Dr. Chris Walsh’s scholarship has resulted in a new study on one of America’s leading authors. In the Wake of the Sun: Navigating the Southern Works of Cormac McCarthy offers close textual analysis of all of McCarthy’s Southern works along with an overview of the notable critical responses to them. The book is designed for use by scholars, teachers, and students at all levels.
McCarthy’s works set in the desert Southwest have received substantial critical and commercial acclaim. However, his Appalachian texts—which include two short stories written as an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee, five novels (including the Pulitzer Prize winner The Road), a play, and a screenplay—rival the Southwestern works in terms of their aesthetic achievement and complexity. In the Wake of the Sun introduces readers, scholars, and students to the pertinent themes in each text while also walking them through the most significant critical dialogues surrounding the texts.
Born 130 years ago in the heart of Mississippi, Charlie Patton (c. 1891–1934) is considered by many to be a father of the Delta blues. With his bullish baritone voice and his fluid slide guitar touch, Patton established songs like “Pony Blues,” “A Spoonful Blues,” and “High Water Everywhere” in the blues lexicon and, through his imitators, in American music. But over the decades, his contributions to blues music have been overshadowed in popularity by those of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and other mid-century bluesmen and women who’ve experienced a resurgence in their music. King of the Delta Blues Singers, originally published in 1988, began a small renaissance in blues and Patton research and set a new scholarly precedent touching even the spelling his name—which, to Patton himself, was "Charlie," not the "Charley" of the early records. And now, with the wide availability of Patton’s complete discography in multiple formats, this revised second edition brings the legend of Charlie Patton into a clarity of detail that was previously impossible.
Gayle Dean Wardlow and the late Stephen Calt (1946–2010) originally probed Patton’s career in the Mississippi Delta, his early performances and recordings, and his musical legacy that continues to influence today’s guitarists and performers, including such musicians as Jack White and Larkin Poe. For this second edition, Wardlow and Edward Komara refined the text and rewrote major sections, updating them with new scholarship on Patton and Delta blues. And finally, Komara has added a new afterword bringing Patton into the contemporary blues conversation and introducing numerous musical examples for the modern researcher and musician.
The second edition of King of the Delta Blues Singers will further cement Patton’s legacy among important blues musicians, and it will be of interest to anyone absorbed in the beginnings of the Delta blues and music biographies.
Southerners have a reputation as storytellers, as a people fond of telling about family, community, and the southern way of life. A compelling book about some of those stories and their consequences, One Homogeneous People examines the forging and the embracing of southern “pan-whiteness” as an ideal during the volatile years surrounding the turn of the twentieth century.
Trent Watts argues that despite real and signifcant divisions within the South along lines of religion, class, and ethnicity, white southerners—especially in moments of perceived danger—asserted that they were one people bound by a shared history, a love of family, home, and community, and an uncompromising belief in white supremacy. Watts explores how these southerners explained their region and its people to themselves and other Americans through narratives found in a variety of forms and contexts: political oratory, fiction, historiography, journalism, correspondence, literary criticism, and the built environment.
Watts examines the assertions of an ordered, homogeneous white South (and the threats to it) in the unsettling years following the end of Reconstruction through the early 1900s. In three extended essays on related themes of race and power, the book demonstrates the remarkable similarity of discourses of pan-whiteness across formal and generic lines. In an insightful concluding essay that focuses on an important but largely unexamined institution, Mississippi’s Neshoba County Fair, Watts shows how narratives of pan-white identity initiated in the late nineteenth century have persisted to the present day.
Written in a lively style, One Homogeneous People is a valuable addition to the scholarship on southern culture and post-Reconstruction southern history.
The harmonies of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the measured brush strokes of painter Lloyd Branson, the intricate basket weaving of Maggie Murphy, the influence of the Agrarian literary movement, and the theater barnstorming of actor-manager Sol Smith—such are the sounds, images, and expressions of Tennessee’s arts legacy.
Through its interlocking themes of tradition and innovation, A History of Tennessee Arts: Creating Traditions, Expanding Horizons traces the story of the arts in Tennessee from its formal, more academic side to its vernacular expressions of culture, self, and community. Both the formal and the vernacular contribute to an understanding of what the arts mean to Tennesseans and, in turn, what Tennesseans have to offer the culture of the state, the region, and the nation. A history of the arts in the Volunteer State becomes, then, an evolving barometer of not only where we have been as a culture, but also how we have matured as a society.
This richly illustrated book, cosponsored by the Tennessee Arts Commission and the Tennessee Historical Society, covers the varieties of art in Tennessee in five parts. The visual arts and architecture section includes chapters on vernacular and high style architecture, sculpture, painting and photography, while the section on craft arts celebrates folk arts such as woodcraft, silversmithing, pottery, and textiles. The section on Tennessee’s rich literary history includes such writers as James Agee, Robert Penn Warren, and Evelyn Scott, while the performing arts are represented by a wealth of storytellers along with two centuries of stage history. Finally, Tennessee is home to—and originator of—much of the music that we know as distinctively American. Contributors to the music section examine gospel, blues, rock, soul, and, of course, country music.
From prehistoric cave paintings to the “cow punk” of Jason and the Scorchers, from the elegant capitol building of William Strickland to Ballet Memphis, and from the unique cantilevered barns of East Tennessee to the chronicles of Alex Haley, the arts in Tennessee truly celebrate traditions and strive to expand our horizons.
The Editor: Carroll Van West is director of the Center for Historic Preservation at Middle Tennessee State University and senior editor of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly.
Peace in the Mountains analyzes student activism at the University of Pittsburgh, Ohio University, and West Virginia University during the Vietnam War era. Drawing from a wide variety of sources including memoirs, periodicals, archival manuscript collections, and college newspapers such as The Pitt News, author Thomas Weyant tracks the dynamics of a student-led campus response to the war in real time and outside the purview of the national media. Along the way, he musters evidence for an emerging social and political conscience among the student bodies of northern Appalachia, citing politics on campus, visions of patriotism and dissent, campus citizenship, antiwar activism and draft resistance, campus issues, and civil rights as major sites of contention and exploration.
Through this regional chronicle of student activism during the Vietnam War era, Weyant holds to one reoccurring and unifying theme: citizenship. His account shows that political activism and civic engagement were by no means reserved to students at elite colleges; on the contrary, Appalachian youth were giving voice to the most vexing questions of local and national responsibility, student and citizen identity, and the role of the university in civil society. Rich in primary source material from student op-eds to administrative documents, Peace in the Mountains draws a new map of student activism in the 1960s and early 1970s. Weyant’s study is a thoughtful and engaging addition to both Appalachian studies and the historiography of the Vietnam War era and is sure to appeal not only to specialists—Appalachian scholars, political historians, political scientists, and sociologists—but to college students and general readers as well.
A unique collection of scholarly essays and primary documents, Votes for Women! brings into sharp focus the suffrage battles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not only does the book examine the struggle at the national level but it looks in depth at how the drama played out in the South and in Tennessee, which in 1920 became the pivotal thirty-sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment—thereby making woman suffrage the law of the land.
The volume contains six essays by leading scholars on topics ranging from the strategies suffragists used to raise the national consciousness to the participation of African-American women in the movement. Also included are discussions of anti-suffragist beliefs and literature, the obstacles to woman suffrage in the South posed by white supremacy and state’s rights, and the ways in which women have used their political power since receiving the vote.
A special feature of the book is its compilation of primary materials—articles, speeches, cartoons, and broadsides—representing the viewpoints of suffragists and anti suffragists alike. Among these documents are the previously unpublished memoirs of the Tennessee anti-suffrage leader Josephine Anderson Pearson and a chapter on Tennessee from the 1923 book by Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Roger Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics, which contains a fascinating firsthand account of the final, no-holds-barred battle over woman suffrage in Nashville during the summer of 1920.
Published to coincide with the seventy-fifth anniversary of the suffragists’ victory, this book, at once stirring and thoughtful, commemorates the courage of those involved in the suffrage movement and recaptures the intensity of emotions and ideology on both sides.
This third edition of Knoxville, Tennessee: A Mountain City in the New South includes a new preface and a valuable new chapter covering the period from the death of Cas Walker to the end of the administration of Madeline Rogero, Knoxville’s first female mayor.
Wheeler argues that, until very recently, like Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby (1925), Knoxvillians had fabricated for themselves a false history, portraying themselves and their city as the almost impotent victims of historical forces that they could neither alter nor control. The result of this myth has been a collective mentality of near-helplessness against the powerful forces of isolation, poverty, and even change itself. But Knoxville’s past is far more complicated than that, for the city contained abundant material goods and human talent that could have been used to propel Knoxville into the ranks of the premier cities of the New South—if those assets had not slipped through the fingers of both the leaders and the populace. In all, Knoxville’s history is the story of colliding forces—country and city, North and South, the poor and the elites as well as the story of colorful figures, including Perez Dickenson, Edward Sanford, George Dempster, Carlene Malone, Bill Haslam, and Madeline Rogero, among many, many more.
While challenges related to public health, income inequality, racism, and the environment remain, Wheeler detects the possibility that the myth Knoxvillians have clung to may finally be fading. Downtown development by vibrant local entrepreneurs, a government more responsive than ever before, and an economy that endured a severe economic downturn only to turn out brighter than expected are all symptoms of a Knoxville that may be ready to take its place in the rising urbanism of twenty-first-century America.
While Allen Wier is perhaps best known as a prizewinning novelist, he is also a master of the short story, an art he has perfected over four decades. Late Night, Early Morning contains twenty-two of Wier’s tales: the stories in his first collection (Things About to Disappear), six uncollected stories, and seven stories that became part of his four novels. Richly textured and often lyrical, with intense images and diverse subjects, these stories feature indelible characters who imprint themselves onto readers’ minds. A man with no family finds the abandoned corpse of an infant and adopts the dead baby as his son. A Texas laborer, while repairing hen houses, learns that the stench of the egg ranch is the smell of money. In 1862 Louisiana, a runaway slave comes face to face with a white sharecropper’s wife who may turn him in, but something unexpected momentarily unites them. An American widow in Mexico as a photographer meets a florist from Texas who widens her angle of view. After discovering an underground cavern, a man lives his entire life in an imagined world shaped from stalactites and stalagmites.
Allen Wier’s skillfully written and compassionate stories reveal the shimmering moments in day-to-day life
In the 1960s and 1970s, Randy Wood was a forerunner in the vintage instrument industry. Known as the instrument repairman to the stars, the list of Wood’s clients reads like a Hall of Fame roster: Elvis Presley, Eric Clapton, Johnny Cash, Chet Atkins, Emmylou Harris, Billy Gibbons, Bill Monroe, Keith Richards, Roy Acuff, Ricky Skaggs, and Hank Williams Jr. . . . to name a few. In Randy Wood: The Lore of the Luthier, Daniel Wile traces the life and work of a man who quietly influenced a hidden history of bluegrass and country music.
In his twenties, Wood vowed to avoid complacency in his work. What started simply as a quest to find fulfillment turned into a career that has shaped a generation of musicians, professional and amateur alike. Through his incredible gift for lutherie, Wood brought cherished pre-WWII instruments back to life, many of which were considered beyond repair. He crafted his own instruments as well, based on what he learned from vintage instruments, and these instruments found their way into the hands of some of the most renowned musicians, thanks in part to Wood’s strategic location in Nashville during the resurgence of country music in the 1970s. Humble, unassuming, and unfazed by the presence of celebrities, Wood has spent his life devoted to building and repairing stringed instruments.
Wood also built community. After tiring of big-city Nashville, he retreated to the Georgia coast, where his home shop became a hub of bluegrass activity. He eventually opened a new shop near Savannah, where a new generation of friends and strangers can come in, visit, and pick a little. Randy’s stories, complemented with those of his friends and family, create a compelling picture of a modest man with a talent for his craft, a genuine care for people, and the courage to follow his passion.
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).
Widely regarded as the crown jewel of the Great Smoky Mountains, Mount Le Conte harbors the greatest concentration of notable geological features in all of the Smokies. This unique book tells the history of the mountain, offering visitors a greater appreciation of its scenic splendor.
Kenneth Wise and Ron Petersen combine their intimate knowledge of Le Conte with a wealth of scientific and historical information. Following introductory coverage of the mountain’s geologic history and human exploration, they follow the six main trails up the mountain—Alum Cave, Bullhead, Rainbow Falls, Trillium Gap, Brushy Mountain, and the Boulevard—and reveal each one to be not merely a path but also a rich source of historical and personal testimony. A final chapter covers the distinguishing features of the summit itself.
Along each route, the authors explain how the trail was developed and provide background for well-known landmarks, from Inspiration Point to Huggins Hell. They offer informative descriptions of the plants and wildlife indigenous to Mount Le Conte as well as observations on the effects of environmental changes on the landscape.
The book is illustrated with dozens of photographs, many of historic interest.
Kenneth Wise is an associate professor at the John C. Hodges Library and the author of Hiking Trails of the Great Smoky Mountains. Ron Petersen is a distinguished professor in the Department of Botany at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
A longtime agitator against war and social injustice, Lawrence Wittner has been tear-gassed, threatened by police with drawn guns, charged by soldiers with fixed bayonets, spied upon by the U.S. government, arrested, and purged from his job for political -reasons. To say that this teacher-historian-activist has led an interesting life is a considerable understatement.
In this absorbing memoir, Wittner traces the dramatic course of a life and career that took him from a Brooklyn boyhood in the 1940s and ’50s to an education at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin to the front lines of peace activism, the fight for racial equality, and the struggles of the labor movement. He details his family background, which included the bloody anti-Semitic pogroms of late-nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and chronicles his long teaching career, which comprised positions at a small black college in Virginia, an elite women’s liberal arts college north of New York City, and finally a permanent home at the Albany campus of the State University of New York. Throughout, he packs the narrative with colorful vignettes describing such activities as fighting racism in Louisiana and Mississippi during the early 1960s, collaborating with peace-oriented intellectuals in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, and leading thousands of antinuclear demonstrators through the streets of Hiroshima. As the book also reveals, Wittner’s work as an activist was matched by scholarly achievements that made him one of the world’s foremost authorities on the history of the peace and nuclear disarmament movements—a research specialty that led to revealing encounters with such diverse figures as Norman Thomas, the Unabomber, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Caspar Weinberger, and David Horowitz.
A tenured professor and renowned author who has nevertheless lived in tension with the broader currents of his society, Lawrence Wittner tells an engaging personal story that includes some of the most turbulent and significant events of recent history.
Lawrence S. Wittner, emeritus professor of history at the University at Albany, SUNY, is the author of numerous scholarly works, including the award-winning three-volume Struggle Against the Bomb. Among other awards and honors, he has received major grants or fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Aspen Institute, the United States Institute of Peace, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
A longtime agitator against war and social injustice, Lawrence Wittner has been tear-gassed, threatened by police with drawn guns, charged by soldiers with fixed bayonets, spied upon by the U.S. government, arrested, and purged from his job for political -reasons. To say that this teacher-historian-activist has led an interesting life is a considerable understatement.
In this absorbing memoir, Wittner traces the dramatic course of a life and career that took him from a Brooklyn boyhood in the 1940s and ’50s to an education at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin to the front lines of peace activism, the fight for racial equality, and the struggles of the labor movement. He details his family background, which included the bloody anti-Semitic pogroms of late-nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and chronicles his long teaching career, which comprised positions at a small black college in Virginia, an elite women’s liberal arts college north of New York City, and finally a permanent home at the Albany campus of the State University of New York. Throughout, he packs the narrative with colorful vignettes describing such activities as fighting racism in Louisiana and Mississippi during the early 1960s, collaborating with peace-oriented intellectuals in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, and leading thousands of antinuclear demonstrators through the streets of Hiroshima. As the book also reveals, Wittner’s work as an activist was matched by scholarly achievements that made him one of the world’s foremost authorities on the history of the peace and nuclear disarmament movements—a research specialty that led to revealing encounters with such diverse figures as Norman Thomas, the Unabomber, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Caspar Weinberger, and David Horowitz.
A tenured professor and renowned author who has nevertheless lived in tension with the broader currents of his society, Lawrence Wittner tells an engaging personal story that includes some of the most turbulent and significant events of recent history.
Lawrence S. Wittner, emeritus professor of history at the University at Albany, SUNY, is the author of numerous scholarly works, including the award-winning three-volume Struggle Against the Bomb. Among other awards and honors, he has received major grants or fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Aspen Institute, the United States Institute of Peace, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
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.
“This is a splendid diary of a man and physician during the late antebellum years, sure to interest not only historians of medicine but also historians of gender, the South, and antebellum politics. . . . An exceptionally useful historical document as well as a good read.” —Steven M. Stowe, Indiana University
Elijah Millington Walker began to keep a diary midway through his medical apprenticeship in Oxford, Mississippi. He composed a lengthy preface to the diary, in which he remembered his life from the time of his family’s arrival in north Mississippi in 1834, when he was ten years old, until late 1848, when the University of Mississippi opened and Walker’s diary begins.
On one level, the diary records the life of a bachelor, chronicling the difficulties of an ambitious young physician who would like to marry but is hampered by poverty and his professional aspirations. Walker details the qualities he desires in a wife and criticizes women who do not measure up; a loyal wife, in Walker’s highly romanticized image, remains a true helpmeet even to the most debased drunkard. On another level, Walker describes various medical cases, giving readers an idea of the kinds of diseases prevalent in the lower South at mid-century, as well as their treatment by orthodox physicians. In this vivid chronicle of everyday life in antebellum Mississippi, Walker also finds space to comment on a wide range of topics that affected the state and the region, including pioneer life in north Mississippi, evangelical Protestantism, the new state university at Oxford, the threat of secession in 1849–50, Henry Clay’s Compromise of 1850, foreign affairs, and local railroad development. A strong defender of the Union at mid-century, Walker nonetheless defended slavery and distinctively Southern institutions.
A Bachelor’s Life in Antebellum Mississippi brings to the public one of the few diaries of a very intelligent yet “ordinary” man, a non-elite member of a society dominated by a planter aristocracy. The author’s frankness and flair for writing reflect a way of life not often seen; this volume will thus prove a valuable addition to the body of primary documents from the early republic.
Lynette Boney Wrenn has taught history at Memphis State University and Southwestern College. She is the author of Crisis and Commission Government in Memphis: Elite Rule in a Gilded Age City and Cinderella of the New South: A History of the Cottonseed Industry, 1855–1955. Wrenn lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.
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