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Tracing the roots of resilience on the American frontier.

Pioneer Family is based on the recollections of Hugie and Oleta Oesterreicher, who lived in rural northeast Florida in the early decades of the twentieth century. Northeast Florida was still frontier country then, and Hugie and Oleta were pioneers. Although the time and setting of their story are particular, the theme of survival during hard times is universal. Born in a cypress cabin on the edge of the great Durbin Swamp located midway between St. Augustine and Jacksonville, Hugie knew every alligator hole, every bog, every creek; he could dry venison so it lasted without refrigeration for months, could build a potato bank that kept potatoes warm all winter, and put down a well without machinery. He knew how to cope with rattlesnakes and moccasins. Early one morning in 1925, Hugie fell in love with a tall, brown-eyed girl as he passed her place on a cattle drive. He courted this girl, Oleta Brown, with no success at first, but finally they were married in 1927.

Their daughter retells their story from vivid accounts they gave of their childhood, courtship, early years of marriage, and struggles during the Great Depression. In an age bereft of heroes, the story of their courage, their faith, and their commitment provides a fascinating empathy with a time that has passed; a place that has disappeared.

Samuel Bangs, the first printer in the territory that is now Texas, once owed his life to his printing press. One of the few survivors of the Mina Expedition to Mexico in 1817, Bangs wrote to Servando de Mier, “I had the good fortune, through the will of God, to have my life saved, as I was a printer.”

Bangs was not always so fortunate. Losses and disappointments plagued him throughout his career, and he spent many miserable months in Mexican jails. But his ingenuity in the face of adversity, his courage and charm, stamped him not only as a storybook hero but as a man whose virtues were large enough to be their own reward.

Lota Spell’s fine biography of Samuel Bangs is at the same time a fascinating history of northern Mexico (including Texas) in the first half of the nineteenth century. Through the successes and failures of an individual it presents the facts about the operation of a business during a time of important political and economic change.

Even more important is its contribution to our knowledge of printing and of the contemporary periodical press. Although first of all a printer, Samuel Bangs was also involved in the production of newspapers, making this book a detailed history of journalism in the Mexico and Texas of his day. His printing office also functioned as a typographer’s school, through which he instituted the apprentice system in the Southwest; and as a result of his interest in presses as a commodity of trade, the first business for merchandising and servicing printing presses in the area was developed.

This narrative, combining the story of a man’s life, the history of his times, and the development of his profession, fills a gap in our knowledge of Mexico and Texas, and does it with perception and charm.

Since the rise of Napster and other file-sharing services in its wake, most of us have assumed that intellectual piracy is a product of the digital age and that it threatens creative expression as never before. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, claimed that in 2005 the film industry lost $2.3 billion in revenue to piracy online. But here Adrian Johns shows that piracy has a much longer and more vital history than we have realized—one that has been largely forgotten and is little understood.

Piracy explores the intellectual property wars from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first. Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over open access, fair use, free culture, and the like, Johns’s book ultimately argues that piracy has always stood at the center of our attempts to reconcile creativity and commerce—and that piracy has been an engine of social, technological, and intellectual innovations as often as it has been their adversary. From Cervantes to Sonny Bono, from Maria Callas to Microsoft, from Grub Street to Google, no chapter in the story of piracy evades Johns’s graceful analysis in what will be the definitive history of the subject for years to come.

A coal miner's daughter, Jackson grew up in eastern Kentucky, married a miner, and became a midwife, labor activist, and songwriter. Fusing hard experience with the rich Appalachian musical tradition, her songs became weapons of struggle. In 1931, at age fifty, she was "discovered" and brought north. There, she was sponsored and befriended by an illustrious circle of left-wing intellectuals and musicians that included Theodore Dreiser, Alan Lomax, and Charles and Pete Seeger. Along with Sarah Ogan Gunning, Jim Garland (two of Aunt Molly's half-siblings), Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and other folk musicians, Jackson served as a cultural broker who linked the rural working poor to big-city, left-wing activism. 

Shelly Romalis combines interviews with archival materials to construct an unforgettable portrait of an Appalachian woman who remained radical, raucous, proud, poetic, offensive, self-involved, and in spirit the "real" pistol packin' mama of the song.

Discover the stories, people, and histories behind the names on Alabama's map.

Place Names in Alabama is the first comprehensive and systematic study of the names that define Alabama's geographic landscape. In this indispensable reference work, Virginia O. Foscue examines more than 2,600 place names drawn from across the state, including counties, cities, towns, rivers, lakes, streams, mountains, and other significant geographic features. Each entry provides detailed information on location, historical development, etymology, naming history, and documented sources, creating a rich portrait of the people, cultures, and events that have shaped Alabama over time.

Drawing upon archival records, historical documents, maps, and interviews with local informants, Foscue uncovers the stories behind the names that appear on Alabama's maps. The volume reveals the influence of Native American languages, European settlement, transportation networks, natural features, political leaders, local families, and regional traditions on the state's evolving identity. By tracing how communities and landmarks acquired their names, the book illuminates broader patterns of migration, settlement, economic development, and cultural exchange throughout Alabama's history.

More than a dictionary of place names, this work offers a unique window into Alabama's social and cultural heritage. Readers discover not only the origins of familiar names but also the histories of the individuals and communities that helped build the state. Whether used as a scholarly resource, a genealogical tool, or a source of fascinating historical insights, Place Names in Alabama remains an essential guide to understanding the connections between geography, language, and history in the American South.

Valuable for historians, genealogists, geographers, librarians, educators, students, journalists, and local history enthusiasts, this landmark volume continues to serve as the definitive reference on Alabama's geographic names and the stories they preserve.

An unflinching account of how city planning was deployed to enforce white supremacy in Montgomery, Alabama—the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement—and how Black activists fought back, block by neighborhood block.

At the heart of the Civil Rights Movement was a city meticulously designed to enforce inequality. In Planning White Supremacy: Civil Rights and City Planning in Montgomery, Alabama, 1920–1970, Rebecca Coleen Retzlaff traces how city officials used the tools of modern planning—zoning, infrastructure, housing codes, public investment, and highway construction—to suppress political power, economic opportunity, and spatial freedom for Black citizens.

As the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement, Montgomery became a battleground where urban planning and direct-action protest collided, shaping the city’s culture in ways that still resonate today. Retzlaff’s analysis exposes the calculated use of municipal power to control land use, displace Black communities, keep schools and neighborhoods segregated, and preserve white political dominance. By placing urban planning at the center of Montgomery’s story, this groundbreaking work reframes the movement not only as a fight for voting rights and legal equality, but as a struggle for space, housing, mobility, education, and the right to live with dignity. Retzlaff also highlights the resilience and joy of the close-knit Black neighborhoods that nurtured the civil rights activists who changed history.

Retzlaff reveals how urban planning decisions systematically targeted Black neighborhoods, reinforcing racial inequality under the guise of modernization. With historical depth and critical insight, Planning White Supremacy situates Montgomery within the broader context of American urban history—offering a vital perspective on the intersection of race, space, and power. Essential for scholars of urban planning, history, and racial justice, this book also provides urgent insight into how these legacies continue to shape cities and Black socioeconomic opportunities today.

A Pulitzer Prize finalist in History, this eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor.

The industrializing North and the agricultural South—that’s how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early nineteenth century. But in doing so, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. We miss slavery’s long reach into small New England communities, just as we fail to see the role of Northern manufacturing in shaping the terrain of human bondage in the South. Using plantation goods—the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in the South—historian Seth Rockman locates the biggest stories in American history in the everyday objects that stitched together the lives and livelihoods of Americans—white and Black, male and female, enslaved and free—across an expanding nation.
 
By following the stories of material objects, such as shoes made by Massachusetts farm women that found their way to the feet of a Mississippi slave, Rockman reveals a national economy organized by slavery—a slavery that outsourced the production of its supplies to the North, and a North that outsourced its slavery to the South. Melding business and labor history through powerful storytelling, Plantation Goods brings northern industrialists, southern slaveholders, enslaved field hands, and paid factory laborers into the same picture. In one part of the country, entrepreneurs envisioned fortunes to be made from “planter’s hoes” and rural women spent their days weaving “negro cloth” and assembling “slave brogans.” In another, enslaved people actively consumed textiles and tools imported from the North to contest their bondage. In between, merchants, marketers, storekeepers, and debt collectors laid claim to the profits of a thriving interregional trade.
 
Examining producers and consumers linked in economic and moral relationships across great geographic and political distances, Plantation Goods explores how people in the nineteenth century thought about complicity with slavery while showing how slavery structured life nationwide and established a modern world of entrepreneurship and exploitation. Rockman brings together lines of American history that have for too long been told separately, as slavery and capitalism converge in something as deceptively ordinary as a humble pair of shoes.

This massive annotated bibliography of all known significant eyewitness accounts of nineteenth-century central overland travel fills a conspicuous gap in historical literature, and will greatly accelerate research, writing, and collecting.

An inside look at a scene and a career, Play Like a Man is the evocative and humorous tale of one woman’s life in the trenches and online.