A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
This reissue of Charles Jones’s classic investigations of the Mound Builders will be an invaluable resource for archaeologists today
Long a classic of southeastern archaeology, Charles Jones’s Antiquities of the Southern Indians was a groundbreaking work that linked historic tribes with prehistoric “antiquities.” Published in 1873, it predated the work of Cyrus Thomas and Clarence Moore and remains a rich resource for modern scholars.
Jones was a pioneer of archaeology who not only excavated important sites but also related his findings to other sites, to contemporary Indians, and to artifacts from other areas. His work covers all of the southeastern states, from Virginia to Louisiana, and is noted for its insights into the De Soto expedition and the history of the Creek Indians.
Best known for refuting the popular myth of the Mound Builders, Jones proposed a connection between living Native Americans of the 1800s and the prehistoric peoples who had created the Southeast’s large earthen mounds. His early research and culture comparisons led to the eventual demise of the Mound Builder myth.
For this reissue of Jones’s book, a new introduction by Frank Schnell places Jones’s work in the context of his times and relates it to current research in the Southeast. An engagingly written work enhanced by numerous maps and engravings, Antiquities of the Southern Indians will serve today’s scholars and fascinate all readers interested in the region’s prehistory.
A 17th-century trading post and Indian town in central Georgia reveal evidence of culture contact and change
Ocmulgee Old Fields near Macon, Georgia, is the site of a Lower Creek village and associated English trading house dating from the late 17th and early 18th centuries. It was excavated in the early 1930s as part of a WPA project directed by A. R. Kelly, which focused primarily on the major Mississippian temple mounds of Macon Plateau. The specific data for the Old Fields was not analyzed until nearly 30 years after the excavation.
Part of the significance of this site lies in its secure identification with a known group of people and the linkage of those people with recognizable archaeological remains. The Old Fields site was among the very first for which this kind of identification was possible and stands at the head of a continuing tradition of historic sites archaeology in the Southeast.
Carol I. Mason's classic study of the Ocmulgee Old Fields site has been a model for contact-period Indian archaeology since the 1960s. The report includes a discussion of the historic setting and an analysis of the archaeological materials with an identification of the Lower Creek town and possibly of the English trader who lived there. Now, for the first time, the original report is widely available in book form. With a new foreword by the author and a new introduction from Southeastern archaeology expert Marvin T. Smith, readers have the benefit of a contemporary view of this very fine piece of careful scholarship.
The largest prehistoric mound site in Georgia is located in modern-day Macon and is known as Ocmulgee. It was first recorded in August 1739 by General James Oglethorpe’s rangers during an expedition to the territory of the Lower Creeks. The botanist William Bartram wrote extensively of the ecology of the area during his visit in 1773, but the 1873 volume by Charles C. Jones, Antiquities of the Southern Indians, Particularly of the Georgia Tribes, was the first to treat the archaeological significance of the site.
Professional excavations began at Ocmulgee in 1933 under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, using Civil Works Administration labor. Investigations continued under a variety of sponsorships until December 1936, when the locality was formally named a national monument. Excavation of the mounds, village sites, earth lodge, and funeral mound revealed an occupation of the Macon Plateau spanning more than 7,000 years. The funeral mound was found to contain log tombs, bundles of disarticulated bones, flexed burials, and cremations. Grave goods included uniquely patterned copper sun disks that were found at only one other site in the Southeast—the Bessemer site in Alabama—so the two ceremonial centers were established as contemporaries.
In this classic work of archaeological research and analysis, Charles Fairbanks has not only offered a full treatment of the cultural development and lifeways of the builders of Ocmulgee but has also related them effectively to other known cultures of the prehistoric Southeast.
Confederate newspapers were beset by troubles: paper shortages, high ink prices, printers striking for higher pay, faulty telegraphic news service, and subscription prices insufficient to support their operations. But they also had the potential to be politically powerful, and their reporting of information—accurate or biased—shaped perceptions of the Civil War and its trajectory.
The Atlanta Daily Intelligencer Covers the Civil War investigates how Atlanta’s most important newspaper reported the Civil War in its news articles, editorial columns, and related items in its issues from April 1861 to April 1865. The authors show how The Intelligencer narrated the war’s important events based on the news it received, at what points the paper (and the Confederate press, generally) got the facts right or wrong based on the authors’ original research on the literature, and how the paper’s editorial columns reflected on those events from an unabashedly pro-Confederate point of view.
While their book focuses on The Intelligencer, Stephen Davis and Bill Hendrick also contribute to the scholarship on Confederate newspapers, emphasizing the papers’ role as voices of Confederate patriotism, Southern nationalism, and contributors to wartime public morale. Their well-documented, detailed study adds to our understanding of the relationship between public opinion and misleading propaganda
Despite African American success in winning the mayor's office and control of the City Council, development plans have remained in the control of private business interests. Keating tells a number of troubling stories. The development of the Underground Atlanta, the construction of the rapid rail system (MARTA), the building of a new stadium for the Braves, the redevelopment of public housing, and the arrangements for the Olympic Games all share a lack of democratic process. Business and political elites ignored protests from neighborhood groups, the interests of the poor, and the advice of planners.
At least twenty-nine black children and young adults were murdered by an Atlanta serial killer between the summer of 1979 and the spring of 1981. Drawing national media attention, the “Atlanta tragedy,” as it became known, was immediately labeled a hate crime. However, when a young black man was arrested and convicted for the killings, public attention quickly shifted. Noted criminologist Bernard Headley was in Atlanta as the tragedy unfolded and provides here a thoughtful exploration of the social and political implications of the case both locally and nationally. Focusing on a singular historical event, Headley exposes broader tensions of race and class in contemporary America.
The Bahá’í Faith is one of the fastest growing, but least studied, of the world’s religions. Adherents view themselves as united by a universal belief that transcends national boundaries. Michael McMullen examines how the Bahá’í develop and maintain this global identity. Taking the Bahá’í community in Atlanta, Georgia, as a case in point, his book is the first to comprehensively examine the tenets of this little-understood faith.
McMullen notes that, to the Bahá’í, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed are all divinely sent teachers of ‘the Truth’, whose messages conform to the needs of their individual cultures and historical periods. But religion—which draws from the teaching of Bahá’u’lláh, a nineteenth-century Persian—encourages its members to think of themselves as global citizens. It also seeks to establish unity among its members through adherence to a Bahá’í worldview.
By examining the Atlanta Bahá’í community, McMullen shows how this global identity is interpreted locally. He discusses such topics as: the organizational structure and authority relations in the Bahá’í “Administrative Order”; Bahá’í evangelicalism; and the social boundaries between Bahá’ís and the wider culture.
The Confederate Navy’s Savannah Squadron, its relationship with the people of Savannah, Georgia, and its role in the city’s economy
In this well-written and extensively researched narrative, Maurice Melton charts the history of the unit, the sailors (both white and black), the officers, their families, and their activities aboard ship and in port.
The Savannah Squadron worked, patrolled, and fought in the rivers and sounds along the Georgia coast. Though they saw little activity at sea, the unit did engage in naval assault, boarding, capture, and ironclad combat. The sailors finished the war as an infantry unit in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, fighting at Sayler’s Creek on the road to Appomattox.
Melton concentrates on navy life and the squadron’s place in wartime Savannah. The book reveals who the Confederate sailors were and what their material, social, and working lives were like.
have of black life in a southern state at the beginning of the twentieth century."
-- Howard N. Rabinowitz,
Journal of American History
"The author shows clearly and forcefully
the ways in which this [white] system abused and controlled the black lower
caste in Georgia." -- Lester C. Lamon, American Historical Review.
"Dittmer has a faculty for lucid exposition of complicated subjects. This is
especially true of the sections on segregation, racial politics, disfranchisement,
woman's suffrage and prohitibion, the neo-slavery in agriculture, and the racial
violence whose threat and reality hung like a pall over all of Georgia throughout
the period." -- Donald L. Grant, Georgia Historical Quarterly.
Grady-Willis describes Black activism within a framework of human rights rather than in terms of civil rights. As he demonstrates, civil rights were only one part of a larger struggle for self-determination, a fight to dismantle a system of inequalities that he conceptualizes as “apartheid structures.” Drawing on archival research and interviews with activists of the 1960s and 1970s, he illuminates a wide range of activities, organizations, and achievements, including the neighborhood-based efforts of Atlanta’s Black working poor, clandestine associations such as the African American women’s group Sojourner South, and the establishment of autonomous Black intellectual institutions such as the Institute of the Black World. Grady-Willis’s chronicle of the politics within the Black freedom movement in Atlanta brings to light overlapping ideologies, gender and class tensions, and conflicts over divergent policies, strategies, and tactics. It also highlights the work of grassroots activists, who take center stage alongside well-known figures in Challenging U.S. Apartheid. Women, who played central roles in the human rights struggle in Atlanta, are at the foreground of this history.
"The Closing Door is a crucial breath of fresh air . . . an important and timely text which will help to alter the 'underclass' debate in favor of reconsidering race-specific policies. Orfield and Ashkinaze construct a convincing argument with which those who favor 'race-neutrality' will have to contend. In readable prose they make a compelling case that economic growth is not enough."—Preston H. Smith II, Transition
In Code of the Suburb, Scott Jacques and Richard Wright offer a fascinating ethnography of the culture of suburban drug dealers. Drawing on fieldwork among teens in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta, they carefully parse the complicated code that governs relationships among buyers, sellers, police, and other suburbanites. That code differs from the one followed by urban drug dealers in one crucial respect: whereas urban drug dealers see violent vengeance as crucial to status and security, the opposite is true for their suburban counterparts. As Jacques and Wright show, suburban drug dealers accord status to deliberate avoidance of conflict, which helps keep their drug markets more peaceful—and, consequently, less likely to be noticed by law enforcement.
Offering new insight into both the little-studied area of suburban drug dealing, and, by extension, the more familiar urban variety, Code of the Suburb will be of interest to scholars and policy makers alike.
Among the many extant volumes of Civil War correspondence penned by military men, few can boast of the writing quality of Dear Courier: The Civil War Correspondence of Editor Melvin Dwinell. This Yankee-turned-Rebel was both fighter and journalist: second lieutenant of the Rome Light Guards and editor of the Rome Courier.
Born in East Calais, Vermont, in 1825, Melvin Dwinell came to the South and was won over to its way of life. He soon found his calling in journalism, purchasing the Rome (Georgia) Courier and serving as its editor. Though he initially opposed Georgia’s immediate secession, Dwinell fully supported his adopted state’s cause, proclaiming that “a great and glorious Confederacy would arise from the ashes of the United States.”
At the outbreak of the war, Dwinell joined the Eighth Georgia Infantry and began an almost weekly correspondence published in his newspaper. The editor’s letters provide vivid descriptions of some of the most important campaigns of the Civil War. Dwinell’s lively account of the “most glorious victory” at Manassas surely delighted his readers, though the list of casualties from the area would have proved sobering. Wounded at Gettysburg in 1863, Dwinell openly described the heavy price paid by the Confederacy in rather a different tone: “The carnage was greater probably than on any other field since the commencement of this wicked war.”
Dwinell resigned his position as second lieutenant to run for the Georgia legislature, where he served until the state was overrun by the Union army. Dwinell was one of the first in Floyd County to take the oath of allegiance to the U.S. Constitution following Confederate defeat. Scholars have drawn upon Melvin Dwinell’s accounts because of the author’s grasp of strategy, strong writing skills, and journalistic instincts. Dear Courier will appeal to those interested in the campaigns of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, as well as those looking for accessible primary documents about the Civil War.
FORD RISLEY is a professor in the College of Communications at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Civil War Journalism and Abolition and the Press: The Moral Struggle Against Slavery.
Decisions at Kennesaw Mountain explores the critical decisions made by Confederate and Federal commanders during the battle and how these decisions shaped its outcome. Rather than offering a history of the battle, Larry Peterson hones in on a sequence of command decisions that provides us, retroactively, with a blueprint of the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain at its tactical core. Identifying and exploring the critical decisions in this way allows students of the battle to progress from a knowledge of what happened to a mature grasp of why events happened.
Complete with maps and a driving tour, Decisions at Kennesaw Mountain is an indispensable primer, and readers looking for a concise introduction to the battle can tour this sacred ground—or read about it at their leisure—with key insights into the campaign and a deeper understanding of the Civil War itself.
Decisions at Kennesaw Mountain is the seventeenth in a series of books that will explore the critical decisions of major campaigns and battles of the Civil War.
Formerly segregated state university systems crafted desegregation plans that gave them more control over policies for admissions, remediation, and retention. These plans created literacy requirements—admissions and graduation tests, remedial classes, and even writing centers and writing across the curriculum programs—that reshaped the landscape of college writing instruction and denied the demands of Black students, civil rights activists, and historically Black colleges and universities for major changes to university systems. This history details the profound influence of desegregation—and resistance to desegregation—on the ways that writing is taught and assessed in colleges today.
Desegregation State provides WPAs and writing teachers with a disciplinary history for understanding racism in writing assessment and writing programs. Mendenhall brings emerging scholarship on the racialization of institutions into the field, showing why writing studies must pay more attention to how writing programs have institutionalized racist literacy ideologies through arguments about student placement, individualized writing instruction, and writing assessment.
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
Detailed reconstruction of the waxing and waning of political fortunes among the chiefly elites at an important center of the prehistoric world
At the time the first Europeans arrived in the New World, thousands of earthen platform mounds dotted the landscape of eastern North America. Only a few of the mound sites have survived the ravages of time and the devastation of pilferers; one of these valuable monuments is Etowah, located near Cartersville in northern Georgia. Over a period of more than 100 years, excavations of the site’s six mounds, and in particular Mound C, have yielded a wealth of artifacts, including marble statues, copper embossed plates, ceremonial items, and personal adornments. These objects indicate an extensive trading network between Mississippian centers and confirm contact with Spanish conquistadores near Etowah in the mid-1500s.
Adam King has analyzed the architecture and artifacts of Etowah and deduced its vital role in the prehistory of the area. He advances a plausible historical sequence and a model for the ancient town's complex political structure. The chiefdom society relied upon institutional social ranking, permanent political offices, religious ideology, a redistribution of goods and services, and the willing support of the constituent population. King reveals strategies used by the paramount chiefs to maintain their sources of power and to control changes in the social organization. Elite alliances did not necessarily involve the extreme asymmetry of political domination and tribute extraction. King's use of ceramic assemblages recovered from Etowah to determine the occupation history and the construction sequence of public facilities (mounds and plazas) at the center is significant.
This fresh interpretation of the Etowah site places it in a contemporary social and political context with other Mississippian cultures. It is a one-volume sourcebook for the Etowah polity and its neighbors and will, therefore, command an eager audience of scholars and generalists.
In An Evil Day in Georgia, author Robert Smith raises lingering questions about the
guilt of two men—one white and one black—executed for a murder in the Deep South
in the 1920s. . . . The telling of this story, one that played out in the Jim Crow era and the
days of bootlegging and the Ku Klux Klan, exposes the death penalty’s imperfections even
as it calls into question the veracity of a woman’s confession, later recanted, that
once brought her within a stone’s throw of the state’s electric chair.”
—John Bessler, author of Cruel and Unusual: The American Death Penalty
and the Founders’ Eighth Amendment
On the night of August 5, 1927, someone shot and killed Coleman Osborn, a store owner in
Chatsworth, Georgia, in his place of business. Police and neighbors found only circumstantial
traces of the murderer: tire tracks, boot prints, shell casings, and five dollars in cash near
Osborn’s body. That day, three individuals—James Hugh Moss, a black family man locally
renowned for his baseball skills; Clifford Thompson, Moss’s white friend who grew up in the
Smoky Mountains; and Eula Mae Thompson, Clifford’s wife and a woman with a troubling history
of failed marriages and minor run-ins with the law—left Etowah, Tennessee, unknowingly
on a collision course with Deep South justice.
In chilling detail, Robert N. Smith examines the circumstantial evidence and deeply flawed
judicial process that led to death sentences for Moss and the Thompsons. Moving hastily in the
wake of the crime, investigators determined from the outset that the Tennessee trio, well known
as bootleggers, were the culprits. Moss and Clifford Thompson were tried and convicted within a
month of the murder. Eula Mae was tried separately from the other two defendants in February
1928, and her sentence brought her notoriety and celebrity status. On the night of her husband’s
execution, she recanted her original story and would change it repeatedly in the following years.
As reporters from Atlanta and across Georgia descended on Murray County to cover the trials
and convictions, the public perception of Eula Mae changed from that of cold-blooded murderer
to victim—one worthy of certain benefits that suited her status as a white woman. Eula Mae
Thompson’s death sentence was commuted in 1928, thanks in part to numerous press interviews
and staged photos. She was released in 1936 but would not stay out of trouble for long.
An Evil Day in Georgia exposes the historic deficiencies in death penalty implementation
and questions, through its case study of the Osborn murder, whether justice can ever be truly
unbiased when capital punishment is inextricably linked to personal and political ambition and
to social and cultural values.
Robert N. Smith is an independent scholar living in Oxford, England.
Henry James called Fanny Kemble’s autobiography “one of the most animated autobiographies in the language.” Born into the first family of the British stage, Fanny Kemble was one of the most famous woman writers of the English-speaking world, a best-selling author on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to her essays, poetry, plays, and a novel, Kemble published six works of memoir, eleven volumes in all, covering her life, which began in the first decade of the nineteenth century and ended in the last. Her autobiographical writings are compelling evidence of Kemble’s wit and talent, and they also offer a dazzling overview of her transatlantic world.
Kemble kept up a running commentary in letters and diaries on the great issues of her day. The selections here provide a narrative thread tracing her intellectual development—especially her views on women and slavery. She is famous for her identification with abolitionism, and many excerpts reveal her passionate views on the subject. The selections show a life full of personal tragedy as well as professional achievements. An elegant introduction provides a context for appreciating Kemble’s remarkable life and achievements, and the excerpts from her journals allow her, once again, to speak for herself.
The Federal Road was a major influence in settlement of the Mississippi Territory during the period between the Louisiana Purchase and removal of the Creek Indians
The authors offer encyclopedic entries on each of the 178 mussel species currently identified in Alabama and the Mobile River Basin—the scientific and common names; a morphological description as well as color photographs of the shell appearance; analysis of the soft anatomy; information about ecology, biology, and conservation status; and a color distribution map. With an extensive glossary of terms and full index, plus additional material on the archaeological record, a history of commercial uses of mussels, and the work of significant biologists studying these species, this volume is a long overdue and invaluable resource, not only for scholars of aquatic biology and zoology but also conservationists interested in the preservation of ecological diversity and protection of inland environments.
This first-hand account tells the story of turbulent civil rights era Atlanta through the eyes of a white upper-class woman who became an outspoken advocate for integration and racial equality
As a privileged white woman who grew up in segregated Atlanta, Sara Mitchell Parsons was an unlikely candidate to become a civil rights agitator. After all, her only contacts with blacks were with those who helped raise her and those who later helped raise her children. As a young woman, she followed the conventional path expected of her, becoming the dutiful wife of a conservative husband, going to the country club, and playing bridge. But unlike many of her peers, Parsons harbored an increasing uneasiness about racial segregation.In a memoir that includes candid diary excerpts, Parsons chronicles her moral awakening. With little support from her husband, she runs for the Atlanta Board of Education on a quietly integrationist platform and, once elected, becomes increasingly outspoken about inequitable school conditions and the slow pace of integration. Her activities bring her into contact with such civil rights leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr., and his wife, Coretta Scott King. For a time, she leads a dual existence, sometimes traveling the great psychic distance from an NAACP meeting on Auburn Avenue to an all-white party in upscale Buckhead. She eventually drops her ladies' clubs, and her deepening involvement in the civil rights movement costs Parsons many friends as well as her first marriage.
Becoming increasingly fascinated by Georgian history and culture, the Wardrops gathered a significant collection of manuscripts dating from the eleventh to the twentieth century, including a seventeenth-century manuscript of Georgia’s national epic poem The Man in the Panther’s Skin, which Marjory famously translated. Through the items of the Waldrop collection—manuscripts, royal charters, correspondence, notebooks, and a draft of the 1918 declaration of independence—Nikoloz Aleksidze narrates a history of Georgian literature and culture, moving from epic and folk tales, to the Georgian Church’s battle against persecution, to the political activism of women in Georgia at the end of the nineteenth century.
Richly illustrated with rare and previously unpublished images from the collection, this book offers unique insight into Georgian culture and political history through the remarkable lens of an eccentric English diplomat and his talented sister.
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
This facsimile edition of Moore's Georgia and South Carolina expeditions includes an extensive new introduction from Georgia's senior archaeologist.
This compilation of Clarence Bloomfield Moore's investigations along the rich coastal and river drainages of Georgia and South Carolina makes
available in a single volume valuable works published a century ago. By modern standards Moore's excavation techniques were crude, but his results were nothing less than spectacular. He recorded data with care, and much information can be learned from his works. In some cases his publications are the only documentation extant for sites that have since been destroyed. In one case, relic collectors had destroyed six mounds at Mason's Plantation—the largest Mississippian center in the Savannah River valley—by the time Moore visited the site in 1897.
Moore also documented prehistoric urn burials, a ritual widely practiced in eastern North America but more frequently on the Gulf Coastal Plain
of Alabama and coastal sites in Georgia and South Carolina. In the introduction, Lewis Larson discusses Moore's investigations within the framework of the current understanding of Georgia and South Carolina coastal archaeological chronology.
Almost from the time of Georgia’s settlement by Oglethorpe in 1733, both Georgians and Carolinians had made periodic unsuccessful attempts to conquer the Spanish Castillo San Marcos in St. Augustine; and during the American Revolution (in 1776, 1777, and 1778) the rebels tried without success to take the fortification, which was then a British stronghold. Each of the three expeditions was less successful than the preceding one, and between the formal campaigns vicious partisan warfare between loyalists and rebels devastated much of the area between the Altamaha and St. Johns rivers.
This book presents a detailed history of the three Georgia-Florida campaigns. Indecisive and lacking the glamour of either the contemporary campaigns in the North, or the later campaigns in the South, they appeared isolated from the mainstream of the revolutionary struggle. The rebels were handicapped by divided command, personal quarrels, difficult terrain, and miserable weather. While Searcy emphasizes the military aspects of the period, she also treats the conflict between civil and military authorities, the effects of war on the civilian populace, and the interaction of economic matters with military affairs. Her work clarifies the importance of these military activities in the subsequent British strategy in the occupation of Georgia and the Carolinas.
The 2008 Ossetia War underlined the fact that Georgia is caught in a political struggle between East and West. Per Gahrton analyses American and Russian policy towards the country and provides a firsthand account of the Rose Revolution of 2003, its origin and aftermath.
The book traces the increasing US involvement in Georgia and the Russian reaction of anger, sanctions and, eventually, invasion. Gahrton's analysis is based on interviews with key politicians and his experience as the rapporteur of the European Parliament on South Caucasus. At centre stage is the growing opposition against authoritarian aspects of President Mikheil Saakashvili’s regime and the mysterious death of Prime Minister Zhvania in 2005. The book also asks if the Rose Revolution was a conspiracy or a genuine popular uprising.
This truly authoritative account of Georgia is a must for students studying international relations in the aftermath of The Cold War.
Andrews was an intelligent, sharp-witted, and skilled observer, and these qualities shine through her engaging memoir. She records her reactions to Newark society and the economic base on which it stood, comparing southern gentility and agriculture to northern brusqueness and industry. Moreover, while the diary reveals clearly the social and cultural attitudes of aristocratic southerners of the period, it also foreshadows the beginning of change as, for example, a visit to a factory opens Andrews’s eyes to the advantages of the new economy. She also recounts her frustrations with the role of southern women, exalted on the one hand but severely restricted on the other. These stark contrasts and Andrews’s own mixed feelings give the diary much of its power.
Also included in this volume are six of Andrews’s magazine and newspaper articles that appeared in the national press around the time she was keeping this journal. Taken together, her private and public writings from this period show a maturing nineteenth-century woman confronting a culture turned upside down in the new world of the Reconstruction-era South.
Andrews’s memoir, with accompanying introduction and commentary by Kit Rushing, will appeal to general readers with an interest in the nineteenth-century South as well as to historians of women, the Civil War era, and nineteenth-century America.
Designated as a battlefield in 1917 and as a park in 1935, the 2,965-acre Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park now preserves far more than the military history and fallen soldiers it was originally founded to commemorate. Located approximately twenty miles northwest of downtown Atlanta, Kennesaw Mountain rises 608 feet above the rolling hills and hardwood forests of the Georgia Piedmont. Kennesaw Mountain’s geology and topography create enough of a
distinctive ecosystem to make it a haven for flora and fauna alike. As the tallest mountain in the metropolitan Atlanta area, it is also a magnet for human visitors. Featuring eighteen miles of interpretive trails looping around and over the mountain, the park is a popular destination for history buffs, outdoor recreationists, and nature enthusiasts alike.
Written for a diverse range of readers and park visitors, Kennesaw: Natural History of a Southern Mountain provides a comprehensive exploration of the entire park punctuated with humor, colorful anecdotes, and striking photographs of the landscape. Sean P. Graham begins with a brief summary of the park’s human history before transitioning to a discussion of the mountain’s nature, including its unique geology, vegetation, animals, and plant-animal interactions. Graham also focuses on Kennesaw Mountain’s most important ecological and conservation attribute—its status as a globally important bird refuge. An insightful chapter on bird watching and the region’s migrating bird populations includes details on migratory patterns, birding hot spots, and the mountain’s avian significance. An epilogue revisits the park’s Civil War history, describing how Union veterans pushed for establishment of the park as a memorial, inadvertently creating a priceless biological preserve in the process.
At the time of Spanish contact in A.D. 1540, the Mississippian inhabitants of the great valley in northwestern Georgia and adjacent portions of Alabama and Tennessee were organized into a number of chiefdoms distributed along the Coosa and Tennessee rivers and their major tributaries. The administrative centers of these polities were large settlements with one or more platforms mounds and a plaza. Each had a large resident population, but most polity members lived in a half dozen or so towns located within a day’s walk of the center. This book is about one such town, located on the Coosa River in Georgia and known to archaeologists as the King site.
Excavations of two-thirds of the 5.1 acre King site reveal a detailed picture of the town’s domestic and public architecture and overall settlement plan. Intensive analysis of architectural features, especially of domestic structures, enables a better understanding of the variation in structure size, compass orientation, construction stages, and symbolic cosmological associations; the identification of multi-family households; and the position of individual structures within the town’s occupation sequence or life history. Comparison of domestic architecture and burials reveals considerable variation between households in house size, shell bead wealth, and prominence of adult members. One household is preeminent in all these characteristics and may represent the household of the town chief or his matrilineal extended family. Analysis of public architectural features has revealed the existence of a large meeting house with likely historical connections to 18th-century Creek town houses; a probable cosmological basis for the town’s physical layout; and an impressive stockade-and-ditch defensive perimeter.
The King site represents a nearly ideal opportunity to identify the kinds of status positions that were held by individual inhabitants; analyze individual households and investigate the roles they played in King site society; reconstruct the community that existed at King, including size, life history, symbolic associations, and integrative mechanisms; and place King in the larger regional political system. With excavations dating back to 1973, and supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Geographic Society, this is social archaeology at its best.
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
The first comprehensive and systematic investigation of a Woodland period ceremonial center.
Kolomoki, one of the most impressive archaeological sites in the southeastern United States, includes at least nine large earthen mounds in the lower Chattahoochee River valley of southwest Georgia. The largest, Mound A, rises approximately 20 meters above the terrace that borders it. From its flat-topped summit, a visitor can survey the string of smaller mounds that form an arc to the south and west.
Archaeological research had previously placed Kolomoki within the Mississippian period (ca. A.D. 1000-1500) primarily because of the size and form of the mounds. But this book presents data for the main period of occupation and mound construction that confirm an earlier date, in the Woodland period (ca. A.D. 350-750). Even though the long-standing confusion over Kolomoki’s dating has now been settled, questions remain regarding the lifeways of its inhabitants. Thomas Pluckhahn's research has recovered evidence concerning the level of site occupation and the house styles and daily lives of its dwellers. He presents here a new, revised history of Kolomoki from its founding to its eventual abandonment, with particular attention to the economy and ceremony at the settlement.
This study makes an important contribution to the understanding of middle range societies, particularly the manner in which ceremony could both level and accentuate status differentiation within them. It provides a readable overview of one of the most important but historically least understood prehistoric Native American sites in the United States.
Offering a fascinating look at an ordinary soldier's struggle to survive not only the horrors of combat but also the unrelenting hardship of camp life, Lee and Jackson's Bloody Twelfth brings together for the first time the extant correspondence of Confederate lieutenant Irby Goodwin Scott, who served in the hard-fighting Twelfth Georgia Infantry.
The collection begins with Scott's first letter home from Richmond, Virginia, in June 1861, and ends with his last letter to his father in February 1865. Scott miraculously completed the journey from naïve recruit to hardened veteran while seeing action in many of the Eastern Theater's most important campaigns: the Shenandoah Valley, the Peninsula, Second Manassas, and Gettysburg. His writings brim with vivid descriptions of the men's activities in camp, on the march, and in battle. Particularly revelatory are the details the letters provide about the relationship between Scott and his two African American body servants, whom he wrote about with great affection. And in addition to maps, photographs, and a roster of Scott's unit, the book also features an insightful introduction by editor Johnnie Perry Pearson, who highlights the key themes found throughout the correspondence.
By illuminating in depth how one young Confederate stood up to the physical and emotional duress of war, the book stands as a poignant tribute to the ways in which all ordinary Civil War soldiers, whether fighting for the South or the North, sacrificed, suffered, and endured.
Johnnie Perry Pearson is a retired state service officer formerly with the North Carolina Division of Veteran Affairs. He served as an infantry platoon sergeant during the Vietnam War and lives in Hickory, North Carolina.
Recounting the human and natural history of the islands, the authors look in particular at the phenomenon of coastal erosion and the implications of various responses to this process. In Georgia, as elsewhere in the United States, the future of the shore is in doubt as recreational and residential development demands increase. This book provides guidelines for living with the shore, as opposed to simply living on it. The former requires planning and a wise choice of property or house site. The latter ignores the potential hazards unique to coastal life and may make inadequate allowance for the dramatic changes that can occur on any sandy ocean shore.
Living with the Georgia Shore includes an introduction to each of the Georgia isles, an overview of federal and state coastal land-use regulations, pointers on buying and building at the shore, a hurricane preparation checklist, a history of recent hurricanes in Georgia, an extensive annotated bibliography, and a guide to government agencies and private groups involved in issues of coastal development.
“Keith Hebert has thoroughly mined the primary source record in one Georgia county to uncover a complex story of divided community identities, shifting economic tides, wartime destruction, and deep social change. Even more, Hebert has helped clarify the differences between the Appalachian and Southern Civil War experiences.”—Aaron Astor, author of Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri
Civil War historians have long noted that support for the Confederacy in the antebellum South tended to align with geography: those who lived in towns, along railroads, and on land suited for large-scale farming tended to side with the Confederacy, while those who lived a more isolated existence and made their livings by subsistence farming and bartering usually remained Unionist. Bartow County in northwest Georgia, with its distinctive terrain of valley, piedmont, and Appalachian hill country, is an ideal microcosm to examine these issues.
Keith S. Hébert examines the rise and precipitous fall of Confederate nationalism in Bartow County, a shared experience among many counties in the upland South. Hébert’s story tells us much about the war’s origins, Confederate defeat, and the enduring legacy of white supremacy in these rural areas. Although no major battles were fought in Bartow County, Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign saw Federal troops occupying the area, testing the loyalties of Bartow County soldiers serving in the Army of Tennessee and elsewhere. As the home front collapsed, they had to decide if they should remain in the army and fight or return home to protect their families and property. Locals hardly knew whom to trust as Unionists and Confederates—from both home and afar—engaged in guerilla warfare, stole resources from citizens, and made the war a confusing trap rather than a struggle for an emergent nation.
Drawing on the primary source record of newspapers, letters, diaries, and official documents from the county, Hébert compellingly works personalized vignettes into a scholarly study of developments from the advent of war through Reconstruction and the decades following. The Long Civil War in the North Georgia Mountains solidifies recent scholarship about the war in southern Appalachia and opens a window into a community deeply divided by civil war.
KEITH S. HÉBERT, assistant professor of history at Auburn University, was formerly state historian at the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Historic Preservation Division. His writing has appeared in The Georgia Historical Quarterly and Reconstructing Appalachia: The Civil War’s Aftermath.
A groundbreaking study, Lynching in the New South is a classic portrait of the tradition of violence that poisoned American life.
The Making of a Black Scholar is structured around schools. Porter attends Georgia's segregated black schools until he enters the privileged world of Amherst College. He graduates (spending one semester at Morehouse College) and moves on to graduate study at Yale. He starts his teaching career at Detroit's Wayne State University and spends the 1980s at Dartmouth College and the 1990s at Stanford University.
About the time of the American Revolutionary war, when the Creek Indians owned land that is today approximately the lower two-thirds of Alabama and of Georgia west of the Oconee River, two sons were born to Indian mothers and Scots fathers in obscure towns in the territory of the Creek Nation. Both sons were named William, and both were to become leaders of their mothers’ people.
The two remarkable men lived during a period of war and turbulence along the frontier in Alabama and Georgia. More often the subjects of folk tale and legend than serious historical inquiry, McIntosh and Weatherford fought on opposing sides in the Creek War of 1813-1814. McIntosh allied himself with Andrew Jackson and the friendly Lower Creeks, while Weatherford joined with the hostile Red Stick and was the leader of a band of Upper Creeks in the massacre at Fort Mims. McIntosh, who was given the rank of brigadier general for his military feats, was involved in the machinations that led to the ceding of Creek lands to Georgia. As a result, he died in disgrace at the hands of his fellow Creeks. Weatherford, once hated and feared, died a planter and local hero in Alabama near the site of Fort Mims.
“Murphy Station is a well-told coming-of-age story. It conveys a deep sense of place, and articulates the everyday ways in which the etiquette of Jim Crow was learned and enacted, and eventually questioned and even challenged.”
—Jason Sokol, author of There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–1975
In the southern Georgia of 1950, Murphy Station is a community marked only by two country stores, two Baptist churches, and a graveyard. Farming is the way of life, and segregation is in full force. Welcome to Deep Dixie.
David Donovan is a young white boy growing up in Murphy Station where even the best farmers are cash poor, and those who work for them, usually blacks, are poorer still. In adult conversation, the main topics are weather, crops, and politics. Within the last category, it’s agreed that the main threats facing America are two: communism and integration. So far as young Dave knows, this isn’t unusual, but already there are changes afoot. In this richly detailed memoir, laced with both humor and tragedy, we see how those changes affect Dave in subtle but ultimately profound ways.
Coming of age in a world with the axiom “no boy a chicken, no man a coward,” Dave has the sorts of boyhood adventures common to the rural South: exploits with firearms, encounters with angry animals, challenges from friends, and a growing interest in girls. As he has these adventures, he also works in the field alongside black farmhands, some of whom teach him vital lessons about the realities of their lives—lessons that begin to challenge the prejudices and preconceptions of his time and place.
By the late 1950s the civil rights movement has become a major force in the South; yet, as David enters high school in 1960 the customs of segregation still hold sway, persisting even when he leaves for college. In his first year away from home, he witnesses the national trauma of the Kennedy assassination, which blunts the promises of Camelot. In Vietnam a few years later, he sees those promises collapse entirely. Returning in 1970 to a Murphy Station much changed from what it was twenty years earlier, David Donovan finds himself transformed as well.
David Donovan is the pseudonym of Terry Turner, professor emeritus of urology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of more than 120 basic science articles on male reproductive biology and of a previous book, Once a Warrior King: Memoirs of an Officer in Vietnam.
This first book-length examination of the Georgia Pine Belt challenges the conventional view of this area as an unchanging economic backwater by examining its postbellum evolution from an independent agricultural economy to one entirely dependent upon a single unstable crop: cotton. Before the Civil War, the Georgia Piney Woods region easily supported a population of mostly self-sufficient yeomen and livestock herders. After the war, a variety of external forces invaded the region, propelling the economy through three stages of social, political, and economic change that permanently altered the landscape. Spearheaded by New South boosters like Henry Grady, these invasions were intended to create a South with a diversified economic future bright with industry and self-sufficient agriculture.
The first stage did see economic advancement in the form of transportation routes, including railroads, that opened up the Pine Belt’s forests to the second stage of change: industrialized sawmilling and turpentining. This second stage created new jobs, but failed to bring in other industries, leaving the area dependent upon an industry that destroyed the antebellum open-range herding system and brought deforestation within a generation.
The lumber industry’s demise led to the final stage of change, which saw New South boosters, in an attempt to curtail the economic malaise, promoting the deforested lands to a wave of newcomers—immigrant cotton farmers from the upcountry, hungry for new lands. With no other industries to compete with them, cotton farmers came to dominate the area’s economic life even more than before the Civil War. By 1910, few Georgia pinelanders doubted that a New South had arrived, but it was not the diversified landscape that Henry Grady and others had originally envisioned. It was, instead, a land of cotton much like the one that had come to dominate life across the rest of the Pine Belt from Virginia to East Texas.
Mark V. Wetherington’s in-depth study of this region sheds new light on its socioeconomic history and encourages a closer examination of the often ignored histories of other areas.
Essays from a prolific career that challenge and overturn traditional narratives of southern Jewish history
Mark K. Bauman, one of the foremost scholars of southern Jewish history working today, has spent much of his career, as he puts it, “rewriting southern Jewish history” in ways that its earliest historians could not have envisioned or anticipated, and doing so by specifically targeting themes and trends that might not have been readily apparent to those scholars. A New Vision of Southern Jewish History: Studies in Institution Building, Leadership, Interaction, and Mobility features essays collected from over a forty-year career, including a never-before-published article.
The prevailing narrative in southern Jewish history tends to emphasize the role of immigrant Jews as merchants in small southern towns and their subsequent struggles and successes in making a place for themselves in the fabric of those communities. Bauman offers assessments that go far beyond these simplified frameworks and draws upon varieties of subject matter, time periods, locations, tools, and perspectives over three decades of writing and scholarship.
A New Vision of Southern Jewish History contains Bauman’s studies of Jewish urbanization, acculturation and migration, intra- and inter-group relations, economics and business, government, civic affairs, transnational diplomacy, social services, and gender—all complicating traditional notions of southern Jewish identity. Drawing on role theory as informed by sociology, psychology, demographics, and the nature and dynamics of leadership, Bauman traverses a broad swath—often urban—of the southern landscape, from Savannah, Charleston, and Baltimore through Atlanta, New Orleans, Galveston, and beyond the country to Europe and Israel.
Bauman’s retrospective volume gives readers the opportunity to review a lifetime of work in a single publication as well as peruse newly penned introductions to his essays. The book also features an “Additional Readings” section designed to update the historiography in the essays.
A Particular Place tells the story of the dramatic changes that take place in the religious lives of a community faced with urban restructuring—in this case, Dacula, Georgia, a once-quiet small town on the outskirts of Atlanta. The demographics of Dacula were changed dramatically by the population inflow, service sector development, and housing expansion brought on by the growing metropolis.
Nancy L. Eiesland provides a qualitative study of how the local religious congregations altered themselves, their relations with one another, and—over time—their community in light of this disruption to their social order. Eiesland accounts for these changes by examining the lives of area newcomers and long-time residents, discussing the responses of locals to the emergence of a megachurch in their community, investigating the wrenching processes of congregational birth and deaths, and studying responses to community conflicts.Applying population ecology approaches to the study of religious organizations within their local contexts, A Particular Place addresses together two types of restructuring that are often mutually implicated—urban and religious restructuring. This book demonstrates all that can be learned from studious attention to a particular place.
-Kelly Cherry, judge of the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel
In 1913, a young white girl in coastal Georgia fabricates a romance between her elder sister and an African American laborer, inadvertently leading to the man's lynching. A crowd gathers and a photographer records the event on picture postcards. In one of these, the young girl stands smiling beside the hung man.
More than fifty years later, nine-year-old Riddley Cross discovers these postcards amid her late grandfather's belongings. As she tries to make sense of why the postcards are in her family's possession, and why the photographed girl seems so familiar, Riddley becomes haunted by apparitions and dreams of lynchings. The postcards force her to question what she has been taught about the world, the South, and her family-and what she has not.
The mysteries of the lynching postcards start to unravel after her widowed grandmother, Adele, moves in with the family. Afflicted with Alzheimer's disease, Adele speaks only to murmur the occasional insult or curse. Nonetheless, she and Riddley become companions of a sort, based largely on their common affinity for silence, wandering, and the nearby river. When Riddley develops a friendship with her neighbor Carver, an artist and iconoclast, the connections between the postcards and Riddley's family gradually come to light, and a series of tragic events begins to unfold. In The Prudent Mariner, Williams offers a searing exploration of the legacies of complicity and violence, silence and regret, and the unforeseeable ways the past shapes and impinges upon the present.
Leslie Walker Williams was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia, and currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her short stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Madison Review, Harvard Review, and American Fiction. The Prudent Mariner, her first novel, was awarded the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, and the Morris Hackney Literary Award for the Novel.
The Reconstruction of Georgia was first published in 1966. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
In this study of the reconstruction period in Georgia following the Civil War, a British historian provides a dispassionate account of a highly controversial subject. A revisionist reappraisal, Dr. Conway's study is the first substantial history of the period to be published in fifty years. The sources include considerable material that has become available since the publication of the last major work on the subject in 1915.
The author gives close attention to the last days of the Civil War and its aftermath in Georgia, the early attempts at political reconstruction in 1865, the work of the Freedmen's Bureau, the economic problems involved in reshaping the state's economy, the development of the state-cropping and crop-lien systems, the imposition of Congressional reconstruction on Georgia under military supervision, the political maneuverings and economic ventures of such prominent figures as Joseph E. Brown, Benjamin Hill, and Hannibal I. Kimball, the efforts of the Ku-Klux Klan to nullify Negro voting rights and re-establish "white supremacy" concepts, and, finally, the investigations by the Democratic party of Republication misgovernment during the administration of Governor Rufus B. Bullock.
Dr. Conway, who did the research for the book in Georgia, has made considerable use of primary manuscripts, travelers' accounts, state and federal reports, and contemporary newspaper material to arrive at an account which judiciously assesses the claims and counter-claims of violently opposed groups which were vitally concerned with the place of the Negro in Southern society after emancipation and with the return of Georgia to the Union.
The old judge enjoyed swapping tales and sharing company with other lawyers, politicians, and family members. A true aristocrat of the Old South, Garnett Andrews (1798–1873) so enjoyed hearing and telling good yarns that he decided late in his life to preserve them for posterity. The judge wrote down a collection of his stories, including tales of men with whom he had worked—and some whom he had worked against—and in 1870, about three years before he died, he had his booklet printed and circulated among friends. He titled it Reminiscences of an Old Georgia Lawyer.
This new volume reprises Andrews’s work, and features a new introduction by S. Kittrell Rushing. In recounting a lawyer’s life from the frontier period through the Civil War and into the Reconstruction era, Andrews’s recollections provide rare and fascinating details, particularly about pre–Civil War Georgia, the state of the judiciary in the early national period—about which little has been written—and the larger political and social milieu of antebellum and postbellum America. This is an eclectic mixture of tall tales, humorous anecdotes, and keen observations about southern society and the practice of law.
In his introduction, Rushing places Andrews’s writings in a broad context. He addresses Andrews’s racial views head on, confronting and probing the racism, sexism, and classism of Andrews and his times. In addition, Rushing provides biographical and genealogical information about the judge and his family, including his daughter, the noted diarist and novelist Eliza Frances Andrews. This volume also includes other pieces by Andrews, among them letters, speeches, and his acceptance of the 1855 gubernatorial nomination.
Highly readable and lively, Reminiscence of an Old Georgia Lawyer will enlighten and entertain both scholars and general readers interested in the history of Georgia, the Old South, and American legal history.
Throughout the twentieth century, millions of African Americans, many from impoverished, historically black counties, left the South to pursue what they thought would be a better life in the North. But not everyone moved away during what scholars have termed the Great Migration. What has life been like for those who stayed? Why would they remain in a place that many outsiders would see as grim, depressed, economically marginal, and where racial prejudice continues to place them at a disadvantage?
Through oral history William Falk tells the story of an extended family in the Georgia-South Carolina lowcountry. Family members talk about schooling, relatives, work, religion, race, and their love of the place where they have lived for generations. This “conversational ethnography” argues that an interconnection between race and place in the area helps explain African Americans’ loyalty to it. In Colonial County, blacks historically enjoyed a numerical majority as well as deep cultural roots and longstanding webs of social connections that, Falk finds, more than outweigh the racism they face and the economic disadvantages they suffer.
In a brilliant comparative study of law and imperialism, Lisa Ford argues that modern settler sovereignty emerged when settlers in North America and Australia defined indigenous theft and violence as crime.
This occurred, not at the moment of settlement or federation, but in the second quarter of the nineteenth century when notions of statehood, sovereignty, empire, and civilization were in rapid, global flux. Ford traces the emergence of modern settler sovereignty in everyday contests between settlers and indigenous people in early national Georgia and the colony of New South Wales. In both places before 1820, most settlers and indigenous people understood their conflicts as war, resolved disputes with diplomacy, and relied on shared notions like reciprocity and retaliation to address frontier theft and violence. This legal pluralism, however, was under stress as new, global statecraft linked sovereignty to the exercise of perfect territorial jurisdiction. In Georgia, New South Wales, and elsewhere, settler sovereignty emerged when, at the same time in history, settlers rejected legal pluralism and moved to control or remove indigenous peoples.
For 15 years, Steven Schrader worked as a firefighter and an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) in Atlanta, Georgia. There, he faced the day-to-day stress created by having to deal with nonstop human catastrophe, one moment administering to terribly hurt accident victims, the next talking down a suicidal person from a rooftop. Added to these difficulties were his own personal struggles, not the least being the bias he experienced because of his severe hearing loss. Silent Alarm presents his no-frills, stunning account of survival in a profession with a notoriously high burn-out rate, and the good that he did as a topnotch EMT.
Schrader makes palpable the constant tension of being the first summoned to life-or-death situations, and he also outlines the grim reality of being an EMT in dangerous parts of the community. “Always wear a bulletproof vest; keep a weapon (out of sight of the supervisors, of course); never, never stand in front of a door when knocking,” are just a few of his rules for the street.
Despite these cautions, time and again he and his partners plunged into danger to save children, elderly citizens, indigents, criminals, and any other persons they found at risk. His hearing loss occasionally hindered him, and sometimes saved him, but, mostly, as it should, it became part of the background to the astonishing compassion in the stories he tells.
This first book-length study of the Ruskin colonies shows how several hundred utopian socialists gathered as a cooperative community in Tennessee and Georgia in the late nineteenth century. The communitarians' noble but fatally flawed act of social endeavor revealed the courage and desperation they felt as they searched for alternatives to the chaotic and competitive individualism of the age of robber barons and for a viable model for a just and humane society at a time of profound uncertainty about public life in the United States.
In the New World, the buying and selling of slaves and of the commodities that they produced generated immense wealth, which reshaped existing societies and helped build new ones. From small beginnings, slavery in North America expanded until it furnished the foundation for two extraordinarily rich and powerful slave societies, the United States of America and then the Confederate States of America. The expansion and concentration of slavery into what became the Confederacy in 1861 was arguably the most momentous development after nationhood itself in the early history of the American republic.
Nichol’s 61st Georgia fought in the renowned brigade commanded consecutively by generals Alexander R. Lawton, John B. Gordon, and Clement A. Evans.
Framed without any excess of sentimental hindsight, in addition to reporting on great battles and dramatic moments, Nichol’s told the story of two cousins killing each other in a quarrel about cooking duties and described maggot-infested corpses around Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle.
Includes an annotated roster of the 61st supplies which details about Nichol’s fellow veterans, some of which is not available anywhere else.
Selected by Civil War Interactive as One of the Top Civil War Books of All Time
On April 12, 1862—one year to the day after Confederate guns opened on Fort Sumter and started the Civil War—a tall, mysterious smuggler and self-appointed Union spy named James J. Andrews and nineteen infantry volunteers infiltrated north Georgia and stole a steam engine called the General. Racing northward at speeds approaching sixty miles an hour, cutting telegraph lines and destroying track along the way, Andrews planned to open East Tennessee to the Union army, cutting off men and matériel from the Confederate forces in Virginia. If they succeeded, Andrews and his raiders could change the course of the war. But the General's young conductor, William A. Fuller, chased the stolen train first on foot, then by handcar, and finally aboard another engine, the Texas. He pursued the General until, running out of wood and water, Andrews and his men abandoned the doomed locomotive, ending the adventure that would soon be famous as The Great Locomotive Chase. But the ordeal of the soldiers involved was just beginning. In the days that followed, the "engine thieves" were hunted down and captured. Eight were tried and executed as spies, including Andrews. Eight others made a daring escape to freedom, including two assisted by a network of slaves and Union sympathizers. For their actions, before a personal audience with President Abraham Lincoln, six of the raiders became the first men in American history to be awarded the Medal of Honor—the nation's highest decoration for gallantry.
Americans north and south, both at the time and ever since, have been astounded and fascinated by this daring raid. But until now, there has not been a complete history of the entire episode and the fates of all those involved. Based on eyewitness accounts, as well as correspondence, diaries, military records, newspaper reports, deposition testimony and other primary sources, Stealing the General: The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor by Russell S. Bonds is a blend of meticulous research and compelling narrative that is now considered to be the definitive history of "the boldest adventure of the war."
Although the Voting Rights Act of 1965 removed the last legal barriers to voting in the South, the anticipated increase in black political power has not been realized. In his analysis of black political participation in three predominantly black Georgia counties between 1960 and 1982, Lawrence J. Hanks seeks to explain why black political empowerment has not increased as expected but also why it has met with such widely varying degrees of success.
Why did blacks in come counties achieve empowerment while others sis not? Arguing that models that focus on individual voting patterns or on political barriers to empowerment fail to account for the varying rates of black participation, hanks draws instead on the literature of collective action. He finds that only in those counties where there was a successful black political organization, backed by strong leaders and sufficient resources, did blacks achieve political empowerment. Once established, such an organization gained popular support through programs of economic development and was able to overcome barriers like ignorance, poverty, and fear and thus promote effective political mobilization.
Approaching his subject historically, Hanks tells the real story of real people working for political change at the local level. He concludes that the franchise alone does not insure political effectiveness, and that blacks need to work toward greater organizational, economic, and political sophistication in order to reap the benefits of the vote.
In 1733, General James Edward Oglethorpe officially established the colony of Georgia, and within three years had fortified the coast southward toward St. Augustine. Although this region, originally known as the provinces of Guale and Mocama, had previously been under Spanish control for more than a century, territorial fighting had emptied the region of Spanish missionaries, soldiers, and their Indian allies. Spanish officials maintained that the long history of Spanish authority over the territory guaranteed Spain the right to defy and repel the English intruders. By 1739, with diplomatic negotiations failing and the potential for war imminent, King Philip V requested that Don Manuel de Montiano, Governor of Spanish Florida, provide him with every document from both governmental and ecclesiastical sources that would demonstrate prior Spanish presence and control over the region. Original documents and translations were delivered within the year and safely filed for future use--then forgotten. With the outbreak of open war six months earlier, the diplomatic utility of the documents had passed.
For over 250 years, the documents languished safely in the Archive of the Indies in Seville until recognized, recovered, translated, and published by John Worth. Within this volume, Worth brings to light the history of the documents, provides complete translations and full explanations of their contents and a narrative exposition of the Spanish presence along the Atlantic coast never before fully understood. David Hurst Thomas provides an introduction that places Worth's translations and his historical overview into the context of ongoing archaeological excavations on the Georgia coast. With the publication of this volume, one of the least known chapters of Georgia history is finally examined in detail.
For decades, Marietta High was the flagship public school of a largely white suburban community in Cobb County, Georgia, just northwest of Atlanta. Today, as the school’s majority black and Latino students struggle with high rates of poverty and low rates of graduation, Marietta High has become a symbol of the wave of resegregation that is sweeping white students and students of color into separate schools across the American South.
Students of the Dream begins with the first generations of Marietta High desegregators authorized by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling and follows the experiences of later generations who saw the dream of integration fall apart. Grounded in over one hundred interviews with current and former Marietta High students, parents, teachers, community leaders, and politicians, this innovative ethnographic history invites readers onto the key battlegrounds—varsity sports, school choice, academic tracking, and social activism—of Marietta’s struggle against resegregation. Well-intentioned calls for diversity and colorblindness, Ruth Carbonette Yow shows, have transformed local understandings of the purpose and value of school integration, and not always for the better.
The failure of local, state, or national policies to stem the tide of resegregation is leading activists—students, parents, and teachers—to reject traditional integration models and look for other ways to improve educational outcomes among African American and Latino students. Yow argues for a revitalized commitment to integration, but one that challenges many of the orthodoxies—including colorblindness—inherited from the mid-twentieth-century civil rights struggle.
"Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe" compares the work, family, and economic experiences of enslaved women and men in upcountry and lowland Georgia during the nineteenth century. Mining planters' daybooks, plantation records, and a wealth of other sources, Daina Ramey Berry shows how slaves' experiences on large plantations, which were essentially self-contained, closed communities, contrasted with those on small plantations, where planters' interests in sharing their workforce allowed slaves more open, fluid communications. By inviting readers into slaves' internal lives through her detailed examination of domestic violence, separation and sale, and forced breeding, Berry also reveals important new ways of understanding what it meant to be a female or male slave, as well as how public and private aspects of slave life influenced each other on the plantation.
A volume in the series Women in American History, edited by Anne Firor Scott, Susan Armitage, Susan K. Cahn, and Deborah Gray White
Petrifying the Peach State, hosts of haints have beset the state of Georgia throughout its storied history. In Thirteen Georgia Ghosts and Jeffrey, best-selling folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham, along with her trusty spectral companion Jeffrey, introduce thirteen of Georgia’s most famous ghost stories.
Windham won hearts across the nation in her regular radio broadcasts and many public appearances. The South’s most prolific raconteur of revenants, Windham, giving new meaning to the phrase “ghost-writer,” does more than tell ghost stories—she captures the true spirit of the place.
Evoking Georgia’s colonial era, “The Eternal Dinner Party” explains why the sounds of an elegant dinner soirée still waft from the grove of Savannah’s Bonaventure estate. At the onset of the Revolution, the Tattnall family abandoned Bonaventure and slipped away to England. Young Josiah Tattnall eventually returned to fight in the Revolution, restored Bonaventure, and later became Georgia’s governor. One holiday eve, when the mansion was bedecked with magnolia and holly and crowded with visitors, a fire too large to control swept through the old house. Tattnall, exhibiting his cool head and impeccable manners, ordered the massive dinner table carried out to the garden where he enjoined his holiday revelers to continue their stately meal. The melancholy strains of Tattnall’s dinner guests still echo through Bonaventure’s ancient oaks on moonlight nights.
In “The Ghost of Andersonville,” Windham takes visitors near the woebegone Confederate prisoner-of-war camp. A plaque there still recounts the tale of Swiss immigrant and Confederate captain Henry Wirz. Convicted—many thought wrongly—of war crimes, Wirz’s restless ghost still perambulates the highways of south Georgia. Writing for the Georgia Historical Commission, Miss Bessie Lewis quips in her preface to this beloved collection, “Who should be better able to tell of happenings long past than the ghosts of those who had a part in them?”
A perennial favorite, this commemorative edition restores Thirteen Georgia Ghosts and Jeffrey to the ghastly grandeur of its original 1973 edition.
As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta—the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south—in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers’ domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization.
Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north.
Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post–Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception—and at the heart—of the new south.
Eggleston describes garrison duty near Vicksburg, where he enjoyed visits from his wife and children; the battery’s first engagement with the enemy at Champion Hill on May 16, 1863; and his service during the 1864 campaigns in Georgia and Tennessee. He offers a significant firsthand account of the Atlanta campaign, including the fighting at Resaca, Cassville, New Hope Church, Kennesaw Mountain, and the Chattahoochee River, as well as the siege of Atlanta. Because of the destruction of Hood’s Army, Confederate records of these engagements are extremely rare, and Eggleston’s observations are invaluable. In Tennessee, he recounts the action at the Battle of Nashville and the capture of his battery.
Featuring an introduction that traces the wartime actions of Company G as well as a complete roster of the men with whom Eggleston served, To Succeed or Perish provides an important primary account of artillery service in an underrepresented theater of the Civil War.
Lawrence Lee Hewitt is professor of history emeritus at Southeastern Louisiana University. He is the author of Port Hudson, Confederate Bastion on the Mississippi and co-editor of six anthologies dealing with America’s Civil War.
Thomas E. Schott worked as a historian for the Department of Defense. He is the author of Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography, winner of the Jefferson Davis Award, and co-editor with Lawrence Hewitt of Lee and His Generals: Essays in Honor of T. Harry Williams.
Marc Kunis is a certified public accountant and the director of accounting at Resolution Productions.
“This book will serve as a valuable resource for other scholars in their attempts to better understand how Latino newcomers are transforming their new homes in this country.” —Melvin Delgado, author of Social Work with Latinos: A Cultural Assets Paradigm
The Dalton-Whit?eld County area of Georgia has one of the highest concentrations of Latino residents in the southeastern United States. In 2006, a Washington Post article referred to the carpet-manufacturing city of Dalton as a “U.S. border town,” even though the community lies more than twelve hundred miles from Mexico. Voices from the Nueva Frontera explores this phenomenon, providing an in-depth picture of Latino immigration and dispersal in rural America along with a framework for understanding the economic integration of the South with Latin America.
Voices from the Nueva Frontera sheds new light on the often invisible changes that have transformed this north Georgia town over the last thirty years. The book's contributors explore the changes to labor markets and educational, religious, and social organizations and show that Dalton provides a largely successful example of a community that has provided a home to a newly arriving immigrant work force. While debates about immigration have raged in the public spotlight in recent years, some of the most important voices-those of the immigrants themselves-have been nearly unheard. In this pathbreaking book, therefore, each chapter opens with an interview of a worker, student, teacher, or other professional involved in the immigrant experience. These narratives add human faces to the realities of dramatic change occurring in rural industrial towns.
Sure to spark lively discussion in the classroom and beyond, Voices from the Nueva Frontera gives readers a look at individual human stories and provides much-needed documentation for what might be the most important social change in recent southern history.
Donald E. Davis, Thomas M. Deaton, and David Boyle are on the faculty at Dalton State College. Jo-Anne Schick is the former director of the Georgia Project.
A masterpiece of prose and research, the definitive history of the struggle for Atlanta during the Civil War, an episode immortalized by the novel Gone with the Wind
Called “the greatest event of the Civil War” by New York diarist George Templeton Strong, the epic struggle for the city of Atlanta in the bloody summer of 1864 was a pivotal moment in American history. Union commander William Tecumseh Sherman’s relentless fight for the city secured the reelection of Abraham Lincoln, sealed the fate of the Southern Confederacy, and set a precedent for military campaigns that endures today. Its depiction in the novel and motion picture Gone with the Wind established the fight for Atlanta as an iconic episode in our nation’s most terrible war. In War Like the Thunderbolt: The Battle and Burning of Atlanta, award-winning author Russell S. Bonds takes the reader behind the lines and across the smoky battlefields of Peachtree Creek, Atlanta, Ezra Church, and Jonesboro, and into the lives of fascinating characters, both the famous and the forgotten, including the fiery and brilliant Sherman; General John Bell Hood, the Confederacy’s last hope to defend Atlanta; Benjamin Harrison, the diminutive young Indiana colonel who would rise to become President of the United States; Patrick Cleburne, the Irishmanturned- Southern officer; and ten-year-old diarist Carrie Berry, who bravely withstood and bore witness to the fall of the city. Here also is the dramatic story of the ordeal of Atlanta itself—the five-week artillery bombardment, the expulsion of its civilian population, and the infamous fire that followed. Based on new research in diaries, newspapers, previously unpublished letters, and other archival sources, War Like the Thunderbolt is a combination of captivating narrative and insightful military analysis—a stirring account of the battle and burning of the “Gate City of the South.”
For its own part, Atlanta had been watching as White residents left the city for the suburbs over the course of the 1960s. As the turn of the decade approached, city leadership was searching for ways to mitigate white flight and bring residents of the surrounding suburbs back to the city center. So when a stereotypically White sport came to the Deep South in 1971 in the form of the Atlanta Flames, ownership saw a new opportunity to appeal to White audiences.
But the challenge would be selling a game that was foreign to most of Atlanta’s longtime sports fans.
Filling a significant gap in scholarly literature concerning race and hockey within US history, White Ice: Race and the Making of Atlanta Hockey is a response to two simple questions: How did a cold-climate sport like hockey end up in a majority Black city in the Deep South? And why did it come when it did? Over seven chronological chapters, Thomas Aiello unpacks the history, culture, and context surrounding these questions, teasing out what the story of the Atlanta Flames can teach us about the NHL, Atlanta, race, and the business of professional sports expansion.
Winner of the PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Award
“A stunning portrayal of a tragedy endured and survived by women.”
—David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass
“Readers expecting hoop-skirted ladies soothing fevered soldiers’ brows will not find them here…Explodes the fiction that men fight wars while women idle on the sidelines.”
—Washington Post
The idea that women are outside of war is a powerful myth, one that shaped the Civil War and still determines how we write about it today. Through three dramatic stories that span the war, Stephanie McCurry invites us to see America’s bloodiest conflict for what it was: not just a brothers’ war but a women’s war.
When Union soldiers faced the unexpected threat of female partisans, saboteurs, and spies, long held assumptions about the innocence of enemy women were suddenly thrown into question. McCurry shows how the case of Clara Judd, imprisoned for treason, transformed the writing of Lieber’s Code, leading to lasting changes in the laws of war. Black women’s fight for freedom had no place in the Union military’s emancipation plans. Facing a massive problem of governance as former slaves fled to their ranks, officers reclassified black women as “soldiers’ wives”—placing new obstacles on their path to freedom. Finally, McCurry offers a new perspective on the epic human drama of Reconstruction through the story of one slaveholding woman, whose losses went well beyond the material to intimate matters of family, love, and belonging, mixing grief with rage and recasting white supremacy in new, still relevant terms.
“As McCurry points out in this gem of a book, many historians who view the American Civil War as a ‘people’s war’ nevertheless neglect the actions of half the people.”
—James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom
“In this brilliant exposition of the politics of the seemingly personal, McCurry illuminates previously unrecognized dimensions of the war’s elemental impact.”
—Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering
This major summary of the current state of archaeological research on the Swift Creek culture is the first comprehensive collection ever published concerning the Swift Creek people.
The Swift Creek people, centered in Georgia and surrounding states from A.D. 100 to 700, are best known from their pottery, which was decorated before firing with beautiful paddle-stamped designs--some of the most intricate and fascinating in the world.
Comprehensive in scope, this volume details the discovery of this culture, summarizes what is known about it at the present time, and shows how continued improvements in the collection and analysis of archaeological data are advancing our knowledge of this extinct society.
Although they know nothing of Swift Creek language and little about its society, archaeologists have collected valuable information about the
economic strategies of Swift Creek inhabitants. What archaeologists know best, however, is that the Swift Creek people were some of the best wood carvers the world has seen, and their pottery will stand as their lasting legacy for all time. This book presents and preserves their legacy.
In the midst of societal optimism, how do young men cope with the loss of a vibrant future? Young Men, Time, and Boredom in the Republic of Georgia provides a vivid exploration of the tension between subjective and societal time and the ways these tensions create experiences of marginality among under- or unemployed young men in the Republic of Georgia.
Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Martin Demant Frederiksen shows how the Georgian state has attempted to make the so-called post-Soviet transition a thing of the past as it creates new ideas about the future. Yet some young men in the regional capital of Batumi do not feel that they are part of the progression these changes create. Instead, they feel marginalized both by space and time—passed over and without prospects.
This distinctive case study provides empirical evidence for a deeper understanding of contemporary societal developments and their effects on individual experiences.
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