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Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas by Kevin Mulroy (Review)

by James E. Crisp

Texas Tech University Press, 1993 Filled with ironies and incongruities, this book is a tale of epic dimensions about a few hundred rather obscure people—the Seminole maroons. These runaways (and their descendants) from the plantations of the southeastern United States first appear in Kevin Mulroy’s narrative as “slaves,” yet they were armed, relatively autonomous, and »

African Americans at Mars Bluff, South Carolina by Amelia Wallace Vernon (Review)

by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

Louisiana State University Press, 1994 This book, which documents the stories of African Americans in a small South Carolina community, is as valuable as it is charming. Written by retired nurse Amelia Wallace Vernon who was born and raised at Mars Bluff, it relies heavily upon interviews with elderly African American residents who tell their »

Urban Vigilantes in the New South: Tampa, 1882-1936 by Robert P. Ingalls and Lynching in the New South- Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 by W. Fitzhugh Brundage (review)

by Grace Elizabeth Hale

University Press of Florida, 1993; University of Illinois Press, 1993 In 1897 in Alexandria, Virginia, an enterprising tobacco merchant placed an advertisement for his products in the most attention-getting spot in town—the lamppost above the body ofJoseph McCoy, an African American lynched for allegedly raping a white woman. Almost fifty years later in Tampa, Florida, »

Farm Security Administration Photographs of Florida edited by Michael Carlebach and Eugene F. Provenzo Jr. (Review)

by Augustus Burns

University Press of Florida, 1993 In no area of American society did Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal more radically alter the political and economic landscape than in the nation’s farm life. The myriad of programs enacted by the government “represented a new policy of government intervention in the business affairs of individual farmers,” as one observer »

After the Trail of Tears: The Cherokees Struggle for Sovereignty, 1839-1880 by William G. McLoughlin (Review)

by Rowena McClinton Ruff

University of North Carolina Press, 1994 A prolific and gifted writer, the late William G. McLoughlin, who died in 1992, left an invaluable contribution to our understanding of Cherokee culture. His earlier works, include Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789-1839 (1984) and Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (1986). After the Trail of Tears, published posthumously, is »

The Southern Harmony & Musical Companion by William Walker (Review)

by Harry Eskew

University Press of Kentucky, 1993 Early nineteenth-century southerners usually learned choral music by attending singing schools taught by itinerant teachers, a number of whom compiled oblong tunebooks in easy-to-read shape notation. Of the several dozen shape-note tunebooks published before the Civil War, probably none was more popular than Southern Harmony by William Walker of Spartanburg, »

The Airwaves of Zion: Radio and Religion in Appalachia by Howard Dorgan (Review)

by Bennett L. Steelman

University of Tennessee Press, 1993 For much of the mainstream media, religious broadcasting evokes images of Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, or Pat Robertson. Yet, as Howard Dorgan reminds us, an older, still lively folk-oriented tradition survives on Sunday mornings (and occasionally Sunday afternoons and Saturdays) on dozens of AM radio stations across the »

Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta by Tom Rankin (Review)

by Susan Kidd

University Press of Mississippi, 1993 Growing up in Georgia, we attended my father’s “country” church on occasion during the year and always on “First Sunday”—the church’s homecoming that fell on the first Sunday of each August. There were some differences between my father’s church and the “city” church (in a town with a population of »

Yesterday a Total Stranger Called Me White Trash

by Tone Blevins

“But first things first.” Yesterday a total stranger called me white trash. On my quiet suburban street walking my dogs. I guess the fact that it’s a middle-class neighborhood was the reason he left off the “poor.” Before being insulted for my family and my family’s family, I was alternately amused, shocked, and wary. But »

Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson by Richard J. Powell (Review)

by Jessie Poesch

National Museum of American Art, 1991 The last twenty years or so have seen a growing number of substantial studies devoted to African American art, necessary since so much of this work has been virtually ignored in earlier surveys of American art. Richard Powell’s study of the life and work of William H. Johnson is »

The Neugents: “Close to Home” by David M. Spear (Review)

by Pamela Grundy

The Jargon Society, 1993. Eighty-year-old Mamie Neugent leans over her kitchen table, plunging her head of long white hair into a metal bowl of water at the newspaper-covered edge. On the bowl’s rim, above the dampened print, she rests fingers swollen wide from age and use, their shape betraying the same kind of long working »

Masters and Lords: Mid-Nineteenth-Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers by Shearer Davis Bowman (Review)

by Walter Hickel

Oxford University Press, 1993 Few historians have dared to draw comparisons between American and European landed elites and the societies over which they presided. Logistical, linguistic, and conceptual problems abound; voluminous and complex historiographies have to be mastered. Shearer Davis Bowman courageously bridges the Atlantic divide in historical studies by pursuing two objectives in this »