front cover of Unbinding Gentility
Unbinding Gentility
Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South
Candace Bailey
University of Illinois Press, 2021
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022

Hearing southern women in the pauses of history

Southern women of all classes, races, and walks of life practiced music during and after the Civil War. Candace L. Bailey examines the history of southern women through the lens of these musical pursuits, uncovering the ways that music's transmission, education, circulation, and repertory help us understand its meaning in the women's culture of the time. Bailey pays particular attention to the space between music as an ideal accomplishment—part of how people expected women to perform gentility—and a real practice—what women actually did. At the same time, her ethnographic reading of binder’s volumes, letters and diaries, and a wealth of other archival material informs new and vital interpretations of women’s place in southern culture.

A fascinating collective portrait of women's artistic and personal lives, Unbinding Gentility challenges entrenched assumptions about nineteenth century music and the experiences of the southern women who made it.

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Understanding the Little Rock Crisis
An Exercise in Remembrance and Reconciliation
Elizabeth Jacoway
University of Arkansas Press, 1999
In the fall of 1957, Gov. Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to prohibit nine black children from entering Little Rock's Central High School. In the fall of 1997, the "Little Rock Nine" returned to Central High, this time escorted by President Bill Clinton. In the forty years that had intervened, the United States witnessed substantial changes in American race relations, but the city of Little Rock had not overcome its legacy of strife. The two-year crisis, once over, left behind confusion and misunderstanding. Racial and class-based mistrust lingers in the city of Little Rock, and, nationally and internationally, perceptions of Arkansas are still tied to the decades-old images of hatred and strife that marked the Little Rock crisis. In 1997, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock sponsored a gathering of scholars who traced the origins and addressed the legacy of the Central High crisis. Elizabeth Jacoway and C. Fred Williams commissioned a series of original and insightful papers that discussed economic, constitutional, historical, and personal aspects of the crisis and of segregation. Jacoway and Williams have collected the best of these papers, by such authors as Sheldon Hackney, Joel Williamson, and James Cobb and offer them here in the hope of enhancing understanding of, and creating a dialogue about, this defining moment in American history. This collection of accessible and provocative essays on a signal event in civil rights in this nation will resonate broadly and appeal to a diverse audience.
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A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers
The Radical Roots and Hard Fights of Local 1199
John Hennen
West Virginia University Press, 2021
History at the intersection of healthcare, labor, and civil rights.

The union of hospital workers usually referred to as the 1199 sits at the intersection of three of the most important topics in US history: organized labor, health care, and civil rights. John Hennen’s book explores the union’s history in Appalachia, a region that is generally associated with extractive industries but has seen health care grow as a share of the overall economy.

With a multiracial, largely female, and notably militant membership, 1199 was at labor’s vanguard in the 1970s, and Hennen traces its efforts in hospitals, nursing homes, and healthcare centers in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and Appalachian Ohio. He places these stories of mainly low-wage women workers within the framework of shake-ups in the late industrial and early postindustrial United States, relying in part on the words of Local 1199 workers and organizers themselves. Both a sophisticated account of an overlooked aspect of Appalachia’s labor history and a key piece of context for Americans’ current concern with the status of “essential workers,” Hennen’s book is a timely contribution to the fields of history and Appalachian studies and to the study of social movements.
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United States District Courts and Judges of Arkansas, 1836–1960
Frances Mitchell Ross
University of Arkansas Press, 2016
The essays in United States District Courts and Judges of Arkansas, 1836–1960—one each for a judge and his decisions—come together to form a chronological history of the Arkansas judicial system as it grew from its beginnings in a frontier state to a modern institution.

The book begins with statehood and continues with Congress’s decision to expand jurisdiction of the original 1836 District Court of Arkansas to include the vast Indian Territory to the west. The territory’s formidable size and rampant lawlessness brought in an overwhelming number of cases. The situation was only somewhat mitigated in 1851, when Congress split the state into eastern and western districts, which were still served by just one judge who travelled between the two courts.

A new judgeship for the Western District was created in 1871, and new seats for that court were established, but it wasn’t until 1896 that Congress finally ended all jurisdiction of Arkansas’s Western District Court over the Indian Territory.

Contributors to this collection include judges, practicing attorneys, academics, and thoughtful and informed family members who reveal how the judges made decisions on issues involving election laws, taxes, civil rights, railroads, liquor and prohibition, quack medicine, gangsters, bankruptcy, personal injury, the draft and Selective Service, school desegregation, prisons, and more. United States District Courts and Judges of Arkansas, 1836–1960 will be of value to anyone interested in Arkansas history—particularly Arkansas legal and judicial history as it relates to the local and national issues that came before these judges.

This project was supported in part by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas and the United States District Court for the Western District of Arkansas.
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The University of Alabama
A Guide to the Campus and Its Architecture
Robert Oliver Mellown
University of Alabama Press, 2013
The University of Alabama: A Guide to the Campusand Its Architecture is a richly illustrated guidebook to the architecture and development of the University of Alabama’s campus as it has evolved over the last two centuries.

In 1988 the University of Alabama Press published Robert Oliver Mellown’s The University of Alabama: A Guide to the Campus, a culmination of a decade’s worth of research into both the facts and the legends surrounding the architecture, history, and traditions of the Capstone.

Over twenty years later, this new guide brings to light the numerous additions, expansions, and renovations the university has undergone on its spacious grounds in Tuscaloosa. In addition to updated sections devoted to the university’s historic landmarks—such as Foster Auditorium, where “the stand in the schoolhouse door” occurred; Denny Chimes,where the handprints and footprints of famous Tide athletes are memorialized in concrete; and the Gorgas House, which with stood the destruction of Union troops at the end of the Civil War—new sections account for the acquisition of Bryce Hospital’s campus, the expansions at Bryant-Denny Stadium to accommodate the growing Crimson Tide fan base, and the burgeoning student recreation facilities, playing fields, and residential communities.

Chapters are arranged into various campus tours for walking or driving—Antebellum, Victorian, Early Twentieth-Century, East Quad, West Quad, Science and Engineering Corridor, Student Life, Bryce, Medical, Southeast, Athletics, and Off Campus. Alumni, prospective students and their parents, new faculty, out-of-state visitors, and foreign dignitaries will all welcome this useful, compact, and colorful guide to one of the most beautiful campuses in the country.
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Unloose My Heart
A Personal Reckoning with the Twisted Roots of My Southern Family Tree
Marcia Edwina Herman-Giddens
University of Alabama Press, 2023
A deeply personal memoir that unearths a family history of racism, slaveholding, and trauma as well as love and sparks of delight

Marcia Herman’s family moved to Birmingham in 1946, when she was five years old, and settled in the steel-making city dense with smog and a rigid apartheid system. Marcia, a shy only child, struggled to fit in and understand this world, shadowed as it was by her mother’s proud antebellum heritage. In 1966, weary of Alabama’s toxic culture, Marcia and her young family left Birmingham and built a life in North Carolina.

Later in life, Herman-Giddens resumed a search to find out what she did not know about her family history. Unloose My Heart interweaves the story of her youth and coming of age in Birmingham during the Civil Rights Movement together with this quest to understand exactly who and what her maternal ancestors were and her obligations as a white woman within a broader sense of American family.

More than a memoir set against the backdrop of Jim Crow and the civil rights struggle, this is the work of a woman of conscience writing in the twenty-first century. Haunted by the past, Unloose My Heart is a journey of exploration and discovery, full of angst, sorrow, and yearning. Unearthing her forebears’ centuries-long embrace of plantation slavery, Herman-Giddens dug deeply to parse the arrogance and cruelty necessary to be a slaveholder and the trauma and fear that ripple out in its wake. All this forced her to scrutinize the impact of this legacy in her life, as well as her debt to the enslaved people who suffered and were exploited at her ancestors’ hands. But she also discovers lost connections, new cousins and friends, unexpected joys, and, eventually, a measure of peace in the process. With heartbreak, moments of grace, and an enduring sense of love, Unloose My Heart shines a light in the darkness and provides a model for a heartfelt reckoning with American history.
 
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Unnatural Resources
Energy and Environmental Politics in Appalachia after the 1973 Oil Embargo
Michael Camp
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019

Unnatural Resources explores the intersection of energy production and environmental regulation in Appalachia after the oil embargo of 1973. The years from 1969 to 1973 saw the passage of a number of laws meant to protect the environment from human destruction, and they initially enjoyed broad public popularity. However, the oil embargo, which caused lines and fistfights at gasoline stations, refocused Americans’ attention on economic issues and alerted Americans to the dangers of relying on imported oil. As a drive to increase domestic production of energy gained momentum, it soon appeared that new environmental regulations were inhibiting this initiative. A backlash against environmental regulations helped inaugurate a bipartisan era of market-based thinking in American politics and discredited the idea that the federal government had a constructive role to play in addressing energy issues. This study connects political, labor, and environmental history to contribute to a growing body of literature on the decline of the New Deal and the rise of pro-market thinking in American politics. 

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The Un-Natural State
Arkansas and the Queer South
Brock Thompson
University of Arkansas Press, 2010
The Un-Natural State is a one-of-a-kind study of gay and lesbian life in Arkansas in the twentieth century, a deft weaving together of Arkansas history, dozens of oral histories, and Brock Thompson's own story. Thompson analyzes the meaning of rural drag shows, including a compelling description of a 1930s seasonal beauty pageant in Wilson, Arkansas, where white men in drag shared the stage with other white men in blackface, a suggestive mingling that went to the core of both racial transgression and sexual disobedience. These small town entertainments put on in churches and schools emerged decades later in gay bars across the state as a lucrative business practice and a larger means of community expression, while in the same period the state's sodomy law was rewritten to condemn sexual acts between those of the same sex in language similar to what was once used to denounce interracial sex. Thompson goes on to describe several lesbian communities established in the Ozark Mountains during the sixties and seventies and offers a substantial account of Eureka Springs's informal status as the "gay capital of the Ozarks." Through this exploration of identity formation, group articulation, political mobilization, and cultural visibility within the context of historical episodes such as the Second World War, the civil rights movement, and the AIDS epidemic, The Un-Natural State contributes not only to our understanding of gay and lesbian history but also to our understanding of the South.
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The Untold Story of Shiloh
The Battle and the Battlefield
Timothy B. Smith
University of Tennessee Press, 2007
At the mention of Shiloh, most tend to think of two particularly bloody and crucial days in April 1862. The complete story, however, encompasses much more history than that of the battle itself. While several accounts have taken a comprehensive approach to Shiloh, significant gaps still remain in the collective understanding of the battle and battlefield.

In The Untold Story of Shiloh, Timothy B. Smith fills in those gaps, looking beyond two days of battle and offering unique insight into the history of unexplored periods and topics concerning the Battle of Shiloh and the Shiloh National Military Park.

This collection of essays, some previously unpublished, tackles a diverse range of subjects, including Shiloh's historiography, the myths about the battle that were created, and the mindsets that were established after the battle. The book reveals neglected military aspects of the battle, such as the naval contribution, the climax of the Shiloh campaign at Corinth, and the soldiers' views of the battle. The essays also focus on the Shiloh National Military Park's establishment and continuation with particular emphasis on those who played key roles in its creation.
Taken together, the essays tell the overall story of Shiloh in greater detail than ever before. General readers and historians alike will discover that The Untold Story of Shiloh is an important contribution to their understanding of this crucial episode in the Civil War.

Timothy B. Smith is on staff at the Shiloh National Military Park. He is author of Champion Hill:  Decisive Battle for Vicksburg and This Great Battlefield of Shiloh:  History, Memory, and the Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park.


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front cover of Unvarnished Arkansas
Unvarnished Arkansas
The Naked Truth about Nine Famous Arkansans
Steven Teske
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2012
A man squanders his family fortune until he is penniless, loses every time he runs for public office, and yet is so admired by the people of Arkansas that the General Assembly names a county in his honor. A renowned writer makes her home in the basement of a museum until she is sued by some of the most prominent women of the state regarding the use of the rooms upstairs. A brilliant inventor who nearly built the first airplane is also vilified for his eccentricity and possible madness. Author Steven Teske rummages through Arkansas’s colorful past to find--and "unvarnish"--some of the state’s most controversial and fascinating figures. The nine people featured in this collection are not the most celebrated products of Arkansas. More than half of them were not even born in Arkansas, although all of them lived in Arkansas and contributed to its history and culture. But each of them has achieved a certain stature in local folklore, if not in the story of the state as a whole.
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Uprooted
Race, Public Housing, and the Archaeology of Four Lost New Orleans Neighborhoods
D. Ryan Gray
University of Alabama Press, 2020
The archaeology of four New Orleans neighborhoods that were replaced by public housing projects

Uprooted: Race, Public Housing, and the Archaeology of Four Lost New Orleans Neighborhoods uses archaeological research on four neighborhoods that were razed during the construction of public housing in World War II–era New Orleans. Although each of these neighborhoods was identified as a “slum” historically, the material record challenges the simplicity of this designation. D. Ryan Gray provides evidence of the inventiveness of former residents who were marginalized by class, color, or gender and whose everyday strategies of survival, subsistence, and spirituality challenged the city’s developing racial and social hierarchies.

These neighborhoods initially appear to have been quite distinct, ranging from the working-class Irish Channel, to the relatively affluent Creole of Color–dominated Lafitte area, to the former location of Storyville, the city’s experiment in semilegal prostitution. Archaeological and historical investigations suggest that race was the crucial factor in the areas’ selection for clearance. Each neighborhood manifested a particular perceived racial disorder, where race intersected with ethnicity, class, or gender in ways that defied the norms of Jim Crow segregation.

Gray’s research makes use of both primary documents—including census records, city directories, and even the brothel advertising guides called “Blue Books”—and archaeological data to examine what this entailed at a variety of scales, reconstructing narratives of the households and communities affected by clearance. Public housing, both in New Orleans and elsewhere, imposed a new kind of control on urban life that had the effect of making cities both more segregated and less equal. The story of the neighborhoods that were destroyed provides a reminder that their erasure was not an inevitable outcome, and that a more equitable and just city is still possible today. A critical examination of the rise of public housing helps inform the ongoing debates over its demise, especially in light of the changing face of post-Katrina New Orleans.
 
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