diary of Lt. Daniel Harvey Hill and Notes of the Mexican War by J. Jacob Oswandel.

 
[more]

front cover of Little to Eat and Thin Mud to Drink
Little to Eat and Thin Mud to Drink
Letters, Diaries, and Memoirs from the Red River Campaigns, 1863–1864
Gary D. Joiner
University of Tennessee Press, 2007
Little to Eat and Thin Mud to Drink does more than just document the history of the Trans-Mississippi conflict of the Civil War. It goes much deeper, offering a profound, extended look into the innermost thoughts of the soldiers and civilians who experienced the events that took place in Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas. Gleaning from a rich body of rare journals, diaries, and letters, this groundbreaking book demonstrates the significant impact that military operations in this region had on the local population in years between 1863 and 1865.

Readers will be introduced to the many different individuals who were touched by the campaign, both Confederate and Union. Ably edited by Joiner, a leading expert on the Trans-Mississippi conflict, and others, some of these manuscripts are witty, others somber, some written by Harvard- and Yale-educated aristocrats, others by barely literate farmers. All profoundly reflect their feelings regarding the extraordinary circumstances and events they witnessed.

In Little to Eat and Thin Mud to Drink, readers will have access to the diary of James A. Jarratt, a Confederate sergeant whose cogent narratives dispute commonly held views of the Battle of Mansfield. Representing a much different point of view is the diary of Private Julius Knapp, whose lengthy diary sheds light on the life of a Northern soldier fighting in the ill-fated Union march through Louisiana in 1864. A rare glimpse into the diary of a Southern woman is offered through the fascinating and melancholy musings of plantation belle Sidney Harding. Readers will also encounter the private letters of a French prince turned Confederate officer; of Elizabeth Jane Samford Fullilove, the angst-ridden wife of a Confederate soldier; and many others.

These first-person narratives vividly bring to life the individuals who lived through this important, but often neglected, period in Civil War history. Little to Eat and Thin Mud to Drink will engross anyone interested in exploring the human side of the Civil War.

Gary Joiner is an assistant professor of history at Louisiana State University in Shreveport and the director of the Red River Regional Studies Center at LSUS. His books include One Damn Blunder from Beginning to End: The Red River Campaign of 1864 and Union Failure in the West and Through the Howling Wilderness: The 1864 Red River Campaign and Union Failure in the West. He is also the coeditor, with Marilyn S. Joiner and Clifton D. Cardin, of another volume in the Voices of the Civil War series, No Pardons to Ask, nor Apologies to Make: The Journal of William Henry King, Gray's 28th Louisiana Infantry Battalion.
 
[more]

front cover of Through the Howling Wilderness
Through the Howling Wilderness
The 1864 Red River Campaign and Union Failure in the West
Gary D. Joiner
University of Tennessee Press, 2006
The Red River Campaign of 1864 was a bold attempt to send large Union army and navy forces deep into the interior of Louisiana, seize the Rebel capital of the state, and defeat the Confederate army guarding the region enabling uninhibited access to Texas to the west. Through the Howling Wilderness emphasizes the Confederate defensive measures and the hostile attitudes of commanders toward each other as well as toward their enemies.Gary D. Joiner contends that the campaign was important to both the Union army and navy in the course of the war and afterward, altering the political landscape in the fall presidential elections in 1864. The campaign redirected troops originally assigned to operate in Georgia during the pivotal Atlanta campaign, thus delaying the end of the war by weeks or even months, and it forced the navy to refocus its inland or “brown water” naval tactics. The Red River Campaign ushered in deep resentment toward the repatriation of the State of Louisiana after the war ended. Profound consequences included legal, political, and sociological issues that surfaced in Congressional hearings as a result of the Union defeat.The efforts of the Confederates to defend northern Louisiana have been largely ignored. Their efforts at building an army and preparations to trap the union naval forces before the campaign began have been all but lost in the literature of the Civil War. Joiner’s book will remedy this lack of historical attention.Replete with in-depth coverage on the geography of the region, the Congressional hearings after the Campaign, and the Confederate defenses in the Red River Valley, Through the Howling Wilderness will appeal to Civil War historians and buffs alike.
[more]

front cover of Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer
Selected Essays and Literary Criticism
Robert B. Jones
University of Tennessee Press, 1996

front cover of Blues And Evil
Blues And Evil
Yahya Jongintaba
University of Tennessee Press, 1993

front cover of Mary McLeod Bethune
Mary McLeod Bethune
Village of God
Yahya Jongintaba
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

Mary McLeod Bethune was born on May 10, 1875, in a log cabin in rural Sumter County, South Carolina. She was the fifteenth child among seventeen siblings but the first born free of the bonds of slavery. As a child she attended a Presbyterian mission school in nearby Mayesville and Scotia Seminary in Concord, North Carolina. After some years at Scotia she was admitted in 1894 to the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Her two years of training at Moody did not lead to missionary work in Africa, as she had dreamed, but to missionlike teaching positions in the South and eventually her founding, in 1904, of the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Girls, in Daytona Beach, Florida. That institution would grow to the present-day Bethune-Cookman University.

In this religious biography, author Yahya Jongintaba traces Bethune’s life of service in lively prose, structuring his book in a five-part framework that organizes his subject’s life in parallel with the Lord’s Prayer and virtues identified by Bethune herself: freedom, creativity, integrity, discipline, and love. With unfettered access to Bethune’s personal archive, Jongintaba paints a picture of a mother figure and mentor to generations, a nearsaint who lived “a blameless life for four-score years.” With deep empathy and the kind of “spiritual understanding” that Bethune had despaired of finding in a biographer in her own lifetime (despite attempts by publishers and herself to find just the right person), Jongintaba endeavors to achieve in his biography what Bethune wrote that she hoped to accomplish in an autobiography that never materialized: to “give to the world the real Mary McLeod Bethune’s life as I have lived it.”

[more]

front cover of New Negroes & Their Music
New Negroes & Their Music
Success Of Harlem Renaissance
Yahya Jongintaba
University of Tennessee Press, 1997

front cover of Re-Searching Black Music
Re-Searching Black Music
Yahya Jongintaba
University of Tennessee Press, 1996
In this provocative book, Jon Michael Spencer offers a new paradigm for the study of African American music. Proceeding from the proposition that black culture in America cannot be considered apart from its religious and philosophical roots, Spencer argues that “theology and musicology serving together” can form the basis of a holistic, integrative approach to black music and, indeed, to black culture in all its aspects.
            As he shows in his opening chapters, Spencer’s scholarly method-- theomusicology—derives from two fundamental, intertwined attributes of African American culture: its underlying rhythmicity and its thoroughly religious nature. The author then applies this approach to the folk, popular, and classical music produced by black Americans. Finally, he considers the ethical implications that his “re-searching” of black music uncovers. “[A] spiritual archaeology of music leads to a recognition that we are estranged from ourselves,” he writes. “This estrangement has occurred by virtue of our maintaining a doctrine of belief that sides the sacred, spiritual, and religious in respective opposition to the profane, sexual, and cultural. The recognition of this estrangement should propel us toward reconciliation, for it is the natural impulse of the ethical agent to resolve life’s tensions in pursuit of human happiness.”
            While Spencer’s own focus is on music, he argues persuasively that theomusicology can serve as a “common mode of inquiry” for all African American cultural studies. Thus, Re-Searching Black Music is certain to stimulate discussion, debate, and further study in a broad range of scholarly arenas.
 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter