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.
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.
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.
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.
This book argues for an original, unorthodox conception about the relationship between globalization and contemporary nationalism. While the prevailing view holds that nationalism and globalization are forces of clashing opposition, Sabanadze establishes that these tend to become allied forces. It acknowledges that nationalism does react against the rising globalization and represents a form of resistance against globalizing influences, but the Basque and Georgian cases prove that globalization and nationalism can be complementary rather than contradictory tendencies.
Nationalists have often served as promoters of globalization, seeking out globalizing influences and engaging with global actors out of their very nationalist interests. In the case of both Georgia and the Basque Country, there is little evidence suggesting the existence of strong, politically organized nationalist opposition to globalization.
Globalization and Nationalism discusses why, on a broader scale, different forms of nationalism develop differing attitudes towards globalization and engage in different relationships.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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In "Some of the People Who Ate My Barbecue Didn't Vote for Me," Scott Buchanan portrays Marvin Griffin as a Yellow Dog Democrat struggling against inevitable change. Griffin was viewed by many as a charismatic voice of resistance in the Georgia and the South in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. He combined a staunch segregationist approach with economically progressive policies, assisting in Georgia's transformation from an agrarian economy to a more industrialized one.
Ironically, it was these efforts and the larger shift in politics that doomed Griffin's career, ensuring his administration would last only one term. In many ways, Griffin stands as a clear dividing line between the Old South and the New.
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."
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.
The story of how the American South became the most incarcerated region in the world’s most incarcerated nation.
Sunbelt Capitalism and the Making of the Carceral State examines the evolution of southern criminal punishment from Jim Crow to the dawn of mass incarceration, charting this definitive era of carceral transformation and expansion in the southern United States. The demise of the county chain gang, the professionalization of police, and the construction of large-scale prisons were among the sweeping changes that forever altered the southern landscape and bolstered the region’s capacity to punish. What prompted this southern revolution in criminal punishment?
Kirstine Taylor argues that the crisis in the cotton fields and the arrival of Sunbelt capitalism in the south’s rising metropolises prompted lawmakers to build expansive, modern criminal punishment systems in response to Brown v. Board of Education and the Black freedom movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. Taking us inside industry-hunting expeditions, school desegregation battles, the sit-in movement, prisoners’ labor unions, and policy commissions, Taylor tells the story of how a modernizing south became the most incarcerated region in the globe’s most incarcerated nation.
"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.
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.”
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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