front cover of Confederate Arkansas
Confederate Arkansas
The People and Policies of a Frontier State in Wartime
Michael B. Dougan
University of Alabama Press, 1990
This book fills a long standing gap in state histories dealing with the period of the Civil War in the western frontier that was Arkansas. Based on newspaper articles, legal documents, letters, diaries, reminiscences, songs, and official military reports, Dougan’s account provides a full picture of the political situation just prior to the war, and set the stage for the state’s entry into the war despite the fate that only a third of the population supported secession.
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Confederate Florida
The Road to Olustee
William H. Nulty
University of Alabama Press, 1990
A new look at the engagement at Olustee, Florida

At the end of 1863 the Federal forces in the Department of the South were tied up in siege operations against Charleston and Savannah, operations that showed little progress or promise. The commander of the Department, Major General Quincy A. Gillmore, led an expedition into Florida to recruit blacks, cut off commissary supplies headed for other parts of the Confederacy, and disrupt the railroad system within Florida. Expedition forces landed at Jacksonville on February 7, 1864.
 
The engagement at Olustee, not far from Gainesville, took place on February 20, 1864. it was the largest Civil War battle in Florida and one of the bloodiest Union defeats of the entire war. Nonetheless, because the engagement forced the Confederacy to divert 15,000 men from the thinly manned defense of Charleston and Savannah, it delayed critical reinforcement of the Army of Tennessee, which was fighting desperately to prevent the Union invasion of northwestern Georgia. Makin use of detailed maps and diagrams, Nulty presents a vivid account of this fascination Civil War effort.
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Confederate Home Front
Montgomery during the Civil War
William Warren Rogers
University of Alabama Press, 2001
With this superbly written, meticulously researched, and concisely argued study, Rogers has helped deepen our understanding of the Confederate civilian experience.

Drawing from a wealth of historic documents and personal papers, William Warren Rogers, Jr., provides a fascinating and detailed political, economic, social, and commercial history of Montgomery from 1860 to 1865. His account begins with an examination of daily life in the city before the war began-how slaves outnumbered whites, how an unvarnished frontier atmosphere prevailed on the streets despite citizens' claims to refinement, how lush crops of corn and cotton grew in fields right up to the city limits, and how class divisions were distinct and immovable.

Rogers arranges his material topically, covering the events that led to the decision for secession and Montgomery's heady days as the Confederacy's first capital; the industrialization of the city's war effort as it became a hub of activity and served as a military post; the city's business patterns and administration as it attempted to promote the Confederacy and defend itself from federal forces; and the plight of the small group of Unionists who inhabited Montgomery through the war. Rogers concludes with chapters examining the situation in Montgomery as the Confederacy unraveled and the city fell to Union troops.

The Montgomery experience offers a microcosm of life on the Confederate home front and demonstrates that citizens generally experienced the same hopes, deprivations, and tragedies that other Southerners did at this time. Rogers's well-written, comprehensive history of the wartime city makes an original contribution to Civil War homefront and community studies that should appeal to general readers and scholars alike.
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Confederate Navy Chief
Stephen R. Mallory
Joseph T. Durkin
University of Alabama Press, 2005

The book tells of Stephen R. Mallory's support of naval inventions, strategy, and ideas. It also sheds light on the the successes and failures of Jefferson Davis. Durkin gives a well-balanced biography of Mallory and his life in the Confederate navy.

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The Confederate Navy in Europe
Warren F. Spencer
University of Alabama Press, 1997

Originally published in 1984, The Confederate Navy in Europe is the first full account of the European activities of the Confederate navy during the American Civil War, including information on the Southerners who procured naval vessels in Great Britain and France, the construction of the ships, and the legal and political impact on the European governments that assisted in the Confederate cause.

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The Confederate Negro
Virginia's Craftsmen and Military Laborers, 1861-1865
James H. Brewer
University of Alabama Press, 2007

A superb work in the social history of American industry

A Gettysburg College "Top 200 Civil War Books" selection

Mayflower Award Winner for 1970

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Conflict and Carnage in Yucatán
Liberals, the Second Empire, and Maya Revolutionaries, 1855–1876
Douglas W. Richmond
University of Alabama Press, 2015
The Yucatán Peninsula has one of the longest, most multifaceted histories in the Americas. With the arrival of Europeans, native Maya with long and successful cultural and diplomatic traditions of their own had to grapple with outside forces attempting to impose new templates of life and politics on them.  Conflict and Carnage in Yucatán provides a rigorously researched study of the vexed and bloody period of 1855 to 1876, during which successive national governments implemented, replaced, and restored liberal policies.
 
Synthesizing an extensive and heterogeneous range of sources, Douglas W. Richmond covers three tumultuous political upheavals of this period. First, Mexico’s fledgling republic attempted to impose a liberal ideology at odds with traditional Maya culture on Yucatán; then, the French-backed regime of Emperor Maximilian began to reform Yucatán; and, finally, the republican forces of Benito Juárez restored the liberal hegemony. Many issues spurred resistance to these liberal governments. Instillation of free trade policies, the suppression of civil rights, and persecution of the Roman Catholic Church mobilized white opposition to liberal governors. The Mayas fought the seizure of their communal properties. A long-standing desire for regional autonomy united virtually all Yucatecans. Richmond advances the thought-provoking argument that Yucatán both fared better under Maximilian’s Second Empire than under the liberal republic and would have thrived more had the Second Empire not collapsed.
 
The most violent and bloody manifestation of these broad conflicts was the Caste War (Guerra de Castas), the longest sustained peasant revolt in Latin American history. Where other scholars have advocated the simplistic position that the war was a Maya uprising designed to reestablish a mythical past civilization, Richmond’s sophisticated recounting of political developments from 1855 to 1876 restores nuance and complexity to this pivotal time in Yucatecan history.
 
Richmond’s Conflict and Carnage in Yucatán is a welcome addition to scholarship about Mexico and Yucatán as well as about state consolidation, empire, and regionalism.
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Conflict in the Great Outdoors
Toward Understanding and Managing for Diverse Sportsmen Preferences
Hobson Bryan, Jr.
University of Alabama Press, 2008

Conflict in the Great Outdoors addresses the different orientations and behaviors within sportsmen categories. A major problem of outdoor recreation management addressed in Hobson Bryan’s work is the difficulty in identifying sportsmen subgroups having distinctive preferences and expectations as to the composition of the “quality” outdoor experience. Land-use managers and planners are faced with the problem of matching resources with more users having increasingly specific motivations. Bryan applies his theory of variations within a leisure activity by addressing what sportsmen do and why they do it in various activities such as mountain climbing, hunting, canoeing, skiing, and backpacking.

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A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks
Elites, Capitalism, and Confederate Migration to Brazil
Laura Jarnagin
University of Alabama Press, 2013
Examines the qualitative nature of capitalism’s processes through the lens of social networks

A Confluence of Transatlantic Network demonstrates how portions of interconnected trust-based kinship, business, and ideational transatlantic networks evolved over roughly a century and a half and eventually converged to engender, promote, and facilitate the migration of southern elites to Brazil in the post–Civil War era. Placing that migration in the context of the Atlantic world sharpens our understanding of the transborder dynamic of such mainstream nineteenth-century historical currents as international commerce, liberalism, Protestantism, and Freemasonry. The manifestation of these transatlantic forces as found in Brazil at midcentury provided disaffected Confederates with a propitious environment in which to try to re-create a cherished lifestyle.
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Congress of States
Proceedings of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America
R. David Carlson
University of Alabama Press, 2023
A landmark publication of public reports that reveal the founding of the Confederate government
 
Past publications of the proceedings of the Confederate Congress have focused on the public sessions of the Regular Confederate States Congress that met in Richmond, Virginia from February 1862 to March 1865. Omitted were the formative early sessions of the Montgomery, Alabama and Richmond, Virginia Provisional Congresses of 1861 and 1862. In Congress of States, David Carlson reveals these critical early meetings.

To illuminate this pivot point in American and Southern history, Carlson has drawn on detailed and often verbatim minutes reported in Richmond, Montgomery, Charleston, New Orleans, Savannah, and Augusta newspapers, assembling here a unique set of transcriptions that reveal the birth of the Confederate government.

Congress of States provides an introduction to the Provisional Confederate Congress and the purpose of this work relative to the Southern Historical Society’s landmark 1923 publication “Proceedings of the Confederate Congress,” which detailed the 1962–1865 Regular Confederate Congress. He also includes a chronology outlining the major events of the secession crisis, annotated minutes for the Provisional Confederate Congress’s five sessions, appendices featuring the leadership and committees of the Provisional Congress, and fascinating examples of the proposed Confederate emblem and flags debated by the delegates.

A key set of primary sources that scholars, historians, librarians, and political scientists will value for years to come, Congress of States will also be essential reading for the general reader interested in American and Southern history, the Antebellum South, and the Civil War.

 
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Connections after Colonialism
Europe and Latin America in the 1820s
Edited by Mathew Brown and Gabriel Pacquette
University of Alabama Press, 2013
Contributing to the historiography of transnational and global transmission of ideas, Connections after Colonialism examines relations between Europe and Latin America during the tumultuous 1820s.

In the Atlantic World, the 1820s was a decade marked by the rupture of colonial relations, the independence of Latin America, and the ever-widening chasm between the Old World and the New. Connections after Colonialism, edited by Matthew Brown and Gabriel Paquette, builds upon recent advances in the history of colonialism and imperialism by studying former colonies and metropoles through the same analytical lens, as part of an attempt to understand the complex connections—political, economic, intellectual, and cultural—between Europe and Latin America that survived the demise of empire.

Historians are increasingly aware of the persistence of robust links between Europe and the new Latin American nations. This book focuses on connections both during the events culminating with independence and in subsequent years, a period strangely neglected in European and Latin American scholarship. Bringing together distinguished historians of both Europe and America, the volume reveals a new cast of characters and relationships including unrepentant American monarchists; compromise-seeking liberals in Lisbon and Madrid who envisioned transatlantic federations; British merchants in the River Plate who saw opportunity where others saw risk; public moralists whose audiences spanned from Paris to Santiago de Chile; and plantation owners in eastern Cuba who feared that slave rebellions elsewhere in the Caribbean would spread to their island.

Contributors
Matthew Brown / Will Fowler / Josep M. Fradera / Carrie Gibson / Brian Hamnett / Maurizio Isabella / Iona Macintyre / Scarlett O’Phelan Godoy / Gabriel Paquette / David Rock / Christopher Schmidt-Nowara / Jay Sexton / Reuben Zahler
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A Conquering Spirit
Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813–1814
Gregory A. Waselkov
University of Alabama Press, 2009
Nationwide repercussions to a bloody battle on the southern frontier.
  
The Fort Mims massacre changed the course of American history in many ways, not the least of which was the ensuing rise of one Andrew Jackson to the national stage. The unprecedented Indian victory over the encroaching Americans who were bent on taking their lands and destroying their culture horrified many and injured the young nation’s pride. Tragedies such as this one have always rallied Americans to a common cause: a single-minded determination to destroy the enemy and avenge the fallen. The August 30, 1813, massacre at Fort Mims, involving hundreds of dead men, women, and children, was just such a spark.
 
Gregory Waselkov tells compellingly the story of this fierce battle at the fortified plantation home of Samuel Mims in the Tensaw District of the Mississippi Territory. With valuable maps, tables, and artifact illustrations, Waselkov looks closely at the battle to cut through the legends and misinformation that have grown around the event almost from the moment the last flames died at the smoldering ruins. At least as important as the details of the battle, though, is his elucidation of how social forces remarkably converged to spark the conflict and how reverberations of the battle echo still today, nearly two hundred years later.
 
A Dan Josselyn Memorial publication
 
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Conquistador in Chains
Cabeza de Vaca and the Indians of the Americas
David A. Howard
University of Alabama Press, 1996

The current image of the Spanish conquest of America and of the conquistadores who carried it out is one of destruction and oppression. One conquistador does not fit that image, however. A life-changing adventure led Cabeza de Vaca to seek a different kind of conquest, one that would be just and humane, true to Spanish religion and law, but one that safeguarded liberty and justice for the Indians of the New World. His use of the skills learned from his experiences with the Indians of North America did not always help him in understanding and managing the Indians of South America, and too many of the Spanish settlers in the Rio de la Plata Province found that his policies threatened their own interests and relations with the Indians. Eventually many of those Spaniards joined a conspiracy that removed him from power and returned him to Spain in chains.

That Cabeza de Vaca was overthrown is not surprising. His ideas and policies opposed the self-interest of most of the first Spaniards who had come to America. What is amazing is that he was able to inspire and hold support among many others in America, who remained loyal to him during his time in prison and after his return to Spain.



 
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The Conscience of a Lawyer
Clifford J. Durr and American Civil Liberties, 1899–1975
John A. Salmond
University of Alabama Press, 1990
Clifford Judkins Durr was an Alabama lawyer who played an important role in defending activists and other accused of disloyalty during the New Deal and McCarthy eras. His uncompromising commitment to civil liberties and civic decency caused him to often take unpopular positions.

In 1933, Durr moved to Washington to work as a lawyer for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a creation of Roosevelt’s new Democratic administration, becoming a dedicated New Dealer in the process. He was then appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a politically sensitive position as FDR sought to counter the increasing power and concentration of broadcasters, many of whom were opponents of the New Deal. Durr resigned from the FCC in 1948 and after brief employment with the National Farmers Union in Colorado, the Durrs eventually returned to Montgomery, Alabama in the hope of returning to a more prosperous, less controversial life.

Durr continued to practice in Montgomery as counsel for black citizens whose rights had been violated and ultimately, in December, 1955, when police arrested Rosa Parks for refusing to give her bus seat to a white man he stepped in and lent his extensive legal prowess to her case and the continuing quest for civil rights. Closing his firm in 1964 Durr began to lecture in the United States and abroad. He died at his grandfather's farm in 1975
 
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Considering Maus
Approaches to Art Spiegelman's "Survivor's Tale" of the Holocaust
Deborah R. Geis
University of Alabama Press, 2007

The first collection of critical essays on Maus, the searing account of one Holocaust survivor's experiences rendered in comic book form.

In 1992, Art Spiegelmans two-volume illustrated work Maus: A Survivor’s Tale was awarded a special-category Pulitzer Prize. In a comic book form, Spiegelman tells the gripping, heart-rending story of his father's experiences in the Holocaust. The book renders in stark clarity the trials Spiegelman's father endured as a Jewish refugee in the ghettos and concentration camps of Poland during World War II, his American life following his immigration to New York, and the author's own troubled sense of self as he grapples with his father's history. Mixing autobiography, biography, and oral history in the comic form, Maus has been hailed as a daring work of postmodern narration and as a vivid example of the power of the graphic narrative.


Now, for the first time in one collection, prominent scholars in a variety of fields take on Spiegelman's text and offer it the critical and artistic scrutiny it deserves. They explore many aspects of the work, including Spiegelman’s use of animal characters, the influence of other "comix" artists, the role of the mother and its relation to gender issues, the use of repeating images such as smoke and blood, Maus's position among Holocaust testimonials, its appropriation of cinematic technique, its use of language and styles of dialect, and the implications of the work’s critical and commercial success.


Informed readers in many areas of study, from popular culture and graphic arts to psychoanalysis and oral history, will value this first substantial collection of criticism on a revered work of literature.

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Constance Baker Motley
One Woman's Fight for Civil Rights and Equal Justice under Law
Gary L. Ford Jr.
University of Alabama Press, 2017
When the name Constance Baker Motley is mentioned, more often than not, the response is “Who was she?” or “What did she do?” The answer is multifaceted, complex, and inspiring.

Constance Baker Motley was an African American woman; the daughter of immigrants from Nevis, British West Indies; a wife; and a mother who became a pioneer and trailblazer in the legal profession. She broke down barriers, overcame gender constraints, and operated outside the boundaries placed on black women by society and the civil rights movement. In Constance Baker Motley: One Woman’s Fight for Civil Rights and Equal Justice under Law, Gary L. Ford Jr. explores the key role Motley played in the legal fight to desegregate public schools as well as colleges, universities, housing, transportation, lunch counters, museums, libraries, parks, and other public accommodations.
 
The only female attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., Motley was also the only woman who argued desegregation cases in court during much of the civil rights movement. From 1946 through 1964, she was a key litigator and legal strategist for landmark civil rights cases including the Montgomery Bus Boycott and represented Martin Luther King Jr. as well as other protesters arrested and jailed as a result of their participation in sit-ins, marches, and freedom rides.
 
Motley was a leader who exhibited a leadership style that reflected her personality traits, skills, and strengths. She was a visionary who formed alliances and inspired local counsel to work with her to achieve the goals of the civil rights movement. As a leader and agent of change, she was committed to the cause of justice and she performed important work in the trenches in the South and behind the scene in courts that helped make the civil rights movement successful.
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Contemporaries and Snobs
Laura Riding
University of Alabama Press, 2014
This new edition of Contemporaries and Snobs, a landmark collection of essays by Laura Riding, offers a counter-history of high modernist poetics.  

Laura Riding’s Contemporaries and Snobs (1928) was the first volume of essays to engage critically with high modernist poetics from the position of the outsider. For readers today, it offers a compelling account—by turns personal, by turns historical—of how the institutionalization of modernism denuded experimental poetry. Most importantly, Contemporaries and Snobs offers a counter-history of the idiosyncratic, of what the institution of modernism left (and leaves) behind. With Gertrude Stein as its figurehead, the book champions the noncanonical, the “barbaric,” and the undertheorized.

Riding’s nuanced defense of a poetics of the person in Contemporaries and Snobs represents a forgotten but essential first attempt to identify and foster what is now a well-defined poetic lineage that leads from Stein to the contemporary experimental avant-garde. In these essays, Riding takes her readers on a remarkably thorough tour through the critical scene of the 1920s. Among other influential treatises, she considers T. S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood and his editorial essays in The Criterion, Allen Tate’s “Poetry and the Absolute,” John Crowe Ransom’s essays on the modernist poet, Edgell Rickword’s essays in The Calendar of Modern Letters, and Herbert Read’s posthumous publication of T. E. Hulme’s essays. All of this criticism, Riding notes, gave modern poets a sheen of seriousness and professionalism, but was it good for poetry? Her decisive answer is “no.” This new edition includes an introduction by Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm that makes legible the many connections between Contemporaries and Snobs and the critical debates and poetic experiments of the 1920s, as well as explanatory notes, a chronological bibliography of Riding’s work, and an index of proper names.
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Contemporary Lithic Analysis in the Southeast
Problems, Solutions, and Interpretations
Philip J. Carr
University of Alabama Press, 2012
Representing work by a mixture of veterans and a new generation of lithic analysts, Contemporary Lithic Analysis in the Southeast explores fresh ideas while reworking and pushing the limits of traditional methods and hypotheses.
 
The variability in the southeastern lithic landscape over space and through time makes it a dynamic and challenging region for archaeologists.  Demonstrating a holistic approach and using a variety of methods, this volume aims to derive information regarding prehistoric lifeways from lithic assemblages.
 
The contributors use data from a wide temporal span and a variety of sites across the Southeast, ranging from Texas to South Carolina and from Florida to Kentucky. Not merely cautionary tales, these case studies demonstrate the necessity of looking beyond the bag of lithic material sitting in the laboratory to address the key questions in the organization of prehistoric lithic technologies.  How do field-collection strategies bias our interpretations? What is therelationship between technological strategies and tool design? How can inferences regarding social and economic strategies be made from lithic assemblages?
 
Contributors
William Andrefsky Jr. / Andrew P. Bradbury / Philip J. Carr / CarolynConklin /
D. Randall Cooper / Jason L.Edmonds / Jay D. Franklin / Albert C.Goodyear III /
Joel Hardison / Lucinda M. Langston / D. Shane Miller / George H.Odell /
Charlotte D. Pevny / Tara L. Potts /Sarah E. Price / Douglas Sain / Sarah C.Sherwood /
Ashley M. Smallwood /Paul Thacker
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front cover of Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation
Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation
American Literature and Culture in the Gilded Age, 1876-1893
Benjamin A. Railton
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Fables of American history embodied in Gilded Age literature
 
In this study of Gilded Age literature and culture, Ben Railton proposes that in the years after Reconstruction, America’s identity was often contested through distinct and competing conceptions of the nation’s history. He argues that the United States moved toward unifying and univocal historical narratives in the years between the Centennial and Columbian Expositions, that ongoing social conflict provided sites for complications of those narratives, and that works of historical literature offer some of the most revealing glimpses into the nature of those competing visions.
 
Gilded Age scholarship often connects the period to the 20th-century American future, but Railton argues that it is just as crucial to see how the era relates to the American past. He closely analyzes the 1876 and 1893 Expositions, finding that many of the period’s central trends, from technology to imperialism, were intimately connected to particular visions of the nation’s history. Railton’s concern is with four key social questions: race, Native Americans, women, and the South. He provides close readings of a number of texts for the ways they highlight these issues. He examines established classics (The Adventures of Huck Finn and The Bostonians); newer additions to the canon (The Conjure Woman, Life Among the Piutes, The Story of Avis); largely forgotten best-sellers (Uncle Remus, The Grandissimes); unrecovered gems (Ploughed Under, Where the Battle Was Fought); and autobiographical works by Douglass and Truth, poems by Harper and Piatt, and short stories by Woolson and Cook.
 
These readings, while illuminating the authors themselves, contribute to ongoing conversations over historical literature’s definition and value, and a greater understanding of not only American society in the Gilded Age, but also debates on our shared but contested history that remain very much alive in the present.
 
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Continuing Bonds with the Dead
Parental Grief and Nineteenth-Century American Authors
Harold K. Bush
University of Alabama Press, 2016
Harold K. Bush's Continuing Bonds with the Dead examines the profound transfiguration that the death of a child wrought on the literary work of nineteenth-century American writers. Taking as his subjects Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Bush demonstrates how the death of a child became the defining "before-and-after moment" in their lives as adults and as artists. In narrating their struggles, Bush maps the intense field of creative energy induced by reverberating waves of parental grief and the larger nineteenth-century culture of mortality and grieving.
 
Bush explores in detail how each of these five writers grappled with and were altered by the loss of a child. He writes, for example, with moving insights about how the famed author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn found himself adrift on a river of grief when meningitis struck down his daughter, Susy. In his deeply learned exploration of Twain's subsequent work, Bush illuminates how Twain wrote to cope with Susy's death, to make sense of her persistent presence in his life, and possibly to redeem her loss. Passionate and personal, Bush's insightful prose traces the paths of personal transformation each of these emblematic American writers took in order to survive the spiritual trauma of loss.
 
The savage Civil War was America's shared "before and after moment," the pivot upon which the nation's future swung. Bush's account of these five writers' grief amplifies our understanding of America's evolving, national relationship to mourning from then to the present.
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Contradiction and Conflict
The Popular Church in Nicaragua
Debra Sabia
University of Alabama Press, 2013
Contradiction and Conflict explores the rich history, ideology, and development of the popular church in Nicaragua. From careful assessments within the context of Nicaragua's revolutionary period (1970s-1990), this book explains the historical conditions that worked to unify members of the Christian faith and the subsequent factors that fragmented the Christian community into at least four identifiable groups with religious and political differences, contradictions, and conflicts.

Debra Sabia describes and analyzes the rise, growth, and fragmentation of the popular church and assesses the effect of the Christian base communities on religion, politics, and the nation's social revolutionary experiment.

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Convicts, Coal, and the Banner Mine Tragedy
Robert David Ward
University of Alabama Press, 1987

In the late 1870s, Jefferson County, Alabama, and the town of Elyton (near the future Birmingham) became the focus of a remarkable industrial and mining revolution. Together with the surrounding counties, the area was penetrated by railroads. Surprisingly large deposits of bituminous coal, limestone, and iron ore—the exact ingredients for the manufacture of iron and, later, steel—began to be exploited. Now, with transportation, modern extractive techniques, and capital, the region’s geological riches began yielding enormous profits.

A labor force was necessary to maintain and expand the Birmingham area’s industrial boom. Many workers were native Alabamians. There was as well an immigrant ethnic work force, small but important. The native and immigrant laborers became problems for management when workers began affiliating with labor unions and striking for higher wages and better working conditions. In the wake of the management-labor disputes, the industrialists resorted to an artificial work force—convict labor. Alabama’s state and county officials sought to avoid expense and reap profits by leasing prisoners to industry and farms for their labor.

This book is about the men who worked involuntarily in the Banner Coal Mine, owned by the Pratt Consolidated Coal Company. And it is about the repercussions and consequences that followed an explosion at the mine in the spring of 1911 that killed 128 convict miners.
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Cookery
Food Rhetorics and Social Production
Edited by Donovan Conley and Justin Eckstein
University of Alabama Press, 2020
The rhetoric of contemporary food production and consumption with a focus on social boundaries

The rhetoric of food is more than just words about food, and food is more than just edible matter. Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production explores how food mediates both rhetorical influence and material life through the overlapping concepts of invention and production. The classical canon of rhetorical invention entails the process of discovering one’s persuasive appeals, whereas the contemporary landscape of agricultural production touches virtually everyone on the planet. Together, rhetoric and food shape the boundaries of shared living.
 
The essays in this volume probe the many ways that food informs contemporary social life through its mediation of bodies—human and extra-human alike—in the forms of intoxication, addiction, estrangement, identification, repulsion, and eroticism. Our bodies, in turn, shape the boundaries of food through research, technology, cultural trends, and, of course, by talking about it.
 
Each chapter explores food’s persuasive nature through a unique prism that includes intoxication, dirt, “food porn,” strange foods, and political “invisibility.” Each case offers new insights about the relations between rhetorical influence and embodied practice through food. As a whole Cookery articulates new ways of viewing food’s powers of persuasion, as well as the inherent role of persuasion in agricultural production.
 
The purpose of Cookery, then, is to demonstrate the deep rhetoricity of our modern industrial food system through critical examinations of concepts, practices, and tendencies endemic to this system. Food has become an essential topic for discussions concerned with the larger social dynamics of production, distribution, access, reception, consumption, influence, and the fraught question of choice. These questions about food and rhetoric are equally questions about the assumptions, values, and practices of contemporary public life.
 
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Corporal Rhetoric
Regulating Reproduction in the Progressive Era
Barbara Schneider
University of Alabama Press, 2021
Examines public discourse from the Progressive Era over the state’s right to regulate women’s bodies and their reproduction

When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes determined in 1927 that sterilization was a legitimate means of safeguarding the nation’s health, he was asserting the state’s right to regulate the production of the national body. His opinion represented a culmination of arguments about reproduction and immigration that had been circulating for years but that intensified during the Progressive Era. Arguments about reproductive and immigration practices surged to the foreground, and tectonic shifts in the conceptual schemes and practices of reproduction in the United States followed.
 
Drawing on feminist historiography and genre studies, Corporal Rhetoric: Regulating Reproduction in the Progressive Era explores the rhetoric of medical research, new technologies, and material practices that shifted the idea of childbirth as an act of God or Nature to a medical procedure enacted by male physicians on the bodies of women made passive by both drugs and discourse. Barbara Schneider considers how efficiency, the hallmark of scientific management, was raised to a cardinal virtue by its inclusions in the powerful mediums of presidential speeches, national educational policies, and eugenics discourse to reclassify babies, long regarded as gifts, as either valuable assets or defective products.
 
Schneider shows how the legal system drew upon medicine, scientific management, and the emerging discipline of sociology to restrict women’s labor in order to preserve reproductive capacity, categorized by Supreme Court opinions as a public good rather than a private capacity. Throughout, she ties the arguments developed during this era to current debates about mothering rhetorics, reproductive rights, immigration, and conceptions of the nation.
 
By weaving together medical research reports, clinical practices, case studies, legal opinions and legislative acts, and the epistemology of scientific management, Schneider illuminates the network that women such as Margaret Sanger, Jane Addams, Lillian Gilbreth and multiple others negotiated as they sought to give women room to exercise their reproductive capacity. Through her analysis of the machinery of these discourses and the material uptake of their genres in the daily practices of reproductive bodies, Schneider offers a provisional theory of corporal rhetoric that begins to answer the call for a new material theory of the body.
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Correction of Drift
A Novel in Stories
Pamela Ryder
University of Alabama Press, 2008
Explores the lives behind the headlines of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, evoking anew the scope of tragedy through the vision of literary fiction.
 
It was called the crime of the century, and it was front-page news: the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Correction of Drift: A Novel in Stories imagines the private lives behind the headlines of the case, and examines the endurance—and demise—of those consumed by the tragedy.

Every character brings a different past life to the event, be it a life of celebrity, or of misfortune and obscurity. There is Anne Morrow Lindbergh—daughter of a millionaire, the shy poet who married a national hero; Charles Lindbergh—the rough-and-tumble Minnesota barnstormer, who at age twenty-five made the first transatlantic flight, bringing him world-wide prestige; Violet—the skittish family maid with a curious attachment to the boy and a secret life that lapses into hysteria and self-destruction; and the kidnappers—an assembly of misfits with their own histories of misery. All are bound by the violence, turmoil, and mystery of the child’s disappearance as it becomes evident that each life has been irrevocably changed. Patterns of bereavement and loss illuminate these stories: despair at the death of a child; the retreat into seclusion; the comfort and the desolation of a marriage. But the heart of this novel is the far-reaching nature of tragedy, and the ways the characters go on to live—or end—their lives.
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Cosella Wayne
Or, Will and Destiny
Cora Wilburn, edited and introduced by Jonathan D. Sarna
University of Alabama Press, 2019
The first novel written and published in English by an American Jewish woman
 
Published serially in the spiritualist journal Banner of Light in 1860, Cosella Wayne: Or, Will and Destiny is the first coming-of-age novel, written and published in English by an American Jewish woman, to depict Jews in the United States and transforms what we know about the history of early American Jewish literature. The novel never appeared in book form, went unmentioned in Jewish newspapers of the day, and studies of nineteenth-century American Jewish literature ignore it com­pletely. Yet the novel anticipates many central themes of American Jewish writing: intermar­riage, generational tension, family dysfunction, Jewish-Christian relations, immigration, poverty, the place of women in Jewish life, the nature of romantic love, and the tension between destiny and free will.
 
The narrative recounts a relationship be­tween an abusive Jewish father and the re­bellious daughter he molested as well as that daughter’s struggle to find a place in the com­plex social fabric of nineteenth-century Amer­ica. It is also unique in portraying such themes as an unmarried Jewish woman’s descent into poverty, her forlorn years as a starving or­phaned seamstress, her apostasy and return to Judaism, and her quest to be both Jewish and a spiritualist at one and the same time.
 
Jonathan Sarna, who introduces the volume, discovered Cosella Wayne while pursuing research at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. This edition is supplemented with selections from Cora Wilburn’s recently rediscovered diary, which are reprinted in the appendix. Together, these materials help to situate Cosella Wayne within the life and times of one of nineteenth-century American Jewry’s least known and yet most prolific female authors.
 
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The Cosmos Revealed
Precontact Mississippian Rock Art at Painted Bluff, Alabama
By Jan F. Simek, Erin E. Dunsmore, Johannes Loubser, and Sierra M. Bow
University of Alabama Press, 2021
The definitive rock art book on Painted Bluff, Alabama

Boasting more than 130 paintings and engravings, Painted Bluff is perhaps the most elaborate prehistoric pictograph site east of the Mississippi River. Positioned at several levels on a dramatic sandstone cliff along the Tennessee River in northern Alabama, the spectacular paintings and engravings depict mythical creatures, dancing humans, and mystical portals. The Cosmos Revealed: Precontact Mississippian Rock Art at Painted Bluff, Alabama is the first complete documentation of one of the most important archaeological sites in eastern North America. Through art, the site materializes a model or “cosmogram” of the Mississippian Native American view of the universe, offering connections between the visible and invisible worlds for Native spiritual leaders and other visitors.

Discovered by Euro-Americans in the early 1800s, the site became known as “Painted Bluff” because of its pictographs, but inexplicably it has only recently been subjected to the intensive archaeological study it deserves. Under the auspices of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the authors of this volume have documented and assessed the site since 2005, and efforts have been made to reverse some of the vandalism that has occurred over many decades and to stabilize natural degradation of the cliff and its artwork.

Including more than one hundred remarkable prehistoric paintings on the cliff face that have been recorded, mapped, and photographed, this book synthesizes the research done on Painted Bluff to date and documents the entire site. Richly illustrated chapters cover the historical background, geology and archaeology, documentation methods, types of rock art, stratigraphy, paint recipes, TVA management, graffiti removal, and a summary that broadly synthesizes the meaning, timeframe, artistry, organization, conceptual boundaries, and the cosmos revealed. This groundbreaking study features 113 color photographs and a complete catalog of the pictographs and petroglyphs at the site.
 
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The Cost of Courage
The Journey of an American Congressman
Carl Elliott
University of Alabama Press, 2001

This deeply moving story chronicles the tenacity and vision that carried Carl Elliott from the hills of northwest Alabama to eight distinguished terms in the United States House of Representatives.

Born in a log cabin on a tenant farm in 1913, Carl Elliott worked his way through The University of Alabama during the Great Depression and was elected to Congress in 1948. With a no-nonsense philosophy of fairness and equal opportunity, he established himself as one of the most effective members of the House of Representatives during the 1950s. He was a progressive Democrat and he fought hard for the dirt farmers and coal miners he grew up with and who sent him to Congress.

In an era when racial segregationists dominated southern politics, Elliott worked with many of the important political leaders of the 20th century, including Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy and powerful House Speaker Sam Rayburn. He was instrumental in passing the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which continues to provide college loans to more than 20 million Americans. But his brave stand against racism and George Wallace in the 1966 Alabama gubernatorial race ruined him professionally (he never returned to elected office) and financially (he cashed in his congressional pension to help fund the campaign). Even as a destitute invalid in his old age, however, Elliott kept his dignity and integrity intact.

The life story of Carl Elliott is full of humor and wry wisdom and explains how he made his way across a stage as big as America, influencing its politics and future, and then emerged, belatedly, as an unsung hero of the fight for civil rights and equality.

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Cotton City
Urban Development in Antebellum Mobile
Harriet E. Amos Doss
University of Alabama Press, 2001

Antebellum Mobile was a cotton port city, and economic dependence upon the North created by the cotton trade controlled the city’s development. Mobile’s export trade placed the city third after New York and New Orleans in total value of exports for the nation by 1860. Because the exports consisted almost entirely of cotton headed for Northern and foreign textile mills, Mobile depended on Northern businessmen for marketing services. Nearly all the city’s imports were from New York: Mobile had the worst export-import imbalance of all antebellum ports.

As the volume of cotton exports increased, so did the city’s population—from1,500 in 1820 to 30,000 in 1860. Amos’s study delineates the basis for Mobile’s growth and the ways in which residents and their government promoted growth and adapted to it. Because some of the New York banking, shipping, and marketing firms maintained local agencies, a significant number of Northern-born businessmen participated widely in civic affairs. This has afforded the author the opportunity to explore the North-South relationship in economic and personal terms, in one important city, during a period of increasing sectional tension.
[more]

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Cotton Patch Schoolhouse
Susie Powers Tompkins
University of Alabama Press, 1992

Cotton-Patch Schoolhouse is a memoir of the author’s year as a young and inexperienced teacher in rural Marengo County, several miles from Linden, Alabama, in 1926. Seeking to earn money to continue college after her freshman year at AlabamaCollege in Montevallo, the author welcomed the opportunity to teach eight children at five different grade levels in a one-room schoolhouse in the middle of a cotton field. Youthful enthusiasm, native wit, and a sense of adventure helped her transform the simple schoolhouse into a place of learning and excitement.

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The Counterpunch (and Other Horizontal Poems)/El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales)
Juan Carlos Flores
University of Alabama Press, 2016
Alamar, the home of award-winning Cuban poet Juan Carlos Flores, is the setting for his collection, The Counterpunch and Other Horizontal Poems) / El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales). Constructed as a self-help community in eastern Havana, Alamar is the largest housing complex in the world. Flores’s highly structured texts, organized into “art galleries,” present prose paintings of a big place in very small form.
 
Flores builds a poetic landscape with repeating structures that mirror Alamar’s five-floor walkups. Exploring life and dream on the flat surfaces of the poems, he gives fleeting glimpses of perception and survival at the urban margins. As the poet ages, so ages Alamar itself. Yet both find renewal through poetry.
 
The eighty poems in this bilingual edition offer the first English translation of a complete Flores collection. It will also be of interest to Spanish-language readers seeking access to Cuban literature abroad. Award-winning scholar and translator Kristin Dykstra has compiled an introduction in which she presents Flores, his literary contexts, and references in his poems. Because Flores made specific requests regarding translation, fascinating notes also clarify and expound on choices Dykstra makes in the English version.
 
A deluxe edition with a handmade, limited-edition color linocut print, including a letterpress-printed poem signed by the author, is available directly from the University of Alabama Press.
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Cracker Culture
Celtic Ways in the Old South
Grady McWhiney
University of Alabama Press, 1989

Cracker Culture is a provocative study of social life in the Old South that probes the origin of cultural differences between the South and the North throughout American history. Among Scotch-Irish settlers the term “Cracker” initially designated a person who boasted, but in American usage the word has come to designate poor whites. McWhiney uses the term to define culture rather than to signify an economic condition. Although all poor whites were Crackers, not all Crackers were poor whites; both, however, were Southerners.

The author insists that Southerners and Northerners were never alike. American colonists who settled south and west of Pennsylvania during the 17th and 18th centuries were mainly from the “Celtic fringe” of the British Isles. The culture that these people retained in the New World accounts in considerable measure for the difference between them and the Yankees of New England, most of whom originated in the lowlands of the southeastern half of the island of Britain. From their solid base in the southern backcountry, Celts and their “Cracker” descendants swept westward throughout the antebellum period until they had established themselves and their practices across the Old South. Basic among those practices that determined their traditional folkways, values, norms, and attitudes was the herding of livestock on the open range, in contrast to the mixed agriculture that was the norm both in southeastern Britain and in New England. The Celts brought to the Old South leisurely ways that fostered idleness and gaiety. Like their Celtic ancestors, Southerners were characteristically violent; they scorned pacifism; they considered fights and duels honorable and consistently ignored laws designed to control their actions. In addition, family and kinship were much more important in Celtic Britain and the antebellum South than in England and the Northern United States. Fundamental differences between Southerners and Northerners shaped the course of antebellum American history; their conflict in the 1860s was not so much brother against brother as culture against culture.
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The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be
Essays and Interviews
Harryette Mullen
University of Alabama Press, 2012

The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be forms an extended consideration not only of Harryette Mullen’s own work, methods, and interests as a poet, but also of issues of central importance to African American poetry and language, women’s voices, and the future of poetry.

Together, these essays and interviews highlight the impulses and influences that drive Mullen’s work as a poet and thinker, and suggest unique possibilities for the future of poetic language and its role as an instrument of identity and power.

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Cradle of Freedom
Alabama and the Movement That Changed America
Frye Gaillard
University of Alabama Press, 2006

Cradle of Freedom puts a human face on the story of the black American struggle for equality in Alabama during the 1960s. While exceptional leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, John Lewis, and others rose up from the ranks and carved their places in history, the burden of the movement was not carried by them alone. It was fueled by the commitment and hard work of thousands of everyday people who decided that the time had come to take a stand.

Cradle of Freedom is tied to the chronology of pivotal events occurring in Alabama the Montgomery bus boycott, the Freedom Rides, the Letter from the Birmingham Jail, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, Bloody Sunday, and the Black Power movement in the Black Belt. Gaillard artfully interweaves fresh stories of ordinary people with the familiar ones of the civil rights icons. We learn about the ministers and lawyers, both black and white, who aided the movement in distinct ways at key points. We meet Vernon Johns, King's predecessor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, who first suggested boycotting the buses and who wrote later, "It is a heart strangely un-Christian that cannot thrill with joy when the least of men begin to pull in the direction of the stars." We hear from John Hulett who tells how terror of lynching forced him down into ditches whenever headlights appeared on a night road. We see the Edmund Pettus Bridge beatings from the perspective of marcher JoAnne Bland, who was only a child at the time. We learn of E. D. Nixon, a Pullman porter who helped organize the bus boycott and who later choked with emotion when, for the first time in his life, a white man extended his hand in greeting to him on a public street.

How these ordinary people rose to the challenges of an unfair system with a will and determination that changed their times forever is a fascinating and extraordinary story that Gaillard tells with his hallmark talent. Cradle of Freedom unfolds with the dramatic flow of a novel, yet it is based on meticulous research. With authority and grace, Gaillard explains how the southern state deemed the Cradle of the Confederacy became with great struggle, some loss, and much hope the Cradle of Freedom.

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Crafting Prehispanic Maya Kinship
Bradley E. Ensor
University of Alabama Press, 2013

By contextualizing classes and their kinship behavior within the overall political economy, Crafting Prehispanic Maya Kinship provides an example of how archaeology can help to explain the formation of disparate classes and kinship patterns within an ancient state-level society.

Bradley E. Ensor provides a new theoretical contribution to Maya ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological research. Rather than operating solely as a symbolic order unobservable to archaeologists, kinship, according to Ensor, forms concrete social relations that structure daily life and can be reflected in the material remains of a society. Ensor argues that the use of cross-culturally identified and confirmed material indicators of postmarital residence and descent group organization enable archaeologists—those with the most direct material evidence on prehispanic Maya social organization—to overturn a traditional reliance on competing and problematic ethnohistorical models.
 
Using recent data from an arch aeological project within the Chontalpa Maya region of Tabasco, Mexico, Ensor illustrates how archaeologists can interpret and explain the diversity of kinship behavior and its influence on gender within any given Maya social formation.
[more]

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Crayfishes of Alabama
Guenter A. Schuster, Christopher A. Taylor, and Stuart W. McGregor
University of Alabama Press, 2022
A comprehensive assessment of the 99 known species of crayfishes inhabiting the state of Alabama

Crayfishes are common organisms in many freshwater habitats. They are usually the largest invertebrates and often represent the greatest amount of invertebrate biomass in their environments. Identified as a keystone species in many ecological communities, aquatic biologists are fond of saying “they eat everything, and everything eats them.”
 
Crayfishes—sometimes called crawfishes, crawdads, mudbugs, ditchbugs, yabbies, and flusskrebs—are taxonomically and ecologically a diverse group of aquatic crustaceans. There are more than 600 known species worldwide and North America alone is home to more than 400. As home to 99 documented species, Alabama is a global hotspot for crayfish diversity.
 
Crayfishes of Alabama is the first comprehensive reference work on the subject and provides the most up-to-date information on the vast range of crayfishes known to reside in Alabama. The authors have collected specimens and data from the state’s major and minor waterways and lakes, as well as specialized habitats such as burrows, caves, roadside ditches, marshes, swamps, and temporary autumnal ponds. This volume represents the most in-depth treatment of crayfishes found in the southeastern United States and offers detailed species accounts including descriptions of morphological characters, color, maximum size, comparative species, distribution and habitat, biology, crayfish associates, and conservation status. The species accounts are accentuated with color photographs, photographic morphological plates, and dot maps showing state and national distributions. A photographic key is provided to guide the identification of all 99 species.
 
[more]

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Creating Citizens
Liberal Arts, Civic Engagement, and the Land-Grant Tradition
Edited by Brigitta R. Brunner
University of Alabama Press, 2016
In Creating Citizens, professors and administrators at Auburn University’s College of Liberal Arts recount valuable, first-hand experiences teaching Community and Civic Engagement (CCE). They demonstrate that, contrary to many expectations, CCE instruction both complements the mission of liberal arts curricula and powerfully advances the fundamental mission of American land-grand institutions.
 
The nine essays in Creating Citizens offer structures for incorporating CCE initiatives into university programs, instructional methods and techniques, and numerous case studies and examples undertaken at Auburn University but applicable at any university. Many contributors describe their own rewarding experiences with CCE and emphasize the ways outreach efforts reinvigorate their teaching or research.
 
Creating Citizens recounts the foundation of land-grant institutions by the Morrill Act of 1862. Their mission is to instruct in agriculture, military science, and mechanics, but these goals augmented rather than replaced an education in the classics, or liberal arts. Land-grant institutions, therefore, have a special calling to provide a broad spectrum of society with an education that not only enriched the personal lives of their students, but the communities they are a part of. Creating Citizens demonstrates the important opportunities CCE instruction represents to any university but are especially close to the heart of the mission of land-grant colleges.
 
In open societies, the role and mission of public institutions of higher learning that are supported by public subsidies are perennial subjects of interest and debate. Creating Citizens provides valuable insights of interest to educators, education administrators, students, and policy makers involved in the field of higher education.
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Creating Community
Life and Learning at Alabama State University
Edited by Karl E. Westhauser, Elaine M. Smith, and Jennifer A. Fremlin
University of Alabama Press, 2008
Creating Community explores how faculty members at Alabama State University, a historically black university in Montgomery, have been inspired by the legacy of African American culture and the civil rights movement and how they seek to interpret and extend that legacy through teaching, scholarship, and service. Authors describe a wide range of experiences from the era of segregation to the present day. These include accounts of growing up and going to college in Alabama, arriving in the South for the first time to teach at ASU, and the development of programs such as the National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African American Culture. Together, the essays present viewpoints that reflect the diverse ethnic, cultural, and academic backgrounds of the contributors and of the university.
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Creating the American State
The Moral Reformers and the Modern Administrative World They Made
Richard Stillman
University of Alabama Press, 1998

In this illuminating and provocative study, Stillman provides a new understanding of the foundation of the American state.

Whether renewing a driver's license, traveling on an airplane, or just watching in fascination as a robot probes Mars, we all participate in the everyday workings of the modern administrative state. As Stillman demonstrates in this study, however, we have not, until now, fully investigated or appreciated this administrative stateÕs origins or its evolution into the entity that so affects our lives today.

Stillman reveals that this modern enterprise emerged from a complex foundation of ideas and ideals rather than as a result of a simple, rational plan or cataclysmic event, as previously contended. In fact, he finds that the basis for our current administrative state lies in the lives of the seven individuals who, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, invented its various elements.

Stillman also finds that although they lived at different times, these seven founders-George William Curtis, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Emory Upton, Jane Addams, Frederick W. Taylor, Richard Childs, and Louis Brownlow-had much in common: all were products of intensely Protestant, small-town America, and all were motivated by strong moral idealism. Indeed, Stillman finds that state making in the United States has been a continuation of the Protestant goal to "protest and purify."

Some names are more recognizable than others, but all, through remarkable moral fervor and exceptional leadership skills, invented the administrative practices and procedures so familiar today.









 
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Creating the Land of the Sky
Tourism and Society in Western North Carolina
Richard D. Starnes
University of Alabama Press, 2005

A sophisticated inquiry into tourism's social and economic power across the South.

In the early 19th century, planter families from South Carolina, Georgia, and eastern North Carolina left their low-country estates during the summer to relocate their households to vacation homes in the mountains of western North Carolina. Those unable to afford the expense of a second home relaxed at the hotels that emerged to meet their needs. This early tourist activity set the stage for tourism to become the region's New South industry. After 1865, the development of railroads and the bugeoning consumer culture led to the expansion of tourism across the whole region.

Richard Starnes argues that western North Carolina benefited from the romanticized image of Appalachia in the post-Civil War American consciousness. This image transformed the southern highlands into an exotic travel destination, a place where both climate and culture offered visitors a myriad of diversions. This depiction was futher bolstered by partnerships between state and federal agencies, local boosters, and outside developers to create the atrtactions necessary to lure tourists to the region.

As tourism grew, so did the tension between leaders in the industry and local residents. The commodification of regional culture, low-wage tourism jobs, inflated land prices, and negative personal experiences bred no small degree of animosity among mountain residents toward visitors. Starnes's study provides a better understanding of the significant role that tourism played in shaping communities across the South.


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Creek Indian History
A Historical Narrative of the Genealogy, Traditions and Downfall of the Ispocoga or Creek Indian Tribe of Indians by One of the Tribe, George Stiggins (1788-1845)
George Stiggins
University of Alabama Press, 2003
George Stiggins, a Creek Indian half blood living in Alabama, wrote this history more than 150 years ago. Raised in the white culture by his father, an English trader, Stiggins nevertheless lived in close contact with the Creeks because his mother was a full blood of the Natchez tribe, part of the Creek Confederacy.

Stiggins writes with firsthand knowledge of the tribes in the central southeast—the Alabamas, Natchez, Abekas, Uchees, and others. He tells of their origins, their towns and chiefs, and their way of life, he traces critical events leading to the Creek War—the battles of Burnt Corn and Fort Mims—and details the roles of the Indian leaders involved. In “Tecumseh and the Age of Prophecy,” he describes how the powerful influence of prophets, such as Josiah Francis and Jim Boy, who incited the Creeks to civil war as the confederacy split into war and peace factions. Stiggin’s account of William Weatherford’s controversial role in the Creek War has special value because Weatherford was Stiggins’s brother-in-law. His descriptions of religious and social aspects of the Creek lifeways make this work prime source material.

William Wyman’s notes and introduction put the Stiggins account into historical perspective and trace its circuitous route to publication. First issued in 1989, Creek Indian History has become an important primary document for the study of Native American history and culture.
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The Creek War of 1813 and 1814
H. S. Halbert and T. H. Ball, edited by Frank L. Owsley, Jr.
University of Alabama Press, 1995

The first edition of Halbert and Ball's Creek War was published in 1895, and a new edition containing an introductory essay, supplementary notes, a bibliography, and an index by Frank L. Owsley Jr., was published in 1969. This standard account of one of the most controversial wars in which Americans have fought is again available, with introductory materials and a bibliography revised to reflect the advances in scholarship since the 1969 edition. This facsimile reproduction of the 1895 original provides a full and sympathetic account of the Indians' point of view, from the earliest visit of the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh to the southern tribes in 1811, through the buildup of apprehension and hostilities leading to the fateful battles at Burnt Corn, Fort Mims, and Holy Ground.

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Creekside
An Archaeological Novel
Kelli Carmean
University of Alabama Press, 2010

In Creekside, dedicated archaeologist Meg Harrington guides her students in a race against time to protect the legacy of the past before bulldozers rip it to shreds.

The setting is a Kentucky pasture slated for development—the construction of the new Creekside subdivision. Once, that same beautiful stretch of land was home to three generations who experienced love, loss, and tragedy in their log cabin beside the creek. It was here during the late 18th century that Estelle Mullins struggled to build her home on the dangerous frontier.

In Meg’s 21st-century world of archaeology we read about excavation techniques, daily experiences at a dig, tight construction deadlines, the use of heavy equipment, report writing, artifact analysis, damage from looters and collectors, and the reality of site destruction in the path of modern development. The depiction of Estelle’s frontier life includes Kentucky’s early Euro-American settlement of the Cumberland Gap, encounters with Shawnee defending their land, Protestant fragmentation, the rise of religious fundamentalism, the immigrant stampede down the Ohio River, and the persistent issue of class-based land ownership.

The two partially interwoven story lines link artifact and place, ancestors and descendants, the present and the past, and inspire us to explore the personal connections between them all in fresh and vital ways.

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Crossing the Borders
New Methods and Techniques in the Study of Archaeological Materials from the Caribbean
Edited by Corinne L. Hofman, Menno Hoogland, and Annelou L. van Gijn
University of Alabama Press, 2008
Explores the application of a selected number of newly emerging methods and techniques
 
During the past few decades, Caribbean scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have increasingly developed and employed new methods and techniques for the study of archaeological materials. The aim of earlier research in the Caribbean was mainly to define typologies on the basis of pottery and lithic assemblages leading to the establishment of chronological charts for the region, and it was not until the 1980s that the use of technological and functional analyses of artifacts became widespread. The 1990s saw a veritable boom in this field, introducing innovative methods and techniques for analyzing artifacts and human skeletal remains. Innovative approaches included microscopic use-wear analysis, starch residue and phytolith analysis, stable isotope analysis, experimental research, ethnoarchaeological studies, geochemical analyses, and DNA studies. 
 
The purpose of this volume is to describe new methods and techniques in the study of archaeological materials from the Caribbean and to assess possible avenues of mutual benefit and integration. Exploring the advantages and disadvantages in the application of a selected number of newly emerging methods and techniques, each of these approaches is illustrated by a case study. These studies benefited from a diverse array of experience and the international background of the researchers from Canada, the Netherlands, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Martinique, Italy, Mexico, Dominican Republic, England, and the United States who are integral members of the archaeological community of the Caribbean. A background to the study of archaeological materials in the Caribbean since the 1930s is provided in order to contextualize the latest developments in this field.
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Crossing the Deadly Ground
United States Army Tactics, 1865–1899
Perry D. Jamieson
University of Alabama Press, 2004

Attempts to answer difficult questions about battle tactics employed by the United States Army

Weapons improved rapidly after the Civil War, raising difficult questions about the battle tactics employed by the United States Army. The most fundamental problem was the dominance of the tactical defensive, when defenders protected by fieldworks could deliver deadly fire from rifles and artillery against attackers advancing in close-ordered lines. The vulnerability of these offensive forces as they crossed the so-called "deadly ground" in front of defensive positions was even greater with the improvement of armaments after the Civil War.

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Crossing the River
Shalom Eilati
University of Alabama Press, 2009
Crossing the River is a personal memoir—and more. Against the backdrop of Lithuania’s occupation—first by the Red Army, next by the Germans, and then again by the Russians—it is a story reflected through the prism of a sharp-eyed young child, Shalom Eilati. His story starts in the occupied Kovno Ghetto and ends with his flight across the Soviet border, through Poland and Germany and finally, his arrival in Palestine.
 
The adult survivor, while recalling the terrorized child that he was and how he then perceived the adult world, also takes stock of his present life. Throughout the memoir, Eilati attempts to reconcile his present life as a husband, father, scientist, and writer, with the images, feelings, and thoughts from the past that have left an indelible mark on his life and that continue to haunt him.
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Cuarto oscuro
Recuerdos en blanco y negro
Lila Quintero Weaver, translated by Karina Elizabeth Vázquez
University of Alabama Press, 2018
La novela gráfico de Lila Quintero-Weaver que obtuvo amplio reconocimiento crítico. Por medio de impresionantes ilustraciones, la autora ofrece una memoria cautivante y conmovedora de la infancia, las relaciones raciales, la etnicidad y la identidad en el sur de los Estados Unidos. Sus dibujos de estilo sutil, pero efectivo, refuerzan dramáticament una sentida narración.

En 1961, cuando la autora tenía cinco años, su familia salió de Buenos Aires, Argentina, para emigrar a los Estados Unidos y establecerse en Marion, un pueblo en el corazón del Black Belt de Alabama. En una región definida por la segregación racial, la familia Quintero, por su condición de clase media educada, se halló en una situación privilegiada para observar las tensiones que minaban la cultura y la sociedad en la que vivían.

Weaver salió de constancia de lo que signifacaba ser una niña latina en una le las regiones más racistas del sur de los Estados Unidos, tratando de entender tanto un país extranjero, como el horror de las relaciones raciales de nuestra nación. Excluida de las categorías raciales empleadas por entonces, la autora observó desde muy temprana edad las desigualdades de la cultura estadounidense, regida por un ideal de belleza femenina que privilegiaba a la mujer rubia y de ojos azules. A lo largo de su vida, Weaver ha luchado por encontrar su lugar en la sociedad norteamericana cuestionando la discriminación de su entorno. Cuarto oscuro contituye su legado visual y verbal sobre esa lucha.
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A Cuban City, Segregated
Race and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century
Bonnie A. Lucero
University of Alabama Press, 2019
A microhistory of racial segregation in Cienfuegos, a central Cuban port city

Founded as a white colony in 1819, Cienfuegos, Cuba, quickly became  home to people of African descent, both free and enslaved, and later a small community of Chinese and other immigrants. Despite the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity that defined the city’s population, the  urban landscape was characterized by distinctive racial boundaries,  separating the white city center from the heterogeneous peripheries. A Cuban City, Segregated: Race and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century explores how the de facto racial segregation was constructed  and perpetuated in a society devoid of explicitly racial laws.

Drawing on the insights of intersectional feminism, Bonnie A. Lucero shows that the key to understanding racial segregation in Cuba is recognizing the often unspoken ways specifically classed notions and practices of gender shaped the historical production of race and  racial inequality. In the context of nineteenth-century Cienfuegos, gender,  race, and class converged in the concept of urban order, a complex and  historically contingent nexus of ideas about the appropriate and desired social hierarchy among urban residents, often embodied spatially in particular relationships to the urban landscape.

As Cienfuegos evolved subtly over time, the internal logic of urban  order was driven by the construction and defense of a legible, developed,  aesthetically pleasing, and, most importantly, white city center. Local authorities produced policies that reduced access to the city center along class and gendered lines, for example, by imposing expensive building codes on centric lands, criminalizing poor peoples’ leisure activities, regulating prostitution, and quashing organized labor. Although none of these policies mentioned race outright, this new scholarship demonstrates that the policies were instrumental in producing and perpetuating the geographic marginality and discursive  erasure of people of color from the historic center of Cienfuegos  during its first century of existence.
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Cultural Forests of the Amazon
A Historical Ecology of People and Their Landscapes
William Balee
University of Alabama Press, 2013
Winner of the Society for Economic Botany's Mary W. Klinger Book Award.

Cultural Forests of the Amazon is a comprehensive and diverse account of how indigenous people transformed landscapes and managed resources in the most extensive region of tropical forests in the world.
 
Until recently, most scholars and scientists, as well as the general public, thought indigenous people had a minimal impact on Amazon forests, once considered to be total wildernesses. William Balée’s research, conducted over a span of three decades, shows a more complicated truth. In Cultural Forests of the Amazon, he argues that indigenous people, past and present, have time and time again profoundly transformed nature into culture. Moreover, they have done so using their traditional knowledge and technology developed over thousands of years. Balée demonstrates the inestimable value of indigenous knowledge in providing guideposts for a potentially less destructive future for environments and biota in the Amazon. He shows that we can no longer think about species and landscape diversity in any tropical forest without taking into account the intricacies of human history and the impact of all forms of knowledge and technology.
 
Balée describes the development of his historical ecology approach in Amazonia, along with important material on little-known forest dwellers and their habitats, current thinking in Amazonian historical ecology, and a narrative of his own dialogue with the Amazon and its people.

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The Cultural Prison
Discourse, Prisoners, and Punishment
John M. Sloop
University of Alabama Press, 2005
The incarcerated in America's cultural imagination.

The Cultural Prison brings a new dimension to the study of prisoners and punishment by focusing on how the punishment of American offenders is represented and shaped in the mass media through public arguments. The study is based on an analysis of 642 articles collected by the author from American popular journals and magazines, as well as newspaper accounts, films, and public speeches, spanning the years 1950 to 1992. By piecing together and studying these popular narratives, he divides the history of prisoners and punishment into four eras, each marked by a shift in value system. He argues that the discourse, or rhetoric, surrounding prisoners and punishment on the public level works as a historical force that shapes contemporary culture.

The author is concerned that the public seems to have an inability or unwillingness to question or resist cultural definitions of normalcy and legal behavior. He explains that ideally moral behavior should be a matter of public debate rather than of unquestioned perpetuation, and he urges increased understanding of institutional and cultural discipline and our questioning the ways in which the constitution of punishment and prisoners influences us culturally.

The"cultural prison" refers to the way in which this study acts as an investigation of "the discipline of discipline"; it is an examination of the way in which discipline is shaped and formed in public discourse. The volume concludes with a fascinating account of the move to electronic means of surveillance; coupled with the representations of the prisoner along the lines of race and gender, it explains what these new techniques mean to contemporary culture.

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Culture, Ethnicity, and Justice in the South
The Southern Anthropological Society, 1968-1971
Southern Anthropological Southern Anthropological Society
University of Alabama Press, 2004

An important anthology putting the leading topics in Southern anthropology in the context of the 1960s

Proceedings of the Southern Anthropological Society:

No. 1, Essays on Medical Anthropology (1968), edited by Thomas Weaver, with contributions by Frank J. Essene, Thomas Weaver, Charles Hudson, Helen Phillips, Hazel Hitson Weidman, Dorothea C. Leighton, Nora F. Cline, Peter Goethals, Berton H. Kaplan, Alice H. Murphree, John G. Peck, and Gianna Hochstein

No. 2, Urban Anthropology: Research Perspectives and Strategies (1968, edited by Elizabeth M. Eddy, with contributions by Charles Hudson, Elizabeth M. Eddy, Conrad M. Arensberg, Charles H. Fairbanks, H. W. Hutchinson, Anthony Leeds, Hans C. Buechler, Brian M. de Toit, Emilio Willems, Michael D. Olien, and John Gulick

No. 3, Concepts and Assumptions in Contemporary Anthropology (1969), edited by Stephen A. Tyler, with contributions by Charles Hudson, Stephen A. Tyler, Eric R. Wolf, Ann Fischer, E. Pendleton Banks, Munro S. Edmonson, Francis E. Johnston, William G. Haag, Arden R. King, and Jan Brukman

No. 4, The Not So Solid South: Anthropological Studies in a Regional Subculture (1971), edited by J. Kenneth Morland, with contributions by Charles Hudson, J. Kenneth Morland, Helen Phillips Keber, Jared Harper, Edward E. Knipe, Helen M. Lewis, Milton B. Newton Jr., Ronald J. Duncan, John Gordon, H. Eugene Hodges, William L. Partridge, Max E. Stanton, Robert Sayers, James L. Peacock, and Christopher Crocker

No. 5, Red, White, and Black: Symposium on Indians in the Old South (1971), edited by Charles M. Hudson, with contributions by Charles Hudson, Louis De Vorsey Jr., William S. Pollitzer, Mary R. Haas, David J. Hally, Charles H. Fairbanks, F. N. Boney, Joseph L. Brent III, William S. Willis Jr., John H. Peterson Jr., and Charles Crowe.
 

Originally distributed by the University of Georgia Press, are all combined herein with a historical overview in the new introduction by Miles Richardson and with a new index to the complete anthology.

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Cultures of Doing Good
Anthropologists and NGOs
Edited by Amanda Lashaw, Christian Vannier, and Steven Sampson
University of Alabama Press, 2018
Anthropological field studies of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in their unique cultural and political contexts.

Cultures of Doing Good: Anthropologists and NGOs serves as a foundational text to advance a growing subfield of social science inquiry: the anthropology of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Thorough introductory chapters provide a short history of NGO anthropology, address how the study of NGOs contributes to anthropology more broadly, and examine ways that anthropological studies of NGOs expand research agendas spawned by other disciplines. In addition, the theoretical concepts and debates that have anchored the analysis of NGOs since they entered scholarly discourse after World War II are explained.
 
The wide-ranging volume is organized into thematic parts: “Changing Landscapes of Power,” “Doing Good Work,” and “Methodological Challenges of NGO Anthropology.” Each part is introduced by an original, reflective essay that contextualizes and links the themes of each chapter to broader bodies of research and to theoretical and methodological debates. A concluding chapter synthesizes how current lines of inquiry consolidate and advance the first generation of anthropological NGO studies, highlighting new and promising directions in this field.

In contrast to studies about surveys of NGOs that cover a single issue or region, this book offers a survey of NGO dynamics in varied cultural and political settings. The chapters herein cover NGO life in Tanzania, Serbia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Peru, the United States, and India. The diverse institutional worlds and networks include feminist activism, international aid donors, USAID democracy experts, Romani housing activism, academic gender studies, volunteer tourism, Jewish philanthropy, Islamic faith-based development, child welfare, women’s legal arbitration, and environmental conservation.

The collection explores issues such as normative democratic civic engagement, elitism and professionalization, the governance of feminist advocacy, disciplining religion, the politics of philanthropic neutrality, NGO tourism and consumption, blurred boundaries between anthropologists as researchers and activists, and barriers to producing critical NGO ethnographies.
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Curators and Culture
The Museum Movement in America, 1740-1870
Joel J. Orosz
University of Alabama Press, 1990

This volume argues that a small, loosely connected group of men constituted an informal museum movement in America from about 1740 to 1870.

As they formed their pioneer museums, these men were guided not so much by European examples, but rather by the imperatives of the American democratic culture, including the Enlightenment, the simultaneous decline of the respectability and rise of the middle classes, the Age of Egalitarianism, and the advent of professionalism in the sciences. Thus the pre-1870 American museum was neither the frivolous sideshow some critics have imagined, nor the enclave for elitists that others have charged. Instead, the proprietors displayed serious motives and egalitarian aspirations.

The conflicting demands for popular education on the one hand and professionalism on the other were a continuing source of tension in American museums after about 1835, but by 1870 the two claims had synthesized into a rough parity. This synthesis, the "American Compromise," has remained the basic model of museums in America down to the present. Thus, by 1870, the form of the modern American museum as an institution which simultaneously provides popular education and promotes scholarly research was completely developed.

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Cussing Dixie, Loving Dixie
Fifty Years of Commentary by H. Brandt Ayers
H. Brandt Ayers and Carol Nunnelley
University of Alabama Press, 2015
Cussing Dixie, Loving Dixie: Fifty Years of Commentary by H. Brandt Ayers collects in one volume the essential writing of the legendary publisher and editor of the Anniston Star.
 
The decades-long ribbon of prose that spilled from Ayers’s pen captured the epochal milestones of our times, such as the 1965 March on Washington, the civil rights movement, the rise and decay of the New South movement, the South’s transformation from a bulwark of Democratic entropy to a heartland of irascible conservatism, and the election of the republic’s first black president.
 
Cussing Dixie, Loving Dixie: Fifty Years of Commentary by H. Brandt Ayers includes Ayers’s unforgettable descriptions of the political giants of Alabama’s turbulent twentieth century. Of George Wallace he wrote: “He lost his way in the swamp of racial politics, squandered his great talent for leadership, and, cruelly, has made his most devoted followers bear the consequences.” And Ayers memorably hymned Supreme Court justice Hugo Black as having “made of the Bill of Rights a trumpet which kept calling the nation back to its original purpose.”
 
Ayers was so known for his passionate crusade for a fair deal for “the plain people of both races” of Alabama that enemies dubbed his family’s newspaper “The Red Star.” A loyal son of Alabama who extolls Southern culture, Ayers unapologetically calls for Alabamians to cast off the moribund ideologies of the past. He jousts against obscurantism itself: “When fear and ignorance snuff out the brains of a man,” he thunders, “he is reduced to the level of a jungle predator—a flexed mass of instincts.”
 
Writing from a generous heart, Ayers enlivens and enlightens. Eschewing the hifalutin, his artful writing is both accessible to the people and admired by the learned. Far from provincial, his far-ranging eye landed often on global events, and he persuasively frames the state and region as an active front on which key national issues hang.
 
Ayers ranks among the most prolific and insightful chroniclers of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Alabama. Cussing Dixie, Loving Dixie: Fifty Years of Commentary by H. Brandt Ayers is a monument to his enduring legacy and relevance.
 
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