front cover of Clotilda
Clotilda
The History and Archaeology of the Last Slave Ship
James P. Delgado, Deborah E. Marx, Kyle Lent, Joseph Grinnan, and Alexander DeCaro
University of Alabama Press, 2023
Documents the maritime historical research and archaeological fieldwork used to identify the wreck of the notorious schooner Clotilda

Clotilda: The History and Archaeology of the Last Slave Ship is the first definitive work to examine the maritime historical and archaeological record of one of the most infamous ships in American history. Clotilda was owned by Alabama businessman Timothy Meaher, who, on a dare, equipped it to carry captured Africans from what is now Benin and bring them to Alabama in 1860—some fifty years after the import of captives to be enslaved was banned. To hide the evidence, Clotilda was set afire and sunk.

What remained was a substantially intact, submerged, and partially buried shipwreck located in a backwater of the Mobile River. The site of the wreck was an open secret to some people who knew Meaher, but its identity remained unknown for more than a century as various surveys through the years failed to locate the ship.

This volume, authored by the archaeological team who conducted a comprehensive, systematic survey of a forgotten “ship graveyard,” details the exhaustive forensic work that conclusively identified the wreck, as well as the stories and secrets that have emerged from the partly burned hulk. James P. Delgado and his coauthors discuss the various searches for Clotilda, sharing the forensic data and other analyses showing how those involved concluded that this wreck was indeed Clotilda. Additionally, they offer physical evidence not previously shared that situates the schooner and its voyage in a larger context of the slave trade.

Clotilda: The History and Archaeology of the Last Slave Ship serves as a nautical biography of the ship as well. After reviewing the maritime trade in and out of Mobile Bay, this account places Clotilda within the larger landscape of American and Gulf of Mexico schooners and chronicles its career before being used as a slave ship. All of its voyages had a link to slavery, and one may have been another smuggling voyage in violation of federal law. The authors have also painstakingly reconstructed Clotilda’s likely appearance and characteristics.
 
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Cotton City
Urban Development in Antebellum Mobile
Harriet E. Amos Doss
University of Alabama Press, 2001
Antebellum Mobile was a cotton port city, and economic dependence upon the North created by the cotton trade controlled the city’s development. Mobile’s export trade placed the city third after New York and New Orleans in total value of exports for the nation by 1860. Because the exports consisted almost entirely of cotton headed for Northern and foreign textile mills, Mobile depended on Northern businessmen for marketing services. Nearly all the city’s imports were from New York: Mobile had the worst export-import imbalance of all antebellum ports.
 
As the volume of cotton exports increased, so did the city’s population—from1,500 in 1820 to 30,000 in 1860. Amos’s study delineates the basis for Mobile’s growth and the ways in which residents and their government promoted growth and adapted to it. Because some of the New York banking, shipping, and marketing firms maintained local agencies, a significant number of Northern-born businessmen participated widely in civic affairs. This has afforded the author the opportunity to explore the North-South relationship in economic and personal terms, in one important city, during a period of increasing sectional tension.
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Intrasite Spatial Analysis of Mobile and Semisedentary Peoples
Analytical Approaches to Reconstructing Occupation History
Edited by Amy E. Clark and Joseph A. M. Gingerich
University of Utah Press, 2022
Describing the nature and meaning of artifact spatial patterning can be highly subjective, yet many patterns can be quantified to create general models that are comparable across time periods and geographic space. The authors employ various techniques in this endeavor, including large sample sizes, model-driven analyses of the ethnographic record, bone and lithic refitting, and a careful consideration of artifact attributes that elucidate spatial patterning. Such detailed analyses allow archaeologists to better interpret site formation processes and address large-scale anthropological questions.

This volume includes studies that span archaeological and ethnographic contexts, from highly mobile Paleoindian foragers to semi-sedentary preagriculturalists of the Epipaleolithic and modern pastoralists in Mongolia. The authors hold that commonalities in human behavior lead to similar patterns in the organization and maintenance of space by people. They present a series of ideas and approaches to make it easier to recognize universals in human behaviors, which allow archaeologists to better compare intrasite spatial patterns. The book creates a baseline for new intrasite spatial analyses in the twenty-first century.
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Major Robert Farmar of Mobile
Robert R. Rea
University of Alabama Press, 1990
The flamboyant military career of a colonist loyal to the British crown before the Revolution.

"An engaging biography [and] a colorful tale. . . . Robert Farmar, a son of New Jersey, used his position among that colony's elite to secure a commission as a captain in the British Army during the War of Jenkins' Ear and King George's War, serving in the unsuccessful assaults at Cartegena, Cuba, and Panama and then in the disaster at Fontenoy in Flanders and in the reversals at Rocoux and Laffeldt. . . . During the Seven Years' War he participated in the capture of Havana.


 

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Mobile and Wireless Communications
Key technologies and future applications
Peter Smyth
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2004
Two of the fastest growing sectors of communications today are mobile and Internet, both of which have had a profound effect on people's lives. The convergence between these two sectors not only presents great opportunities for the future of 'unplugged' telecommunications but also great challenges in understanding the relative position of different technologies in this future.
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Old Mobile Archaeology
Gregory A. Waselkov
University of Alabama Press, 2005

An archaeological guide to the earliest French settlement on the northern Gulf Coast. Archaeological excavations since 1989 have uncovered exciting evidence of the original townsite of Mobile, first capital of the Louisiana colony, and remnants of the colony's port on Dauphin Island.



 

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front cover of The Pen Makes a Good Sword
The Pen Makes a Good Sword
John Forsyth of the Mobile Register
Lonnie A. Burnett
University of Alabama Press, 2006
This book is a biography of Alabama native John Forsyth Jr. and documents his career as a southern newspaper editor during the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods. From 1837 to 1877 Forsyth wrote about many of the most important events of the 19th century. He used his various positions as an editor, Civil War field correspondent, and Reconstruction critic at the MobileRegister to advocate on behalf of both the South and the Democratic Party.
 
In addition, Forsyth played an active role in the events taking place around him through his political career, as United States Minister to Mexico, state legislator, Confederate Peace Commissioner to the Lincoln administration, staff officer to Braxton Bragg, and twice mayor of the city of Mobile.
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front cover of The Political Use of Racial Narratives
The Political Use of Racial Narratives
School Desegregation in Mobile, Alabama, 1954-97
Richard A. Pride
University of Illinois Press, 2002
Arguing that politics is essentially a contest for meaning and that telling a story is an elemental political act, Richard A. Pride lays bare the history of school desegregation in Mobile, Alabama, to demonstrate the power of narrative in cultural and political change. This book describes the public, personal, and meta-narratives of racial inequality that have competed for dominance in Mobile. Pride begins with a white liberal's quest to desegregate the city's public schools in 1955 and traces which narratives--those of biological inferiority, white oppression, the behavior and values of blacks, and others--came to influence public policy and opinion over four decades. Drawing on contemporaneous sources, he reconstructs the stories of demonstrations, civic forums, court cases, and school board meetings as citizens of Mobile would have experienced them, inviting readers to trace the story of desegregation in Mobile through the voices of politicians, protestors, and journalists and to determine which narratives were indeed most powerful.

Exploring who benefits and who pays when different narratives are accepted as true, Pride offers a step-by-step account of how Mobile's culture changed each time a new and more forceful narrative was used to justify inequality. More than a retelling of Mobile's story of desegregation, The Political Use of Racial Narratives promotes the value of rhetorical and narrative analysis in the social sciences and history.

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