Southern America History

The matter-of-fact descriptive title of this interesting little volume on railroading in the pre-Civil War South does not do justice to Alvarez's coverage of the subject. Along with his full account of trains and train accommodations, he manages to encompass a number of social, political, and even ideological subjects.

Written in the form of a letter to her granddaughter, the author of this little book describes her plantation childhood, her marriage and parenthood, and her experiences during the Civil War and Reconstruction. In response to what she believed were misconceptions about antebellum Southern slavery, she argues that while some slaveholders were cruel, the majority were conscientious about the well-being of their servants and looked upon them as members of the household.

The State of Jones is a true story about the South during the Civil War: the real South. Not the South that has been mythologized in novels and movies, but an authentic, hardscrabble place where poor men were forced to fight a rich man's war for slavery and cotton. In Jones County, Mississippi, a farmer named Newton Knight led his neighbors, white and black alike, in an insurrection against the Confederacy at the height of the Civil War.

In the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century, crusading African American journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett bravely reported on the scourge of white supremacist violence that had personally impacted her own life and work. Her reporting exposed and riled the South, enlightened uninformed Northerners, and captured international attention. Southern Horrors and The Red Record offer extensive accounts of the lynching, cruelty, and hate that African Americans faced in the early years of the Jim Crow South.

After an arduous overland journey, Levi Scott and his son John arrived in Oregon City in November 1844. Scott joined the Jesse Applegate's 1846 expedition seeking a better, safer way through the Cascades to the Willamette Valley. Their new southern route wound through the Umpqua Valley, three mountain ranges, and the Black Rock Desert before meeting the established California Trail.

As author Gayden Metcalfe asserts, people in the Delta have a strong sense of community, and being dead is no impediment to belonging to it. Down south, they don't forget you when you've up and died - they may even like you better and visit you more often! But just as there is an appropriate way to live your life in the South, there is an equally essentially tasteful way of departing it - and the funeral is the final social event of your existence, so it must be handled flawlessly. Metcalfe portrays this slice of American culture.

Christmas Hemming, a newly freed slave, lived to be 110 years old. In 1885, he used cash to purchase 640 acres of land in North Florida (Suwannee County). Hear about his incredible journey and how his decedents have lived and worked his homestead for more than a century. The author, Pat Hines, is Christmas’ great-great-great-granddaughter. She is on record in Florida as having the only African-American Century Old Pioneer Farm.

The Underground Railroad is one of the most taught topics to young schoolchildren, and every American is familiar with the idea of fugitive slaves escaping to Canada and the North with the help of determined abolitionists and even former escaped slaves like Harriet Tubman. The secrecy involved in the Underground Railroad made it one of the most mysterious aspects of the mid-19th century in America, to the extent that claims spread that 100,000 slaves had escaped via the Underground Railroad.

You were lied to about the nature, character, and cause of the American Civil War, but that is just the start. The entire South - its people, culture, history, customs, both past and present - has been and continues to be lied about and demonized by the unholy trinity of the American establishment: academia, Hollywood, and the media.

Beginning around World War I, due to so many problems at home and so much seeming to be offered in the North, scores of African-Americans left the South and headed to the big cities across the Mason-Dixon, among them, Chicago. Chicago provided, they thought, so much that they couldn't get elsewhere. Thanks to their mass migration, the city, and the state of Illinois, were vastly changed forever, and so were they.