front cover of The Southern States Since The War
The Southern States Since The War
Robert Somers
University of Alabama Press, 1965
An extraordinarily valuable contribution to the history of the South during Reconstruction
 
Somers was fifty-eight years of age when he landed in America in the fall of 1870. His long-time newspaper career and his interest in social and economic matters had prepared him in a very special way to study the South, where the whole way of life had been so lately wracked by war. He was a keen and objective observer, modest and restrained in criticism and praise. On the whole he was optimistic for the future of the South. Although apparently a Southern sympathizer during the War, he was able to subordinate this sympathy and give a fair, detached, and balanced appraisal of economic life, politics and race relations. His interest in politics was confined in the main to their effect on the economic and social phases of the South's welfare.
 
Since his trip to America was not sponsored by “any Association, mercantile or political,” he was at liberty to record conditions as he saw them. Many of the accounts of conditions in the South in this period may be classified as promotional literature. State bureaus of immigration and agriculture, land companies, railroads and other interested groups hired agents to make favorable reports on cheap lands, on opportunities for industrial enterprise, deposits of minerals and the existence of other natural resources. They exaggerated economic opportunities and favorable political, cultural, and social conditions. Somers, on the other hand, was a true traveler, in the pay of no organization and with no axe to grind. He was particularly interested in economic and social matters: cotton and sugar culture, Negroes, railroads, natural resources, labor, industry, immigration and education. Since an analysis of the South’s economy was Somers’ major objective, his book made an extraordinarily valuable contribution to the history of the South during Reconstruction.
 
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front cover of Three Capitals
Three Capitals
St. Stephens, Huntsville, and Cahawba, 1818-1826
William H. Brantley Jr
University of Alabama Press, 1976

 "Three Capitals is an in-depth study of Alabama's first three seats of government--St. Stephens, Huntsville, and Cahawba.... The University of Alabama Press has reprinted the book in a handsome new edition with a pertinent introduction by Malcolm C. McMillan. Brantley's study is a tribute to the accomplishments of an amateur historian and contains a wealth of useful information."

--Bulletin of the History of the Early American Republic

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