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Winner, ISHS Certificate of Excellence, 2015 Disaster relief as we know it did not exist when the deadliest tornado in U.S. history gouged a path from southeast Missouri through southern Illinois and into southwestern Indiana. The tri-state tornado of 1925 hugged the ground for 219 miles, generated wind speeds in excess of 300 miles per hour, and killed 695 people. Drawing on survivor interviews, public records, and newspaper archives, America’s Deadliest Twister offers a detailed account of the storm, but more important, it describes life in the region at that time as well as the tornado’s lasting cultural impact, especially on southern Illinois. Author Geoff Partlow follows the storm f...
Bishop Charles H. Mason in the Age of Jim Crow profiles the life and career of Charles Harrison Mason. Mason was the founder of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), which from its Memphis roots, grew into the most significant black Pentecostal denomination in the United States, with profound theological and political ramifications for poor and working-class black Memphians. Bishop Charles H. Mason in the Age of Jim Crow is grounded in the history of the Jim Crow era. The book traces the origins of COGIC in Memphis; it reveals just how Mason’s new black Pentecostal denomination grew, gained social and political power, and earned a permanent place in Memphis’s black religious pantheon. This book tells how a son of slaves transformed a rural migrant movement into an urban phenomenon, how unusual religious demonstrations exemplified infrapolitical religious protests, and how these rituals of resistance changed black lives and helped strengthen and sustain blacks fighting for freedom in segregated Memphis. The author reveals why Charles H. Mason was an important pre-civil rights religious leader who laid the groundwork for integrated churches.
Dr. Ekberg's masterwork on the old French town south of St. Louis brings into sharp focus life in colonial America. Ekberg has rendered a rich portrait of community life on the most fascinating of American frontiers, the composite world of French Creoles and American Indians in the Mississippi Valley. This is an important book and a good read to boot. That's how Yale University's John Mack Faragher praised this book.
Winner, ISHS Best of Illinois History Award, 2019 This first-ever pictorial record of the people and methods of the Illinois-Kentucky Fluorspar District from the 1900s to the 1990s covers early and modern means of extracting, hoisting, processing, and transporting the mineral from mine mouth to end user. Nearly one hundred images carefully selected by author Herbert K. Russell show early pick-and-shovel extraction and open-flame lighting as well as primitive drilling methods and transportation by barrels, buckets, barges, mule teams, and trams, in addition to the use of modern equipment and sophisticated refinement procedures such as froth flotation. Russell also provides an overview of the many industrial uses of fluorspar, from metal work by ancient Romans to the processing of uranium by scientists seeking to perfect the atomic bomb. Preserving what is known about the industry by miners, managers, and museums, this detailed and fascinating pictorial history looks both above and below ground at fluorspar mining.
One of the earliest sources of humanity's religious impulse was severe weather, which ancient peoples attributed to the wrath of storm gods. Enlightenment thinkers derided such beliefs as superstition, but in America, scientific and theological hubris came face-to-face with the tornado, nature's most violent windstorm. In this groundbreaking history, Peter J. Thuesen traces the primal connections between weather and religion in the United States. He shows that tornadoes and other storms have repeatedly drawn Americans into the profoundest of religious mysteries and confronted them with the question of their own destiny--how much is self-determined and how much is beyond human understanding or control.
This first comprehensive account of the Illinois village of Kaskaskia covers more than two hundred years in the vast and compelling history of the state. David MacDonald and Raine Waters explore Illinois’s first capital in great detail, from its foundation in 1703 to its destruction by the Mississippi River in the latter part of the nineteenth century, as well as everything in between: successes, setbacks, and the lives of the people who inhabited the space. At the outset the Kaskaskia tribe, along with Jesuit missionaries and French traders, settled near the confluence of the Kaskaskia and Mississippi rivers, about sixty miles south of modern-day St. Louis. The town quickly became the lar...
Winner of the 2023 Award for Excellence for Best History in the category of Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, R&B, Gospel, Hip Hop, or Soul Music from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections Wasn’t That a Mighty Day: African American Blues and Gospel Songs on Disaster takes a comprehensive look at sacred and secular disaster songs, shining a spotlight on their historical and cultural importance. Featuring newly transcribed lyrics, the book offers sustained attention to how both Black and white communities responded to many of the tragic events that occurred before the mid-1950s. Through detailed textual analysis, Luigi Monge explores songs on natural disasters (hurricanes,...
This book details the Depression era history behind the simultaneous creations of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois, where enrollees at twenty-six camps worked on soil and forest conservation projects. A camp compendium provides photographs, the work history and company rosters of each camp.
From the author of the New York Times bestselling I Survived series, comes two gripping accounts of two young people who survived two terrifying twisters. The Tri-State Tornado of 1925 was the deadliest tornado strike in American history, tearing through three states and killing 700 people. Almost a century later, the Joplin Tornado was a mile-wide monster that nearly destroyed theheart of a vibrant city. The author of the New York Times best-selling I Survived series now brings you the vivid and true stories of two young people who survived these terrifying twisters, along with fascinating facts abouttornadoes and profiles of the well-respected scientists and storm chasers who study them.