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Visions of the Black Belt offers a rich cultural overview of the emblematic core of Alabama known for its prairie soils, plantation manors, civil rights history, gothic churches, traditional foodways, and resilient and gracious people.
How do well-meaning people help a community move beyond its past when confronted by those who hold ingrained stereotypes, profit from maintaining the status quo, or are filled with antipathy toward others? This book tells the story of how a Black university president tried to do just that when he led the first non-court ordered merger of an historically Black university with an historically white two-year college in Albany, Georgia. Arthur “Art” N. Dunning came of age in the Black Belt of Alabama during the Jim Crow era. Among many pivotal experiences, he was part of a group of student athletes who helped to integrate Bear Bryant’s University of Alabama football team in 1967. The value...
Alabama’s history and culture revealed through fourteen iconic foods, dishes, and beverages The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods explores well-known Alabama food traditions to reveal salient histories of the state in a new way. In this book that is part history, part travelogue, and part cookbook, Emily Blejwas pays homage to fourteen emblematic foods, dishes, and beverages, one per chapter, as a lens for exploring the diverse cultures and traditions of the state. Throughout Alabama’s history, food traditions have been fundamental to its customs, cultures, regions, social and political movements, and events. Each featured food is deeply rooted in Alabama identity and has a story with b...
A celebration of art traditionally devalued as too domestic or feminine to be taken seriously and the innovative, brilliant artists reclaiming the idea of ‘women’s work’.
Reconstruction politics and race relations between freed blacks and the white establishment in Perry County, Alabama In his fascinating, in-depth study, Bertis D. English analyzes why Perry County, situated in the heart of a violence-prone subregion of Alabama, enjoyed more peaceful race relations and less bloodshed than several neighboring counties. Choosing an atypical locality as central to his study, English raises questions about factors affecting ethnic disturbances in the Black Belt and elsewhere in Alabama. He also uses Perry County, which he deems an anomalous county, to caution against the tendency of some scholars to make sweeping generalizations about entire regions and subregion...
From Muscle Shoals to Mobile, Alabamians enjoy fabulous barbecue at home, at club meetings and at countless eateries. In the 1820s, however, a group of reformers wanted to eliminate the southern staple because politicians used it to entice voters. As the state and nation changed through wars and the civil rights movement, so did Alabama barbecue. Alabama restaurants like Big Bob Gibson's, Dreamland and Jim 'n Nick's have earned fans across the country. Mark A. Johnson traces the development of the state's famous food from the earliest settlement of the state to the rise of barbecue restaurants.
Beyond Berlin breaks new ground in the ongoing effort to understand how memorials, buildings, and other spaces have figured in the larger German struggle to come to terms with the legacy of Nazism. The contributors challenge reigning views of how the task of "coming to terms with the Nazi Past" (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) has been pursued at specific urban and architectural sites. Focusing on west as well as east German cities—whether prominent metropolises like Hamburg, dynamic regional centers like Dresden, gritty industrial cities like Wolfsburg, or idyllic rural towns like Quedlinburg—the volume's case studies of individual urban centers provide readers with a more complex sense of ...
Who are American Catholics and what do they believe and practice? How has American Catholicism influenced and been influenced by American culture and society? This book examines the history of American Catholics from the colonial era to the present, with an emphasis on changes and challenges in the contemporary church. Chester Gillis chronicles America Catholics: where they have come from, how they have integrated into American society, and how the church has influenced their lives. He highlights key events and people, examines data on Catholics and their relationship to the church, and considers the church’s positions and actions on politics, education, and gender and sexuality in the con...
Some devastation has struck the soul and the Earth alike, and in Enola Gay, his second volume of poems, Mark Levine surveys the disaster. Here is a volume of poetry approaching Carolyn Forche's The Angel of History as a stark meditation on Blanchot's sense of writing as the "desired, undesired torment which endures everything." Levine engages the traditional resources of lyric poetry in an exploration of historical and cultural landscapes ravaged by imponderable events. Enola Gay's "mission" can seem spiritual, imaginative, and militaristic as the speaker in these poems surveys marshes and fields and a land on the edge of disintegration. Levine sifts the psychological residue that accumulates in the wake of unspeakable acts and so negotiates that terrain between the banality of language and the need to stand witness and to speak. Levine's stunning second book, with its grave cultural implications and its surveillance of a distinctly postmodern malaise, offers multiple readings. Here are compact poems with uncanny power, rhythm, and a strange, formal beauty echoing and renewing the legacy of Wallace Stevens for a new era.