How social and political power was wielded in order to build Moundville This work is a state-of-the-art, data-rich study of excavations undertaken at the Moundville site in west central Alabama, one ...of the largest and most complex of the mound sites of pre-contact North America. Despite the site's importance and sustained attention by researchers, until now it has lacked a comprehensive analysis of its modern excavations. Richly documented by maps, artifact photo-graphs, profiles of strata, and inventories of materials found, the present work explores one expression of social complexity; the significance of Moundville’s monumental architecture, including its earthen mounds; the pole-frame architecture that once occupied the summits of these mounds; and the associated middens that reveal the culture of Moundville’s elites.   This book supplies a survey of important materials recovered in more than a decade of recent excavations of seven mounds and related areas under the author’s direction, as part of a long-term archaeological project consisting of new field work at the Mississippian political and ceremonial center of Moundville.   Visitors to Moundville are immediately impressed with its monumentality. The expansiveness and grandness of that landscape are, of course, deliberate features that have a story to tell and this archaeological project reveals Moundville’s monumentality and its significance to the people whose capital town it was.   Exactly how the social and political power symbolized by mound building was distributed is a question central to this work. It seems critical to ask to what extent this monumental landscape was the product of a chief’s ability to recruit and direct the labor of large groups of political subordinates, most of whom were presumably non-kin. At the onset of the present project, speculations regarding the paired orders of mounds and the timing of the formal structuring of space at Moundville were already suggested but were in need of further testing, confirmation, and refinement. The work reported in this volume is largely devoted to filling in such evidence and refining those initial insights. An excellent chapter by H. Edwin Jackson and Susan L. Scott, "Zooarchaeology of Mounds Q, G, E, F, and R," compliments this research.   A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
The long-term significance of the household as a social and economic force—particularly in relation to authority positions or institutions—has remained relatively unexplored in North ...American archaeology. Households and Hegemony makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the role households played in long-term cultural change after contact with European traders and settlers.   Drawing together information from ethnohistoric records and data from one of the largest excavations in Alabama's history (the Fusihatchee Project), Cameron B. Wesson reexamines changes in early Creek culture from before and after contact with Europeans, beginning in the sixteenth century. Casting the household as a multifaceted cultural institution, he contends that important social, economic, and political transformations occurred during this time—changes that redefined the relationship between Creek households and authority. As avenues for exchange with outsiders broadened and diversified, prestige trade goods usually associated with Creek elites became increasingly available to individual households, so that contact with Europeans contributed to empowerment for Creek households and a weakening of traditional chiefly authority.   Wesson demonstrates that change within Creek culture in the historic period was shaped by small-scale social units and individual decisions rather than by the effects of larger social and political events. Households and Hegemony enriches our understanding of Creek history and makes a key contribution to comparative archaeological models of cultural change.
Diamonds in the Rough reconstructs the historical moment that defined the Cahaba Coal Field, a mineral-rich area that stretches across sixty-seven miles and four counties of central Alabama.
 
...Combining existing written sources with oral accounts and personal recollections, James Sanders Day’s Diamonds in the Rough describes the numerous coal operations in this region—later overshadowed by the rise of the Birmingham district and the larger Warrior Field to the north.
 
Many of the capitalists are the same: Truman H. Aldrich, Henry F. DeBardeleben, and James W. Sloss, among others; however, the plethora of small independent enterprises, properties of the coal itself, and technological considerations distinguish the Cahaba from other Alabama coal fields. Relatively short-lived, the Cahaba coal-mining operation spanned from discovery in the 1840s through development, boom, and finally bust in the mid-1950s.
 
Day considers the chronological discovery, mapping, mining, and marketing of the field’s coal as well as the issues of convict leasing, town development, welfare capitalism, and unionism, weaving it all into a rich tapestry. At the heart of the story are the diverse people who lived and worked in the district—whether operator or miner, management or labor, union or nonunion, white or black, immigrant or native—who left a legacy for posterity now captured in Diamonds in the Rough. Largely obscured today by pine trees and kudzu, the mining districts of the Cahaba Coal Field forever influenced the lives of countless individuals and families, and ultimately contributed to the whole fabric of the state of Alabama.
 
Turning the Tide Tilford, Earl H; Drake, Jack
2014, 2016-03-15
eBook
Turning the Tide is an institutional and cultural history of a dramatic decade of change at the University of Alabama set against the backdrop of desegregation, the continuing civil rights struggle, ...and the growing antiwar movement. This book documents the period when a handful of University of Alabama student activists formed an alliance with President Frank A. Rose, his staff, and a small group of progressive-minded professors in order to transform the university during a time of social and political turmoil. Together they engaged in a struggle against Governor George Wallace and a state legislature that reflected the worst aspects of racism in a state where the passage of civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965 did little to reduce segregation and much to inflame the fears and passions of many white Alabamians. Earl H. Tilford details the origins of the student movement from within the Student Government Association, whose leaders included Ralph Knowles and future governor Don Siegelman, among others; the participation of key members of “The Machine,” the political faction made up of the powerful fraternities and sororities on campus; and the efforts of more radical non-Greek students like Jack Drake, Ed Still, and Sondra Nesmith. Tilford also details the political maneuverings that drove the cause of social change through multiple administrations at the university. Turning the Tide highlights the contributions of university presidents Frank A. Rose and David Mathews, as well as administrators like the dean of men John L. Blackburn, who supported the student leaders but also encouraged them to work within the system rather than against it. Based on archival research, interviews with many of the principal participants, and the author’s personal experiences, Tilford’s Turning the Tide is a compelling portrait of a university in transition during the turbulence surrounding the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s.
Racial union Novkov, Julie
2008., 20090911, 2008, c2008.
eBook
In November 2001, the state of Alabama opened a referendum on its long-standing constitutional prohibition against interracial marriage. A bill on the state ballot offered the opportunity to relegate ...the state's antimiscegenation law to the dustbin of history. The measure passed, but the margin was alarmingly slim: more than half a million voters, 40 percent of those who went to the polls, voted to retain a racist and constitutionally untenable law. Julie Novkov's Racial Union explains how and why, nearly forty years after the height of the civil rights movement, Alabama struggled to repeal its prohibition against interracial marriage—the last state in the Union to do so. Novkov's compelling history of Alabama's battle over miscegenation shows how the fight shaped the meanings of race and state over ninety years. Novkov's work tells us much about the sometimes parallel, sometimes convergent evolution of our concepts of race and state in the nation as a whole.
Social and political history of the modern South.   This collection of essays on the social and political history of the modern South consider the region’s poor, racial mores and race ...relations, economic opportunity, Protestant activism, political coalitions and interest groups, social justice, and progressive reform. History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie illuminates the dual role of historian and public advocate in modern America. In a time when the nation’s eyes have been focused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita onto the vulnerability and dire condition of poor people in the South, the applicability of research, teaching, and activism for this voiceless element seems all the more relevant.   Responding to the example of Wayne Flynt, whose fierce devotion to his state of Alabama and its region has not blinded his recognition of the inequities and despair that define southern life for so many, the scholars assembled in this work present contributions to the themes Flynt so passionately explored in his own work. Two seasoned observers of southern history and culture—John Shelton Reed and Dan T. Carter—offer assessments of Flynt’s influence on the history profession as a whole and on the region of the South in particular.  
BCALA 2023 Nonfiction Award Winner
The untold story of a dynamic student movement on one of
the nation's most important historically Black campuses
The Tuskegee Institute, one of the nation's most ...important
historically Black colleges, is primarily known for its World War
II pilot training program, a fateful syphilis experiment, and the
work of its founder, Booker T. Washington. In The Tuskegee
Student Uprising , Brian Jones explores an important yet
understudied aspect of the campus's history: its radical student
activism. Drawing upon years of archival research and interviews
with former students, professors, and administrators, Brian Jones
provides an in-depth account of one of the most dynamic student
movements in United States history. The book takes the reader
through Tuskegee students' process of transformation and
intellectual awakening as they stepped off campus to make unique
contributions to southern movements for democracy and civil rights
in the 1960s. In 1966, when one of their classmates was murdered by
a white man in an off-campus incident, Tuskegee students began
organizing under the banner of Black Power and fought for sweeping
curricular and administrative reforms on campus. In 1968, hundreds
of students took the Board of Trustees hostage and presented them
with demands to transform Tuskegee Institute into a "Black
University." This explosive movement was thwarted by the arrival of
the Alabama National Guard and the school's temporary closure, but
the students nevertheless claimed an impressive array of victories.
Jones retells these and other events in relation to the broader
landscape of social movements in those pivotal years, as well as in
connection to the long pattern of dissent and protest within the
Tuskegee Institute community, stretching back to the 19th century.
A compelling work of scholarship, The Tuskegee Student
Uprisin g is a must-read for anyone interested in student
activism and the Black freedom movement.
Sydney Nathans offers a counterpoint to the narrative of the Great Migration, a central theme of black liberation in the twentieth century. He tells the story of enslaved families who became the ...emancipated owners of land they had worked in bondage.
The Guttenberg Isotope Carbon Excursion (GICE), a positive carbon isotope excursion that occurs near the base of the Katian Stage, is thought to be a global event possibly related to Late Ordovician ...cooling. Documenting how much regional and global variability exists in carbon isotopic trends prior to and during the GICE is a critical aspect in understanding the implications of the excursion for interpreting changes in the global carbon cycle, paleoclimate, and chemostratigraphic correlation during the Ordovician. To investigate carbon isotopic trends along the southern margin of the Laurentian carbonate platform during the Late Ordovician, we measured bulk carbonate δ13Ccarb and δ18Ocarb as well as organic carbon δ13Corg values from four locations in Alabama. These sections are excellent study sites because they are well exposed, contain the regionally well-correlated Deicke and Millbrig K-bentonites, and are in a region where δ13C trends have not been studied.
Carbonate δ13Ccarb results from one section (i.e. Fort Payne) in northeastern Alabama record a 1.5‰ positive excursion above the Millbrig K-bentonite. We interpret the 1.5‰ positive excursion as a primary feature and identify it as the GICE. The characteristic GICE excursion is absent in the other study sections and we attribute this absence to the presence of unconformities (either non-depositional or erosional) in these sections. We find neither evidence for sea level control on δ13C trends nor conclusive evidence for δ13CDIC gradients along the southeast margin of Laurentia's epeiric sea. Combined with the proximity to the Iapetus Ocean, these results suggest that carbon isotopic trends in Alabama are a reliable proxy for open ocean conditions. Therefore, despite the absence of GICE excursion in all but one of our study sections, increasing δ13C values in Alabama prior to the GICE provides evidence for a steady 13C enrichment of the global surficial carbon reservoir consistent with a drawdown of atmospheric CO2 during the early Late Ordovician
•The GICE is recorded in northeastern Alabama as a 1.5‰ positive excursion.•Increasing δ13C values supports a 13C enrichment of the global carbon reservoir.•Alabama δ13C trends correlate with compilations of North American chemostratigraphy.•There is no evidence of sea level control on δ13C trends.•There is no evidence of δ13CDIC gradients at the margin of Laurentia's epeiric sea.
Child Abuse in the Deep South Badger, Lee W; Green, Nicholas A; Hartman, Julia A ...
2016, 2015-07-31, Letnik:
2
eBook
The recognition of child abuse as a troubling social and public health problem along with the documentation required by mandatory reporting laws have made possible the epidemiological investigation ...of risk factors association with child abuse. Child Abuse in the Deep South is a study of physical and sexual child abuse designed to measure the incidence of child abuse and neglect in the state of Alabama, identify the characteristics of confirmed abuse, and test the hypothesis that community size is a key, predictive variable in the surveillance, reporting, and caseworker determination of abuse. Child Abuse in the Deep South is based on a comprehensive review of more than seven thousand randomly selected narrative reports from the Alabama Central Registry.
A landmark finding in this study is that different combinations of cultural factors contribute to the physical and sexual abuse of black and white children in rural, small-town, and urban communities. The rates of abuse discovered and reported in small towns are revealed to be materially higher than those in rural or urbanized locations, especially for young white males, and the authors query whether this indicates higher rates of abuse or higher rates of reporting
Child Abuse in the Deep South provides a quantitative benchmark that investigators and policy-makers will find invaluable on the path to defining at-risk populations, effective interventions, and treatments.
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