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Mainstreaming Fundamentalism
John R. Rice and Fundamentalism's Public Reemergence
Keith Bates
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

In Mainstreaming Fundamentalism: John R. Rice and Fundamentalism’s Public Reemergence, Keith Bates embarks on a thematic and chronological exploration of twentieth-century Baptist fundamentalism in postwar America, sharing the story of a man whose career intersected with many other leading fundamentalists of the twentieth century, such as J. Frank Norris, Bob Jones Sr., Bob Jones Jr., and Jerry Falwell.

Unique among histories of American fundamentalism, this book explores the theme of Southern fundamentalism’s reemergence through a biographical lens. John R. Rice’s mission to inspire a broad cultural activism within fundamentalism—particularly by opposing those who fostered an isolationist climate—would give direction and impetus to the movement for the rest of the twentieth century. To support this claim, Bates presents chapters on Rice’s background and education, personal and ecclesiastical separatism, and fundamentalism and political action, tracing his rise to leadership during a critical phase of fundamentalism’s development until his death in 1980.

Bates draws heavily upon primary source texts that include writings from Rice’s fundamentalist contemporaries, his own The Sword of the Lord articles, and his private papers—particularly correspondence with many nationally known preachers, local pastors, and laypeople over more than fifty years of Rice’s ministry. The incorporation of these writings, combined with Bates’s own conversations with Rice’s family, facilitate a deeply detailed, engaging examination that fills a significant gap in fundamentalist history studies.

Mainstreaming Fundamentalism: John R. Rice and Fundamentalism’s Public Reemergence provides a nuanced and insightful study that will serve as a helpful resource to scholars and students of postwar American fundamentalism, Southern fundamentalism, and Rice’s contemporaries.

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Making an Atlantic World
Circles, Paths, and Stories from the Colonial South
James Taylor Carson
University of Tennessee Press, 2007
In the South, colonialism threw together three peoples who each played important roles in the creation of a new kind of society. Making an Atlantic World explores how Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans understood the landscapes they inhabited and how, after contact, their views of the world had to accommodate and then accept the presence of the others.

Based on the notion of “founding peoples” rather than “founding fathers,” Making an Atlantic World uses an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to interpret the Colonial South. James Taylor Carson uses historical ethnogeography-a new methodology that brings together the study of history, anthropology, and geography.  This method seeks to incorporate concepts of space and landscape with social perspectives to give students and scholars a better understanding of the forces that shaped the development of a synthesized southern culture.

Unlike previous studies, which considered colonization as a contest over land but rarely considered what the land was and how people understood their relationships to it, Making an Atlantic World shows how the founding peoples perceived their world before contact and how they responded to contact and colonization.

The author contends that each of the three groups involved-the first people, the invading people, and the enslaved people-possessed a particular worldview that they had to adapt to each other to face the challenges brought about by contact.

James Taylor Carson is associate professor of history at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.  He is the author of <i>Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal</i>. His articles and reviews have appeared in <i>Ethnohistory, Journal of Mississippi History, Agricultural History, Journal of Military History</i>, and other publications.


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Making Haiti
Saint Domingue Revolution From Below
Carolyn E. Fick
University of Tennessee Press, 1991

In 1789 the French colony of Saint Domingue was the wealthiest and most flourishing of the Caribbean slave colonies, its economy based on the forced labor of more than half a million black slaves raided from their African homelands.  The revolt of this underclass in 1791—the only successful slave rebellion in history—gained the slaves their freedom and set in motion the colony's struggle for independence as the black republic of Haiti.

In this pioneering study, Carolyn E. Fick argues that the repressed and uneducated slaves were the principal architects both of their own freedom and of the successful movement toward national independence.  Fick identifies "marronage," the act of being a fugitive slave,  as a basic unit of slave resistance from which the revolution grew and shows how autonomous forms of popular slave participation were as important to the success of the rebellion as the leadership of men like Toussaint Louverture, Henri Christophe, and Dessalines. Using contemporary manuscripts and previously untapped archival sources, the author depicts the slaves, their aspirations, and their popular leaders and explains how they organized their rebellion.

Fick places the Saint Domingue rebellion in relation to the larger revolutionary movements of the era, provides background on class and caste prior to the revolution, the workings of the plantation system, the rigors of slave life, and the profound influence of voodoo.  By examining the rebellion and the conditions that led to it from the perspective of the slaves it liberated, she revises the history of Haiti.

Carolyn Fick is currently a Canada Research Fellow at Concordia University in Montreal.

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Making Music in Music City
Conversations with Nashville Music Industry Professionals
John Markert
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

At least since the rise of the “Nashville sound” in the 1950s, Tennessee’s capital city has attracted numerous books and articles offering insight into the celebrity machine known as Music City. But behind the artist in the limelight are a host of support personnel and contributors who shape the artist’s music. Of these myriad occupations within the music industry, only two have received significant attention: executives at the major labels and elite songwriters who have forged a path to the top of the charts. In Making Music in Music City, sociologist John Markert compiles and assesses more than one hundred interviews with industry professionals whose roles have been less often examined: producers, publishers, songwriters, management, studio musicians, and more.

The book naturally pivots around the country music industry but also discusses Nashville’s role in other forms of modern music, such as rock, Christian, and rap. Markert’s in-depth interviews with key music professionals provide a fresh perspective on the roles of critical players in Nashville’s music industry. This book sheds light not only on the complexities of the industry and the occupational changes taking place but on the critical role of those who work behind the scenes to shape the music that ultimately reaches the public.

Through firsthand accounts, Making Music in Music City analyzes just what it takes to create, produce, and disseminate the Nashville sound.

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The Making of an American
The Autobiography of a Hungarian Immigrant, Appalachian Entrepreneur, and OSS Officer
Cathy Cassady Corbin
University of Tennessee Press, 2018
Martin Himler emigrated from Hungary to America in 1907, and he arrived in New York City with no money and no plan other than to find work. From these impoverished beginnings, Himler persevered to become a self-made new American. As a coal mining entrepreneur, he established the Himler Coal Company—a bold experiment in a worker-owned mine—founded the small town of Himlerville, Kentucky—a town almost completely populated by Hungarian immigrants—and founded and edited a weekly newspaper, the Magyar Bányászlap (Hungarian Miners’ Journal). During WWII, Himler was called by the United States government to work for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Colonel Himler arrested more than 300 Nazi war criminals and interrogated 40 himself.

Himler’s autobiography tells in Himler’s own words his life story as it evolves into the American dream, wherein hard work results in success. Himler captivates readers from his earliest memories of his childhood in Hungary to his experiences with the OSS.

Following Himler’s death, the manuscript of the autobiography was passed down among Himler family members and then donated to the Martin County Historical and Genealogical Society, Inez, Kentucky, in 2007. Editor Cathy Cassady Corbin’s annotations enhance Himler’s words, while the introduction by scholar Doug Cantrell provides historical context for Himler’s migration to Appalachia. Finally, Charles Fenyvesi’s foreword analyzes Himler’s courageous OSS work.
 
 
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Mama Said
A Daughter’s Escape from the Alamo Christian Foundation
Christhiaon Coie
University of Tennessee Press, 2022

There are many books on the cult phenomenon that bloomed in the wake of the social upheaval of the 1960s, and many discuss the abuses of cult leaders; the physical, mental, and emotional challenges of breaking free; and the lived experiences of those who manage to leave and begin to heal. With Mama Said: A Daughter’s Escape from the Alamo Christian Foundation, we get a unique angle—what the daughter of a cult leader could see from the inside.

Christhiaon Coie grew up “Little Susie,” the daughter of Susan Alamo and stepdaughter of Tony Alamo, founders of the Alamo Christian Foundation. Coie continued to embrace the faith as she got older, but she was not a little girl anymore and began to realize that people don’t go to church and leave with the offering. She did not embrace the “faith” her mother was peddling, and she saw the financial grift that exploited the vulnerable followers. This is a story about the complex, unremitting relationship between a daughter and her abusive mother. Coie shares insight into Susan Alamo before her foundation days and reveals what it was like to grow up as her daughter between the 1950s and early 1970s. Across thirty-six chapters, she chronicles life within the Alamo cult and the twisted mother-daughter dynamic that persisted through it all. As Coie’s story unfolds, we see Little Susie transform into Christhiaon, navigating a manipulative mother and the distorted biblical teachings enlisted to her cause.

With a foreword from noted Alamo cult historian Debby Schriver, Coie’s gritty memoir is a true survivor story. What she survived, however, was not the cult only but the cruel double bind of what “mama said.”

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Manufacturing Tales
Sex Money Contemporary Legends
Gary Alan Fine
University of Tennessee Press, 1992

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Marble Goddesses and Mortal Flesh
David Madden
University of Tennessee Press, 2017

The Hero and the Witness is a harrowing and comic story of nineteen-year-old Lucius’s ordeal as a merchant seaman caught in the crossfire between an enigmatic scapegoat and a violent crew en route to Chile. In To Play the Con, Lucius, now a teacher and a first-time novelist, cons his little brother’s six small-town victims into accepting restitution for passing bad checks, a scam their older brother taught him and that may send him to the chain gang. Lucius works another con in Nothing Dies, but Something Mourns by persuading an ancient lady in a mountain town to tell him the romantic story of her brief love affair with Jesse James. In the innovative novella Marble Goddesses and Mortal Flesh, Lucius, now middle-aged and a successful novelist, buys the derelict Bijou Theater where he was a very young usher and becomes immersed to the brink of psychosis in memories of the immortal movie goddesses of the 40s and the mortal girls of his youth.

The novella is the perfect medium for this wide-ranging author to explore the power of the imagination and of oral storytelling in the lives of his characters. Madden’s unmatched scope in this collection could draw comparisons to Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Thomas Wolfe, and James M. Cain equally well.

Like Lucius, a native of Knoxville, DAVID MADDEN was an adolescent usher in the
1940s, a Merchant Mariner in the 1950s, and his two brothers were con men in their youth. He became a teacher in 1957, retiring in 2008 as LSU’s Robert Penn Warren Professor of Creative Writing, emeritus. Living now in Black Mountain, North Carolina, he has nearly finished a memoir recounting his youthful experiences in the U.S. Army.

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Marble Goddesses and Mortal Flesh
David Madden
University of Tennessee Press
The Hero and the Witness is a harrowing and comic story of nineteen-year-old Lucius’s ordeal as a merchant seaman caught in the crossfire between an enigmatic scapegoat and a violent crew en route to Chile. In To Play the Con, Lucius, now a teacher and a first-time novelist, cons his little brother’s six small-town victims into accepting restitution for passing bad checks, a scam their older brother taught him and that may send him to the chain gang. Lucius works another con in Nothing Dies, but Something Mourns by persuading an ancient lady in a mountain town to tell him the romantic story of her brief love affair with Jesse James. In the innovative novella Marble Goddesses and Mortal Flesh, Lucius, now middle-aged and a successful novelist, buys the derelict Bijou Theater where he was a very young usher and becomes immersed to the brink of psychosis in memories of the immortal movie goddesses of the 40s and the mortal girls of his youth.



The novella is the perfect medium for this wide-ranging author to explore the power of the imagination and of oral storytelling in the lives of his characters. Madden’s unmatched scope in this collection could draw comparisons to Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Thomas Wolfe, and James M. Cain equally well.



Like Lucius, a native of Knoxville, DAVID MADDEN was an adolescent usher in the
1940s, a Merchant Mariner in the 1950s, and his two brothers were con men in their youth. He became a teacher in 1957, retiring in 2008 as LSU’s Robert Penn Warren Professor of Creative Writing, emeritus. Living now in Black Mountain, North Carolina, he has nearly finished a memoir recounting his youthful experiences in the U.S. Army.

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Margaret Murray Washington
The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman
Sheena Harris
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

Born enslaved in 1861, by 1892 Margaret Murray Washington of Macon, Mississippi, married the twice-widowed race leader Booker T. Washington and joined the ranks of the rising black middle class. While one cannot discount the accomplishments of her storied husband, Washington’s own successes warrant further exploration. In this first biography of Margaret Murray Washington, author Sheena Harris discusses Washington’s importance as an active clubwoman, educational reformer, and integral partner to her husband and his success with the Tuskegee Institute.

Individual black, female leadership continues to be a blind spot in much scholarly historical literature. Washington was an important educator and clubwoman whose influence emanated from her own planning and actions. As Lady Principal, Washington was sincere and earnest in her campaign to improve Tuskegee Institute. She also transformed her community through her local club organizations. In addition, Washington cofounded the National Federation of Afro-American Women (1895) and the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) (1896). Harris illustrates how Washington improved race relations as a whole through local and national organizations such as the Tuskegee Woman’s Club, the NACW, and 1922 creation of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races (ICWDR). Harris explains clearly that Washington took her leadership positions seriously and strategically worked to expand opportunities for blacks through such organizations.

Washington’s life provides a glimpse into the inner workings of the Black Women’s Club Movement and illuminates the experiences of a race woman who came of age during the Jim Crow South. Harris’s biography is a convincing portrait of an under-studied black woman in the early civil rights movement and places Washington within the pantheon of other important women of the era.

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A Marginal Majority
Women, Gender, and a Reimagining of Southern Baptists
Elizabeth Flowers
University of Tennessee Press, 2020

In step with the #MeToo movement and third wave feminism, women’s roles provoke lively debate in today’s evangelical sphere. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has a complicated past regarding this issue, and determining what exactly women’s roles in home, church, and society should be, or even what these roles should be called, has been a contentious subject. In A Marginal Majority: Women, Gender, and a Reimagining of Southern Baptists, editors Elizabeth H. Flowers and Karen K. Seat and eight other contributors examine the SBC’s complex history regarding women and how that history reshapes our understanding of the denomination and its contemporary debates.

This comprehensive volume starts with women as SBC fundraisers, moves to the ways they served Southern Baptist missions, and considers their struggles to find a place at Southern Baptist seminaries as well as their launching of “teaching” or “women’s” ministries. Along the way, it introduces new personalities, offers fresh considerations of familiar figures, and examines the power dynamics of race and class in a denomination that dominated the South and grew into a national behemoth.

Additionally, the essay collection provides insights into why the SBC has often politically aligned with the right. Not only did the denomination become increasingly oriented toward authoritarianism as it clamped down on evangelical feminism, but, as several contributors reveal, even as Southern Baptist women sought agency, they often took it from others. Read together, the chapters strike a somber tone, challenging any triumphal historiography of the past.

By providing a history of contentious issues from the nineteenth century to the present day, A Marginal Majority provides invaluable context for the recurrent struggles women have faced within the United States’ largest Protestant denomination. Moreover, it points to new directions in the study of American denominational life and culture.

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Market Square
A History of the Most Democratic Place on Earth
Jack Neely
University of Tennessee Press, 2009

Conceived in 1853 as a canny real-estate scheme by two young investors expecting to get rich off the idea, Market Square came to be Knoxville’s most public spot, a marketplace familiar to every man, woman, and child in the area. By the 1860s, it was the busiest place in a burgeoning city. In a town that became bitterly divided by politics, race, and background, Market Square became a rare common ground: a place to buy all sorts of local produce, but also a place to experience new things, including the grandiose Market House itself, considered a model in a progressive era. Beset by urban blight by the mid-1900s, Market Square had become more of a curiosity than a point of municipal pride, and the neighborhood declined. After years of controversy, the city razed the Market House and struggled to modernize the old Square itself.
 
This second edition is packed with more information about the colorful history of this eccentric place, including details about its African American heritage, the surprising origins of a recent international bestseller, and a much fuller account of its present-day resurgence as an example of vigorous urban revival. Through a combination of public and private efforts in the 21st century, Market Square seems to be returning to its original diverse spirit, suggesting why, on a good day, it can resemble—as a reporter described it in 1900—“the most democratic place on earth.”
 
Jack Neely is the award-winning “Secret History” columnist for Metro Pulse, Knoxville’s weekly newspaper. He is the author of From the Shadow Side and Other Stories about Knoxville, Tennessee, and, with Aaron Jay, of The Marble City: A Photographic Tour of Knoxville’s Graveyards.
 

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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.”

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Masonic Temples
Freemasonry, Ritual Architecture, and Masculine Archetypes
William D. Moore
University of Tennessee Press, 2006
In Masonic Temples, William D. Moore introduces readers to the structures American Freemasons erected over the sixty-year period from 1870 to 1930, when these temples became a ubiquitous feature of the American landscape. As representations of King Solomon’s temple in ancient Jerusalem erected in almost every American town and city, Masonic temples provided specially designed spaces for the enactment of this influential fraternity’s secret rituals. Using New York State as a case study, Moore not only analyzes the design and construction of Masonic structures and provides their historical context, but he also links the temples to American concepts of masculinity during this period of profound economic and social transformation. By examining edifices previously overlooked by architectural and social historians, Moore decodes the design and social function of Masonic architecture and offers compelling new insights into the construction of American masculinity. Four distinct sets of Masonic ritual spaces—the Masonic lodge room, the armory and drill room of the Knights Templar, the Scottish Rite Cathedral, and the Shriners’ mosque – form the central focus of this volume. Moore argues that these spaces and their accompanying ceremonies communicated four alternative masculine archetypes to American Freemasons—the heroic artisan, the holy warrior, the adept or wise man, and the frivolous jester or fool. Although not a Freemason, Moore draws from his experience as director of the Chancellor Robert R Livingston Masonic Library in New York City, where heutilized sources previously inaccessible to scholars. His work should prove valuable to readers with interests in vernacular architecture, material culture, American studies, architectural and social history, Freemasonry, and voluntary associations.
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Massacre at Cavett's Station
Frontier Tennessee during the Cherokee Wars
Charles H. Faulkner
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
In the late 1700s, as white settlers spilled across the Appalachian Mountains, claiming Cherokee and Creek lands for their own, tensions between Native Americans and pioneers reached a boiling point. Land disputes stemming from the 1791 Treaty of Holston went unresolved, and Knoxville settlers attacked a Cherokee negotiating party led by Chief Hanging Maw resulting in the wounding of the chief and his wife and the death of several Indians. In retaliation, on September 25, 1793, nearly one thousand Cherokee and Creek warriors descended undetected on Knoxville to destroy this frontier town. However, feeling they had been discovered, the Indians focused their rage on Cavett’s Station, a fortified farmstead of Alexander Cavett and his family located in what is now west Knox County. Violating a truce, the war party murdered thirteen men, women, and children, ensuring the story’s status in Tennessee lore.
            In Massacre at Cavett’s Station, noted archaeologist and Tennessee historian Charles Faulkner reveals the true story of the massacre and its aftermath, separating historical fact from pervasive legend. In doing so, Faulkner focuses on the interplay of such early Tennessee stalwarts as John Sevier, James White, and William Blount, and the role each played in the white settlement of east Tennessee while drawing the ire of the Cherokee who continued to lose their homeland in questionable treaties. That enmity produced some of history’s notable Cherokee war chiefs including Doublehead, Dragging Canoe, and the notorious Bob Benge, born to a European trader and Cherokee mother, whose red hair and command of English gave him a distinct double identity. But this conflict between the Cherokee and the settlers also produced peace-seeking chiefs such as Hanging Maw and Corn Tassel who helped broker peace on the Tennessee frontier by the end of the 18th century.  After only three decades of peaceful co-existence with their white neighbors, the now democratic Cherokee Nation was betrayed and lost the remainder of their homeland in the Trail of Tears.        
 
Faulkner combines careful historical research with meticulous archaeological excavations conducted in developed areas of the west Knoxville suburbs to illuminate what happened on that fateful day in 1793. As a result, he answers significant questions about the massacre and seeks to discover the genealogy of the Cavetts and if any family members survived the attack. This book is an important contribution to the study of frontier history and a long-overdue analysis of one of East Tennessee’s well-known legends.
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Maxine Smith’s Maxine Smith's Unwilling Pupils
Lessons Learned in Memphis's Civil Rights Classroom
Sherry L. Hoppe and Bruce W. Speck
University of Tennessee Press, 2007
Maxine Smith's Unwilling Pupils is the authorized biography of Maxine Atkins Smith. As such it tells the story of the civil rights movement in Memphis from Smith's viewpoint. Primarily based on newspaper accounts from the 1960s and 1970s and on Smith's papers housed at the Memphis Public Library, the book also draws from a rich source of interviews conducted by the coauthors and others.

This book presents a well-balanced historical background of the civil rights era even while serving as a tribute to Maxine Smith and her work. A panoramic view of Maxine's life, Maxine Smith's Unwilling Pupils, presents one woman's struggle as a prism for understanding the human dimensions of the fight for equality.

The biography portrays Smith's lifelong focus on education as she tried to enlighten both blacks and whites about equality and the inalienable rights of all races. Along the way she became the face of the civil rights movement in Memphis during a critical time in the movement's history. Maxine's unwilling pupils often hated her for her outspoken and tenacious advocacy for those rights; her followers loved her for her unwavering commitment to ensure the rights of African Americans.

Smith's selfless struggles as chronicled in this biography will leave no doubt that her influence on the progress of civil rights in Memphis was profound. Moreover, her example of tireless commitment should inspire the efforts of new generations of equal rights activists to come.

Sherry L. Hoppe is president of Austin Peay State University. She has coedited a number of volumes with Bruce W. Speck in the New Directions for Teaching and Learning series. She is coeditor, with Dr. Speck, of Service-Learning: History, Theory, and Issues.

Bruce W. Speck is provost and vice president for academic and student affairs at Austin Peay State University. He is the co-author, with Jordy Rocheleau, of Rights and Wrongs in the College Classroom: Ethical Issues in Postsecondary Teaching. He has written numerous articles and contributed to edited volumes.
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Mayday! Mayday!
Aircraft Crashes In The Great Smoky Mtn Nat Park, 1920-
Jeff Wadley
University of Tennessee Press, 2002
Mayday! Mayday!
Aircraft Crashes in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, 1920–2000
Jeff Wadley and Dwight McCarter
Since the dawn of aviation, more than fifty aircraft have crashed in the Great Smoky Mountains. This book details all of those known incidents from 1920 to 2000, including those that occurred within the area before the establishment of the National Park in 1934. Jeff Wadley and Dwight McCarter, who have been involved in search-and-rescue missions in the Smokies for decades, have researched official documents and newspaper archives and conducted extensive interviews with survivors, family members, and eyewitnesses to record not only tragedies but also triumphs of survival.
The authors tell how the earliest known plane crashes in the Smokies were of the single-engine Curtis "Jenny" biplanes flown by young air aces during the World War I era. In the years since, the Smokies have claimed private planes, military jets, helicopters, and even a hot air balloon. These disasters arose from numerous causes—from fuel depletion and icing to "dare-deviling" or simply flying too low. Wadley and McCarter attest to the difficult duties of search-and-rescue teams in the most remote areas of the park. Of 127 persons involved in crashes, only 56 survived. Readers will be touched by these accounts—such as that of two small children who survived a December 1977 crash that killed their father and older sister.
Mayday! Mayday! offers both cautionary tales for pilots who fly above these ridges and seasoned advice to those who search for victims. The Smokies have been called by some another Bermuda Triangle; this book explains why and reminds us that no skies are entirely friendly.
The Authors: Jeff Wadley is a lieutenant colonel in the Tennessee Civil Air Patrol who serves as a mission coordinator and trainer in the Smokies.
Dwight McCarter served as a backcountry ranger in the park for over twenty years and is the author of Lost! A Ranger's Journal of Search and Rescue in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.


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Melancholia and Maturation
The Use of Trauma in American Children's Literature
Eric L. Tribunella
University of Tennessee Press, 2010

“Coming of age” in children’s fiction often means achieving maturity through the experience of trauma. In classics ranging from Old Yeller to The Outsiders, a narrative of psychological pain defies expectations of childhood as a time of innocence and play. In this provocative new book, Eric L. Tribunella explores why trauma, especially the loss of a loved object, occurs in some of the most popular and critically acclaimed twentieth-century American fiction for children.

Tribunella draws on queer theory and feminist revisions of Freud’s notion of melancholia, which is described as a fundamental response to loss, arguing that the low-grade symptoms of melancholia are in fact what characterize the mature, sober, and responsible American adult. Melancholia and Maturation looks at how this effect is achieved in a society that purports to protect youngsters from every possible source of danger, thus requiring melancholia to be induced artificially.

Each of the book’s five chapters focuses on a different kind of lost object sacrificed so as to propel the child toward a distinctively gendered, sexual, ethical, and national adulthood—from same-sex friends to the companionship of boy-and-his-dog stories, from the lost ideals of historical fiction about the American Revolution to the children killed or traumatized in Holocaust novels. The author examines a wide spectrum of works—including Jack London’s dog tales, the contemporary “realistic” novels of S. E. Hinton, and Newbery Medal winners like Johnny Tremain and Bridge to Terabithia.

Tribunella raises fundamental questions about the value of children’s literature as a whole and provides context for understanding why certain books become required reading for youth.

Eric L. Tribunella is assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. His articles have been published in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Children’s Literature in Education, The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children’s Literature, and Children’s Literature.

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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.

 
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Memphis Hoops
Race and Basketball in the Bluff City,1968–1997
Keith Brian Wood
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

Memphis Hoops tells the story of basketball in Tennessee’s southwestern-most metropolis following the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Keith Brian Wood examines the city through the lens of the Memphis State University basketball team and its star player-turned-coach Larry Finch. Finch, a Memphis native and the first highly recruited black player signed by Memphis State, helped the team make the 1973 NCAA championship game in his senior year. In an era when colleges in the south began to integrate their basketball programs, the city of Memphis embraced its flagship university’s shift toward including black players. Wood interjects the forgotten narrative of LeMoyne-Owen’s (the city’s HBCU) 1975 NCAA Division III National Championship team as a critical piece to understanding this era. Finch was drafted by the Lakers following the 1973 NCAA championship but instead signed with the American Basketball Association’s Memphis Tams. After two years of playing professionally, Finch returned to the sidelines as a coach and would eventually become the head coach of the Memphis State Tigers.

Wood deftly weaves together basketball and Memphis’s fraught race relations during the post–civil rights era. While many Memphians viewed the 1973 Tigers’ championship run as representative of racial progress, Memphis as a whole continued to be deeply divided on other issues of race and civil rights. And while Finch was championed as a symbol of the healing power of basketball that helped counteract the city’s turbulence, many black players and coaches would discover that even its sports mirrored Memphis’s racial divide. Today, as another native son of Memphis, Penny Hardaway, has taken the reigns of the University of Memphis’s basketball program, Wood reflects on the question of progress in the city that saw King’s assassination little more than forty years ago.

In this important examination of sports and civil rights history, Wood summons social memory from an all-too-recent past to present the untold—and unfinished—story of basketball in the Bluff City.

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front cover of Memphis In The Great Depression
Memphis In The Great Depression
Roger Biles
University of Tennessee Press, 1986

front cover of Men in German Uniform
Men in German Uniform
POWs in America during World War II
Antonio Thompson
University of Tennessee Press, 2010

Examining the largest prisoner-of-war handling operation in U.S. history, this book offers a meticulous account of the myriad history, this book offers a meticulous account of the myriad problems—as well as the impressive successes—that came with problems—as well as the impressive successes—that came with housing 371,000 German POWs on American soil during World War II. Antonio Thompson draws on extensive archival research to probe the various ways in which the U.S. government strove to comply with the Geneva Convention’s mandate that enemy prisoners be moved from the war zone and given food, shelter, and clothing equal to that provided for American soldiers.

While the prisoners became a ready source of manpower for the labor- starved American home front and received small wages in return, their stay in the United States generated more than a few difficulties, which included not only daunting logistics but also violence within the camps. Such violence was often blamed on Nazi influence and control; however, as Thompson points out, only a few of the prisoners were actually Nazis. Because the Germans had cobbled together military forces that included convicts, their own POWs, volunteers from neutral nations, and conscripts from occupied countries, the bonds that held these soldiers together amid the pressures of combat dissolved once they were placed behind barbed wire. When these “men in German uniform,” who were not always Germans, donned POW garb, their former social, racial, religious, and ethnic tensions quickly reemerged.

To counter such troubles, American authorities organized various activities—including sports, arts, education, and religion—within the
POW camps; some prisoners even participated in an illegal denazification program created by the U.S. government. Despite the problems, Thompson argues, the POW-housing program proved largely successful, as Americans maintained their reputation for fairness and humane treatment during a time of widespread turmoil.

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A Mere Kentucky of a Place
The Elkhorn Association and the Commonwealth's First Baptists
Keith Harper
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

As the story goes, an itinerant preacher once visited the Bluegrass region and proclaimed heaven to be “a mere Kentucky of a place.” The Commonwealth’s first Baptists certainly thought so as they began settling the region a decade before statehood. By 1785 a group of pioneering preachers formed the Elkhorn Association, widely regarded as the oldest Baptist association west of the Alleghenies. Often portrayed in the historiography as the vanguard of a new frontier democracy, the Elkhorn Association, on closer inspection, reveals itself to be far more complex. In A Mere Kentucky of a Place, Keith Harper argues that the association’s Baptist ministers were neither full-fledged frontier egalitarians nor radical religionists but simply a people in transition. These ministers formed their identities in the crucible of the early national period, challenged by competing impulses, including their religious convictions, Jeffersonian Republicanism, and a rigid honor code—with mixed results.

With a keen eye for human interest, Harper brings familiar historical figures such as John Gano and Elijah Craig to life as he analyzes leadership in the Elkhorn Association during the early republic. Mining the wealth of documents left by the association, Harper details the self-aware struggle of these leaders to achieve economic wealth, status, and full social and cultural acceptance, demonstrating that the Elkhorn Association holds a unique place in the story of Baptists in the “New Eden” of Kentucky.

Ideal for course adoption in religious studies and students of Kentucky history, this readable work is sure to become a standard source on the history of religion on the Kentucky frontier.

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Met His Every Goal?
James K. Polk and the Legends of Manifest Destiny
Tom Chaffin
University of Tennessee Press, 2015
Soon after winning the presidency in 1845, according to the oft-repeated anecdote, James K. Polk slapped his thigh and predicted what would be the "four great measures" of his administration: the acquisition of some or all of the Oregon Country, the acquisition of California, a reduction in tariffs, and the establishment of a permanent independent treasury. Over the next four years, the Tennessee Democrat achieved all four goals. And those milestones—along with his purported enunciation of them—have come to define his presidency. Indeed, repeated ad infinitum in U.S. history textbooks, Polk's bold listing of goals has become U.S. political history’s equivalent of Babe Ruth’s called home run of the 1932 World Series, in which the slugger allegedly gestured toward the outfield and, on the next pitch, slammed a home run.
            But then again, as Tom Chaffin reveals in this lively tour de force of historiographic sleuthing, like Ruth's alleged "called shot" of 1932, the "four measures" anecdote hangs by the thinnest of evidentiary threads. Indeed, not until the late 1880s, four decades after Polk’s presidency, did the story first appear in print.
            In this eye-opening study, Tom Chaffin, author, historian, and, since 2008, editor of the multi-volume series Correspondence of James K. Polk, dispatches the thigh-slap anecdote and other misconceptions associated with Polk. In the process, Chaffin demonstrates how the "four measures" story has skewed our understanding of the 11th U.S. president. As president, Polk enlarged his nation's area by a third—thus rendering it truly a coast-to-coast continental nation-state. Indeed, the anecdote does not record, and effectively obscures complex events, including notable failures—such as Polk's botched effort to purchase Cuba, as well as his inability to shape the terms of California's and the New Mexico territory's admission into the Union. Cuba would never enter the federal Union; and those other tasks would be left for successor presidents. Indeed, debates over the future of slavery in the United States—debates accelerated by Polk's territorial gains—eventually produced perhaps the central irony of his legacy: A president devoted to national unity further sectionalized the nation’s politics, widening geopolitical fractures among the states that soon led to civil war.
            Engagingly written and lavishly illustrated, Met His Every Goal?—intended for general readers, students, and specialists—offers a primer on Polk and a revisionist view of much of the scholarship concerning him and his era. Drawing on published scholarship as well as contemporary documents—including heretofore unpublished materials—it presents a fresh portrait of an enigmatic autocrat. And in Chaffin's examination of an oft-repeated anecdote long accepted as fact, readers witness a case study in how historians use primary sources to explore—and in some cases, explode—received conceptions of the past.
 
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Miners Millhands Mountaineers
Industrialization Appalachian South
Ronald D. Eller
University of Tennessee Press, 1982

front cover of A Mirror for History
A Mirror for History
How Novels and Art Reflect the Evolution of Middle-Class America
Marc Egnal
University of Tennessee Press, 2024
In A Mirror for History, author Marc Egnal uses novels and art to provide a new understanding of American society. The book argues that the arc of middle-class culture reflects the evolution of the American economy from the near-subsistence agriculture of the 1750s to the extraordinarily unequal society of the twenty-first century. Fiction offers a rich source for this analysis. By delving deep into the souls of characters and their complex worlds, novels shed light on the dreams, hopes, and goals of individuals and reveal the structures that shape character’s lives. Additionally, paintings of the time periods expand upon these insights drawn from literature.

Egnal’s lively exploration of the changing economy, fiction, art, and American values is organized into four expansive periods—the Sentimental Era, Genteel America, Modern Society, and Post-Modern America. Within that framework, A Mirror for History looks at topics such as masculinity, childhood, the status of women, the outlook of African Americans, the role of religion, and varying views of capitalism.

Readers will be enthralled to find discussions of overlooked novels and paintings as well as discover new approaches to familiar pieces. A Mirror for History examines over one hundred authors and dozens of artists and their works, presented here in full color.
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Miserable Little Conglomeration
A Social History of the Port Hudson Campaign
Christopher Thrasher
University of Tennessee Press, 2023
While Vicksburg and Gettysburg tend to receive the most attention among Civil War battles, it is Port Hudson that holds the record for the longest-running siege in American history. During the summer of 1863, US soldiers fought in the infamous heat and damp of Louisiana for forty-eight grueling days, having severely underestimated the Confederates’ determination to win.

Previous accounts of these events have rested on the leaders, well-known figures, and familiar faces of the Civil War. Here, social historian Christopher Thrasher draws from a robust collection of archival sources to tell the story of the common people’s experience throughout the Port Hudson Campaign: the soldiers who fought, the civilians who persisted, and the men who persevered, for those long days.

With more than forty illustrations and maps depicting the battles of Port Hudson and the defenses of the place itself, Miserable Little Conglomeration builds upon previous scholarship to present a social history of this campaign through the eyes of the people who lived, fought, and died within it.

Filling a long-empty gap within Civil War scholarship, Thrasher’s fresh approach to the Port Hudson campaign will be of interest to Civil War scholars, students of Louisiana history, and younger learners who are interested in the voices of American history.
 
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Miss Minerva And William Green Hill
Frances Boyd Calhoun
University of Tennessee Press, 1976

front cover of Mockingbird Grows Up
Mockingbird Grows Up
Re-Reading Harper Lee since Watchman
Michele Reutter
University of Tennessee Press, 2020
Although Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird has attracted a great deal of scholarly and popular attention due to its engaging
narrative and broad appeal to a sense of justice, little has been done to examine the modern classic through the lens of Lee’s controversial “lost” novel Go Set a Watchman, published unexpectedly a year before the author’s death. In Mockingbird Grows Up: Re-Reading Harper Lee since Watchman, Cheli Reutter and Jonathan S. Cullick assemble a team of scholars to take on the task of interpreting, contextualizing, and deconstructing To Kill a Mockingbird in the wake of Go Set a Watchman. The essays contained in this groundbreaking volume cover a range of literary topics, such as race, sexuality, language, and reading contexts. Critically, the volume revisits the question of African American characterization in Lee’s work and reexamines the development of Atticus Finch, a character long believed to be an exemplar of justice and virtue in Lee’s fiction. And perhaps most imperative, the editors take on questions regarding the publication of Go Set a Watchman, and Holly Blackford contributes an essay that places Go Set a Watchman within the pantheon of American literature.

Literary scholars, educators, and those interested in southern literature will appreciate the new light this publication sheds on a classic American novel. Mockingbird Grows Up offers a deeper understanding of a canonical American work and prepares a new generation to engage with Harper Lee’s appealing prose, complex characters, and influential metaphors.
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Mockingbird Passing
Closeted Traditions and Sexual Curiosities in Harper Lee's Novel
Holly Blackford
University of Tennessee Press, 2011

How often does a novel earn its author both the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to Harper Lee by George W. Bush in 2007, and a spot on a list of “100 best gay and lesbian novels”? Clearly, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee’s Pulitzer Prize–winning tale of race relations and coming of age in Depression-era Alabama, means many different things to many different people. In Mockingbird Passing, Holly Blackford invites the reader to view Lee’s beloved novel in parallel with works by other iconic American writers—from Emerson, Whitman, Stowe, and Twain to James, Wharton, McCullers, Capote, and others. In the process, she locates the book amid contesting literary traditions while simultaneously exploring the rich ambiguities that define its characters.

Blackford finds the basis of Mockingbird’s broad appeal in its ability to embody the mainstream culture of romantics like Emerson and social reform writers like Stowe, even as alternative canons—southern gothic, deadpan humor, queer literatures, regional women’s novels—lurk in its subtexts. Central to her argument is the notion of “passing”: establishing an identity that conceals the inner self so that one can function within a closed social order. For example, the novel’s narrator, Scout, must suppress her natural tomboyishness to become a “lady.” Meanwhile, Scout’s father, Atticus Finch, must contend with competing demands of thoughtfulness, self-reliance, and masculinity that ultimately stunt his effectiveness within an unjust society. Blackford charts the identity dilemmas of other key characters—the mysterious Boo Radley, the young outsider Dill (modeled on Lee’s lifelong friend Truman Capote), the oppressed victim Tom Robinson—
in similarly intriguing ways. Queer characters cannot pass unless, like the narrator, Miss Maudie, and Cal, they split into the “modest double life.”

In uncovering To Kill a Mockingbird’s lively conversation with a diversity of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers and tracing the equally diverse journeys of its characters, Blackford offers a myriad of fresh insights into why the novel has retained its appeal for so many readers for over fifty years. At once Victorian, modern, and postmodern, Mockingbird passes in many canons.

Holly Blackford, an associate professor of English at Rutgers University–Camden, has published extensively in the fields of American literature and children’s literature.

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front cover of Modernizing Mountaineer
Modernizing Mountaineer
People, Power, Planning Appalachia
David E. Whisnant
University of Tennessee Press, 1994

front cover of Momma's Lost Piano
Momma's Lost Piano
A Memoir
David Madden
University of Tennessee Press, 2023
When she is seventeen, Emily Merritt’s beloved father gives her the piano she has always wanted. A few days later, having lost his job, he sells Emily’s piano and moves the family out of its two-story house in Cleveland, Ohio, to his mother’s three-room house in his hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee.

The loss of her piano casts a shadow over Emily’s life in Knoxville, a city she could never love. Throughout the rest of her life, Emily longs to return to Cleveland, where she had an idyllic youth with many boyfriends and girlfriends and was, above all, a good piano student. Her life becomes like that of a nomad, moving from house to house and from job to job.
Her great love of life is expressed by dancing in highway honky-tonks, along with her six beautiful girlfriends. After divorcing her lovable, alcoholic husband, Emily falls deeply in love with troubled married men. She doesn’t enjoy whiskey or smoking, but she’s not a churchgoer. She raises three boys in poverty. A fourth son dies soon after birth. Oldest Dickie becomes a life-long petty conman, but little brother John, known as “Sunshine,” becomes a legendary rescuer of wayward boys and girls. Jerry, the middle brother, becomes a merchant seaman, a soldier, and finally a professor and successful writer.

Rather than a chronological narrative, Madden employs an impressionistic style that enables readers to experience Emily’s memories as he imagines them. In sharply focused scenes, Madden evokes the colorful expressions of the articulate, witty woman he has spent all his life listening to—and this memoir will inspire readers to listen eagerly, too.
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front cover of The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It
The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It
The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson
Jo Ann Gibson Robinson
University of Tennessee Press, 1987
Histories of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956 typically focus on Rose Parks, who refused to yield her bus seat to a white man, and on a young Martin Luther King Jr., who became the spokesman for the black community organization set up to pursue a boycott of Montgomery's segregated city buses. In an important revision of the traditional account, this extraordinary personal memoir reveals an earlier and more important role played by a group of middle-class black Montgomery women in creating the boycott.

As head of the Women's Political Council, the most active and assertive black civic organization in the City, Jo Ann Robinson was centrally involved in planning for a boycott far in advance and was able to immediately initiate it the evening Rosa Parks was arrested. Robinson also took part in curcial but ultimately unsuccessful negotiations with white officials both before and during the protest. Her proud, moving narrative vividly portrays her colleagues in the struggle, their strategies and decisions, and evokes the complex emotional currents in Montgomery during the boycott.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott ignited the civil rights movement and has always been vitally important in southern history and African American history. This seminal publication, named to Wall Street Journal's top ten list of book on the civil rights movement, has long been a milestone publication in understanding America's complicated racial history.
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Monuments to the Lost Cause
Women, Art, And The Landscapes Of Southern Memory
Cynthia Mills
University of Tennessee Press, 2003
This richly illustrated collection of essays, reissued in paperback with a new foreword by Karen L. Cox, examines Confederate memorials from Monument Avenue to Stone Mountain and explores how each monument, with its associated public rituals, testifies to the romanticized narrative of the American Civil War known as the Lost Cause. Several of the fourteen essays highlight the creative leading role played by women’s groups in memorialization, while others explore the alternative ways in which people outside white southern culture wrote their very different histories on the southern landscape. The contributors – who include Karen L. Cox, Richard Guy Wilson, Catherine W. Bishir, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, and William M.S. Ramussen – trace the origins, objectives, and changing consequences of Confederate monuments over time and the dynamics of individuals and organizations that sponsored them. Thus these essays extend the growing literature on the rhetoric of the Lost Cause by shifting the focus to the realm of the visual. They are especially relevant in the present day when Confederate symbols and monuments continue to play a central role in a public – and often emotionally charged – debate about how the South’s past should be remembered.
[more]

front cover of More American than Southern
More American than Southern
Kentucky, Slavery, and the War for an American Ideology, 1828-1861
Gary Matthews
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
When Fort Sumter fell to Confederate troops in April 1861, most states quickly declared their allegiances to the North or South. Kentucky, however, assumed an antiwar posture that outlasted Fort Sumter by five months, begrudgingly joining the Union cause only when Confederate troops marched into the state and seized the town of Columbus. With its hesitancy to make an immediate commitment and faced with the conflicting sentiments of its people, Kentucky stood as a microcosm of the nation’s dilemma. In the first comprehensive examination of Kentucky’s secession crisis in nearly ninety years, Gary R. Matthews examines the antebellum social, economic, and political issues that distinguished Kentucky from the rest of the slave and border states, identifying it instead with a national perspective and its own peculiar form of Unionism.
            On the eve of the Civil War, Kentucky’s affinity for the South was based on historical and cultural similarities, including the presence of slavery and a powerful “master class.” However, the planter class that dominated early Kentucky was supplanted in the 1830s by an urban middle class that challenged both the need for slavery and the authority of the master class. Matthews analyzes the dichotomy of these two groups, examines emancipation efforts in Kentucky, and explores the intricacies of Whig politics to show how Kentucky differed from the “southern” model in significant ways. He also explains how geographical components, most importantly the southern Appalachian Mountains and the Ohio-Mississippi River system, helped define Kentucky’s singular role in antebellum America.
            As Matthews shows, Kentuckians desired both Union and slavery, and saw secession as a threat to both. The state’s unique political and economic identities had been established long before the sectional crisis, and its self-interests could be best served in a national as opposed to a sectional environment. By choosing neutrality and then Unionism, the Kentucky of 1861 proved it was more American than southern.
 
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front cover of More Than A Muckraker
More Than A Muckraker
Ida Tarbell's Lifetime Journalism
Robert C., Jr. Kochersberger
University of Tennessee Press, 1996

front cover of Mount Le Conte
Mount Le Conte
Kenneth Wise
University of Tennessee Press, 2016

In print for the first time in fifty years, Mount Le Conte is a reissue of the important 1966 self-published memoir by Paul J. Adams (1901–1985), a well-known Tennessee naturalist and the first custodian of the Smoky Mountain’s majestic summit in the years before the area was declared a national park.

Appointed custodian of Mount Le Conte in 1925 by the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association, Adams went to work immediately and spent a year making the camp suitable for overnight visitors. Mount Le Conte, a massive mile-high formation extending five miles from the main divide of the Great Smoky Mountains, with its rugged landscapes, rushing streams, and fecund forests, was considered a prime showplace in efforts to establish the Smokies as a national park.

In addition to an extensive introduction, the editors have augmented the original text of Mount Le Conte with several photographs and sketches gleaned from Adams’s personal papers, resulting in a fuller, more complete reconstruction of Adams’s role in establishing the camp that would later come to be known as Le Conte Lodge.

An important source on the fascinating history of Mount Le Conte in the pre-Park era, this book is a companion to the recently published Smoky Jack: The Adventures of a Dog and his Master on Mount Le Conte (University of Tennessee Press, 2016).

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Mountain Holiness
A Photographic Narrative
Deborah Vansau Mccauley
University of Tennessee Press, 2003
“A remarkable achievement. Mountain Holiness combines Warren Brunner’s poignant and sensitive photographs with a succinct narrative by Deborah McCauley, the preeminent authority on Appalachian mountain religion. This is a landmark study that sheds light on one of the most neglected subjects in American religion.”—Randall Balmer, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of American Religion, Barnard College, Columbia University

Hidden deep in the hills of central Appalachia, tiny churches have quietly carried on their worship practices in an unbroken chain for two centuries. Harking back to the camp-meeting movement of the early nineteenth century, independent Holiness churches are considered by some to represent Appalachia's single largest religious tradition. Yet it is one that remains uncounted in any census of American church life because of the lack of formal institutions or written records. Through vivid images and perceptive words, this book documents this rich history, showing how these independent churches have sustained both faith and followers.
The authors spent five years interviewing and photographing Appalachia's Holiness people and participating in their services. From thousands of photographs, they have selected nearly three hundred fifty images for this large-format volume. Here are small one-room churches—many built to hold no more than a dozen people—scattered in the hills of Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Yet Warren Brunner's striking images depict not only buildings but also the people and their faith practices: river baptisms and homecomings, serpent handling and tent evangelism, radio preaching and special holiday services.

Deborah McCauley and Laura Porter's text combines descriptions of the pictures with the history of the churches and interviews with members. They create a representative window into the material and oral culture of central Appalachia's independent Holiness heritage. Mountain Holiness is a book that will fascinate anyone who cares about these traditions, as well as anyone concerned with the preservation of America's most vital folkways.

About the Authors: Deborah Vansau McCauley is a leading authority on
religion in Appalachia and is the author of Appalachian Mountain Religion: A History.
Laura E. Porter became familiar with Appalachian religion while pursuing a Master of Divinity degree at Union Theological Seminary; she is presently a computer consultant for religious and relief organizations.

Warren E. Brunner is a renowned photographer of Appalachia who has lived and worked in Berea, Kentucky, for nearly half a century. He has published three collections of photographs of the region. Patricia Parker Brunner, his wife, is an ordained Southern Baptist deacon who holds an M.A. in biblical studies.
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Mountain Homespun
Frances Louisa Goodrich
University of Tennessee Press, 2010

“Mountain Homespun will be of special interest to those studying southern Appalachian handicrafts, the 1890s handicraft revival, and northern Protestant missionary work in turn-of-the-century Appalachia.” —North Carolina Historical Review

“Mountain Homespun is much more than a memoir. It offers unrivaled specific information on the processes of mountain crafts—not only on weaving, spinning, and dyeing, the author’s primary interest, but also on basketry, quilting, and other pursuits. All in all, the book is an important publishing event.”
—Berea College Newsletter
 
“This is a wonderful book. It belongs at the bedside of every spinner and weaver everywhere.” —Jude Daurelle, Handwoven

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Mountain Masters
Slavery Sectional Crisis Western North Carolina
John C. Inscoe
University of Tennessee Press, 1996

front cover of Mountain Rebels
Mountain Rebels
East Tennessee Confederates 1860-1870
W. Todd Groce
University of Tennessee Press, 1999
“Groce offers a gracefully written, impressively researched narrative account of the experience of East Tennessee Confederates during the Civil War era. His analysis raises provocative questions about the socioeconomic foundations of Civil War sympathies in the Mountain South.”—Robert Tracy McKenzie, University of Washington
“Scholars of Appalachia’s Civil War have long awaited Todd Groce’s study of East Tennessee secessionists. I am pleased to report that this ground-breaking study of Southern Mountain Confederates was worth the wait.”—Kenneth Noe, State University of West Georgia

A bastion of Union support during the Civil War, East Tennessee was also home to Confederate sympathizers who took up the Southern cause until the bitter end. Yet historians have viewed these mountain rebels as scarcely different from other Confederates or as an aberration in the region's Unionism. Often they are simply ignored.
W. Todd Groce corrects this distorted view of East Tennessee's antebellum development and wartime struggle. He paints a clearer picture of the region’s Confederates than has previously been available, examining why they chose secession over union and revealing why they have become so invisible to us today. Drawing extensively on primary sources—newspapers, diaries, government reports—Groce allows the voices of these mountain rebels finally to be heard.

Groce explains the economic forces and the family and political ties to the Deep South that motivated the East Tennessee Confederates reluctantly to join the fight for Southern independence. Caught in a war they neither sought nor started, they were trapped between an unfriendly administration in Richmond and a hostile Union majority in their midst. When the fighting was over and they returned home to face their vengeful Unionist neighbors, many were forced to flee, contributing to the postwar economic decline of the region.
Placing the story in a broad context, Groce provides an overview of the region's economy and explains the social origins of secessionist sympathies. He also presents a collective profile of one hundred high-ranking Confederate officers from East Tennessee to show how they were representative of the rising commercial and financial leadership in the region.

Mountain Rebels intertwines economic, political, military, and social history to present a poignant tale of defeat, suffering, and banishment. By piecing together this previously untold story, it fills a void in Southern history, Civil War history, and Appalachian studies.

The Author: W. Todd Groce is executive director of the Georgia Historical Society.
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Mountaineers In Gray
The Nineteenth Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment, C. S. A.
John D. Fowler
University of Tennessee Press, 2004
On April 26, 1865, on a farm just outside Durham, North Carolina, General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered the remnants of the Army of Tennessee to his longtime foe, General William T. Sherman. Johnston’s surrender ended the unrelenting Federal drive through the Carolinas and dashed any hope for Southern independence. Among the thirty thousand or so ragged Confederates who soon received their paroles were seventy-eight men from the Nineteenth Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Originally consisting of over one thousand men, the unit had—through four years of sickness, injury, desertion, and death—been reduced to a tiny fraction of its former strength.

Organized from volunteer companies from the upper and lower portions of East Tennessee, the men of the Nineteenth represented an anomaly—Confederates in the midst of the largest Unionist stronghold of the South. Why these East Tennesseans chose to defy their neighbors, risking their lives and fortunes in pursuit of Southern independence, lacks a simple answer. John D. Fowler finds that a significant number of the Nineteenth’s members belonged to their region’s local elite—old, established families engaged in commercial farming or professional occupations. The influence of this elite, along with community pressure, kinship ties, fear of invasion, and a desire to protect republican liberty, generated Confederate sympathy amongst East Tennessee secessionists, including the members of the Nineteenth.

Utilizing an exhaustive exploration of primary source materials, the author creates a new model for future regimental histories—a model that goes beyond “bugles and bullets” to probe the motivations for enlistment, the socioeconomic backgrounds, the wartime experiences, and the postwar world of these unique Confederates. The Nineteenth served from the beginning of the conflict to its conclusion, marching and fighting in every major engagement of the Army of Tennessee except Perryville. Fowler uses this extensive service to explore the soldiers’ effectiveness as fighting men, the thrill and fear of combat, the harsh and often appalling conditions of camp life, the relentless attrition through disease, desertion, and death in battle, and the specter of defeat that haunted the Confederate forces in the West. This study also provides insight into the larger issues of Confederate leadership, strategy and tactics, medical care, prison life, the erosion of Confederate morale, and Southern class relations.  The resulting picture of the war is gritty, real, and all too personal. If the Civil War is indeed a mosaic of “little wars,” this, then, is the Nineteenth’s war.

John D. Fowler is assistant professor of history at Kennesaw State University. He is the recipient of the Mrs. Simon Baruch University Award for the best manuscript in Civil War History (2002).
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Murphy Station
A Memoir from the American South
David Donovan
University of Tennessee Press, 2010

“Murphy Station is a well-told coming-of-age story. It conveys a deep sense of place, and articulates the everyday ways in which the etiquette of Jim Crow was learned and enacted, and eventually questioned and even challenged.”
—Jason Sokol, author of There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–1975

In the southern Georgia of 1950, Murphy Station is a community marked only by two country stores, two Baptist churches, and a graveyard. Farming is the way of life, and segregation is in full force. Welcome to Deep Dixie.

David Donovan is a young white boy growing up in Murphy Station where even the best farmers are cash poor, and those who work for them, usually blacks, are poorer still. In adult conversation, the main topics are weather, crops, and politics. Within the last category, it’s agreed that the main threats facing America are two: communism and integration. So far as young Dave knows, this isn’t unusual, but already there are changes afoot. In this richly detailed memoir, laced with both humor and tragedy, we see how those changes affect Dave in subtle but ultimately profound ways.
Coming of age in a world with the axiom “no boy a chicken, no man a coward,” Dave has the sorts of boyhood adventures common to the rural South: exploits with firearms, encounters with angry animals, challenges from friends, and a growing interest in girls. As he has these adventures, he also works in the field alongside black farmhands, some of whom teach him vital lessons about the realities of their lives—lessons that begin to challenge the prejudices and preconceptions of his time and place.

By the late 1950s the civil rights movement has become a major force in the South; yet, as David enters high school in 1960 the customs of segregation still hold sway, persisting even when he leaves for college. In his first year away from home, he witnesses the national trauma of the Kennedy assassination, which blunts the promises of Camelot. In Vietnam a few years later, he sees those promises collapse entirely. Returning in 1970 to a Murphy Station much changed from what it was twenty years earlier, David Donovan finds himself transformed as well.

David Donovan is the pseudonym of Terry Turner, professor emeritus of urology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of more than 120 basic science articles on male reproductive biology and of a previous book, Once a Warrior King: Memoirs of an Officer in Vietnam.

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front cover of Museums and Memory
Museums and Memory
Margaret Wilson Huber
University of Tennessee Press, 2011


This volume brings together contributions from a variety of anthropologists working in a variety of fields, including archaeology, cultural anthropology, linguistics, and ethnohistory, in order to reflect on the importance of memory and its public presentation. The intense interest surrounding the 400th anniversary of Jamestown in 2007 was the immediate occasion for this theme, and the volume has several chapters on issues devoted to memory in the U.S. South. While museums often present themselves as neutral settings for the interpretation of artifacts, they are deeply embedded in cultural, political, and social situations that anthropologists are in a unique position to evaluate. Moreover, the volume is noteworthy for including analyses of more informal sites of memory, including oral history, that connect local pasts and futures. A sophisticated, multilayered examination of a now trendy topic in anthropology, this work seeks to question widely held notions about collective memory, always reminding us that museums and monuments inform each of us of the past in some particular way and insist that we add it to our consciousness—that we remember it.

Margaret Williamson Huber is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Mary Washington. She is the author of Powhatan Lord of Life and Death: Command and Consent in Seventeenth-Century Virginia.

Southern Anthropological Society Proceedings, no. 39

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front cover of My Dearest Lilla
My Dearest Lilla
Letters Home from Civil War General Jacob D. Cox
Gene Schmiel
University of Tennessee Press, 2023
Jacob D. Cox experienced more facets of the Civil War than most officers: by land and sea, in both Western and Eastern Theaters, among the inner political circles of Ohio and Washington, DC, in territories hostile and friendly, amidst legal conflicts both civilian and military, and in the last campaigns in Tennessee and North Carolina. The Union general capitalized on his experience by penning his two-volume Military Reminiscences of the Civil War, one of the war’s finest memoirs and arguably the best by a nonprofessional soldier, as well as Atlanta and The Battle of Franklin, both definitive studies for nearly a century. In 2012, Gene Schmiel, Cox’s biographer, learned of a cache in the Oberlin College archives of 213 letters Cox wrote to his wife, Helen, during the war. Schmiel recognized these documents as a ready resource for Cox as he wrote his histories, and many stand as first drafts of Cox’s analyses of the military and sociopolitical events of the day.

Helen Finney Cox (her husband affectionately referred to her as “Lilla”) was a mother of six and the daughter of Oberlin College president Charles Finney. These intimate and insightful wartime letters show both the fondness Cox had for his spouse and his respect for her as an intellectual equal. To Helen, the stoic, introverted statesman revealed—as he did to no one else—his inner thoughts and concerns, presenting observant, lucid, and informative reports and analyses of the war, his changing life, and his ambitions. This collection illustrates the life of a Gilded Age Renaissance man as he made the transition from untested soldier to respected general and statesman.
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The Myles Horton Reader
Education For Social Change
Myles Horton
University of Tennessee Press, 2003
Cornel West has called Myles Horton “an indescribably courageous and visionary white brother from Tennessee.” Horton (1905-1990) cofounded the Highlander Folk School (now known as the Highlander Research and Education Center), an institution controversial from its beginnings. During the early labor movement, the Highlander School sponsored programs for both union organizers and rank-and-file members; the staff of Highlander saw education as a way to approach and work through problems. Issues of race were always important to the school, which became a beacon for the civil rights movement; its summer institutes included such influential participants as Rosa parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Andrew young. His commitment to education as an agent of social change allowed Horton to see himself as both a teacher and a student, as one who could learn from others as well as help others learn. The Myles Horton Reader presents essays, speeches, and interviews, giving the reader a grounding in the pathbreaking work of an extraordinary man.

The editor: Dale Jacobs is assistant professor of English and director of composition at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. His work has appeared in Composition Studies, Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, National Writing Project Quarterly, and other publications.
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front cover of Mythic Black Fiction
Mythic Black Fiction
Transformation Of History
Jane Campbell
University of Tennessee Press, 1986


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