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6 books match the query 'Memphis'

cover of Dewey and Elvis: The Life and Times of a Rock 'n' Roll Deejay

Dewey and Elvis

The Life and Times of a Rock 'n' Roll Deejay

Louis Cantor

University of Illinois Press, 2010

Beginning in 1949, while Elvis Presley and Sun Records were still virtually unknown--and two full years before Alan Freed famously "discovered" rock 'n' roll--Dewey Phillips brought the budding new music to the Memphis airwaves by playing Howlin' Wolf, B. B. King, and Muddy Waters on his nightly radio show Red, Hot and Blue. The mid-South's most popular white deejay, "Daddy-O-Dewey" soon became part of rock 'n' roll history for being the first major disc jockey to play Elvis Presley and, subsequently, to conduct the first live, on-air interview with the singer.

Louis Cantor illuminates Phillips's role in turning a huge white audience on to previously forbidden race music. Phillips's zeal for rhythm and blues legitimized the sound and set the stage for both Elvis's subsequent success and the rock 'n' roll revolution of the 1950s. Using personal interviews, documentary sources, and oral history collections, Cantor presents a personal view of the disc jockey while restoring Phillips's place as an essential figure in rock 'n' roll history.

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cover of Room 306: The National Story of the Lorraine Motel

Room 306

The National Story of the Lorraine Motel

Ben Kamin

Michigan State University Press, 2012

A tragic landmark in the civil rights movement, the Lorraine Motel in Memphis is best known for what occurred there on April 4, 1968. As he stood on the balcony of Room 306, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, ending a golden age of nonviolent resistance, and sparking riots in more than one hundred cities. Formerly a seedy, segregated motel, and prior to that a brothel, the motel quickly achieved the status of national shrine. The motel attracts a variety of pilgrims—white politicians seeking photo ops, aging civil rights leaders, New Age musicians, and visitors to its current incarnation, the National Civil Rights Museum. A moving and emotional account that comprises a panorama of voices, Room 306 is an important oral history unlike any other.
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cover of Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity

Sapphic Slashers

Sex, Violence, and American Modernity

Lisa Duggan

Duke University Press, 2000

On a winter day in 1892, in the broad daylight of downtown Memphis, Tennessee, a middle class woman named Alice Mitchell slashed the throat of her lover, Freda Ward, killing her instantly. Local, national, and international newspapers, medical and scientific publications, and popular fiction writers all clamored to cover the ensuing “girl lovers” murder trial. Lisa Duggan locates in this sensationalized event the emergence of the lesbian in U.S. mass culture and shows how newly “modern” notions of normality and morality that arose from such cases still haunt and distort lesbian and gay politics to the present day.
Situating this story alongside simultaneously circulating lynching narratives (and its resistant versions, such as those of Memphis antilynching activist Ida B. Wells) Duggan reveals how stories of sex and violence were crucial to the development of American modernity. While careful to point out the differences between the public reigns of terror that led to many lynchings and the rarer instances of the murder of one woman by another privately motivated woman, Duggan asserts that dominant versions of both sets of stories contributed to the marginalization of African Americans and women while solidifying a distinctly white, male, heterosexual form of American citizenship. Having explored the role of turn-of-the-century print media—and in particular their tendency toward sensationalism—Duggan moves next to a review of sexology literature and to novels, most notably Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Sapphic Slashers concludes with two appendices, one of which presents a detailed summary of Ward’s murder, the trial, and Mitchell’s eventual institutionalization. The other presents transcriptions of letters exchanged between the two women prior to the crime.
Combining cultural history, feminist and queer theory, narrative analysis, and compelling storytelling, Sapphic Slashers provides the first history of the emergence of the lesbian in twentieth-century mass culture.
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cover of Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers

Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights

Organizing Memphis Workers

Michael K. Honey

University of Illinois Press, 1993

Widely praised upon publication and now considered a classic study, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights chronicles the southern industrial union movement from the Great Depression to the Cold War, a history that created the context for the sanitation workers' strike that brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis in April 1968. Michael K. Honey documents the dramatic labor battles and sometimes heroic activities of workers and organizers that helped to set the stage for segregation's demise.

Winner of the Charles S. Sydnor Award, given by the Southern Historical Association, 1994.  Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize given by the Organization of American Historians, 1994.  Winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Award for an outstanding book in American social history.
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cover of The Clouds in Memphis: Stories and Novellas

The Clouds in Memphis

Stories and Novellas

C. J. Hribal

University of Massachusetts Press, 2000

The late Raymond Carver wrote of Matty's Heart, C. J. Hribal's first book, "our literature is healthier, and wiser with the publication of this collection of short fiction." Commenting on the same volume, Anne Tyler wrote, "some of these pieces are real masterpieces." Now Hribal is back with a new collection that charts both the recesses of the human heart and the resiliency of the human spirit. In three novellas and two short stories, Hribal traces the arcs of emotion and action that can follow on the heels of calamity. In the title novella, a divorced woman whose oldest son is hit and killed by a reckless driver struggles to come to terms with both her grief and the wreckage of her life since her marriage ended. In "War Babies," the sister of a woman killed in what may or may not have been an industrial accident tries to imagine the circumstances leading up to her sister's death, believing that in knowledge there can be solace. A different tack is taken by the central character in "Consent," a real estate developer who has to deal with a drowning that occurs in his newest subdivision: his reconstruction of the event carries him into dangerous moral territory. But not all the territory here is dangerous. The novella "And That's the Name of That Tune" features a narrator who recalls his father's escapades in a bar when the son was his seven-year-old companion. Tender, compassionate, bewildered, the son strives to understand the havoc his father inflicts on his family. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly wrote that Hribal "establishes an American landscape in the tradition of Cheever and Updike, though his is a world not of cocktail parties but of trailer parks, bars, and courtrooms. The subtle power of these stories will leave the reader hungry for more."
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cover of The Grit and the Grind: Building High-Performing Education Systems in an Era of Polarization

The Grit and the Grind

Building High-Performing Education Systems in an Era of Polarization

Joshua L. Glazer, Cori Egan, William R. Berry, and Amar Fattal

University of Chicago Press, 2026

Offers a much-needed perspective on the connections between community, policymaking, and the improvement of underperforming schools. 

School reform remains a fraught issue in the United States as educators, policymakers, and communities strive to improve outcomes for all students. In The Grit and the Grind, Joshua L. Glazer, Cori Egan, William R. Berry, and Amar Fattal examine two ambitious efforts to improve the lowest-performing schools in Memphis, Tennessee. The book offers a rare inside look at the political, organizational, and educational challenges of improving schools at scale.

The two initiatives, the Achievement School District (ASD) and the Shelby County Innovation Zone (iZone), shared a common goal but pursued it through fundamentally different approaches. The ASD was a state-run turnaround district that removed schools from local control and placed them under the management of charter organizations. By contrast, the iZone operated through existing district institutions, relying on local educators and leaders to drive improvement. Despite common goals and substantial resources, the reforms developed in strikingly different ways. Drawing on years of research in Memphis, the authors move beyond familiar debates about charter schools and district reform to explore a deeper question: What does it take to improve schools in complex, pluralistic, and contested democratic societies? Their analysis reveals that educational improvement is simultaneously professional, organizational, and political. Efforts to enhance educational opportunities depend not only on curriculum, leadership, and expertise, but also on the legitimacy, trust, and community support that allow educational systems to learn from experience and sustain improvement.

At once a study of reform, organizations, and politics, The Grit and the Grind challenges simple explanations of success and failure, showing that meaningful improvement is forged through the slow, uncertain work of building systems capable of earning community trust while continuously strengthening teaching and learning.

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