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This first book-length examination of the Klan in Alabama represents exhaustive research that challenges traditional interpretations.

The Ku Klux Klan has wielded considerable power both as a terrorist group and as a political force. Usually viewed as appearing in distinct incarnations, the Klans of the 20th century are now shown by Glenn Feldman to have a greater degree of continuity than has been previously suspected. Victims of Klan terrorism continued to be aliens, foreigners, or outsiders in Alabama: the freed slave during Reconstruction, the 1920s Catholic or Jew, the 1930s labor organizer or Communist, and the returning black veteran of World War II were all considered a threat to the dominant white culture. Feldman offers new insights into this "qualified continuity" among Klans of different eras, showing that the group remained active during the 1930s and 1940s when it was presumed dormant, with elements of the "Reconstruction syndrome" carrying over to the smaller Klan of the civil rights era.

In addition, Feldman takes a critical look at opposition to Klan activities by southern elites. He particularly shows how opponents during the Great Depression and war years saw the Klan as an impediment to attracting outside capital and federal relief or as a magnet for federal action that would jeopardize traditional forms of racial and social control. Other critics voiced concerns about negative national publicity, and others deplored the violence and terrorism.

This in-depth examination of the Klan in a single state, which features rare photographs, provides a means of understanding the order's development throughout the South. Feldman's book represents definitive research into the history of the Klan and makes a major contribution to our understanding of both that organization and the history of Alabama.

The year was 1896, and nineteenth-century journalists called the murder of Pearl Bryan the "Crime of the Century." From the day Pearl's headless body was found to the execution of her murderers on the gallows, the details of the murder fascinated newspaper reporters and ballad composers alike.

Often glossing over the facts of the case, newspaper accounts presented the events according to stereotypes that were remarkably similar to those found in well-known murdered-girl ballads, such as "Pretty Polly," "Omie Wise," and "The Jealous Lover." Events, characters, motivations, and plot were presented through this framework: the simple country girl led astray by a clever degenerate. Nearly all variants of the Pearl Bryan ballad point the same moral:

Young ladies now take warning
Young men are so unjust,
It may be your best lover
But you know not whom to trust.

Representations of this formula appear in such diverse genres as the ballad "Poor Ellen Smith" and the novel An American Tragedy.

As Anne Cohen demonstrates, both newspaper accounts and ballads tell the Pearl Bryan story from the same moral stance, express the same interpretation of character, and are interested in the same details. Both distort facts to accommodate a shared pattern of storytelling. This pattern consists of a plot formula—the murdered-girl formula—that is accompanied by stereotyped scenes, actors, and phrases. The headless body—surely the most striking element in the Pearl Bryan case—is absent from those ballads that have survived. Anne Cohen contends that a decapitated heroine does not belong to the formula—a murdered heroine, yes, but not a decapitated one. Similarly, newspapers made much of Pearl's "innocence" and tended to downplay the second murderer. Only one murderer, the lover, belongs to the stereotype.

Poor Pearl, Poor Girl! is a ballad study conducted on historic- geographic lines; that is, it seeks to trace the history and interrelations of a series of ballad texts and to relate the ballads directly to their ideological and historical context in the American scene. It also compares the narrative techniques of ballad composition with the techniques of other forms of popular narrative, especially newspaper journalism.

CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC BOOK (SPONSORED BY CHOICE MAGAZINE)

JAMES F. SULZBY BOOK AWARD (SPONSORED BY ALABAMA HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION)

ALABAMA LIBRARY AUTHOR AWARD (SPONSORED BY ALABAMA LIBRARY ASSOCIATION)

LILLIAN SMITH BOOK AWARD (SPONSORED BY SOUTHERN REGIONAL COUNCIL)

A groundbreaking history of class, culture, and resilience in the Alabama South.

First published in 1989 by The University of Alabama Press, this new paperback version will make the classic work available for general readers, bookstores, and classrooms.

Wayne Flynt addresses the life experiences of poor whites through their occupations, society, and culture. He explores their family structure, music, religion, folklore, crafts, and politics and describes their attempts to resolve their own problems through labor unions and political movements. He reveals that many of our stereotypes about poor whites are wildly exaggerated; few were derelicts or "white trash." Even though racism, emotionalism, and a penchant for violence were possible among poor whites, most bore their troubles with dignity and self-respect - working hard to eventually lift themselves out of poverty.

The phrase "poor but proud" aptly describes many white Alabamians who settled the state and persisted through time. During the antebellum years, poor whites developed a distinctive culture on the periphery of the cotton belt. As herdsmen, subsistence farmers, mill workers, and miners, they flourished in a society more renowned for its two-class division of planters and slaves. The New Deal era and the advent of World War II broke the long downward spiral of poverty and afforded new opportunities for upward mobility.
 

With a new preface Bill V. Mullen updates his dynamic reappraisal of a critical moment in American cultural history. Mullen's study includes reassessments of the politics of Richard Wright's critical reputation and a provocative reading of class struggle in Gwendolyn Brooks' A Street in Bronzeville. He also takes an in-depth look at the institutions that comprised Chicago's black popular front: the Chicago Defender, the period's leading black newspaper; Negro Story, the first magazine devoted to publishing short stories by and about African Americans; and the WPA-sponsored South Side Community Art Center.

Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, most Americans “heard” rather than “read” national history. They absorbed lessons from the past more readily by attending Patriots' Day orations and anniversary commemorations than by reading expensive, multivolume works of patrician historians. By the 1840s, however, innovations in publishing led to the marketing of inexpensive, mass-produced “popular” histories that had a profound influence on historical literacy and learning in the United States. In this book, Gregory M. Pfitzer charts the rise and fall of this genre, demonstrating how and why it was born, flourished, and then became unpopular over time.

Pfitzer begins by exploring how the emergence of a new literary marketplace in the mid-nineteenth century affected the study of history in America. Publishers of popular works hoped to benefit from economies of scale by selling large numbers of inexpensive books at small profit. They hired authors with substantial literary reputations to make the past accessible to middle-class readers. The ability to write effectively for wide audiences was the only qualification for those who dominated this field. Privileging narration and effusive literary style over dispassionate prose, these artists adapted their favorite fictional and poetic conventions with an ease that suggests the degree to which history was viewed as literary art in the nineteenth century.

Beginning as a small cottage industry, popular histories sold in the hundreds of thousands by the 1890s. In an effort to illuminate the cultural conditions for this boom, Pfitzer focuses on the business of book making and book promotion. He analyzes the subscription sales techniques of book agents as well as the aggressive prepublication advertising campaigns of the publishers, including the pictorial embellishments they employed as marketing devices.

He also examines the reactions of professional historians who rejected the fictionalizing and poetic tendencies of popular history, which they equated with loose and undisciplined scholarship. Pfitzer explains how and why these professionals succeeded in challenging the authority of popular histories, and what the subsequent “unpopularity of popular history” meant for book culture and the study of history in the twentieth century.

A conversation about who we are, where we’ve been, and where we might be going. 

Popular Stories and Promised Lands enters a conversation about who we are, where we’ve been, and where we might be going by suggesting that possible answers to those questions can be found in the popular stories we encounter at the movies, on television, in popular magazines, and even on the funny pages.

As countless scholars and popular writers have noted, those of us living in the United States find ourselves at a cultural crossroads. We are increasingly aware that the stories that once permeated life in these United States, stories that tell us that social and economic progress comes from working hard, that everyone has an equal opportunity to experience such progress, do not resonate to the degree they once did. Because many Americans have traditionally defined themselves, others, and their unique sense of place through these stories, we find ourselves displaced socially, economically, politically, and/or culturally.

So, Roger Aden says, we go to places of our own making. Fans of the television series The X-Files return to the Funhouse each week for a dose of frightening fun. Fans of the weekly magazine Sports Illustrated play in the American Elysian Fields where democratic efforts at balancing work and play are valued. Fans of the movie Field of Dreams work as altruistic producers in an alternative garden spot.

Grounded in the author’s own experiences and reinforced by the voices of approximately two hundred additional fans of the four popular stories, this book offers a compelling case for understanding the alleged wasteland of popular culture as a fertile site of individually and communally created sacred places.
 

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

Popularizing the Past tells the stories of five postwar historians who changed the way ordinary Americans thought about their nation’s history.
 
What’s the matter with history? For decades, critics of the discipline have argued that the historical profession is dominated by scholars unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to write for the public. In Popularizing the Past, Nick Witham challenges this interpretation by telling the stories of five historians—Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner—who, in the decades after World War II, published widely read books of national history.
 
Witham compellingly argues that we should understand historians’ efforts to engage with the reading public as a vital part of their postwar identity and mission. He shows how the lives and writings of these five authors were fundamentally shaped by their desire to write histories that captivated both scholars and the elusive general reader. He also reveals how these authors’ efforts could not have succeeded without a publishing industry and a reading public hungry to engage with the cutting-edge ideas then emerging from American universities. As Witham’s book makes clear, before we can properly understand the heated controversies about American history so prominent in today’s political culture, we must first understand the postwar effort to popularize the past.

In an era of intense polarization, misinformation, and challenges to democratic norms, American citizens have become disenchanted with democracy and instead embraced populism and grievance. In Populism, Education, and Teaching the Manners of Democracy Robert V. Bullough Jr. offers readers a range of concepts useful for re-imagining the practice of democratic citizenship, both in the classroom as well as for themselves as citizens. Structured around five democratic manners that Bullough argues teachers, students, and citizens should cultivate, hospitality, attuned listening, voice, reflectivity, and evidential discernment, he argues that democracy is a peculiar and demanding way of life that shares with education the goal of human flourishing. By embracing these five manners, we can counter the current grievance culture and instead promote personal and social growth, reorienting education toward democratic living.

For many Americans, the emergence of a “porno chic” culture provided an opportunity to embrace the sexual revolution by attending a film like Deep Throat (1972) or leafing through an erotic magazine like Penthouse. By the 1980s, this pornographic moment was beaten back by the rise of Reagan-era political conservatism and feminist anti-pornography sentiment.

This volume places pornography at the heart of the 1970s American experience, exploring lesser-known forms of pornography from the decade, such as a new, vibrant gay porn genre; transsexual/female impersonator magazines; and pornography for new users, including women and conservative Christians. The collection also explores the rise of a culture of porn film auteurs and stars as well as the transition from film to video. As the corpus of adult ephemera of the 1970s disintegrates, much of it never to be professionally restored and archived, these essays seek to document what pornography meant to its producers and consumers at a pivotal moment.

In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Peter Alilunas, Gillian Frank, Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Lucas Hilderbrand, Nancy Semin Lingo, Laura Helen Marks, Nicholas Matte, Jennifer Christine Nash, Joe Rubin, Alex Warner, Leigh Ann Wheeler, and Greg Youmans.