Southern America History

In thinking about her native land, Julia Reed quotes another Southern writer, Willie Morris, who said, “It’s the juxtapositions that get you down here.” These juxtapositions are, for Julia Reed, the soul of the South and in her warmhearted and funny new audiobook, South Toward Home, she chronicles her adventures through the highs and the lows of Southern life - the Delta hot tamale festival, a masked ball, a rollicking party in a boat on a sand bar, scary Christian billboards, and the southern affection for the lowly possum.

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.

Following the Indian uprising known as the Red River War, Fort Reno (in what would become western Oklahoma) was established in 1875 by the United States government. Its original assignment was to serve as an outpost to exercise control over the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians. But Fort Reno also served as an embryonic frontier settlement around which the first trappings of Anglo-American society developed a regulatory force between the Indian tribes and the white man.

In 1860, Charleston, South Carolina, embodied the combustible spirit of the South. No city was more fervently attached to slavery, and no city was seen by the North as a greater threat to the bonds barely holding together the Union. And so, with Abraham Lincoln's election looming, Charleston's leaders faced a climactic decision: They could submit to abolition - or they could drive South Carolina out of the Union and hope that the rest of the South would follow.

Anybody who is familiar with the Civil Rights movement knows that 1964 was a pivotal year. And in Birmingham, Alabama - perhaps the epicenter of racial conflict - the Barons amazingly started their season with an integrated team.

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.

The smog beast wafted into downtown Los Angeles on July 26, 1943. Nobody knew what it was. Secretaries rubbed their eyes. Traffic cops seemed to disappear in the mysterious haze. Were Japanese saboteurs responsible? A reckless factory? The truth was much worse - it came from within, from Southern California's burgeoning car-addicted, suburban lifestyle. Smogtown is the story of pollution, progress, and how an optimistic people confronted the epic struggle against airborne poisons barraging their hometowns.

In March to Independence: The American Revolution in the Southern Colonies, 1775-1776, historian Michael Cecere, consulting primary source documents, examines how Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia ended up supporting the colonies to the north, while East Florida remained within the British sphere.

The last 14 months of the American Revolution, the final phase after Yorktown, were crucial for the declared "united States" to achieve their collective and sovereign independence. This groundbreaking, updated history of The Revolutionary War is based on recently deciphered and transcribed, first-person correspondence from the American military, civilian, political, and diplomatic leaders who were running the war.

Most familiar with the Wild West know Wyatt Earp, Virgil Earp, and Morgan Earp for the famous shootout on the streets of Tombstone, Arizona. But few know the later years of the close-knit Earp family, which revolved around patriarch Nicholas Earp, and their last push at a major monetary coup in Los Angeles.

For too long, the Southern woman has been synonymous with the Southern belle, a "moonlight and magnolias" myth that gets nowhere close to describing the strong, richly diverse women who have thrived because of - and in some cases, despite of - the South. No more. Garden & Gun’s Southern Women: More Than 100 Stories of Trail Blazers, Visionaries, and Icons obliterates that stereotype by sharing the stories of more than 100 of the region’s brilliant women, groundbreakers who have embraced the South’s proud traditions and overcome its equally pervasive barriers.

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.

On Palm Sunday 1964, at the Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis, a group of black and white students began a "kneel-in" to protest the church's policy of segregation, a protest that would continue in one form or another for more than a year and eventually force the church to open its doors to black worshippers. In The Last Segregated Hour, Stephen Haynes tells the story of this dramatic yet little studied tactic which was the strategy of choice for bringing attention to segregationist policies in Southern churches.

Prior to World War II, Finley explains, southern senators recognized the fall of segregation as inevitable, and consciously changed their tactics to delay, rather than prevent defeat, enabling them to frustrate civil rights advances for decades. As public support for civil rights grew, southern senators transformed their arguments to limit the use of overt racism and appeal to northerners. They granted minor concessions on bills only tangentially related to civil rights.

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.

With his 2003 announcement of a program known as PEPFAR, George W. Bush launched an astonishingly successful American war against a global pandemic. PEPFAR played a key role in slashing HIV cases and AIDS deaths in sub-Saharan Africa, leading to the brink of epidemic control. Resilient in the face of flatlined funding and political headwinds, PEPFAR is America’s singular example of how to fight long-term plague - and win.

Sixteen historians, all members of the Society of Independent Southern Historians, have come together to write this truthful history of America specifically for home-schooled students. Herein is a history that is truthful, concise, yet comprehensive, written especially for students of middle school and high school age and for the parents who provide guidance through the home school educational approach. The 40 student lessons in this book present 278 years of our history.

In January of 1950, Mary Church Terrell, an 86-year-old charter member of the NAACP, headed into Thompson’s Restaurant, just a few blocks from the White House, and requested to be served. She and her companions were informed by the manager that they could not eat in his establishment, because they were “colored.” Terrell, a former suffragette and one of the country’s first college-educated African-American women, took the matter to court. Three years later, the Supreme Court vindicated her outrage: District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co., Inc. was decided in 1953.