African-American women fought for their freedom with courage and vigor during and after the Civil War. Leslie Schwalm explores the vital roles of enslaved and formerly enslaved women on the rice plantations of lowcountry South Carolina, both in antebellum plantation life and in the wartime collapse of slavery. From there, she chronicles their efforts as freedwomen to recover from the impact of the war while redefining their lives and labor.
Freedwomen asserted their own ideas of what freedom meant and insisted on important changes in the work they performed both for white employers and in their own homes. As Schwalm shows, these women rejected the most unpleasant or demeaning tasks, guarded the prerogatives they gained under the South's slave economy, and defended their hard-won freedoms against unwanted intervention by Northern whites and the efforts of former owners to restore slavery's social and economic relations during Reconstruction. A bold challenge to entrenched notions, A Hard Fight for We places African American women at the center of the South's transition from a slave society.
Winner of the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize
Benjamin L. Hooks Award Finalist
“An insightful, powerful, and moving book.”
—Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice
“Sturkey’s clear-eyed and meticulous book pulls off a delicate balancing act. While depicting the terrors of Jim Crow, he also shows how Hattiesburg’s black residents, forced to forge their own communal institutions, laid the organizational groundwork for the civil rights movement.”
—New York Times
If you really want to understand Jim Crow—what it was and how African Americans rose up to defeat it—you should start by visiting Mobile Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the heart of the historic black downtown. There you can still see remnants of the shops and churches where, amid the violence and humiliation of segregation, men and women gathered to build a remarkable community. Hattiesburg takes us into the heart of this divided town and deep into the lives of families on both sides of the racial divide to show how the fabric of their existence was shaped by the changing fortunes of the Jim Crow South.
“Sturkey’s magnificent portrait reminds us that Mississippi is no anachronism. It is the dark heart of American modernity.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk
“When they are at their best, historians craft powerful, compelling, often genre-changing pieces of history…William Sturkey is one of those historians…A brilliant, poignant work.”
—Charles W. McKinney, Jr., Journal of African American History
Heaven’s Soldiers chronicles the history of a community of free people of African descent who lived and thrived, while resisting the constraints of legal bondage, in East Florida in the four decades leading up to the Civil War.
A biography of Bruce Crawford, a southwest Virginia journalist-writer of the radical tradition and one of the first to interpret Appalachian labor history.
Hell’s Not Far Off is a grounded, politically engaged study of the Appalachian journalist and political critic Bruce Crawford, a scourge of coal and railway interests. Crawford fought injustices wherever he saw them at major risk to his own life and became an early interpreter of Appalachian labor history.
His writings and actions from the 1920s to the 1960s helped shape southwest Virginia and West Virginia. Through Crawford’s Weekly, a newspaper active from 1920 to 1935, Crawford challenged the Ku Klux Klan, lynch mobs, and the private police forces of coal barons. The wounds received for these efforts were the closing of his paper and a bullet to his leg during a Harlan County strike in the 1930s. In his work after journalism, he led the West Virginia branch of the Federal Writers’ Project during the political standoff over the contents of the state’s official guidebook.
In Hell’s Not Far Off, Josh Howard resurrects strands of a radical tradition centered especially on matters of labor, environment, and race, drawing attention to that tradition’s ongoing salience: “Present-day Appalachia’s fights were [Crawford’s], and his fights are still ours.”
Helvetia: A Swiss Village in the Hills of West Virginia explores the unique founding and development of a community nestled within the wilderness of Appalachia. Established in 1869, this tiny Swiss settlement embodies the American immigrant experience, reflecting the steadfast desire of settlers to preserve cultural traditions and values while adapting to new and extraordinary surroundings. From ramp suppers to carnivals, traditional architecture, folk music, and cheese making, this book documents a living community by exploring the ethnic customs, farming practices, community organization, and language maintenance of Helvetia residents. Drawing upon a diverse body of resources such as Swiss and American archival documents and local oral accounts, this chronicledepicts the everyday social and economic life of this village during the past two centuries. Helvetia celebrates a small community where residents and visitors alike continue to practice a Swiss American culture that binds an international history to a local heritage.
"Convincingly argues for the importance of these middle years to understanding American science and vividly illustrates the effect of the Civil War on science. . . . Ravenel, a geographically isolated planter with a college degree but no scientific training, managed to serve as one of America's leading mycologists, despite continual financial and medical problems and the disruption of the Civil War. This lively account of his life and work is at once inspiring and tragic."
Journal of the History of Biology
"A thoroughly enjoyable biography of one of the important American naturalists, botanists, and mycologists of the 1800s. . . . Truly an outstanding contribution to the history of American science."
—Brittonia
The first half of the fourteen essays deal with historical issues including Native Americans, pioneer settlement, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, industrialization, the Great Depression, migration, and finally, modernization. The remaining essays take a more cultural focus, addressing stereotypes, music, folklife, language, literature, and religion.
Bringing together many of the most prestigious scholars in Appalachian studies, this volume has been designed for general and classroom use, and includes suggestions for further reading.
J. Blake Perkins searches for the roots of rural defiance in the Ozarks--and discovers how it changed over time. Eschewing generalities, Perkins focuses on the experiences and attitudes of rural people themselves as they interacted with government from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century.He uncovers the reasons local disputes and uneven access to government power fostered markedly different reactions by hill people as time went by. Resistance in the earlier period sprang from upland small farmers' conflicts with capitalist elites who held the local levers of federal power. But as industry and agribusiness displaced family farms after World War II, a conservative cohort of town business elites, local political officials, and midwestern immigrants arose from the region's new low-wage, union-averse economy. As Perkins argues, this modern antigovernment conservatism bore little resemblance to the backcountry populism of an earlier age but had much in common with the movement elsewhere.
It’s the 1960s. The Vietnam War is raging and protests are erupting across the United States. In many quarters, young people are dropping out of society, leaving their urban homes behind in an attempt to find a safe place to live on their own terms, to grow their own food, and to avoid a war they passionately decry. During this time, West Virginia becomes a haven for thousands of these homesteaders—or back-to-the-landers, as they are termed by some. Others call them hippies.
When the going got rough, many left. But a significant number remain to this day. Some were artisans when they arrived, while others adopted a craft that provided them with the cash necessary to survive. Hippie Homesteaders tells the story of this movement from the viewpoint of forty artisans and musicians who came to the state, lived on the land, and created successful careers with their craft. There’s the couple that made baskets coveted by the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery. There’s the draft-dodger that fled to Canada and then became a premier furniture maker. There’s the Boston-born VISTA worker who started a quilting cooperative. And, there’s the immigrant Chinese potter who lived on a commune.
Along with these stories, Hippie Homesteaders examines the serendipitous timing of this influx and the community and economic support these crafters received from residents and state agencies in West Virginia. Without these young transplants, it’s possible there would be no Tamarack: The Best of West Virginia, the first statewide collection of fine arts and handcrafts in the nation, and no Mountain Stage, the weekly live musical program broadcast worldwide on National Public Radio since 1983. Forget what you know about West Virginia.
Hippie Homesteaders isn’t about coal or hillbillies or moonshine or poverty. It is the story of why West Virginia was—and still is—a kind of heaven to so many.
Identifies town site locations and clarifies entries from the earliest documents and maps of explorers in Alabama
This encyclopedic work is a listing of 398 ancient towns recorded within the present boundaries of the state of Alabama, containing basic information on each village's ethnic affiliation, time period, geographic location, descriptions, and (if any) movements. While publications dating back to 1901 have attempted to compile such a listing, none until now has so exhaustively harvested the 214 historic maps drawn between 1544, when Hernando de Soto's entourage first came through the southeastern territory, and 1846, when Indian removal to the Oklahoma Territory was complete. Wright combines the map data with a keen awareness of both previously published information and archival sources, such as colonial town lists, census information, and travel narratives.
The towns are listed alphabetically, and the text of each entry develops chronologically. While only a few of these towns have been accurately located by archaeologists, this volume provides a wealth of information for the future study of cultural geography, southeastern archaeology, and ethnohistory. It will be an enduring reference source for many years to come.
SAMPLE ENTRY,
ALIBAMA TOWN (Alibama)
The Alibama consisted of several towns—Mucclassa, Tawasa, Tomopa, Koarsati (Knight 1981, 27:48). Pickett ([1851] 1962:81) adds Ecanchati, Pawokti, and Autauga. The Alibama Town can also be added. Many maps show the Alibama as a group, but one map, 1796 Thomas and Andrews, locates the "Alabama Town"on the east bank of the Coosa just below Wetumpka.
Swanton ([1922] 1970a:209) wrote that the Tuskegee at the Alabama forks may have been known as the "Alabama Town"; however, this is unlikely, as Major W. Blue, a removal agent, wrote in July 1835 that Coosada, Alabama Town, and Tuskegee were ready to emigrate and they all lived adjoining each other in Macon County (ASP, Military Affairs 1861,6:731).
On 6 July 1838, some twenty-seven towns, including "Alibama" (NA M234 R225), attended the Creek council held in Indian Territory. Thomas Bibb, brother to Alabama territorial govenor William Wyatt Bibb, and others, including Nashville investors, founded the town of Alabama in 1817 at Ten Mile Bluff in Montgomery County (Moser 1980-94, 4:131). The town soon disappeared into history.
Brooks Blevins tells the cultural history of the Ozarks as a regional variation of an American story. As he shows, the experiences of the Ozarkers have not diverged from the currents of mainstream life as sharply or consistently as the mythmakers would have it. If much of the region seemed to trail behind by a generation, the time lag was rooted more in poverty and geographic barriers than a conscious rejection of the modern world and its progressive spirit. In fact, the minority who clung to the old days seemed exotic largely because their anachronistic ways clashed against the backdrop of the evolving region around them. Blevins explores how these people’s disproportionate influence affected the creation of the idea of the Ozarks, and reveals the truer idea that exists at the intersection of myth and reality.
The conclusion to the acclaimed trilogy, The History of the Ozarks, Volume 3: The Ozarkers offers an authoritative appraisal of the modern Ozarks and its people.
By the early 1960s, Jimmy Hoffa had a stranglehold on the presidency of the Teamsters Union. However, his nemesis, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, was convinced that Hoffa was a corrupt force whose heavy-handed influence over the union threatened the nation. As Attorney General, Kennedy established a “Get Hoffa Squad” that set out to unearth criminal wrongdoing by the labor leader in order to remove him from power. A number of criminal trials in the 1950s and early 1960s resulted in not-guilty verdicts for Hoffa. Matters would finally come to head in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in a climatic, but often overlooked, historical moment chronicled by Maury Nicely in this engrossing book.
After a Christmastime 1962 acquittal in Nashville of charges that Hoffa had illegally received funds from a trucking company in exchange for settling a costly strike, it was discovered that several attempts had been made to bribe jurors. Fresh charges of jury tampering in that case were quickly filed against Hoffa and five others. Moved to Chattanooga, the new trial was held before a young, relatively untested federal judge named Frank Wilson. The six-week courtroom conflict would devolve into a virtual slugfest in which the defense team felt was necessary to turn its ire against Wilson, hoping to provoke an error and cause a mistrial. As Nicely shows in vivid detail, Hoffa’s Chattanooga trial became the story of a lone, embattled judge struggling mightily to control a legal proceeding that teetered on the edge of bedlam, threatening to spin out of control. In the end, Hoffa was convicted-an extraordinary change of fortune that presaged his downfall and mysterious disappearance a decade later.
In examining how justice prevailed in the face of a battering assault on the judicial system, Hoffa in Tennessee demonstrates how a Chattanooga courtroom became a crucial tipping point in Jimmy Hoffa’s career, the beginning of the end for a man long perceived as indomitable.
In 1985, a black veteran of the civil rights movement offered a bleak vision of a long and troubled struggle. For more than a century, black southerners learned to live with betrayed expectations, diminishing prospects, and devastated aspirations. Their odyssey includes some of the most appalling examples of terrorism, violence, and dehumanization in the history of this nation. But, as Leon Litwack graphically demonstrates, it is at the same time an odyssey of resilience and resistance defined by day-to-day acts of protest: the fight for justice poignantly recorded in the stories, songs, images, and movements of a people trying to be heard.
For black men and women, the question is: how free is free? Despite two major efforts to reconstruct race relations, injustices remain. From the height of Jim Crow to the early twenty-first century, struggles over racism persist despite court decisions and legislation. Few indignities were more pronounced than the World War II denial of basic rights and privileges to those responding to the call to make the world safe for democratic values—values that they themselves did not enjoy. And even the civil rights movement promise to redeem America was frustrated by change that was often more symbolic than real.
Although a painful history to confront, Litwack’s book inspires as it probes the enduring story of racial inequality and the ongoing fight for freedom in black America with power and grace.
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