Anne Wetzell Armstrong adored her adopted hometown. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, she moved with her family to the “West End” (Fort Sanders) area of Knoxville, Tennessee, in the 1880s, a pivotal decade for a city just getting past the trauma of the Civil War and becoming an economically diverse and culturally cosmopolitan center. Author of The Seas of God (1915), set in a thinly disguised Knoxville (called “Kingsville”), Armstrong was privileged, unconventional, and modern. She was divorced (she later married an Armstrong of Knoxville’s Bleak House), a single mother, and worked—not only as a teacher at Knoxville Girls High School but also in personnel with National City Company of New York and in industrial relations at Eastman Kodak. Her second novel, This Day and Time (1930), is regarded as the first fictional work to treat Appalachia realistically.
Journalist John Gunther’s 1946 description of Knoxville as the “ugliest city I ever saw in America” served as the impetus for Armstrong to pen a memoir of a city she remembered quite differently. Sophisticated and witty, Of Time and Knoxville provides lively, sometimes scandalous sketches of such well-known Knoxville figures as Lizzie Crozier French, Armstrong’s mentor and a leader in the woman’s suffrage movement; Perez Dickinson, businessman and owner of the socially popular Island Home farm (and cousin of Emily Dickinson); and Mary Boyce Temple, clubwoman, philanthropist, and socialite, whose home is preserved as the last extant single-family residence in downtown Knoxville. Complemented by Linda Behrend’s excellent introduction and meticulous annotations, this distinctive memoir also delivers an unusual picture of Knoxville’s beloved Market Square and vividly depicts fin de siècle Knoxville, with its great food at hotel restaurants and lively events at dance halls. Armstrong also details the tragic Flat Creek train wreck of 1889, which seriously injured her own father and led to his death five years later. Of Time and Knoxville is a must-read for lovers of Knoxville, Victorian America, women’s history, and memoir.
In Off Whiteness: Place, Blood, and Tradition in Post-Reconstruction Southern Literature, Izabela Hopkins explores the remaking of whiteness in the Post-Reconstruction South as represented in literary fiction. To focus her study, she discusses the writings of four prominent figures: Thomas Nelson Page, Ellen Glasgow, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, who contributed to discussions of racial and social identity during the post–Civil War South through poetry, journalism, essays, novels, and more.
Off Whiteness draws from both sides of the color line—as well as from both the male and female experience—to examine the ambivalence of Southern whiteness from three particular vantage points: place, ideality, and repeatability. Hopkins develops her analysis across nine chapters divided into three parts. In her exploration of these four writers with differing backgrounds and experiences, she utilizes both their well-known and lesser-known texts to argue against the superficial oversimplification that “whiteness requires blackness to define itself.”
Hopkins’s analysis not only successfully grapples with a wide range of post-structural theories; it also approaches the significance of language and religion with intention and sensitivity, thereby addressing areas that are typically ignored in whiteness studies scholarship. The interdisciplinary nature of Off Whiteness positions it as an engaging text relevant to the work and interests of scholars drawn to American and Southern history, cultural and social studies, literary studies, etymology, and critical race theory.
How international oil companies navigated the local, segregated landscape of north Louisiana in the first decades of the twentieth century.
In 1904, prospectors discovered oil in the rural parishes of North Louisiana just outside Shreveport. As rural cotton fields gave way to dense, industrial centers of energy extraction, migrants from across the US—and the world—rushed to take a share of the boom. The resulting boomtowns, most notoriously Oil City, quickly gained a reputation for violence, drinking, and rough living. Meanwhile, North Louisiana’s large Black population endured virulent white supremacy in the oil fields and the courtrooms to earn a piece of the boom, including one Black woman who stood to become the wealthiest oil heiress in America.
In Oil Cities, Henry Wiencek uncovers what life was like amidst the tent cities, saloons, and oil derricks of North Louisiana’s oil boomtowns, tracing the local experiences of migrants, farmers, sex workers, and politicians as they navigated dizzying changes to their communities. This first historical monograph on the region’s dramatic oil boom reveals a contested history, in which the oil industry had to adapt its labor, tools, and investments to meet North Louisiana’s unique economic, social, political, and environmental dynamics.
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.
How does a state, tarnished with a racist, violent history, emerge from the modern civil rights movement with a reputation for tolerance and progression? Old South, New South, or Down South?: Florida and the Modern Civil Rights Movement exposes the image, illusion, and reality behind Florida’s hidden story of racial discrimination and violence. By exploring multiple perspectives on racially motivated events, such as black agency, political stonewalling, and racist assaults, this collection of nine essays reconceptualizes the civil rights legacy of the Sunshine State. Its dissection of local, isolated acts of rebellion reveals a strategic, political concealment of the once dominant, often overlooked, old south attitude towards race in Florida.
John Shelton Reed is one of today’s most knowledgeable authors on the subject of barbecue. Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue, written with his wife, Dale Volberg Reed, won the National Barbecue Association Award of Excellence in 2017 and was a finalist for the 2009 International Associate of Culinary Professionals Cookbook Award. In this collection, On Barbecue, Reed compiles reviews, essays, magazine articles, op-eds, and book extracts from his many-year obsession with the history and culture of barbecue. Brought together, these pieces constitute a broad look at the cultural, culinary, historical, and social aspects of this American institution.
Reed’s original and provocative voice carries through this collection, which spans more than twenty years of barbecue lore. A lover of tradition whose study of regional distinctions has made him prize and defend them, Reed writes with conviction on what “real” barbecue looks, smells, and tastes like. He delves into the history of barbecue and even the origins of the word barbecue itself. Other topics include present-day barbecue, Carolina ’cue and other regional varieties, and even the role of "barbeculture" in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.
Anyone with an interest in this signature American food will find themselves immersed in this book’s accessible, conversational, and frequently tart pages. From one of the wittiest and most knowledgeable authors writing on the subject, On Barbecue is essential reading.
Southerners have a reputation as storytellers, as a people fond of telling about family, community, and the southern way of life. A compelling book about some of those stories and their consequences, One Homogeneous People examines the forging and the embracing of southern “pan-whiteness” as an ideal during the volatile years surrounding the turn of the twentieth century.
Trent Watts argues that despite real and signifcant divisions within the South along lines of religion, class, and ethnicity, white southerners—especially in moments of perceived danger—asserted that they were one people bound by a shared history, a love of family, home, and community, and an uncompromising belief in white supremacy. Watts explores how these southerners explained their region and its people to themselves and other Americans through narratives found in a variety of forms and contexts: political oratory, fiction, historiography, journalism, correspondence, literary criticism, and the built environment.
Watts examines the assertions of an ordered, homogeneous white South (and the threats to it) in the unsettling years following the end of Reconstruction through the early 1900s. In three extended essays on related themes of race and power, the book demonstrates the remarkable similarity of discourses of pan-whiteness across formal and generic lines. In an insightful concluding essay that focuses on an important but largely unexamined institution, Mississippi’s Neshoba County Fair, Watts shows how narratives of pan-white identity initiated in the late nineteenth century have persisted to the present day.
Written in a lively style, One Homogeneous People is a valuable addition to the scholarship on southern culture and post-Reconstruction southern history.
In Opportunity Lost, Marcus D. Pohlmann examines the troubling issue of why Memphis city school students are underperforming at alarming rates. His provocative interdisciplinary analysis, combining both history and social science, examines the events before and after desegregation, compares a city school to an affluent suburban school to pinpoint imbalances, and offers critical assessments of various educational reforms.
In addition to his analysis of the problems, Pohlmann lays out educational reforms that run the gamut from early intervention and parental involvement to increasing teacher compensation, improving time utilization, and more. Pohlmann’s illuminating and original study has wide application for a problem that bedevils inner-city children everywhere and prevents the promise of equality from reaching all of our nation’s citizens.
In Opportunity Lost, Marcus D. Pohlmann examines the troubling issue of why Memphis city school students are underperforming at alarming rates. His provocative interdisciplinary analysis, combining both history and social science, examines the events before and after desegregation, compares a city school to an affluent suburban school to pinpoint imbalances, and offers critical assessments of various educational reforms.
Employing a rich trove of data to demonstrate the realities of racial and economic inequality, Pohlmann underscores the difficulties that plague the urban schools and their students-problems that persist despite the fact that the city schools often have more resource advantages than the county schools: better student-to-teacher ratios, more teachers with advanced degrees, and even greater spending on each student. Pohlmann demonstrates that post-industrial economic shifts and continuing racial exclusion have resulted in a predominance of low-income students at these schools. This economic disadvantage has had a lasting impact on performance among students at all grade levels and has not been reversed simply by increasing resources.
In addition to his analysis of the problems, Pohlmann lays out educational reforms that run the gamut from early intervention and parental involvement to increasing class size and teacher compensation, improving time utilization, and more. Pohlmann's illuminating and original study has wide application for a problem that bedevils inner-city children everywhere and prevents the promise of equality from reaching all of our nation's citizens.
Marcus D. Pohlmann is professor of political science at Rhodes College. He is the author of Governing the Postindustrial City; coauthor, with Michael P. Kirby, of Racial Politics at the Crossroads: Memphis Elects W. W. Herenton; and editor of the six-volume African American Political Thought.
"As befits a state in which coal, iron, and steel were the bulwarks of its industrial sector, Taft stresses that history of unionism among coal miners and iron and steel workers. Here we learn much about the experiences of the United Mine Workers of America and the Steel Workers Organizing Committee—United Steelworkers of America in the Deep South. Yet Taft does not neglect the history of other Alabama workers. Building tradesmen, railroad employees, textile millhands, and Gadsden’s rubber workers all appear in the pages of this book. Here we have the most complete and modern history of a state labor movement in the South written from the perspective of its institutional leaders." —American Historical Review
Although Oscar W. Underwood was considered a titan of his age, few American political figures have suffered such neglect as he. Except for his candidacy for the Democratic nomination in 1924, his political career is largely forgotten even in Alabama. The one place in which Underwood is well remembered is in the folklore of Congress, where he is widely regarded as a great party leader who had mastered the rules perhaps as thoroughly as any member of Congress. This mastery, together with steady work, personal magnetism, and a willingness to compromise, made him effective as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in formulating a majority program after the Democrats seized control of the House in 1910. Pat Harrison, Underwood's lieutenant as minority leader, referred to Underwood as the "greatest natural parliamentarian, the greatest leader of a law-making body that I ever saw."
--from the Preface to Oscar W. Underwood: A Political Biography
Published just days before America’s entry into World War II, Ozark Country is Otto Ernest Rayburn’s love letter to his adopted region. One of several chronicles of the Ozarks that garnered national attention during the Depression and war years, when many Americans craved stories about people and places seemingly untouched by the difficulties of the times, Rayburn’s colorful tour takes readers from the fictional village of Woodville into the backcountry of a region teeming with storytellers, ballad singers, superstitions, and home remedies.
Rayburn’s tales—fantastical, fun, and unapologetically romantic—portray a world that had already nearly disappeared by the time they were written. Yet Rayburn’s depiction of the Ozarks resonates with notions of the region that have persisted in the American consciousness ever since.
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