front cover of Labor Revolt In Alabama
Labor Revolt In Alabama
The Great Strike of 1894
Robert David Ward
University of Alabama Press, 1965
The gripping story of the 1894 Alabama coal miners strike

The Alabama coal miners’ strike of 1894 to gain improved working conditions and to protect themselves from wage reductions. The authors recount the depression of the early 1890s, which set the stage for the strike, and the subsequent use of convict labor, which became a catalyst. The gripping story of the strike includes the dramatic decision to strike and corporate attempts to break the strike by the use of company guards and “scab” labor. In Alabama corporate bosses inflamed passions further by deploying African American “black leg” workers, ultimately requiring the deployment of the state militia to restore peace.
 
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Learning from Birmingham
A Journey into History and Home
Julie Buckner Armstrong
University of Alabama Press, 2023
A steel town daughter’s search for truth and beauty in Birmingham, Alabama
 
“As Birmingham goes, so goes the nation,” Fred Shuttlesworth observed when he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to the city for the transformative protests of 1963. From the height of the Civil Rights Movement through its long aftermath, images of police dogs, fire hoses and four girls murdered when Ku Klux Klan members bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church have served as an uncomfortable racial mirror for the nation. Like many white people who came of age in the Civil Rights Movement’s wake, Julie Buckner Armstrong knew little about this history. Only after moving away and discovering writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker did she realize how her hometown and family were part of a larger, ongoing story of struggle and injustice.

When Armstrong returned to Birmingham decades later to care for her aging mother, Shuttlesworth’s admonition rang in her mind. By then an accomplished scholar and civil rights educator, Armstrong found herself pondering the lessons Birmingham holds for a twenty-first century America. Those lessons extended far beyond what a 2014 Teaching Tolerance report describes as the common distillation of the Civil Rights Movement into “two names and four words: Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, and ‘I have a dream.’” Seeking to better understand a more complex local history, its connection to broader stories of oppression and resistance, and her own place in relation to it, Armstrong embarked on a journey to unravel the standard Birmingham narrative to see what she would find.

Beginning at the center, with her family’s 1947 arrival to a housing project near the color line, within earshot of what would become known as Dynamite Hill, Armstrong works her way over time and across the map. Weaving in stories of her white working-class family, classmates, and others not traditionally associated with Birmingham’s civil rights history, including members of the city’s LGBTQ community, she forges connections between the familiar and lesser-known. The result is a nuanced portrait of Birmingham--as seen in public housing, at old plantations, in segregated neighborhoods, across contested boundary lines, over mountains, along increasingly polluted waterways, beneath airport runways, on highways cutting through town, and under the gaze of the iconic statue of Vulcan.

In her search for truth and beauty in Birmingham, Armstrong draws on the powers of place and storytelling to dig into the cracks, complicating easy narratives of civil rights progress. Among the discoveries she finds in America’s racial mirror is a nation that has failed to recognize itself in the horrific images from Birmingham’s past and to acknowledge the continuing inequalities that make up the Civil Right’s Movement’s unfinished business. Learning from Birmingham reminds us that stories of civil rights, structural oppression, privilege, abuse, race and gender bias, and inequity are difficult and complicated, but their telling, especially from multiple stakeholder perspectives, is absolutely necessary.
 
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front cover of Let Us Now Praise Famous Women
Let Us Now Praise Famous Women
A Memoir
Frank Sikora
University of Alabama Press, 2005

An affectionate, humorous account of small town Alabama during the civil rights era.

When Frank Sikora's six-year-old daughter contracted pneumonia in 1962, his wife Millie vowed that would be the last winter she would spend in Ohio. Despite their misgivings about the racial tensions erupting there, they moved their family of six south, where Frank hoped to fulfill his dream of becoming a newspaper reporter. But when those dreams didn't materialize immediately, mounting bills, repossession, and eviction forced them to move in with Millie's parents, Dan and Minnie Belle Helms, in rural Wellington, Alabama.

With even slimmer prospects for employment in impoverished Calhoun County, the Sikoras came to depend heavily upon the Helmses and extended family members and all their lives became closely intertwined. The Helmses were uneducated, unpolished people, but Sikora's narration of his life with them—often humorous but never condescending—provides a compelling portrait of the attitudes and lifestyle of poor whites in Alabama during the second half of the 20th century, just as James Agee's monumental work, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, illuminated the Depression years in Hale County, Alabama. Sikora illustrates how resourceful, southern women, in particular, held their families together through trying times.

Interwoven with this commentary on rural white culture in the Deep South is the story of Sikora's developing career as a newsman. Determined to succeed, he finally lands a job with the Gadsden Times reporting the news of black citizens. From that introduction to journalism, Sikora becomes one of Alabama's most acclaimed chroniclers of the civil rights movement, eventually writing some of the acknowledged masterpieces about the subject. Like his landmark book, Selma, Lord, Selma, Sikora's newest work tells the stories of ordinary Alabamians and their perspectives on extraordinary times.

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front cover of Letters from Alabama, 1817–1822
Letters from Alabama, 1817–1822
Anne Newport Royall
University of Alabama Press, 1969
Letters of an outspoken “first” woman journalist in Alabama

Anne Royall was a prominent woman journalist for more than a quarter of a century before her death in 1854, publishing some ten books of travel accounts, one novel, and two successive weekly newspapers in Washington, and sponsoring causes, often unpopular, in the manner of latter-day "muck­rakers." She was a well-known habitue of the halls of Congress, looking for news and subscribers, sniffing out irregularities in governmental departments, and pressing claims for a pension which she believed should have been hers from her Revolu­tionary War husband. For those who helped her she had high, often inordinate, praise; for those who refused her or crossed her path she was a "holy terror," lashing out against them often in intemperate language. Through the columns of her paper she debated such public issues as the Bank, anti­Masonry, Nullification, and the franking privilege; she was forever attacking what she considered a very diabolical plot to unite church and state. There was never a doubt where she stood on any of the issues on which she spoke out; she was no compromiser or "fence-straddler." She has the distinction of being the only woman in our national history who was tried (and convicted) for being a "common scold." She was, in short, an aggressive, intolerant, outspoken, suspicious, meddlesome, nonconforming but patriotic, and fascinating woman.
 
Anne Royall, we might say, began her journalistic career in Alabama. Although the letters were not published until 1830, some four years after Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the United States, they were her :first literary effort. Ostensibly written to a young lawyer friend “Matt” in Virginia, the letters are dated from November 28, 1817 to June 8, 1822.. The letters include, in addition to personal matters and comments on the inconveniences of travel, a considerable amount of description of the country through which she traveled and discussions -often lengthy-of religion, literature, education, social in­justices, crops, and important personages she met in her travels. While she is often outspoken, her comments in these letters are more temperate than those in her later works.
 
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front cover of Letters from Alabama
Letters from Alabama
Chiefly Relating to Natural History
Philip Henry Gosse, Edited by Gary R. Mullen and Taylor D. Littleton
University of Alabama Press, 2013

This new and improved edition of Letters from Alabama offers a valuable window into pioneer Alabama and the landscape and life-forms encountered by early settlers of the state.

Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888), a British naturalist, left home at age seventeen and made his way to Alabama in 1838. He was employed by Judge Reuben Saffold and other planters near Pleasant Hill in Dallas County as a teacher for about a dozen of their children, but his principal interest was natural history. Letters from Alabama is a personalized record of Gosse’s perceptive observations during his eight-month residence in this small antebellum community. The work addresses a Victorian readership, including entomologists, who Gosse believed were relatively uninformed about the novelty and beauty of this “hilly region of the State of Alabama.” Written in an engaging literary style and organized as a series of epistolary discussions, the book is unparalleled in its detailed evocations of the natural history and cultural conditions of frontier Alabama. By the time Letters from Alabama appeared in 1859, Gosse’s scientific publications and fine illustrations had led to his being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Edited by Gary R. Mullen and Taylor D. Littleton, this authoritative edition features thirty grayscale lithographs shot directly from the 1859 edition, reset type for easier reading, a new introduction and index by the two foremost scholars of Gosse in Alabama, a new appendix that provides modern scientific and common names for the plant and animal species described by Gosse, and a four-color cover featuring one of the plates from Gosse’s Entomologia Alabamensis.
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front cover of Letters from Alabama
Letters from Alabama
Chiefly Relating to Natural HIstory
Philip Henry Gosse, introduction by Harvey H Jackson, edited by Virginia Hamilton
University of Alabama Press, 1993

Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888), a British naturalist, left home at age 17 and made his way to Alabama in 1838, where he had heard educated people were in demand. He was employed by Judge Reuben Saffold at Pleasant Hill in Dallas County as a teacher for about a dozen children of local landowners, but his principal interest was natural history. During the eight months he lived in th Black Belt he watched, listened, thought, took notes, and made sketches--activities that eventually led to Letters from Alabama. He lived among Alabamians, talked and listened to them, saw them at their best and their worst, and came to understand their hopes and fears. They were a part of the natural world, and he paid attention to them as any good scientist would. With the skills of a scientist and the temperament of an artist, Gosse set down an account of natural life in frontier Alabama that has no equal. Written to no one in particular, a common literary device of the period, the letters were first published in a magazine, and in 1859 appeared as a book. By that time Gosse was an established scholar and one of England’s most noted scientific illustrators.

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front cover of Listen to Me Good
Listen to Me Good
The Story of an Alabama Midwife
MARGARET CHARLES SMITH
The Ohio State University Press, 1996

Margaret Charles Smith, a ninety-one-year-old Alabama midwife, has thousands of birthing stories to tell. Sifting through nearly five decades of providing care for women in rural Greene County, she relates the tales that capture the life-and-death struggle of the birthing experience and the traditions, pharmacopeia, and spiritual attitudes that influenced her practice. She debunks images of the complacent southern “granny” midwife and honors the determination, talent, and complexity of midwifery.

Fascinating to read, this book is part of the new genre of writing that recognizes the credibility of midwives who have emerged from their own communities and were educated through apprenticeship and personal experience. Past descriptions of southern black midwives have tended to denigrate their work in comparison with professional established medicine. Believed to be the oldest living (though retired) traditional African American midwife in Alabama, Smith is one of the few who can recount old-time birthing ways. Despite claims that midwives contributed to high infant mortality rates, Smith’s story emphasizes midwives' successes in facing medical challenges and emergencies.

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front cover of Lister Hill
Lister Hill
Statesman from the South
Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton
University of Alabama Press, 2004
"Hamilton makes clear in this intelligent and sensitive biography [that] Hill, whose 45 years in Congress spanned the presidents from Calvin Coolidge to Lyndon Johnson, deserves to be remembered, both for the impressive legislative record he compiled and for the light he shed on southern liberalism in the 20th century." -- Journal of Southern History "Hamilton's fine book is based on extensive research [and] it will be of interest to a general audience as well as to scholars." -- Journal of American History "This is an important work about a highly influential lawmaker." Choice Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton is Professor Emerita of History at The University of Alabama at Birmingham and author of Hugo Black: The Alabama Years.
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front cover of The Little Mans Big Friend
The Little Mans Big Friend
James E. Folsom in Alabama Politics, 1946-1958
George E. Sims
University of Alabama Press, 1985
Examines the political career of Alabama’s “Big Jim” Folsom
 
At the end of World War II changing economic and social forces transformed the lives of Alabamians, whose political leaders had built careers on localistic politics shaped by established economic and governmental interests. Into this context strolled “Big Jim”—six feet eight inches tall—with his corn-shuck mop, wooden suds bucket, and a promise to scrub out the Capitol. Ridiculed by his opponents, Folsom advertised his progressive program in every crossroads community.
 
As governor, Folsom faced a legislature dominated by local politicians whom he had bypassed during the campaign, and although he won approval of some bills, legislative opposition made his administration a four-year filibuster.
 
Not until 1955, after his election to a second term, did Folsom become an effective leader. Tying programs for expanded services to the local interests of the legislators, he won approval for road construction, “old-age pensions,” industrial development, and reorganization of the state docks. But the lawmakers balked at constitutional reform.
 
As his reform efforts met defeat during 1956, Folsom was losing his ability to lead. He refused to exploit racial tensions, and the rise of the civil rights movement undermined his popularity among whites. Unwilling to discipline his aides and supporters, his administration became notorious for petty graft. By 1958 aspiring candidates kept their distance from Folsom. “Big Jim” attempted a comeback in the 1962 campaign, but he was never again to hold public office.
 
 
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front cover of Living on the Edge of the Gulf
Living on the Edge of the Gulf
The West Florida and Alabama Coast
David M. Bush, Norma J. Longo, William J. Neal, Luciana S. Esteves, Orrin H. Pilkey, Deborah F. Pilkey, Craig A. Webb
Duke University Press, 2001

The Gulf coast of Florida and Alabama is a fragile combination of barrier islands, low-lying marshes, and highly erodable mainland shores. In addition to sea-level rise, winter storms, and altered sediment supplies, hurricanes frequently damage or destroy the human developments and infrastructures that line this coast. Indeed, a single storm can cause billions of dollars in losses. Memories of such hurricanes as Camille, Frederic, Opal, and Andrew cause great concern for residents and property owners alike; events of equal magnitude are always just beyond the horizon and the uninformed have much to lose.

The authors of Living on the Edge of the Gulf seek to counteract potential loss by providing an illustrated introduction to coastal processes, a history of hazards for the region, and risk-reduction guidance in the form of site evaluations, community mitigation techniques, and storm-resistant construction practices. Risk maps that focus on individual coastal beaches are designed to assist property owners, community planners, and officials in prudent decision making, while a review of coastal regulations helps owners to understand and navigate various permit requirements.

This latest book in the Living with the Shore series replaces the earlier guide Living with the West Florida Shore and supplements the Alabama portion of Living with the Alabama/Mississippi Shore.

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front cover of Living with the Alabama/Mississippi Shore
Living with the Alabama/Mississippi Shore
Wayne F. Canis, William F. Neal, Orrin H. Pilkey Jr. and Orrin H. Pilkey Sr.
Duke University Press, 1985
The Alabama-Mississippi shoreline along the Gulf of Mexico boasts some of the world's most beautiful beaches and balmiest climes. Ever-increasing numbers of retirees, recreation lovers, and industries with work forces are being attracted to the "Sun Belt." On a soft April day the Gulf's waters look as peaceful as a pond.

Yet this same serene shoreline has been ravaged by seven major hurricanes during this century. Several years more than one fearful storm has come hurtling in during a single "season." Loss of life an property damage have been devastating. And newcomers seem almost unaware of the potential dangers.

The authors of this book offer a vivid, historical overview for understanding the environment of the Alabama-Mississippi shore. They describe the risks faced by new residents, and they point the way toward safe and sane coastal development.

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front cover of Lizards and Snakes of Alabama
Lizards and Snakes of Alabama
Craig Guyer, Mark A. Bailey, and Robert H. Mount
University of Alabama Press, 2019
An up-to-date and comprehensive herpetological guide to Alabama
 
Lizards and Snakes of Alabama is the most comprehensive taxonomy gathered since Robert H. Mount’s seminal 1975 volume on the reptiles and amphibians of Alabama. This richly illustrated guide provides an up-to-date summary of the taxonomy and life history of lizards and snakes native to, or introduced to, the state.
 
Alabama possesses one of the most species-rich biotas in north temperate areas and this richness is reflected in some groups of lizards, such as skinks, and especially in snakes. The authors examine all known species within the state and describe important regional variations in each species, including changes in species across the many habitats that comprise the state. Significant field studies, especially of Alabama’s threatened and endangered species, have been performed and are used to inform discussion of each account.
 
The life-history entry for each species is comprised of scientific and common names, full-color photographs, a morphological description, discussion of habits and life cycle, and a distribution map depicting the species range throughout the state, as well as notes on conservation and management practices. The illustrated taxonomic keys provided for families, genera, species, and subspecies are of particular value to herpetologists.
 
This extensive guide will serve as a single resource for understanding the rich natural history of Alabama by shedding light on an important component of that biodiversity. Accessible to all, this volume is valuable to both the professional herpetologist and the general reader interested in snakes and lizards.
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front cover of Long Night
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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front cover of The Looking-Glass
The Looking-Glass
William March
University of Alabama Press, 1943
William March's debut novel, Company K, introduced him to the reading public as a gifted writer of modern fiction. Of that World War I classic, Graham Greene wrote: "It is the only war book I have read which has found a new form to fit the novelty of the protest. The prose is bare, lucid, without literary echoes." After Company K, March brought his same unerring style to a cycle of novels and short stories–his "Pearl County" series–inspired in part by his childhood in the vicinity of Mobile, Alabama. The University of Alabama Press is pleased to be bringing these three novels back into print.

Third in the "Pearl County" series, The Looking-Glass is March's story of a small Alabama town in the early days of the twentieth century. Connected by relationships that bind, support, and strangle, the citizens of Reedyville are drawn ineluctably toward a single climactic night. March's skillful blend of humor and pathos evinces his deep insights and empathy into the problems of the mind and heart that are both peculiar to Reedyville yet found in every town and family.
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