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418 books match the query 'Southern States' and 4 start with j

cover of Jeffrey Introduces Thirteen More Southern Ghosts: Commemorative Edition

Jeffrey Introduces Thirteen More Southern Ghosts

Commemorative Edition

Kathryn Tucker Windham

University of Alabama Press, 2015

A commemorative edition of the beloved and best-selling second book in famed folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham’s southern ghosts series. 

Jeffrey was the resident apparition in the Selma, Alabama, home of nationally-known folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham and the inspiration for Windham’s best-selling collection of macabre tales that reveal two hundred years of Alabama’s ghostly secrets, Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey. One of the most popular books ever published in the state, generations of Alabama children and students have been thrilled and chilled by Windham’s spectral legends.

Following the overwhelming success of Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey, Windham and Jeffrey began to journey across the South assembling a second collection of ghastly tales that repeat Windham’s winning combination of traditional folklore, Southern history and culture, and family-friendly story-telling. In Jeffrey Introduces Thirteen More Southern Ghosts, Windham’s disembodied friend roams the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida to recall thirteen more timeless, spine-tingling tales of baneful and melancholy spirits that spook the most stoic heart.

Opening this volume is “The Girl Nobody Knew.” One midsummer night in the genteel Kentucky mineral spring resort of Harrodsburg, a beautiful lady arrived at the town’s grand hotel. The belle danced late into the night with the town’s smitten gallants only to expire suddenly with the notes of the last quadrille. The spooked residents of Harrodsburg guard a grave you can see to this day. Readers then visit the world-famous Bell Witch of Robinson County, Tennessee. Jeffrey also makes his first trip to old New Orleans to reveal a revenant in residence on Royal Street before continuing his ghostly progress across Dixie.

This new edition returns Jeffrey Introduces Thirteen More Southern Ghosts to its original format in jacketed cloth full of original, black-and-white illustrations in a handsome keepsake edition perfect for gift-giving and for families, folklorists of all ages, and libraries. 

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cover of Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History

Jewish Roots in Southern Soil

A New History

Edited by Marcie Ferris and Mark I. Greenberg

Brandeis University Press, 2006

Jews have long been a presence in the American South, first arriving in the late seventeenth century as part of exploratory voyages from Europe to the New World. Two of the nation’s earliest Jewish communities were founded in Savannah in 1733 and Charleston in 1749. By 1800, more Jews lived in Charleston than in New York City. Today, Jews comprise less than one half of one percent of the southern population but provide critical sustenance and support for their communities. Nonetheless, southern Jews have perplexed scholars. For more than a century, historians have wrestled with various questions. Why study southern Jewish history? What is the southern Jewish experience? Is southern Jewish culture distinctive from that of other regions of the country, and if so, why? Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History addresses these questions through the voices of a new generation of scholars of the Jewish South. Each of this book’s thirteen chapters reflects a response with particular attention paid to new studies on women and gender; black/Jewish relations and the role of race, politics, and economic life; popular and material culture; and the changes wrought by industrialization and urbanization in the twentieth century. Essays address historical issues from the colonial era to the present and in every region of the South. Topics include assimilation and American Jewish identity, southern Jewish women writers, the Jewish Confederacy, Jewish peddlers, southern Jewish racial identity, black/Jewish relations, demographic change, the rise of American Reform Judaism, and Jews in southern literature.
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cover of Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America

Journalism and Jim Crow

White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America

Edited by Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield

University of Illinois Press, 2021

Winner of the American Historical Association’s 2022 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize.

White publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture, and protect white supremacy across the South in the decades after the Civil War. At the same time, a vibrant Black press fought to disrupt these efforts and force the United States to live up to its democratic ideals. Journalism and Jim Crow centers the press as a crucial political actor shaping the rise of the Jim Crow South. The contributors explore the leading role of the white press in constructing an anti-democratic society by promoting and supporting not only lynching and convict labor but also coordinated campaigns of violence and fraud that disenfranchised Black voters. They also examine the Black press’s parallel fight for a multiracial democracy of equality, justice, and opportunity for all—a losing battle with tragic consequences for the American experiment.

Original and revelatory, Journalism and Jim Crow opens up new ways of thinking about the complicated relationship between journalism and power in American democracy.

Contributors: Sid Bedingfield, Bryan Bowman, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Kathy Roberts Forde, Robert Greene II, Kristin L. Gustafson, D'Weston Haywood, Blair LM Kelley, and Razvan Sibii

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cover of Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making of a Healthier South, 1900-1955

Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent

Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making of a Healthier South, 1900-1955

Kristine M. McCusker

University of Illinois Press, 2023

As the twentieth century began, Black and white southerners alike dealt with low life expectancy and poor healthcare in a region synonymous with early death. But the modernization of death care by a diverse group of actors changed not only death rituals but fundamental ideas about health and wellness.

Kristine McCusker charts the dramatic transformation that took place when southerners in particular and Americans in general changed their thinking about when one should die, how that death could occur, and what decent burial really means. As she shows, death care evolved from being a community act to a commercial one where purchasing a purple coffin and hearse ride to the cemetery became a political statement and the norm. That evolution also required interactions between perfect strangers, especially during the world wars as families searched for their missing soldiers. In either case, being put away decent, as southerners called burial, came to mean something fundamentally different in 1955 than it had just fifty years earlier.

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