front cover of Faulkner the Storyteller
Faulkner the Storyteller
Blair Labatt
University of Alabama Press, 2006

A study exploring the role of event and plot in William Faulkner’s fiction.

Faulkner the Storyteller addresses the role of event and plot in Faulkner's fiction and the creation of an implied teller behind the tale. Novels like The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! are often thought of as canonical modernist texts antagonistic to traditional notions of plot and storytelling. Blair Labatt, however, argues that Faulkner's fiction, regardless of its modernist gestures, is filled and driven by sophisticated manifestations of plot—willed challenges, structural targets, gambits, designs, engagements, and battles—a language of competition and conflict and a syntax of events.

Labatt examines Faulkner's short stories, such as "Mountain Victory," "That Evening Sun," and "Barn Burning," and the architecture of the Snopes Trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion), and finds that Faulkner's deployment of cause and effect is central to his narratives. Labatt also explores how Faulkner's use of plot creates an implied voice that lends a humorous element to his story's twists and turns that often brackets and encloses the pathos of his characters.

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front cover of Architectural Variability in the Southeast
Architectural Variability in the Southeast
Cameron H. Lacquement
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Research into a millennium of Native American architecture in the Southeast

Some of the most visible expressions of human culture are illustrated architecturally. Unfortunately for archaeologists, the architecture being studied is not always visible and must be inferred from soil inconsistencies or charred remains. This study deals with research into roughly a millennium of Native American architecture in the Southeast and includes research on the variation of construction techniques employed both above and below ground. Most of the architecture discussed is that of domestic houses with some emphasis on large public buildings and sweat lodges. The authors use an array of methods and techniques in examining native architecture including experimental archaeology, ethnohistory, ethnography, multi-variant analysis, structural engineering, and wood science technology. A major portion of the work, and probably the most important in terms of overall significance, is that it addresses the debate of early Mississippian houses and what they looked like above ground and the changes that occurred both before and after the arrival of Europeans.
 
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front cover of Language in Exile
Language in Exile
Three Hundred Years of Jamaican Creole
Barbara Lalla
University of Alabama Press, 2009
"An important addition to studies of the genesis and life of Jamaican Creole as well as other New World creoles such as Gulla. Highlighting the nature of the nonstandard varieties of British English dialects to which the African slaves were exposed, this work presents a refreshingly cogent view of Jamaican Creole features."
--SECOL Review

"The history of Jamaican Creole comes to life through this book. Scholars will analyze its texts, follow the leads it opens up, and argue about refining its interpretations for a long time to come."
--Journal of Pidgin & Creole Languages

"The authors are to be congratulated on this substantial contribution to our understanding of how Jamaican Creole developed. Its value lies not only in the linguistic insights of the authors but also in the rich trove of texts that they have made accessible."
--English World-Wide

"Provides valuable historical and demographic data and sheds light on the origins and development of Jamaican Creole. Lalla and D'Costa offer interesting insights into Creole genesis, not only through their careful mapping of the migrations from Europe and Africa, which constructed the Jamaican society but also through extensive documentation of early texts. . . . Highly valuable to linguists, historians, anthropologists, psychologists, and anyone interested in the Caribbean or in the history of mankind."
--New West Indian Guide
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front cover of Caribbean Literary Discourse
Caribbean Literary Discourse
Voice and Cultural Identity in the Anglophone Caribbean
Barbara Lalla
University of Alabama Press, 2013
A study of the multicultural, multilingual, and Creolized languages that characterize Caribbean discourse, especially as reflected in the language choices that preoccupy creative writers

Caribbean Literary Discourse opens the challenging world of language choices and literary experiments characteristic of the multicultural and multilingual Caribbean. In these societies, the language of the master— English in Jamaica and Barbados—overlies the Creole languages of the majority. As literary critics and as creative writers, Barbara Lalla, Jean D’Costa, and Velma Pollard engage historical, linguistic, and literary perspectives to investigate the literature bred by this complex history. They trace the rise of local languages and literatures within the English speaking Caribbean, especially as reflected in the language choices of creative writers.

The study engages two problems: first, the historical reality that standard metropolitan English established by British colonialists dominates official economic, cultural, and political affairs in these former colonies, contesting the development of vernacular, Creole, and pidgin dialects even among the region’s indigenous population; and second, the fact that literary discourse developed under such conditions has received scant attention.

Caribbean Literary Discourse explores the language choices that preoccupy creative writers in whose work vernacular discourse displays its multiplicity of origins, its elusive boundaries, and its most vexing issues. The authors address the degree to which language choice highlights political loyalties and tensions; the politics of identity, self-representation, and nationalism; the implications of code-switching—the ability to alternate deliberately between different languages, accents, or dialects—for identity in postcolonial society; the rich rhetorical and literary effects enabled by code-switching and the difficulties of acknowledging or teaching those ranges in traditional education systems; the longstanding interplay between oral and scribal culture; and the predominance of intertextuality in postcolonial and diasporic literature.
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front cover of The Remembered Gate
The Remembered Gate
Memoirs by Alabama Writers
Jay Lamar
University of Alabama Press, 2002
Showcases nineteen nationally known writers who have roots in Alabama

In The Remembered Gate, nationally prominent fiction writers, essayists, and poets recall how their formative years in Alabama shaped them as people and as writers. The essays range in tone from the pained and sorrowful to the wistful and playful, in class from the privileged to the poverty-stricken, in geography from the rural to the urban, and in time from the first years of the 20th century to the height of the Civil Rights era and beyond.

In all the essays we see how the individual artists came to understand something central about themselves and their art from a changing Alabama landscape. Whether from the perspective of C. Eric Lincoln, beaten for his presumption as a young black man asking for pay for his labors, or of Judith Hillman Paterson, floundering in her unresolved relationship with her troubled family, these personal renderings are intensely realized visions of a writer's sense of being a writer and a human being. Robert Inman tells of exploring his grandmother's attic, and how the artifacts he found there fired his literary imagination. William Cobb profiles the lasting influence of the town bully, the diabolical Cletus Hickey. And in “Growing up in Alabama: A Meal in Four Courses, Beginning with Dessert,” Charles Gaines chronicles his upbringing through the metaphor of southern cooking.

What emerges overall is a complex, richly textured portrait of men and women struggling with, and within, Alabama’s economic and cultural evolution to become major voices of our time.
 
[more]

front cover of Bioarchaeological Studies of Life in the Age of Agriculture
Bioarchaeological Studies of Life in the Age of Agriculture
A View from the Southeast
Patricia M. Lambert
University of Alabama Press, 2000

Investigations of skeletal remains from key archaeological sites reveal new data and offer insights on prehistoric life and health in the Southeast.

The shift from foraging to farming had important health consequences for prehistoric peoples, but variations in health existed within communities that had made this transition. This new collection draws on the rich bioarchaeological record of the Southeastern United States to explore variability in health and behavior within the age of agriculture. It offers new perspectives on human adaptation to various geographic and cultural landscapes across the entire Southeast, from Texas to Virginia, and presents new data from both classic and little-known sites.

The contributors question the reliance on simple cause-and-effect relationships in human health and behavior by addressing such key bioarchaeological issues as disease history and epidemiology, dietary composition and sufficiency, workload stress, patterns of violence, mortuary practices, and biological consequences of European contact. They also advance our understanding of agriculture by showing that uses of maize were more varied than has been previously supposed.

Representing some of the best work being done today by physical anthropologists, this volume provides new insights into human adaptation for both archaeologists and osteologists. It attests to the heterogeneous character of Southeastern societies during the late prehistoric and early historic periods while effectively detailing the many factors that have shaped biocultural evolution.

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front cover of Politics and Welfare in Birmingham, 1900–1975
Politics and Welfare in Birmingham, 1900–1975
Edward Shannon LaMonte
University of Alabama Press, 1995

This well-written volume explores the relationships between politics and welfare programs for low-income residents in Birmingham during four periods in the twentieth century:

• 1900-1917, the formative period of city building when welfare was predominantly a responsibility of the private sector;
• 1928-1941, when the Great Depression devastated the local economy and federal intervention became the principal means of meeting human need;
• the mid 1950s, when the lasting impacts of the New Deal could be assessed and when matters of race relations became increasingly significant;
• 1962-1975, when an intense period of local government reform, the Civil Rights movement, federal intervention in the form of the War on Poverty, and increasing demands for citizen participation all reinforced one another.

From the time of its founding in 1871, Birmingham has had a biracial population, so the theme of race relations runs naturally throughout the narrative. LaMonte pays particular attention to those efforts to achieve a more harmonious biracial community, including the failed effort to establish an Urban League in the 1940s, the progressive activities of the Community Chest’s Interracial Division in the 1950s, which were abruptly terminated, and the dramatic events of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, when local events were elevated to international significance.

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front cover of Ways to Disappear
Ways to Disappear
Stories
Victoria Lancelotta
University of Alabama Press, 2023

The stories in Victoria Lancelotta’s Ways to Disappear excavate the unexamined places between dread and desire, promise and threat, where the body is both prison and salvation. Populated by the grieving and the exultant and those who see no difference between the two, by men and women who are only a little bit broken and boys and girls who can’t wait to be, by souls untethered, rootless, yet bound by blood and flesh, Lancelotta’s characters are driven by the irresistible need to be a bigger part of the worlds they each inhabit, by turns strange and commonplace. In language lush and jagged, never sentimental, these stories scrutinize the exhaustion and enchantment of the everyday: houses seething with resentment and devotion, cars dream-full and hurtling the children in them into a world they think they know but can’t imagine; front porches, back yards, luxury hotels, and truck stops. Lancelotta understands that sometimes people check their wounds not to see if they’ve healed, but to be sure they’re still there.

 

 

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front cover of Scalia v. Scalia
Scalia v. Scalia
Opportunistic Textualism in Constitutional Interpretation
Catherine L. Langford
University of Alabama Press, 2018
An analysis of the discrepancy between the ways Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argued the Constitution should be interpreted versus how he actually interpreted the law

Antonin Scalia is considered one of the most controversial justices to have been on the United States Supreme Court. A vocal advocate of textualist interpretation, Justice Scalia argued that the Constitution means only what it says and that interpretations of the document should be confined strictly to the directives supplied therein. This narrow form of constitutional interpretation, which limits constitutional meaning to the written text of the Constitution, is known as textualism.
 
Scalia v. Scalia:Opportunistic Textualism in Constitutional Interpretation examines Scalia’s discussions of textualism in his speeches, extrajudicial writings, and judicial opinions. Throughout his writings, Scalia argues textualism is the only acceptable form of constitutional interpretation. Yet Scalia does not clearly define his textualism, nor does he always rely upon textualism to the exclusion of other interpretive means.
 
Scalia is seen as the standard bearer for textualism. But when textualism fails to support his ideological aims (as in cases that pertain to states’ rights or separation of powers), Scalia reverts to other forms of argumentation. Langford analyzes Scalia’s opinions in a clear area of law, the cruel and unusual punishment clause; a contested area of law, the free exercise and establishment cases; and a silent area of law, abortion. Through her analysis, Langford shows that Scalia uses rhetorical strategies beyond those of a textualist approach, concluding that Scalia is an opportunistic textualist and that textualism is as rhetorical as any other form of judicial interpretation.
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front cover of Looking for Lost Lore
Looking for Lost Lore
Studies in Folklore, Ethnology, and Iconography
George E. Lankford
University of Alabama Press, 2008
All students of the past bump into what seem to be impenetrable walls and are left looking longingly beyond the barrier for the lore that seems hopelessly lost. This book is an argument that all that information is not necessarily lost. It may just need a different approach–perhaps multidisciplinary, perhaps a new method, or maybe just with a new hypothesis for testing. Vanished societies have left behind masses of raw data, but it is up to us to discover new ways to look through these windows into the past.
 
Especially in light of the growing relationship—and tensions—between cultural traditions and scientific inquiry, Lankford’s breadth of knowledge, long-term engagement with the issues, and excellent writing style bring clarity to this issue. It is not an easy process, but it is engaging. Any puzzle-solver will find this sort of historical detective work worth the effort.
[more]

front cover of Native American Legends of the Southeast
Native American Legends of the Southeast
Tales from the Natchez, Caddo, Biloxi, Chickasaw, and Other Nations
George E. Lankford
University of Alabama Press, 2011
The study of legends has long been a critical component of cultural anthropological analysis.  In Native American Legends of the Southeast, George E. Lankford has compiled and analyzed a collection of unique and rare legends that will continue to appeal to scholars and students of Native American culture and the study of legends in general.
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front cover of Reachable Stars
Reachable Stars
Patterns in the Ethnoastronomy of Eastern North America
George E. Lankford
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Modern Westerners say the lights in the sky are stars, but culturally they are whatever we humans say they are. Some say they are Forces that determine human lives, some declare they are burning gaseous masses, and some see them as reminders of a gloried past by which elders can teach and guide the young—mnemonics for narratives. Lankford’s volume focuses on the ancient North Americans and the ways they identified, patterned, ordered, and used the stars to light their culture and illuminate their traditions. They knew them as regions that could be visited by human spirits, and so the lights for them were not distant points of light, but “reachable stars.” Guided by the night sky and its constellations, they created oral traditions, or myths, that contained their wisdom and which they used to pass on to succeeding generations their particular world view.
 
However, they did not all tell the same stories. This study uses that fact—patterns of agreement and disagreement—to discover prehistoric relationships between Indian groups. Which groups saw a constellation in the same way and told the same story? How did that happen? Although these preliterate societies left no written records, the mythic patterns across generations and cultures enable contemporary researchers to examine the differences in how they understood the universe—not as early scientists, but as creators of cosmic order. In the process of doing that, the myth-tellers left the footprints of their international cultural relationships behind them. Reachable Stars is the story of their stories.
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front cover of Hunting for Hides
Hunting for Hides
Deerskins, Status, and Cultural Change in the Protohistoric Appalachians
Heather A. Lapham
University of Alabama Press, 2006
Changes in Native American communities as they adapted to advancing Europeans.
 
This volume investigates the use of deer, deerskins, and nonlocal goods in the period from A.D. 1400 to 1700 to gain a comprehensive understanding of historic-era cultural changes taking place within Native American communities in the southern Appalachian Highlands. In the 1600s, hunting deer to obtain hides for commercial trade evolved into a substantial economic enterprise for many Native Americans in the Middle Atlantic and Southeast.  An overseas market demand for animal hides and furs imported from the Americas, combined with the desire of infant New World colonies to find profitable export commodities, provided a new market for processed deerskins as well as new sources of valued nonlocal goods.  This new trade in deerskins created a reorganization of the priorities of native hunters that initiated changes in native trade networks, political alliances, gender relations, and cultural belief systems.  

Through research on faunal remains and mortuary assemblages, Lapham tracks both the products Native Americans produced for colonial trade--deerskins and other furs--as well as those items received in exchange--European and native prestige goods that end up in burial contexts. Zooarchaeological analyses provide insights into subsistence practices, deer-hunting strategies, and deer-hide production activities, while an examination of mortuary practices contributes information on the use of the nonlocal goods acquired through trade in deerskins. This study reveals changes in economic organization and mortuary practices that provide new insights into how participation in the colonial deerskin trade initially altered Native American social relations and political systems.
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front cover of Cultures of Doing Good
Cultures of Doing Good
Anthropologists and NGOs
Amanda Lashaw
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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front cover of Three Voyages
Three Voyages
Rene Laudonniere
University of Alabama Press, 2001

This translation of an eyewitness account by a major participant offers valuable information about all three attempts to establish a French colony on the south Atlantic coast of North America.



Rene Laudonniere's account of the three attempts by France to colonize what is now the United States is uniquely valuable because
he played a major role in each of the ventures—first, in 1562, as second in command during the founding of the ill-fated Charlesport, then as commander for the establishment of Fort Caroline on Florida's St. Johns River in 1564, and finally as the one to welcome French reinforcements the following year. It was also Laudonniere's destiny to witness the tragic fall of Fort Caroline to Spanish claims one month later.




Laudonniere wrote his chronicle, L'histoire Notable de la Floride, in 1565 following the fall of Fort Caroline as he recuperated in England. Much more than an account of his feelings and adventures, Laudonniere's history reveals him to be an exceedingly able and accurate geographer with a highly developed interest in anthropology.




The first English translation was published by Richard Hakluyt in 1587. Charles E. Bennett's graceful and accurate rendering in modern English was first published in 1975 by the University Press of Florida. Besides the account, thoroughly annotated and with present-day names identifying sites visited by the Frenchman, this volume includes a valuable introductory essay. The appendices to the volume are four noteworthy documents, the last of which—a guide to plants of 16th-century Florida—will be of exceptional interest to naturalists, gardeners, and students of folklore. The account itself will fascinate professional historians and anthropologists as well as general readers interested in the exciting and often moving
events of early European settlement in the New World.




Rene Laudonniere was a French adventurer and explorer of the 16th century who wrote L'histoire Notable de la Floride. Charles E. Bennett is a historian and former Florida congressman. He was coauthor of the Moss-Bennett legislation and was instrumental in the establishment of the Fort Caroline National Memorial and the Timucuan Ecological and Historical Preserve. Jerald T. Milanich is Curator in Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

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front cover of Another South
Another South
Experimental Writing in the South
Bill Lavender
University of Alabama Press, 2002
Gathers the best work of flourishing but often-neglected avant-garde southern poets

Another South is an anthology of poetry from contemporary southern writers who are working in forms that are radical, innovative, and visionary. Highly experimental and challenging in nature, the poetry in this volume, with its syntactical disjunctions, formal revolutions, and typographic playfulness, represents the direction of a new breed of southern writing that is at once universal in its appeal and regional in its flavor.

Focusing on poets currently residing in the South, the anthology includes both emerging and established voices in the national and international literary world. From the invocations of Andy Young’s “Vodou Headwashing Ceremony” to the blues-informed poems of Lorenzo Thomas and Honorée Jeffers, from the different voicings of John Lowther and Kalamu ya Salaam to the visual, multi-genre art of Jake Berry, David Thomas Roberts, and Bob Grumman, the poetry in Another South is rich in variety and enthusiastic in its explorations of new ways to embody place and time. These writers have made the South lush with a poetic avant-garde all its own, not only redefining southern identity and voice but also offering new models of what is possible universally through the medium of poetry.

Hank Lazer’s introductory essay about “Kudzu textuality” contextualizes the work by these contemporary innovators. Like the uncontrollable runaway vine that entwines the southern landscape, their poems are hyperfertile, stretching their roots and shoots relentlessly, at once destructive and regenerative. In making a radical departure from nostalgic southern literary voices, these poems of polyvocal abundance are closer in spirit to "speaking in tongues" or apocalyptic southern folk art—primitive, astonishing, and mystic.
 
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front cover of Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds
Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds
A Novel
Patrick Lawler
University of Alabama Press, 2012
Winner of the 2013 CNY Book Award for Fiction. 

When you step inside Patrick Lawler’s Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds, you will find yourself hovering in the clouds, among a family and a town, and in the world of one of fiction’s most inventive writers.
 
Patrick Lawler’s novel is about resonance, echoes, and naming; about hiding inside of names; about standing completely still; and about the fractalization of family. Connect the dots. Connect the secrets. Mother. Father. Sisters. Brother. Every character wears a variety of masks, and every place is also someplace else.
 
Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds is a reconfiguring of narrative—how stories exist inside stories, how place exists inside self, how self exists inside others, and how parachutists exist inside clouds.
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front cover of What Is A Poet?
What Is A Poet?
Hank Lazer
University of Alabama Press, 1987

This book discusses the extent of distrust and the extent of the misunderstandings that exist in the poetry world.

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front cover of Patton's Pawns
Patton's Pawns
The 94th US Infantry Division at the Siegfried Line
Tony Le Tissier
University of Alabama Press, 2007

The 94th US Infantry Division was an organization formed late in the Second World War, made up largely of draft-deferred university students as enlisted men and an officer corps pulled together from various domestic postings with unfortunate consequences for mutual trust and respect.
Initially used as part of the force blockading the Brittany ports after D-Day, in December of 1944, the division was incorporated into General Patton’s Third Army south of the Moselle-Saar Triangle, the base of which was a portion of the Siegfried Line known as the Orscholz Switch. Its first combat experience came in battalion-sized attacks during that terrible winter while the Battle of the Bulge raged to the north, and the Division suffered heavy casualties, many due to the ferocity of the winter weather. Patton, with characteristic zeal, excoriated the division’s officers and senior NCOs for the rate of non-combat casualties. Thereafter, the division was ordered forward on an all-out assault to break through the Siegfried Line. After horrific fighting against entrenched defenders, with ice turning to mud as spring approached, on February 19, 1945, the 94th broke through to open the roads to Trier and the Rhine.

This book is the most comprehensive study to date of the fierce fighting between the 94th U.S. Infantry Division and their German counterparts during that spring of 1945. It sheds new light on the achievements of the outnumbered division in penetrating Germany’s Westwall. With characteristic verve and detail, Tony Le Tissier narrates the action and illuminates the tribulations and sacrifices of American soldiers who won their laurels at great cost.

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front cover of Explorations into Highland New Guinea, 1930-1935
Explorations into Highland New Guinea, 1930-1935
Michael J. Leahy
University of Alabama Press, 1991

In the 1920s and 1930s there were adventures to be lived and fortunes to be made by strong young men in the outback of Australia and the gold fields of New Guinea. This is the diary of five years spent in hot pursuit—not of honor and glory, but of excitement and riches—by one such adventurer, Michael "Mick" Leahy, his brothers Jim and Pat, and friends Mick Dwyer and Jim Taylor. Leahy and his associates explored the unknown interior of New Guinea, seeking gold and making contact for the first time with the aborigines of the interior mountains and valleys.

White man was unknown to these often cannibalistic, always dangerous, aborigines who thought the seekers of yellow in the streams slightly mad, and thus easy prey. The chronicles of their explorations and their hundreds of photographs brought news of these native peoples to the outside world. In doing so, they changed forever our understanding of the human landscape of New Guinea, and carved a place in history for these explorers who, braving the environment in search of gold, found people.

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front cover of The Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency
History and Documents
William M. Leary
University of Alabama Press, 1984
Provides for the first time a complete and dispassionate history of the most discussed and least known agency in the history of the American Republic

In late 1974 the U.S. Senate Select Committee on the CIA, headed by Frank Church of Idaho, began collecting documents and materials to buttress the committee hearings on the CIA’s role and activities that were to begin in the fall of 1975. Among the materials prepared for the Church Committee is History of the Central Intelligence Agency, which was written by committee staff member Anne Karalekas.

This book reproduces the History, with an introduction by Leary that establishes the historical framework for the Church Committee hearings, and also includes ten relevant documents covering events from 1944 to 1981.
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front cover of Perilous Missions
Perilous Missions
Civil Air Transport and CIA Covert Operations in Asia
William M. Leary
University of Alabama Press, 2005

Civil Air Transport (CAT), founded in China after World War II by Claire Chennault and Whiting Willauer, was initially a commercial carrier specializing in air freight. Its role quickly changed as CAT became first a paramilitary adjunct of the Nationalist Chinese Air Force, then the CIA's secret "air force" in Korea, then "the most shot-at airline in the world" in French Indochina, and eventually becoming reorganized as Air America at the height of the Vietnam War. William M. Leary's detailed operational history of CAT sets the story in the perspective of Asian and Cold War geopolitics and shows how CAT allowed the CIA to operate with a level of flexibility and secrecy that it would not have attained through normal military or commercial air transportation.

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front cover of A Presidential Civil Service
A Presidential Civil Service
FDR's Liaison Office for Personnel Management
Mordecai Lee
University of Alabama Press, 2016
A masterful account of the founding of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Liaison Office for Personnel Management (LOPM), and his use of LOPM to demonstrate the efficacy of a management-oriented federal civil service over a purely merit-based Civil Service Commission

A Presidential Civil Service offers a comprehensive and definitive study of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Liaison Office for Personnel Management (LOPM). Established in 1939 following the release of Roosevelt’s Brownlow Committee report, LOPM became a key milestone in the evolution of the contemporary executive-focused civil service.
 
The Progressive Movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries comprised groups across the political spectrum with quite different. All, however, agreed on the need for a politically autonomous and independent federal Civil Service Commission (CSC) to eliminate patronage and political favoritism. In A Presidential Civil Service, public administration scholar Mordecai Lee explores two models open to later reformers: continuing a merit-based system isolated from politics or a management-based system subordinated to the executive and grounded in the growing field of managerial science.
 
Roosevelt’s 1937 Brownlow Committee, formally known as the President’s Committee on Administrative Management, has been widely studied including its recommendation to disband the CSC and replace it with a presidential personnel director. What has never been documented in detail was Roosevelt’s effort to implement that recommendation over the objections of Congress by establishing the LOPM as a nonstatutory agency.
 
The role and existence of LOPM from 1939 to 1945 has been largely dismissed in the history of public administration. Lee’s meticulously researched A Presidential Civil Service, however, persuasively shows that LOPM played a critical role in overseeing personnel policy. It was involved in every major HR initiative before and during World War II. Though small, the agency’s deft leadership almost always succeeded at impelling the CSC to follow its lead.
 
Roosevelt’s actions were in fact an artful and creative victory, a move finally vindicated when, in 1978, Congress abolished the CSC and replaced it with an Office of Personnel Management headed by a presidential appointee. A Presidential Civil Service offers a fascinating account and vital reassessment of the enduring legacy of Roosevelt’s LOPM.
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front cover of Sounds of Tohi
Sounds of Tohi
Cherokee Health and Well-Being in Southern Appalachia
Lisa J. Lefler
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Dialogue between a medical anthropologist and a Cherokee linguist about health, well-being, and environmental issues
 
Sounds of Tohi: Cherokee Health and Well-Being in Southern Appalachia is the result of almost two decades of work by medical anthropologist Lisa J. Lefler and Cherokee elder and traditionalist Thomas N. Belt. The narrative consists of a dialogue between them that displays traditional Indigenous knowledge as well as the importance of place for two people from cultures and histories that intersect in the mountains of Southern Appalachia. Together, Lefler and Belt decolonize thinking about health, well-being, and environmental issues through the language and experiences of people whose identity is inextricably linked to the mountains and landscape of western North Carolina.

Lefler and Belt discuss several critical cultural concepts that explain the science of relationships with this world, with the spirit world, and with people. They explore tohi, the Cherokee concept of health, which offers a more pervasive understanding of relationships in life as balanced and moving forward in a good way. They converse about the importance of matrilineality, particularly in light of community healing, the epistemologies of Cherokee cosmography, and decolonizing counseling approaches.

The discussions here offer a different way of approaching the issues that face Americans in this difficult time of division. Lefler and Belt share their urgency to take action against the wholesale exploitation of public lands and the shared environment, to work to perpetuate tribal languages, to preserve the science that can make a difference in how people treat one another, and to create more forums that are inclusive of Native and marginalized voices and that promote respect and appreciation of one another and the protection of sacred places. Throughout, they rely on the preservation of traditional knowledge, or Native science, via Native language to provide insight as to why people should recognize a connection to the land.
 
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front cover of Under the Rattlesnake
Under the Rattlesnake
Cherokee Health and Resiliency
Lisa J. Lefler
University of Alabama Press, 2009
Provides a balanced portrait of Cherokee health issues

For the Cherokee, health is more than the absence of disease; it includes a fully confident sense of a smooth life, peaceful existence, unhurried pace, and easy flow of time. The natural state of the world is to be neutral, balanced, with a similarly gently flowing pattern. States of imbalance, tension, or agitation are indicative of physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual illness and whether caused intentionally through omission or commission, or by outside actions or influences, the result affects and endangers the collective Cherokee.
 
Taking a true anthropological four-field approach, Lefler and her colleagues provide a balanced portrait of Cherokee health issues. Topics covered include: an understanding of the personal and spiritual impact of skeletal research among the Cherokee; the adverse reactions to be expected in well-meaning attempts to practice bioarchaeology; health, diet, and the relationship between diet and disease; linguistic analysis of Cherokee language in historical and contemporary contexts describing the relationship of the people to the cosmos; culturally appropriate holistic approaches to disease prevention and intervention methodologies; and the importance of the sacred feminine and the use of myth and symbolism within this matrilineal culture. All aspects—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual—figure into the Cherokee concept of good health. By providing insight into the Cherokee perspective on health, wellness, and the end of the life cycle, and by incorporating appropriate protocol and language, this work reveals the necessity of a diversity of approaches in working with all indigenous populations.
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America's Battalion
Marines in the First Gulf War
Otto J. Lehrack
University of Alabama Press, 2008
Tells the experiences of one unit, the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, during Operation Desert Storm

Building from interviews with the members of the battalion, Otto Lehrack examines the nature of warfare in the Persian Gulf. The terrain of the Arabian Peninsula and the disposition of the enemy dictated conventional warfare requiring battalion and regimental assaults coordinated at the division level, so interviewees are primarily the officers and senior non-commissioned officers concerned.

The 3rd of the 3rd, also known as “America’s Battalion,” had just returned from deployment in the summer of 1990 when they were required to immediately re-deploy to a strange land to face a battle-hardened enemy after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Theirs was only the second Marine battalion to arrive in Saudi Arabia. They participated in the first allied ground operation of the war, played a key role in the battle for the city of Khafji, and were the first to infiltrate the Iraqi wire and minefield barrier in order to provide flank security for the beginning of the allied offensive.

Facing an enemy that had used some of the most fearsome weapons of mass destruction—chemical and biological agents—against its former opponents and against its own people, the Marines had been prepared for the worst. Lehrack has documented this unit’s remarkable performance through the accounts of those who participated in the historic events in the Persian Gulf and returned home to tell of them.
 
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Standing Before the Shouting Mob
Lenoir Chambers and Virginia's Massive Resistance to Public School Integration
Alex Leidholdt
University of Alabama Press, 2007

A southern journalist campaigns for racial understanding during the
struggle over school desegregation in Virginia.

In 1958 the nation's attention was focused on Norfolk,
Virginia, where nearly ten thousand students were locked out of their schools.
Rather than comply with the desegregation mandate of Brown v. Board
of Education
, Governor J. Lindsay Almond, supported by the powerful
political machine of Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr., had closed Norfolk's white
secondary schools.

Massive resistance to integration transformed Norfolk
into a civil rights arena. Although the process by which Norfolk's schools
were integrated was far from orderly, the transition was characterized
by debate, political maneuvering, and judicial action--not violence. Lenoir
Chambers, editor of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, conducted a five-year
editorial campaign supporting the peaceful implementation of the Court's
order. The Pilot was Virginia's only white newspaper to take this
position. Chambers was later awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials.

Utilizing a wide range of primary and secondary sources,
Standing before the Shouting Mob examines Chambers's campaign, explores
the influences that shaped his racial views, and places him within the
context of southern journalism. The book also provides a detailed analysis
of Virginia's massive resistance and Norfolk's school closing.




 
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The Story upon a Hill
The Puritan Myth in Contemporary American Fiction
Christopher Leise
University of Alabama Press, 2017
In this provocative and thought-provoking volume, Christopher Leise sheds new light on modern American novelists who question not only the assumption that Puritans founded New England—and, by extension, American identity—but also whether Puritanism ever existed in the United States at all.

The Story upon a Hill: The Puritan Myth in Contemporary American Fiction analyzes the work of several of the most important contemporary writers in the United States as reinterpreting commonplace narratives of the country’s origins with a keen eye on the effects of inclusion and exclusion that Puritan myths promote. In 1989, Ronald Reagan recalled the words of Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop, who imagined the colony as a “city upon a hill” for future nations to emulate. In Reagan’s speech, Winthrop’s signature rhetoric became an emblem of American idealism, and for many Americans, the Puritans’ New England was the place where the United States forged its original identity.
 
But what if Winthrop never gave that speech? What if he did not even write it? Historians cannot definitively answer these questions. In fact, no group that we refer to as American Puritans thought of themselves as Puritans. Rather, they were a group of dissident Christians often better defined by their disagreements than their shared beliefs.
 
Literary scholars interested in Anglo-American literary production from the seventeenth century through the present, historians, and readers interested in how ideas about Christianity circulate in popular culture will find fascinating the ways in which William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Marilynne Robinson repurpose so-called Puritan forms of expression to forge a new narrative of New England’s Congregationalist legacy in American letters. Works by Colson Whitehead, Paul Auster, Toni Morrison, and others are also considered. The Story upon a Hill raises a provocative question: if the Puritans never existed as we understand them, what might American history look like in that context?
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Triumph of the Dead
American World War II Cemeteries, Monuments, and Diplomacy in France
Kate Clarke Lemay
University of Alabama Press, 2018
An investigation into the relationship between history, art, architecture, memory, and diplomacy.
 
Between 1948 and 1956, the United States government planned an enormous project to build fourteen permanent overseas military cemeteries in Europe. These park-like burial grounds eventually would hold the graves of approximately 80,000 American soldiers and nurses who died during or immediately after World War II. Five of these cemeteries are located in France, more than any other nation: two in Normandy; one in Provence; and two in Lorraine.
 
In Triumph of the Dead: American World War II Cemeteries, Monuments, and Diplomacy in France, Kate Clarke Lemay explores the relationship between art, architecture, war memory, and Franco-American relations. She addresses the many functions, both original and more recent, that the American war cemeteries have performed, such as: war memorials, diplomatic gestures, Cold War political statements, prompts for debate about Franco-American relations, and the nature of French identity itself. Located on or near former battlefields, the American war cemeteries are at once history lessons, sites of memory, and commemorative monuments. As places of mourning, war cemeteries are considerably different than civic cemeteries in their rituals, designs, and influences on collective memory. As transatlantic sites, the cemeteries both construct and sustain an American memory of World War II for a Francophile and European audience.
 
The book features ten color photographs, fifty black and white photographs, and four maps. Scholars as well as enthusiasts of World War II history, mid-century art and architecture, and cultural diplomacy will be interested in reading this richly researched book, the first in-depth history of some of the most important sites of American World War II remembrance.
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Amulets, Effigies, Fetishes, and Charms
Native American Artifacts and Spirit Stones from the Northeast
Edward J. Lenik
University of Alabama Press, 2016
Rounds out Edward J. Lenik’s comprehensive and expert study of the rock art of northeastern Native Americans
 
Decorated stone artifacts are a significant part of archaeological studies of Native Americans in the Northeast. The artifacts illuminated in Amulets, Effigies, Fetishes, and Charms: Native American Artifacts and Spirit Stones from the Northeast include pecked, sculpted, or incised figures, images, or symbols. These are rendered on pebbles, plaques, pendants, axes, pestles, and atlatl weights, and are of varying sizes, shapes, and designs. Lenik draws from Indian myths and legends and incorporates data from ethnohistoric and archaeological sources together with local environmental settings in an attempt to interpret the iconography of these fascinating relics. For the Algonquian and Iroquois peoples, they reflect identity, status, and social relationships with other Indians as well as beings in the spirit world.
 
Lenik begins with background on the Indian cultures of the Northeast and includes a discussion of the dating system developed by anthropologists to describe prehistory. The heart of the content comprises more than eighty examples of portable rock art, grouped by recurring design motifs. This organization allows for in-depth analysis of each motif. The motifs examined range from people, animals, fish, and insects to geometric and abstract designs. Information for each object is presented in succinct prose, with a description, illustration, possible interpretation, the story of its discovery, and the location where it is now housed. Lenik also offers insight into the culture and lifestyle of the Native American groups represented. An appendix listing places to see and learn more about the artifacts and a glossary are included.
 
The material in this book, used in conjunction with Lenik’s previous research, offers a reference for virtually every known example of northeastern rock art. Archaeologists, students, and connoisseurs of Indian artistic expression will find this an invaluable work.
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Making Pictures in Stone
American Indian Rock Art of the Northeast
Edward J. Lenik
University of Alabama Press, 2008

A full range of rock art appearances, including dendroglyphs, pictographs, and a selection of portable rock objects

The Indians of northeastern North America are known to us primarily through reports and descriptions written by European explorers, clergy, and settlers, and through archaeological evidence. An additional invaluable source of information is the interpretation of rock art images and their relationship to native peoples for recording practical matters or information, as expressions of their legends and spiritual traditions, or as simple doodling or graffiti. The images in this book connect us directly to the Indian peoples of the Northeast, mainly Algonkian tribes inhabiting eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland and the lower Potomac River Valley, New York, New Jersey, the six New EnglandStates, and Atlantic Canada. Lenik provides a full range of rock art appearances in the study area, including some dendroglyphs, pictographs, and a selection of portable rock objects. By providing a full analysis and synthesis of the data, including the types and distribution of the glyphs, and interpretations of their meaning to the native peoples, Lenik reveals a wealth of new information on the culture and lifeways of the Indians of the Northeast.

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Rock Art in an Indigenous Landscape
From Atlantic Canada to Chesapeake Bay
Edward J. Lenik
University of Alabama Press, 2021
Examines a host of rock art sites from Nova Scotia to Maryland
 
Rock art, petroglyphs, and pictographs have been made by indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Images have been found on bedrock, cliff faces, ridge tops, and boulders and in rock shelters. Some rock surfaces are covered with abstract and geometric designs such as concentric circles, zigzag lines, grids, and cross-hatched and ladder-like patterns. Others depict humans, footprints and handprints, mammals, serpents, and mythic creatures. All were meticulously pecked, incised or painted. This ancient art form connects us to Native Americans’ past, traditions, world views, and sacred places.
 
Rock Art in an Indigenous Landscape: From Atlantic Canada to Chesapeake Bay is the culmination of the research of preeminent rock art scholar Edward J. Lenik. Here, he profiles more than 64 examples of rock art in varied locations from Nova Scotia to Maryland. Chapters are organized geographically and lead the reader through coastal sites, rivers and streams, lakes and ponds, and upland sites.
 
Lenik discusses the rock art examples in the context of the indigenous landscape, noting the significance of the place of discovery. Coverage includes a meticulous description of the design or motif and suggestions of time frame, artist-makers, and interpretations. Where possible, indigenous views on the artifacts enrich the narrative. Other invaluable elements are a discussion of how to identify indigenous rock art; a glossary of rock art terms and features and archaeological culture periods; an up-to-date bibliography; and an appendix of a number of reported but unconfirmed petroglyph sites in the regions.
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United States–Latin American Relations, 1850–1903
Establishing a Relationship
Thomas M. Leonard
University of Alabama Press, 1999

During the second half of the 19th century several forces in the United States, Latin America, and Europe converged to set the stage for the establishment of a more permanent relationship between the United States and Latin America. The key factors--security, economics, and modernization--created both commonalities and conflicts between and among regions. In this volume, scholars examine not only the domestic but also the geopolitical forces that encouraged and guided development of diplomatic relations in this rapidly changing period.

As the contributors note, by the end of the century, economic interests dominated the relationship that eventually developed. This period saw the building of a string of U.S. naval bases in Latin America and the Caribbean, the rapid industrialization of the United States and the development of a substantial export market, the entrance of many U.S. entrepreneurs into Latin American countries, and the first two inter-American conferences. By the century's end, the United States appeared as the dominant partner in the relationship, a perception that earned it the "imperialist" label.

This volume untangles this complex relationship by examining U.S. relations with Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Central America, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay from the perspective of both the United States and the individual Latin American countries.

A companion volume to United States-Latin American Relations, 1800-1850: The Formative Generations, edited by T. Ray Shurbutt, this book establishes a historical perspective crucial to understanding contemporary diplomatic relations.

 

 


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Waccamaw Legacy
Contemporary Indians Fight for Survival
Patricia Barker Lerch
University of Alabama Press, 2004

An insightful and informative look into the Waccamaw Siouan's quest for identity and survival

Waccamaw Legacy: Contemporary Indians Fight for Survival sheds light on North Carolina Indians by tracing the story of the now state-recognized Waccamaw Siouan tribe from its beginnings in the Southeastern United States, through their first contacts with Europeans, and into the 21st century, detailing the struggles these Indians have endured over time. We see how the Waccamaw took hold of popular theories about Indian tribes like the Croatan of the Lost Colony and the Cherokee as they struggled to preserve their heritage and to establish their identity.

Patricia Lerch was hired by the Waccamaw in 1981 to perform the research needed to file for recognition under the Bureau of Indian Affairs Federal Acknowledgement Program of 1978. The Waccamaw began to organize powwows in 1970 to represent publicly their Indian heritage and survival and to spread awareness of their fight for cultural preservation and independence. Lerch found herself understanding that the powwows, in addition to affirming identity, revealed important truths about the history of the Waccamaw and the ways they communicate and coexist.

Waccamaw Legacy outlines Lerch’s experience as she played a vital role in the Waccamaw Siouan's continuing fight for recognition and acceptance in contemporary society and culture.

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Cayman's 1794 Wreck of the Ten Sail
Peace, War, and Peril in the Caribbean
Margaret E. Leshikar-Denton
University of Alabama Press, 2020
The greatest shipwreck disaster in the history of the Cayman Islands
 
The story has been passed through generations for more than two centuries. Details vary depending on who is doing the telling, but all refer to this momentous maritime event as the Wreck of the Ten Sail. Sometimes misunderstood as the loss of a single ship, it was in fact the wreck of ten vessels at once, comprising one of the most dramatic maritime disasters in all of Caribbean naval history. Surviving historical documents and the remains of the wrecked ships in the sea confirm that the narrative is more than folklore. It is a legend based on a historical event in which HMS Convert, formerly L’Inconstante, a recent prize from the French, and 9 of her 58-ship merchant convoy sailing from Jamaica to Britain, wrecked on the jagged eastern reefs of Grand Cayman in 1794.
 
The incident has historical significance far beyond the boundaries of the Cayman Islands. It is tied to British and French history during the French Revolution, when these and other European nations were competing for military and commercial dominance around the globe. The Wreck of the Ten Sail attests to the worldwide distribution of European war and trade at the close of the eighteenth century.
 
In Cayman’s 1794 Wreck of the Ten Sail: Peace, War, and Peril in the Caribbean, Margaret E. Leshikar-Denton focuses on the ships, the people, and the wreck itself to define their place in Caymanian, Caribbean, and European history. This well-researched volume weaves together rich oral folklore accounts, invaluable supporting documents found in archives in the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and France, and tangible evidence of the disaster from archaeological sites on the reefs of the East End.
 
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Standing Watch
American Submarine Veterans Remember the Cold War Era
Jonathan Li-Chung Leung
University of Alabama Press, 2019
The first book to capture and preserve the inside story of the exclusive brotherhood that manned the front lines of the Cold War
 
Featuring interviews from seventeen veteran submariners, Standing Watch: American Submarine Veterans Remember the Cold War Era offers the perspective of the submariners themselves—lending them a voice and paying homage to their service. Jonathan Li-Chung Leung provides an original glimpse into a world of unique challenges and characters, a life isolated and submerged, and a duty defined by the juxtaposition of monotonous routine and unparalleled excitement.
 
These personal accounts of life below the surface offer readers a front-row seat to close encounters with Soviet submarines and the naval blockade during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as an intimate understanding of daily life onboard the vessels, the culture of military discipline, and the religious-like fervor exercised in honoring traditions big and small. By applying first-hand perspectives to a larger thematic overview, this book uses authentic narratives to deliver a lively and colorful picture of the Silent Service.
 
Set against the backdrop of sobering geo-political disputes and their own role as the nation’s defenders against a seemingly ambiguous super-enemy, these veterans focus on their responsibilities and reflect on careers built on the simple axioms of pride and service. This invigorating and unalloyed account is an unprecedented addition to the existing literature on naval and military history.
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Maurice Samuel
Life and Letters of a Secular Jewish Contrarian
Alan T. Levenson
University of Alabama Press, 2022
An intellectual biography that reassesses one of the premier Jewish humanists of the mid-twentieth century
 
In Maurice Samuel: Life and Letters of a Secular Jewish Contrarian, Alan T. Levenson captures the life, works, and milieu of the Romanian-born, English-educated, American belletrist Maurice Samuel. A diaspora intellectual—or a rooted cosmopolitan, as Levenson describes him—Samuel made an indelible mark on many features of contemporary Jewish thought and culture. A generalist in an age of experts, an independent scholar in an age of rabbis and professors, Samuel was one of the most productive and visible members of the group dubbed the “other” New York Jewish intellectuals.

His fame as a public intellectual and popular speaker were well warranted: no mere popularizer, Samuel contributed significantly to four seemingly unrelated but critical areas of modern Jewish thought. Samuel is characterized by some as principally a Zionist, by others as an accomplished translator and many Americans’ first entrée into the world of Yiddish literature, by still others as a polemicist and campaigner against anti-Semitism, and finally as a media-savvy Biblical critic, essayist, and radio personality. But he was all of these things, since Samuel succeeded in an era when it was possible to be a public intellectual without being an expert.

Drawing on Samuel’s vast literary opus, as well as previously unexplored archival material from three continents, this study writes Samuel back into the history of mid-twentieth-century American letters. Levenson argues that Samuel’s varied and substantive contributions demand reconsideration of our assumptions about the means and ends of cultural transmission, and merit him a place as one of twentieth-century American Jewry’s most significant cultural and intellectual voices.

 
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Duped
Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception
Timothy R. Levine
University of Alabama Press, 2020
A scrupulous account that overturns many commonplace notions about how we can best detect lies and falsehoods

From the advent of fake news to climate-science denial and Bernie Madoff’s appeal to investors, people can be astonishingly gullible. Some people appear authentic and sincere even when the facts discredit them, and many people fall victim to conspiracy theories and economic scams that should be dismissed as obviously ludicrous. This happens because of a near-universal human tendency to operate within a mindset that can be characterized as a “truth-default.” We uncritically accept most of the messages we receive as “honest.” We all are perceptually blind to deception. We are hardwired to be duped. The question is, can anything be done to militate against our vulnerability to deception without further eroding the trust in people and social institutions that we so desperately need in civil society?

Timothy R. Levine’s Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception recounts a decades-long program of empirical research that culminates in a new theory of deception—truth-default theory. This theory holds that the content of incoming communication is typically and uncritically accepted as true, and most of the time, this is good. Truth-default allows humans to function socially. Further, because most deception is enacted by a few prolific liars, the so called “truth-bias” is not really a bias after all. Passive belief makes us right most of the time, but the catch is that it also makes us vulnerable to occasional deceit.

Levine’s research on lie detection and truth-bias has produced many provocative new findings over the years. He has uncovered what makes some people more believable than others and has discovered several ways to improve lie-detection accuracy. In Duped, Levine details where these ideas came from, how they were tested, and how the findings combine to produce a coherent new understanding of human deception and deception detection.
 
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School
A Novel
Ray Levy
University of Alabama Press, 2023
Both an exorcism of contemporary academia and a comedic portrait of an artist seeking the means to survive
 
At once angry and jubilant, Ray Levy’s School is a curse on a dying system and an incantation for transforming pain into a vessel for capacious, creative selfhood.

A dissertation manuscript possessed by the spirit of Marquis de Sade; a lecture on psychoanalysis delivered as stand-up comedy by a dysphoric graduate student; a review of a found-footage horror movie that’s also a YouTube video of a conference presentation on French theory; an interview with an avant-garde filmmaker that’s really an invocation for conjuring your demon brother; oversharing and withholding, chanting and channeling, School is a slapstick roast of Derrida’s corpse and a mystical vision of a life in which you have not lost.
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The Winter Sailor
Francis R. Stebbins on Florida's Indian River, 1878-1888
Carolyn Frances Baker Lewis
University of Alabama Press, 2004

A unique guide to Florida's frontier history along Indian River.

The Winter Sailor is a historical adventure that details the yearly winter travels of Francis R. Stebbins to Florida's Indian River. Stebbins, a writer from Michigan, visited Florida in March of 1878 and became entranced by its pristine beauty. Subsequently, Stebbins and his traveling companions made annual visits to Indian River—until 1888 when tragedy struck and ended Stebbins' yearly journeys.

Being an observant traveler, Stebbins began a series of descriptive articles for his hometown newspaper that chronicled his journeys to the Indian River area. Stebbins's articles tell of his own personal experiences during his leisurely visits, which included such activities as hunting and fishing, studying the natural surroundings, and excavating Indian mounds. What Stebbins enjoyed most was sailing down the river interviewing townspeople and examining local attractions as he went. His articles also detail the lifestyle of the region, food, fashion, industry, history, environment, and changes that occurred over time. Stebbins's articles not only entertained and informed but also became a travelogue for his readers. He inspired northern travelers to go south and visit Florida, which contributed to the beginnings of large-scale tourism in the region.

The Winter Sailor combines Stebbins's 49 articles along with three by his companions, to provide an enjoyable, historical guide. Unique among 19th-century travelogues, this fascinating look into Florida's past documents a decade of change to the Indian River wilderness and becomes Stebbins's gift to the present.

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Trailing Clouds of Glory
Zachary Taylor's Mexican War Campaign and His Emerging Civil War Leaders
Felice Flanery Lewis
University of Alabama Press, 2010
This work is a narrative of Zachary Taylor’s Mexican War campaign, from the formation of his army in 1844 to his last battle at Buena Vista in 1847, with emphasis on the 163 men in his “Army of Occupation” who became Confederate or Union generals in the Civil War. It clarifies what being a Mexican War veteran meant in their cases, how they interacted with one another, how they performed their various duties, and how they reacted under fire. Referring to developments in Washington, D.C., and other theaters of the war, this book provides a comprehensive picture of the early years of the conflict based on army records and the letters and diaries of the participants.

Trailing Clouds of Glory is the first examination of the roles played in the Mexican War by the large number of men who served with Taylor and who would be prominent in the next war, both as volunteer and regular army officers, and it provides fresh information, even on such subjects as Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. Particularly interesting for the student of the Civil War are largely unknown aspects of the Mexican War service of Daniel Harvey Hill, Braxton Bragg, and Thomas W. Sherman.

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Alabama Founders
Fourteen Political and Military Leaders Who Shaped the State
Herbert James Lewis
University of Alabama Press, 2018
A biographical history of the forefathers who shaped the identity of Alabama politically, legally, economically, militarily, and geographically
 
While much has been written about the significant events in the history of early Alabama, there has been little information available about the people who participated in those events. In Alabama Founders:Fourteen Political and Military Leaders Who Shaped the State Herbert James Lewis provides an important examination of the lives of fourteen political and military leaders. These were the men who opened Alabama for settlement, secured Alabama’s status as a territory in 1817 and as a state in 1819, and helped lay the foundation for the political and economic infrastructure of Alabama in its early years as a state.
 
While well researched and thorough, this book does not purport to be a definitive history of Alabama’s founding. Lewis has instead narrowed his focus to only those he believes to be key figures—in clearing the territory for settlement, serving in the territorial government, working to achieve statehood, playing a key role at the Constitutional Convention of 1819, or being elected to important offices in the first years of statehood.
 
The founders who readied the Alabama Territory for statehood include Judge Harry Toulmin, Henry Hitchcock, and Reuben Saffold II. William Wyatt Bibb and his brother Thomas Bibb respectively served as the first two governors of the state, and Charles Tait, known as the “Patron of Alabama,” shepherded Alabama’s admission bill through the US Senate. Military figures who played roles in surveying and clearing the territory for further settlement and development include General John Coffee, Andrew Jackson’s aide and land surveyor, and Samuel Dale, frontiersman and hero of the “Canoe Fight.” Those who were instrumental to the outcome of the Constitutional Convention of 1819 and served the state well in its early days include John W. Walker, Clement Comer Clay, Gabriel Moore, Israel Pickens, and William Rufus King.
 
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Southern Sanctuary
A Naturalist's Walk through the Seasons
Marian Moore Lewis
University of Alabama Press, 2015
In Southern Sanctuary, retired NASA research scientist and writer Marian Moore Lewis takes readers on a journey of discovery through the Goldsmith-Schiffman Wildlife Sanctuary, a 400-acre preserve in Madison County, Alabama. Writing in the voice of a knowledgeable friend and with accompanying color photographs, Lewis introduces plants, animals, and other wildlife that reside in the preserve’s meadows, woods, and waterways—like those beloved throughout the American South.
 
Lewis has organized this beautifully presented volume into twelve monthly chapters. She starts her year in April after the crystalline frosts of winter have thawed. Already a bobcat has stamped a padded paw print in the lush spring muds as crossvine blossoms of magenta and lemon beckon winged pollinators nearby. Walk with her into the months of summer, when trees leaf out into a cathedral of habitats for birds, insects, and small mammals. In language naturalists of any age will enjoy, Lewis explains marvelous compound eyes, called ommatidia, of iridescent dragonflies and the homey carpentry of beavers damming a creek. As colored reflections signal autumn, companionable songbirds migrate south while the last caterpillars of summer roll themselves into a leaf tent, or hibernaculum, to exist in diapause until next spring. In winter, Lewis admires nature at rest and rocks like chert, sought by Native Americans for arrowheads. Chert lies over bedrock of crenellated limestone, remnant of a time when an undersea Alabama reverberated with life preparing to emerge from the sea.
 
Southern Sanctuary provides a rich compendium of useful features. Lewis uses both common and Latin names for the insects, plants and flowers, fungi, fish, reptiles, and mammals thus enriching knowledge of botany and zoology. Her photos and descriptions make it easy for explorers of Southern Appalachian riparian habitats to use the book to identify species of plants and animals near their own homes. Rounding out this astonishing work are handy guides to additional resources, taxonomy and measurements, rainfall, soil types, and native trees.
 
Southern Sanctuary will be of value to educators and students, professional and amateur naturalists, hikers, birdwatchers, botanists, and ecologists. Infusing a wealth of useful information into an elegant design, it encourages an awareness of Alabama’s rich biodiversity. Marian Moore Lewis’s Southern Sanctuary is a new classic in the best tradition of nature writing.
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Mississippian Towns and Sacred Spaces
Searching for an Architectural Grammar
R. Barry Lewis
University of Alabama Press, 1998

Archaeologists and architects draw upon theoretical perspectives from their fields to provide valuable insights into the structure, development, and meaning of prehistoric communities.


Architecture is the most visible physical manifestation of human culture. The built environment envelops our lives and projects our distinctive regional and ethnic identities to the world around us. Archaeology and architecture find common theoretical ground in their perspectives of the homes, spaces, and communities that people create for themselves. Although archaeologists and architects may ask different questions and apply different methods, the results are the same—a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.


In this volume, prominent archaeologists examine the architectural design spaces of Mississippian towns and mound centers of the eastern United States. The diverse Mississippian societies, which existed between A.D. 900 and 1700, created some of the largest and most complex Native American archaeological sites in the United States. The dominant architectural feature shared by these communities was one or more large plazas, each of which was often flanked by buildings set on platform mounds. The authors describe the major dimensions of an architectural grammar, centered on the design of the plaza and mound complex that was shared by different societies across the Mississippian world. They then explore these shared architectural features as physical representations or metaphors for Mississippian world views and culture.





 


 
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Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District
An Industrial Epic
W. David Lewis
University of Alabama Press, 1994
This pathbreaking book tells the dramatic story of a unique manufacturing complex and the city that it helped to create. The events recounted and  interpreted by W. David Lewis are of more than local or regional significance. The rise of Sloss furnaces and Birmingham epitomized the emergence of the United States as the world's foremost economic power.  Similarly, the closing of a once-profitable ironmaking installation amid social and technological changes that convulsed Birmingham nine decades after the city's founding typified challenges that were facing America at the dawn of the postindustrial age.
 
Above all,  Sloss Furnaces resonates with the class of competition and the frenetic energy with which southerners joined other Americans in a rush to transform a continent after a fratricidal drive for independence had failed. The sweeping narrative that Lewis has produced amply justifies its subtitle, An Industrial Epic.
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Grass Widow
Making My Way in Depression Alabama
Viola Goode Liddell
University of Alabama Press, 2004

An engaging account of one woman’s overcoming the Depression and small town mores.

Viola Goode Liddell’s short memoir tells the story of her return to Alabama in search of a husband and a new life. Thirty years old and recently divorced, Liddell comes back to her home state—with her young son—determined to survive, during the depths of the Depression. Liddell narrates the obstacles she faces as a single mother in the 1930s Deep South with self-deprecating humor and a confessional tone that reveal both her intelligence and her unapologetic ambitions.

Unable to earn, borrow, or beg enough money to support herself and her child, Liddell uses her family connections to secure a teaching position in Camden, Alabama. Even though an older sister’s status within the community helps her land the job, Liddell is warned that she must be very careful as she navigates the tricky social terrain of small town life, particularly when it comes to men. A commentary on the plight of women of the time is woven into the narrative as Liddell recounts her experience of being refused a loan at the local bank by her own brother-in-law.

Despite all the restrictions on her behavior and the crushing reality that she has become "the biggest nuisance in the family" because of her past, Liddell cheerfully and successfully builds a new life of respectability and hope.

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With a Southern Accent
Viola Goode Liddell
University of Alabama Press, 1982

Two generations of Alabamians will welcome the reappearance of this classic: those who loved it when it was published to national acclaim in 1948 and who have missed it during the many years it has been out of print, and those who have enjoyed Viola Goode Liddell’s follow-up success, A Place of Springs, and eagerly seek more from her pen.

            A Book-of-the-Month Club selection when first published, With a Southern Accent belongs on the shelves of all those who have wearied of the labels and want to meet the people of yesterday’s South.
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Pushmataha
A Choctaw Leader and His People
Gideon Lincecum
University of Alabama Press, 2004

Comprises two valuable, original, and difficult-to-find pieces on Choctaw history and culture that originally appeared in the 1904 and 1906 volumes of Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society

This important book comprises two articles that appeared in the 1904 and 1906 volumes of Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society. In “Life of Apushimataha,” Gideon Lincecum tells the story of Choctaw chief Pushmataha, who was born in Mississippi in 1764. A fearless warrior, his name literally means “one whose tomahawk is fatal in war or hunting.” As a charismatic leader, his foresight in making an alliance with General Andrew Jackson brought the Choctaws into war with the Creek Nation and into the War of 1812 but served to their benefit for many years with the United States government. In 1824, Pushmataha traveled to Washington, DC, to negotiate the Treaty of Doak’s Stand as pressure grew for Choctaw removal to Oklahoma Territory, but he fell ill and died there. He was buried with full military honors in the Congressional Cemetery at Arlington.
 
In “Choctaw Traditions about Their Settlement in Mississippi and the Origin of Their Mounds,” Lincecum translates a portion of the Skukhaanumpula—the traditional history of the tribe, which was related to him verbally by Chata Immataha, “the oldest man in the world, a man that knew everything.” It explains how and why the sacred Nanih Waya mound was erected and how the Choctaws formed new towns, and it describes the structure of leadership roles in their society.
 

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Maria Martin's World
Art and Science, Faith and Family in Audubon’s America
Debra J. Lindsay
University of Alabama Press, 2018
The first book-length treatment of one of John James Audubon’s background painters.
 
Maria Martin (1796–1863) was an evangelical Lutheran from Charleston, South Carolina, who became an accomplished painter within months of meeting John James Audubon. Martin met Audubon through her brother-in-law, Reverend John Bachman, who befriended Audubon while passing through Charleston on route to Florida where he expected to find new avian species. Martin was an amateur artist, but by the time Audubon left, she had familiarized herself with his style of drawing. Six months after their initial meeting, her background botanicals were deemed good enough to embellish Audubon’s exquisite bird paintings.
 
Martin’s botanicals and insects appeared in volumes two and four of The Birds of America (1830–1838). She painted snakes for John Edwards Holbrook’s North American Herpetology (1842) and assisted in drafting the descriptive taxonomies prepared by John Bachman—who later became her husband in 1848 following the death of her older sister—for The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1846–1854). Until now, her contributions have been unknown to all but the most astute students of natural history and art history and a close circle of family and friends.
 
Maria Martin’s World is a heavily illustrated volume examining how Maria Martin learned to paint aesthetically beautiful botanicals with exacting accuracy. Drawing on deep research into archival documents and family-held artifacts, Debra Lindsay brings Maria Martin out from behind the curtain of obscurity and disinformation that has previously shrouded her and places her centrally in her own time and milieu. In the telling of Maria Martin’s story, Lindsay also uncovers many nuances of the behavior and actions of the two prominent men in her life that readers interested in Audubon and Bachman will find noteworthy.

Martin was a gifted artist recognized for having contributed beautiful paintings to a natural history. But beyond the natural world this is a biography of an evangelical Lutheran steeped in the faith of her German ancestors and raised to respect the patriarchal norms of her time. Maria Martin pursued her scientific and artistic interests only when they did not conflict with her religious and familial responsibilities.
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The Vast and Terrible Drama
American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century
Eric Carl Link
University of Alabama Press, 2004

A broad treatment of the cultural, social, political, and literary under-pinnings of an entire period and movement in American letters

The Vast and Terrible Drama is a critical study of the context in which authors such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London created their most significant work. In 1896 Frank Norris wrote: "Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary . . . and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama." There could be "no teacup tragedies here." This volume broadens our understanding of literary naturalism as a response to these and other aesthetic concerns of the 19th century.

Themes addressed include the traditionally close connection between French naturalism and American literary naturalism; relationships between the movement and the romance tradition in American literature, as well as with utopian fictions of the 19th century; narrative strategies employed by the key writers; the dominant naturalist theme of determinism; and textual readings that provide broad examples of the role of the reader. By examining these and other aspects of American literary naturalism, Link counters a century of criticism that has perhaps viewed literary naturalism too narrowly, as a subset of realism, bound by the conventions of realistic narration.

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Archaeological Researches at Teotihuacan, Mexico
Sigvald Linné
University of Alabama Press, 2003
The field data and archaeological analysis of the first controlled excavations of the vast "City of the Gods" in central Mexico
 
In 1932, the Ethnographical Museum of Sweden sent an archaeological expedition to Mexico under the direction of Sigvald Linné to determine the full extent of this ancient Teotihuacan occupation and to collect exhibit-quality artifacts. Of an estimated 2,000-plus residential compounds at Teotihuacan, only 20 apartment-like structures were excavated at the time. Yet Linné’s work revealed residential patterns that have been confirmed later in other locations.
 
Some of the curated objects from the Valley of Mexico and the adjacent state of Puebla are among the most rare and unique artifacts yet found. Another important aspect of this research was that, with the aid of the Museum of Natural History in Washington, Linné’s team conducted ethnographic interviews with remnant native Mexican peoples whose culture had not been entirely destroyed by the Conquest, thereby collecting and preserving valuable information for later research.
 
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Mexican Highland Cultures
Archaeological Researches at Teotihuacan, Calpoulalpan and Chalchicomula in 1934-35
Sigvald Linné
University of Alabama Press, 2003

Presents the broad picture and analysis of excavations at three cultural centers in central Mexico

This classic work published in 1942, ten years after archaeological excavations were begun in the Valley of Mexico by Linné's team, presents additional data that had not been fully detailed in the previously published Archaeological Researches at Teotihuacan. It provides comparative information on the high-status ruins situated on the fringes of the Valley of Mexico and excavation results from a compound within the city of Teotihuacan. This information is of critical use to archaeologists still excavating at Teotihuacan in projecting compound extent, types of artifacts expected to be discovered, and patterns of artifacts to be found in particular types of rooms. The characteristics of burials is also explored.

This book, along with its predecessor, is an important primary resource for Americanists. Staffan Brunius's foreword offers a broad background of Linné's life and work. The introduction by George Cowgill focuses more specifically on the conduct and impact of the archaeological exavations.
G. C. Vaillant has stated, "The greatest achievement of Dr. Linné from the viewpoint of the general student is the presentation of a technical field excavation in such terms that anyone can follow his text and see the relationship between the details of position of specimens and the larger problems of history and anthropology."

Sigvald Linné was Professor of Ethnography at the University of Stockholm and Director of the Swedish National Museum of Ethnography until 1969. He published several other books, including The Technique of South American Ceramics. Staffan Brunius

is Curator of the Americas at the National Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm. George L. Cowgill is Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University and coeditor of The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations.

Additional reviews:
This book . . . makes Linne's work widely available again to those interested and may prompt a new generation of specialists to examine the original material either in Stockholm's National Museum of Ethnography, Mexico's Museo Nacional de Antropologia or the Teotihuacan site itself. Testament to the lasting value of Linne's work is given in a succinct and helpful new introduction by anthropologist George L. Cowgill. A more recent curator of the Americas at Stockholm's ethnographical museum, Steffan Brunius, also chips in with a brief contextualization of Linne's work against the background of the early Swedish-American tradition.—The Historian

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Bending Archaeology toward Social Justice
Transformational Action for Positive Peace
Barbara J. Little
University of Alabama Press, 2023
Introduces an analytic model for how archaeologists can work toward social justice

In this time of Black Lives Matter, the demands of NAGPRA, and climate crises, the field of American archaeology needs a radical transformation. It has been largely a white, male, privileged domain that replicates an entrenched patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist system. In Bending Archaeology toward Social Justice, Barbara J. Little explores the concepts and actions required for such a change, looking to peace studies, anthropology, sociology, social justice activism, and the achievements of community-based archaeology for helpful approaches in keeping with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. She introduces an analytic model that uses the strengths of archaeology to destabilize violence and build peace.

As Little explains, the Diachronic Transformational Action model and the peace/violence triad of interconnected personal, cultural, and structural domains of power can help disrupt the injustice of all forms of violence. Diachronic connects the past to the present to understand how power worked in the past and works now. Transformational influences power now by disrupting the stability of the violence triad. Action refers to collaborative work to diagnose power relations and transform toward social justice.

Using this framework, Little confronts the country’s founding and myth of liberty and justice for all, as well as the American Dream. She also examines whiteness, antiracism, privilege, and intergenerational trauma, and offers white archaeologists concepts to grapple with their own racialized identities and to consider how to relinquish white supremacy. Archaeological case studies examine cultural violence and violent direct actions against women, Indigenous peoples, African Americans, and Japanese Americans, while archaeologies of poverty, precarity, and labor are used to show how archaeologists have helped expose the roots of these injustices. Because climate justice is integral to social justice, Little showcases insights that archaeology can bring to bear on the climate crisis and how lessons from the past can inform direct actions today. Finally, Little invites archaeologists to embrace inquiry and imagination so that they can both imagine and achieve the positive peace of social justice.
 
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Mississippian Polity and Politics on the Gulf Coastal Plain
A View from the Pearl River, Mississippi
Patrick C. Livingood
University of Alabama Press, 2011

The definition of the regional limits of chiefly influence during the Mississippian period in the southeastern United States remains unresolved. In the Gulf Coastal Plain between the Mississippi and Black Warrior rivers, some studies have explored the role that interpolity interactions played in influencing a polity’s social and political complexity through time. It has been argued that the larger, more complex polities were able to preempt the development of more complex political structures among the smaller polities.

Using research at the Pevey (22Lw510) and Lowe-Steen (22Lw511) mound sites on the Pearl River in Lawrence County, Mississippi, this book explores the social and political mechanisms by which these polities may have interacted with each other and the geographic limit to the effects of inter-polity competition. The Pevey site is a nine-mound Mississippian site and Lowe-Steen is a two-mound site located 18 kilometers to the north of Pevey. These sites provide a “missing link” of sorts to explore questions about inter-polity interactions because of their centrality to the study region and their unusual size. By filling a void in the regional dataset, this study allows us to better understand the capacity of the largest polities to negatively effect the political development of their smaller neighbors.

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Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the Culture of American Science
David N. Livingstone
University of Alabama Press, 1987
Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the Culture of American Science is the first book-length study of the man who served a Harvard’s Professor of Geology and Paleontology during the Darwinian era. Shaler was a student of Louis Agassiz and went on to a successful, multifaceted career as a geologist, geographer, educator, humanist, and poet. Livingstone employs a thematic approach to chart Shaler’s career against the broader intellectual currents of America’s Gilded Age. After tracing Shaler’s life story from his boyhood in Kentucky through his student years at Harvard, his service with the Geological Survey, and eventually his years as Dean of Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School, the author examines Shaler’s evolutionary vision and portrays his strategic efforts to reconcile the nineteenth century’s scientific and religious world views.
            Livingstone assesses Shaler’s prolific writings, including those on race, which demonstrate a typical concern to provide a “scientific” perspective on the political questions of immigration restriction and eugenic control. IN addition, the book explores his efforts to interweave geography and history, particularly in relation to the American frontier; and his contributions to geology and geomorphology. The portrait of Shaler is completed with a review of his educational thinking and his role in establishing the American Summer School and in furthering scientific and technological education.
            Nathaniel Southgate Shaler emerges from Livingstone’s work as a distinctive figure in the development of the new scientific culture, a figure who provides a focal point for assessing the impact of evolutionary naturalism on late-nineteenth-century American thought.
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A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle
Women and Public Execution in Early Modern England
Jennifer Lillian Lodine-Chaffey
University of Alabama Press, 2022
A study of the depictions of women’s executions in Renaissance England
 
A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle: Women and Public Execution in Early Modern England provides critical insights on representations of women on the scaffold, focusing on how female victims and those writing about them constructed meaning from the ritual. Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey draws on a wide range of genres, from accounts of martyrdom to dramatic works, to explore not only the words of women executed in Tudor and Stuart England, but also the ways that writers represented female bodies as markers of penitence or deviance.

A significant part of the execution spectacle—one used to assess the victim’s proper acceptance of death and godly repentance—was the final speech offered at the foot of the gallows or before the pyre. To ensure their final words held value for audiences, women adopted conventionally gendered language and positioned themselves as subservient and modest. The reception of women’s speeches, Lodine-Chaffey argues, depended on their performances of accepted female behaviors and language as well as physical signs of interior regeneration. Indeed, when women presented themselves or were represented as behaving in stereotypically feminine and virtuous ways, they were able to offer limited critiques of their fraught positions in society.

Just as important as their words, though, were the depictions of women’s bodies. The executed woman’s body, Lodine-Chaffey contends, functioned as a text, scrutinized by witnesses and readers for markers of innocence or guilt. The intense focus on the words and bodies of women facing execution during this period, Lodine-Chaffey argues, became a catalyst for a more thorough interest in and understanding of women’s roles not just as criminals but as subjects
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The Life of Selina Campbell
A Fellow Soldier in the Cause of Restoration
Loretta M. Long Hunnicutt
University of Alabama Press, 2001
This first biography of Selina Campbell opens a window onto the experience of women in one of the most dynamic religious groups of 19th-century America
 
Loretta M. Long examines the life and influence of Selina Campbell, one of the most visible women in the 19th-century Disciples of Christ movement. Best known as the wife of Alexander Campbell, founder of the Disciples, Selina Campbell both shaped and exemplified the role of women in this dynamic religious group (also known as the Stone-Campbell movement). Her story demonstrates the importance of faith in the lives of many women during this era and adds a new dimension to the concept of the “separate spheres” of men and women, which women like Campbell interpreted in the context of their religious beliefs.

A household manager, mother, writer, and friend, Campbell held sway primarily in the domestic sphere, but she was not held captive by it. Her relationship with her husband was founded on a deep sense of partnership conditioned by their strong faith in an all-powerful God. Each of them took on complementary roles according to the perceived natural abilities of their genders: Alexander depended on Selina to manage his property and raise the children while he traveled the country preaching. Campbell outlived her husband by 30 years, and during that time published several newspaper articles and supported new causes, such as women in missions.

In the end, as Long amply demonstrates, Selina Campbell was neither her husband’s shadow nor solely a domestic worker. She was, in her husband’s eyes, a full partner and a “fellow soldier” in the cause of Restoration.
 
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Rhetoric and the Republic
Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America
Mark Garrett Longaker
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Casts a revealing light on modern cultural conflicts through the lens of rhetorical education.

Contemporary efforts to revitalize the civic mission of higher education in America have revived an age-old republican tradition of teaching students to be responsible citizens, particularly through the study of rhetoric, composition, and oratory. This book examines the political, cultural, economic, and religious agendas that drove the various—and often conflicting—curricula and contrasting visions of what good citizenship entails. Mark Garrett Longaker argues that higher education more than 200 years ago allowed actors with differing political and economic interests to wrestle over the fate of American citizenship. Then, as today, there was widespread agreement that civic training was essential in higher education, but there were also sharp differences in the various visions of what proper republic citizenship entailed and how to prepare for it.

Longaker studies in detail the specific trends in rhetorical education offered at various early institutions—such as Yale, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and William and Mary—with analyses of student lecture notes, classroom activities, disputation exercises, reading lists, lecture outlines, and literary society records. These documents reveal an extraordinary range of economic and philosophical interests and allegiances—agrarian, commercial, spiritual, communal, and belletristic—specific to each institution. The findings challenge and complicate a widely held belief that early-American civic education occurred in a halcyon era of united democratic republicanism. Recognition that there are multiple ways to practice democratic citizenship and to enact democratic discourse, historically as well as today, best serves the goal of civic education, Longaker argues.

Rhetoric and the Republic illuminates an important historical moment in the history of American education and dramatically highlights rhetorical education as a key site in the construction of democracy.
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Pulpits of the Lost Cause
The Faith and Politics of Former Confederate Chaplains during Reconstruction
Steve Longenecker
University of Alabama Press, 2023
A comparison of the faith and politics of former Confederate chaplains with intriguing insights about the evolution of their postwar beliefs and the Lost Cause
 
Pulpits of the Lost Cause: The Faith and Politics of Former Confederate Chaplains during Reconstruction is the first in-depth study of former chaplains that juxtaposes their religion and politics, thereby revealing important insights about the Lost Cause movement. Steve Longenecker demonstrates that while some former chaplains vigorously defended the Lost Cause and were predictably conservative in the pulpit, embracing orthodoxy and resisting religious innovation, others were unexpectedly progressive and advocated on behalf of evolution, theological liberalism, and modern biblical criticism.

Former Confederate chaplains embodied both the distinctive white, Southern, regional identity and the variation within it. Most were theologically conservative and Lost Cause racists. But as with the larger South, variation abounded. The Lost Cause, which Longenecker interprets as a broad popular movement with numerous versions, meant different things to different chaplains. It ranged from diehard-ism to tempered sectional forgiveness to full reconciliation to a harmless once-a-year Decoration Day ritual.

This volume probes the careers of ten former chaplains, including their childhoods, wartime experiences, Lost Cause personas, and theologies, making use of manuscripts and published sermons as well as newspapers, diaries, memoirs, denominational periodicals, letters, and the books they themselves produced. In theology, many former chaplains were predictably conservative, while others were unexpectedly broad-minded and advocated evolution, theological liberalism, and modern Biblical criticism. One former chaplain became a social-climbing Harvard progressive. Another wrote innovative, liberal theology read by European scholars. Yet another espoused racial equality, at least in theory if not full practice. Additionally, former chaplains often exhibited the fundamental human trait of compartmentalization, most notably by extolling the past as they celebrated the Lost Cause while simultaneously looking to the future as religious progressives or New South boosters. The stereotypical preacher of the Lost Cause—a gray-clad Bible thumper—existed sufficiently to create the image but hardly enough to be universally accurate.
 
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Sparrow and the Hawk
Costa Rica and the United States during the Rise of Jose Figueres
Kyle Longley
University of Alabama Press, 1997

Using Costa Rica as a example, Longley carefully examines the development of the successful relationship between a nonindustrialized country and the United States, revealing the complex forces at work in resistance and accommodation. 

During World War II and the immediate postwar era, both the United States and Costa Rica experienced dramatic changes. The United States assumed world leadership and the accompanying responsibilities; Costa Rica encountered far-reaching difficulties that culminated in the Civil War of 1948 and the rise to power of José Figueres. Longley examines why the United States supported Figueres and emphasizes the history and role of Costa Ricans, primarily the figueristas, in maintaining good relations in such a difficult era. Figueres implemented economic and political nationalism, which produced domestic and international tensions, and in spite of its rejection of similar policies in Guatemala and Iran, the United States supported Figueres against domestic and foreign threats.
 


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Salt as a Factor in the Confederacy
Ella Lonn
University of Alabama Press, 1965
An exhaustive study of the role salt played in the drama of the War Between the States
 
It is only when a prime necessity thrusts itself upon public attention by its absence that a person ceases to take it for granted. Only when he no longer has it, does he realize what an important ingredient for his palate and digestion is plain, ordinary salt, necessary alike for man and beast. He then recalls that the salt licks and salt springs have from the earliest times been centers of interest and development.
 
The author has searched into the archives of most of the states of the old confederacy, and also into departments of knowledge remote from her own, so that she has had to delve into geological libraries, consult colleagues in the fields of chemistry and physiology, and do more sums in arithmetic than have fallen to her lot since she was in the primary school. But it has been a pleasant and profitable search.
 
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A Place of Our Own
The Rise of Reform Jewish Camping
Michael M. Lorge
University of Alabama Press, 2006
The history of educational summer camps in American Reform Judaism
 
The history of educational summer camps in American Reform Judaism. Reform Judaism is not the only religious community in America to make the summer camp experience a vital part of a faith community's effort to impart its values and beliefs to its adolescents, but perhaps no group relied more on summer camp as an adjunct to home and community for this purpose. Summer camp became an important part of Reform group identity, a bulwark against the attraction of assimilation into the greater society and mere nominal Judaism.
 
These essays, which commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the first Reform Jewish educational camp in the United States (Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute [OSRUI], in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin) cover a wide range of topics related to both the Reform Judaism movement and the development of the Reform Jewish camping system in the United States. Donald M. Splansky’s chapter on “Prayer at Reform Jewish Camps” documents changes in prayer services that took place both at OSRUI and in the Reform movement in general; Michael Zeldin’s “Making the Magic in Reform Jewish Summer Camps” describes the educational philosophies employed at many camps and analyzes their effectiveness; and Jonathan D. Sarna’s “The Crucial Decade in Jewish
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Origins of the Tainan Culture, West Indies
Sven Loven
University of Alabama Press, 2010

When originally published in German in 1924, this volume was hailed as the first modern, comprehensive archaeological overview of an emerging area of the world. Yes, the Caribbean islands had long been known and owned, occupied, or traded among by the economically advanced nations of the world. However, the original inhabitants—as well as their artifacts, languages, and culture—had been treated by explorers and entrepreneurs alike as either slaves or hindrances to progress, and were used or eliminated. There was no publication that treated seriously the region and the peoples until this work. In the following ten years, additional pertinent publications emerged, along with a request to translate the original into Spanish. Based on those recent publications, Loven decided to update and reissue the work in English, which he thought to be the future international language of scholarship. This work is a classic, with enduring interpretations, broad geographic range, and an eager audience.

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James Barbour, a Jeffersonian Repulican
Charles D. Lowery
University of Alabama Press, 1984

Barbour, a Virginia contemporary of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, during a long public career spanning the years 1798-1842, exerted a constructive influence on the nation’s history. Active in state and national politics during the formative decades of the republic, Barbour was a political nationalist who grafted to the dominant political philosophy of the day those elements of the Hamiltonian Federalist creed necessary for governing a dynamic, changing nation.

Barbour’s life affords a unique vantage point for viewing party politics in the South and the nation during the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian periods, for understanding Jeffersonian Republicanism, and for comprehending the difficulties a Southern agrarian had in embracing the economic and political realities at the dawn of the modern commercial age.

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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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A Fortified Sea
The Defense of the Caribbean in the Eighteenth Century
Pedro Luengo
University of Alabama Press, 2024

A multidisciplinary examination of the role of military forts in the Caribbean during the age of European colonial expansion

A Fortified Sea illuminates the key role of military forts in the greater Caribbean during the long eighteenth century. The historical Caribbean, with its multiple contested boundaries at the periphery of European western expansion, typically has been analyzed as part of an empire. European powers, including Spain, the Netherlands, England, and Denmark, carved up the Caribbean Sea into a cultural patchwork. These varied cultural contexts were especially evident during regional and national conflicts throughout the eighteenth century and prompted the construction of more fortifications to protect imperial interests. The emergence of Anglo-American colonies during the eighteenth century and later the United States gradually altered previous geopolitical balances, redefining the cultural and geopolitical boundaries of the region.

This collection of essays incorporates several historiographical traditions—from Spanish to American—all portraying the borderland as a breakthrough contested cultural, social, economic, and military boundary. A multinational roster of contributors approaches topics through a war studies lens as well as architecturally and historically, enriching a usually monothematic view. As well, discussion of cultural management of the historical remains of forts shows local communities trying to preserve and interpret the role of forts in society.

Part I defines the training of military engineers in Spain. Part II engages with British defensive military plans and settlements in the Caribbean and shows how the British dealt with the rhetorical image of the empire. Part III clarifies the building processes of fortifications in Santiago de Cuba, Cartagena de Indias, Havana, and Veracruz, among other places. Copious period maps complement the prodigious research. The book will appeal to readers interested in the history of the Caribbean, military history, and European imperial expansion.
 

CONTRIBUTORS
Mónica Cejudo Collera / Pedro Cruz Freire / María Mercedes Fernández Martín / Aaron Graham / Manuel Gámez Casado / Francisco Javier Herrera García / Nuria Hinarejos Martín / Pedro Luengo / Ignacio J. López-Hernández / José Miguel Morales Folguera / Alfredo J. Morales / Juan Miguel Muñoz Corbalán / Jesús Maria Ruiz Carrasco / Germán Segura García / Gene Allen Smith / Christopher K. Waters

 

 

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Lacan in Public
Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric
Christian Lundberg
University of Alabama Press, 2012

Lacan in Public argues that Lacan’s contributions to the theory of rhetoric are substantial and revolutionary and that rhetoric is, in fact, the central concern of Lacan’s entire body of work.

Scholars typically cite Jacques Lacan as a thinker primarily concerned with issues of desire, affect, politics, and pleasure. And though Lacan explicitly contends with some of the pivotal thinkers in the field of rhetoric, rhetoricians have been hesitant to embrace the French thinker both because his writing is difficult and because Lacan’s conception of rhetoric runs counter to the American traditions of rhetoric in composition and communication studies.

Lacan’s conception of rhetoric, Christian Lundberg argues in Lacan in Public, upsets and extends the received wisdom of American rhetorical studies—that rhetoric is a science, rather than an art; that rhetoric is predicated not on the reciprocal exchange of meanings, but rather on the impossibility of such an exchange; and that rhetoric never achieves a correspondence with the real-world circumstances it attempts to describe.

As Lundberg shows, Lacan’s work speaks directly to conversations at the center of current rhetorical scholarship, including debates regarding the nature of the public and public discourses, the materiality of rhetoric and agency, and the contours of a theory of persuasion.
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W. C. McKern and the Midwestern Taxonomic Method
R. Lee Lyman
University of Alabama Press, 2002

Explores W. C. McKern's use of Linnaean taxonomy as the model for development of a pottery classification system

By the early 20th century, North American archaeologists had found evidence of a plethora of prehistoric cultures displaying disparate geographic and chronological distributions. But there were no standards or algorithms for specifying when a culture was distinct or identical to another in a nearby or distant region.

Will Carleton McKern of the Milwaukee Public Museum addressed this fundamental problem of cultural classification beginning in 1929. He modeled his solution—known as the Midwestern Taxonomic Method—on the Linnaean biological taxonomy because he wanted the ability to draw historical and cultural "relationships" among cultures. McKern was assisted during development of the method by Carl E. Guthe, Thorne Deuel, James B. Griffin, and William Ritchie.

This book studies the 1930s correspondence between McKern and his contemporaries as they hashed out the method's nuances. It compares the several different versions of the method and examines the Linnaean biological taxonomy as it was understood and used at the time McKern adapted it to archaeological problems. Finally, this volume reveals how and why the method failed to provide the analytical solution envisioned by McKern and his colleagues and how it influenced the later development of Americanist archaeology.

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What Are Stem Cells?
Definitions at the Intersection of Science and Politics
John Alexander Lynch
University of Alabama Press, 2011
In recent years political, religious, and scientific communities have engaged in an ethical debate regarding the development of and research on embryonic stem cells. Does the manipulation of embryonic stem cells destroy human life? Or do limitations imposed on stem cell research harm patients who might otherwise benefit?
 
John Lynch’s What Are Stem Cells? identifies the moral stalemate between the rights of the embryo and the rights of the patient and uses it as the framework for a larger discussion about the role of definitions as a key rhetorical strategy in the debate. In the case of stem cells, the controversy arises from the manner in which stem cells are defined--in particular, whether they are defined with an appeal to their original source or to their future application. Definitions such as these, Lynch argues, are far more than convenient expository references; they determine the realities of any given social discourse.
 
Lynch addresses definitions conceptually--their stability in the face of continual technological innovation, their versatility at the crossroads of scientific and public forums, and their translations and retranslations through politics. Most importantly, his work recognizes definitions as central to issues, not only within the topic of stem cell research, but also in all argumentation.
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A New Deal for Southeastern Archaeology
Edwin A. Lyon
University of Alabama Press, 1996

Recipient of the 1994 Anne B. and James B. McMillan Prize

This comprehensive study provides a history of New Deal archaeology in the Southeast in the 1930s and early 1940s and focuses on the projects of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civil Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the National Park Service, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Utilizing primary sources including correspondence and unpublished reports, Lyon demonstrates the great importance of the New Deal projects in the history of southeastern and North American archaeology. New Deal archaeology transformed the practice of archaeology in the Southeast and created the basis for the discipline that exists today. With the current emphasis on curation and repatriation, archaeologists and historians will find this volume invaluable in reconstructing the history of the projects that generated the many collections that now fill our museums.

 

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At the Moon's Inn
Andrew Lytle
University of Alabama Press, 2009
A fascinating tale that brings to life the history of Spanish efforts to establish a controlling presence in the New World during the first half of the 16th century
 
At the Moon’s Inn, first published in 1941, provides a fictional account of De Soto’s famous Spanish expedition to La Florida and through the southeastern United States between 1539 and 1543. The novel begins in Spain in 1538, where De Soto and his chief lieutenants, veterans of the campaigns in South America, pledge themselves to a new enterprise to explore and exploit La Florida. The narrative follows them on their voyage to Cuba, where they rest and obtain additional supplies, then set sail for the area now known as Tampa Bay. Lytle’s brilliant historical novel takes the readers with the conquistadores through the hot, humid land, where despite their advantage in military technology they found they must rely on the Indians for food. The author explores the cultural confrontation that seriously weakened the Indians, while the Spaniards’ dreams of gold gradually turned to hopes of survival in the hostile environment.
 
Drawing his facts from the 1939 United States De Soto Commission Report and from the surviving historical chronicles of the expedition, Lytle weaves a fascinating tale that brings to life the history of Spanish efforts to establish a controlling presence in the New World during the first half of the 16th century.
 
In his introduction, Douglas Jones places At the Moon’s Inn within the context of the documentary record, as well as within the framework of its distinguished author’s career.
 
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Long Night
Andrew Lytle
University of Alabama Press, 1988
Provides vivid descriptions of Alabama during an important period in the state’s history
 
A first-rate novel that provides vivid descriptions of Alabama during an important period in the state’s history, The Long Night is set in the vicinity of Montgomery, Alabama, between 1850 and 1865. Originally published in 1936, the book is based on a true story related to Lytle by one of his close friends and colleagues at Vanderbilt University, Frank L. Owsley, who later became the chairman of The University of Alabama Department of History. In fact, the novel opens with a letter to Professor Owsley from the author, and Owsley’s son has written the introduction to this edition.

As described by George B. Tindall, The Long Night is “the episodic story of a young Alabamian beset by the moral dilemma of desire for revenge against the persecutors of his father and his larger duty in the war, a story that rose to its climax in the Battle of Shiloh.” The work is rich in its description of the land and people of Black-Belt Alabama during the mid-19th century.

 
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The Sephardim in the Holocaust
A Forgotten People
Isaac Jack Lévy
University of Alabama Press, 2020
Documents the first-hand experiences in the Holocaust of the Sephardim from Greece, the Balkans, North Africa, Libya, Cos, and Rhodes
 
The Sephardim suffered devastation during the Holocaust, but this facet of history is poorly documented. What literature exists on the Sephardim in the Holocaust focuses on specific countries, such as Yugoslavia and Greece, or on specific cities, such as Salonika, and many of these works are not available in English.
 
The Sephardim in the Holocaust: A Forgotten People embraces the Sephardim of all the countries shattered by the Holocaust and pays tribute to the memory of the more than 160,000 Sephardim who perished. Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt draw on a wealth of archival sources, family history (Isaac and his family were expelled from Rhodes in 1938), and more than 150 interviews conducted with survivors during research trips to Belgium, Canada, France, Greece, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States. Lévy follows the Sephardim from Athens, Corfu, Cos, Macedonia, Rhodes, Salonika, and the former Yugoslavia to Auschwitz.
 
The authors chronicle the interminable cruelty of the camps, from the initial selections to the grisly work of the Sonderkommandos inside the crematoria, detailing the distinctive challenges the Sephardim faced, with their differences in language, physical appearance, and pronunciation of Hebrew, all of which set them apart from the Ashkenazim. They document courageous Sephardic revolts, especially those by Greek Jews, which involved intricate planning, sequestering of gunpowder, and complex coordination and communication between Ashkenazi and Sephardic inmates—all done in the strictest of secrecy. And they follow a number of Sephardic survivors who took refuge in Albania with the benevolent assistance of Muslims and Christians who opened their doors to give sanctuary, and traces the fate of the approximately 430,000 Jews from Morocco, Algiers, Tunisia, and Libya from 1939 through the end of the war.
 
The author’s intention is to include the Sephardim in the shared tragedy with the Ashkenazim and others. The result is a much needed, accessible, and viscerally moving account of the Sephardim’s unique experience of the Holocaust.
 
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