Southern America History

Belle Brezing made a major career move when she stepped off the streets of Lexington, Kentucky, and into Jennie Hill's bawdy house: an upscale brothel run out of a former residence of Mary Todd Lincoln. At 19, Brezing was already infamous as a youth steeped in death, sex, drugs, and scandal.

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.

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 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.

The Potlikker Papers tells the story of food and politics in the South over the last half century. Beginning with the pivotal role of cooks in the civil rights movement, noted authority John T. Edge narrates the South's journey from racist backwater to a hotbed of American immigration. In so doing, he traces how the food of the poorest Southerners has become the signature trend of modern American haute cuisine. This is a people's history of the modern South told through the lens of food.

A thrilling story of the pioneering Tumlinson family, and their quest westward to Texas; formation of the Texas Rangers; involvement of the 'Come and Take it' cannon; and conflicts of the region with Mexico. The listener is given a detailed account of the bloody Texas Revolution, the Camanche War, and the proud state of Texas!

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.

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.

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.