You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In Show Thyself a Man, Gregory Mixon explores the ways African Americans in postbellum Georgia used the militia as a vehicle to secure full citizenship, respect, and a more stable place in society. As citizen-soldiers, black men were empowered to get involved in politics, secure their own financial independence, and publicly commemorate black freedom with celebrations such as Emancipation Day. White Georgians, however, used the militia as a different symbol of freedom--to ensure the postwar white right to rule. This book is a forty-year history of black militia service in Georgia and the determined disbandment process that whites undertook to destroy it, connecting this chapter of the post-emancipation South to the larger history of militia participation by African-descendant people through the Western hemisphere and Latin America.
For many people, the circus, with its clowns, exotic beasts, and other colorful iconography, is lighthearted entertainment. Yet for Greg Renoff and other scholars, the circus and its social context also provide a richly suggestive repository of changing attitudes about race, class, religion, and consumerism. In the South during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, traveling circuses fostered social spaces where people of all classes and colors could grapple with the region’s upheavals. The Big Tent relates the circus experience from the perspectives of its diverse audiences, telling what locals might have seen and done while the show was in town. Renoff digs deeper, too. He points...
Their songs insist that the arrival of the railroad and the appearance of the tiny depot often created such hope that it inspired the construction of the architectural extravaganzas that were the courthouses of the era. In these buildings the distorted myth of the Old South collided head-on with the equally deformed myth of the New South."
Lynch mobs in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America exacted horrifying public torture and mutilation on their victims. In Lynching and Spectacle, Amy Wood explains what it meant for white Americans to perform and witness these sadistic spectacles and how lynching played a role in establishing and affirming white supremacy. Lynching, Wood argues, overlapped with a variety of cultural practices and performances, both traditional and modern, including public executions, religious rituals, photography, and cinema, all which encouraged the horrific violence and gave it social acceptability. However, she also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images ultimately fueled ...
In 1861, northeast Georgians were the driving force into secession and war. In 1865, Confederate president Jefferson Davis, his government collapsing and himself a wanted man, brought the reality of the war to the regions doorstep. Governor Joseph Brown, U.S. senator Robert Toombs and the politically influential Howell Cobb of Athens and his brother Thomas R.R. Cobb all fought passionately for Southern independence. The region epitomized the reasons for which the South waged and supported the war, yet it was spared the destruction seen in other places. Even Sherman's Union army touched only the region's fringes. Author Ray Chandler brings to light the final act of the Confederacy in the Peach State's northeast and the lasting impact it had on Georgians. Book jacket.
A look at a fascinating Deep South region and its distinctive way of life
Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman's March and American Memory
In the late eighteenth century, waves of intrepid settlers made their way down the Great Wagon Road into the virgin wilderness of Northeast Georgia to find new homes and opportunity for land and wealth. Against a dramatic mountainous backdrop, these pioneers carved out farms and small communities in perilous isolation and created an American experience vastly different from that of the plantation-style society established along Georgia's coast. Battling Creek and Cherokee warriors, government intervention, natural disasters, and a landscape not easily tamed, year after year, these men and women of Northeast Georgia stamped their self-reliance, their perseverance, and their industriousness up...
The world of Magnolia Le Guin, like that of countless farm women, was defined by and confined to home and family. Born in 1869 into the rural, white, agrarian society of Georgia's central piedmont, she raised eight children virtually on her own, yet never in her life ventured farther than thirty miles from her birthplace. Her situation, however extreme, was not unique in her day. What distinguished Le Guin was her love of writing, her need to write about being a wife and mother--despite a daunting workload and burden of responsibilities that left her with little free time or energy. In a plain, idiomatic style, these diaries detail some of the most trying, but nonetheless fulfilling, years o...
According to the author, during the era of awakenings and revival, the various denominations in the Southern States of the USA shared the same goal of saving souls but disagreed over the correct definition of true religion and conversion.