Southern America History

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.