A candid, courageous portrait of the South as told by a writer unafraid to confront its heat, its history, and its humanity.Clarence Cason belonged to that restless generation of southern intellectuals who, between the world wars, questioned the South's stubborn traditionalism, even as they tried to explain and defend its distinctiveness. From his professorial perch at The University of Alabama, Cason wrote polished essays for leading national publications...

The deadliest campaign of vigilante justice in American history erupted in the Rocky Mountains during the Civil War when a private army hanged twenty-one troublemakers. Hailed as great heroes at the time, the Montana vigilantes are still revered as founding fathers.Combing through original sources, including eye-witness accounts never before published, Frederick Allen concludes that the vigilantes were justified in their early actions, as they fought violent crime in a remote corne...

This book is for those Louisiana slaves (and all the American slaves) whose labor was forced without regard to their humanity, even further, with unrestrained disrespect for their existence. This book is a tribute to the indigenous (originated in or native to the region) Black people of Northeast Louisiana, those folk who were reared in the rural areas, villages, and small towns; who worked on the farms and plantations; sharecropped; cleared all the land; tended all the livestock; planted ...

In this fascinating social history of America’s first frontier, Charles Clark brings to life the people and settlements of Maine and New Hampshire before the Revolutionary War. He describes what life was like beyond the Merrimack from the early fishing camps on the coast to the settlement of mid-eighteenth-century wilderness towns in the interior.The sturdy, independent men who first settled the craggy islands and salt marsh harbors of northern New England were a very different bre...

The Catskills (“Cat Creek” in Dutch), America’s original frontier, northwest of New York City, with its seven hundred thousand acres of forest land preserve and its five counties—Delaware, Greene, Sullivan, Ulster, Schoharie; America’s first great vacationland; the subject of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School paintings that captured the almost godlike majesty of the mountains and landscapes, the skies, waterfalls, pastures, cliffs . . . refuge and home to poets and gangsters, tyco...

On January 27, 1951, the first atomic weapon was detonated over a section of desert known as Frenchman Flat in southern Nevada, providing dramatic evidence of the Nevada Test Site's beginnings. Fifty years later, author A. Costandina Titus reviews contemporary nuclear policy issues concerning the continued viability of that site for weapons testing. Titus has updated her now-classic study of atomic testing with fifteen years of political and cultural history, from the mid-1980s Reagan-Gorb...

Hollywood and Christianity often seem to be at war. Indeed, there is a long list of movies that have attracted religious condemnation, from Gone with the Wind with its notorious "damn," to The Life of Brian and The Last Temptation of Christ. But the reality, writes William Romanowski, has been far more complicated--and remarkable. In Reforming Hollywood, Romanowski, a leading historian of popular culture, explores the long and varied efforts of Protestants to influence the film industry. H...

"How would you like to ship with me?"Dick regarded me with a look of mingled surpise and inquiry."To be explicit: I have been thinking of making the tour of New England in search of sport and adventures. I want a companion. How would you like to ship for the voyage as first mate, with half the fish and half the trouble for your wages?"My kinsman's quench countenance blazed with renewed light: "Cousin Robert, here's my hand on it. I'm ready for anything by land or se...

Rural women comprised the largest part of the adult population of Texas until 1940 and in the American South until 1960. On the cotton farms of Central Texas, women’s labor was essential. In addition to working untold hours in the fields, women shouldered most family responsibilities: keeping house, sewing clothing, cultivating and cooking food, and bearing and raising children. But despite their contributions to the southern agricultural economy, rural women’s stories have remained largel...

At the end of the Revolutionary War, James Steven James settled the land around Long Pond, a 101.9-acre, spring-fed lake tucked away in Northwood, New Hampshire. Once a working farm, the land was later divided and became Long Pond Estates. In Memories of Long Pond, author Irene E. DuPont shares the history of the development and the growth of Long Pond.DuPonts family purchased a cottage on the lake more than thirty-eight years ago; it was a place where they could enjoy swimming, hi...

Lincoln County, New Mexico was once one of the largest counties in the United States and was the setting for a famous feud which lit up the horizon of history. Here between 1869 and 1881 were all the explosive ingredients for violence. On one side of the county was the Mescalero Apache reservation. A day away was an Army fort to keep the Indians “subdued.” Along the Pecos River were hundreds of thousands of acres of public land, much of it claimed by settlers with deeds of “Squatters’ Righ...

A contemporaneous account of Ellet's steam rams and their place in the history of opening the Mississippi.