The Federal Road Through Georgia, the Creek Nation, and Alabama, 1806–1836


Book Description

From postal horse path to military road and thoroughfare for pioneers and travellers, the Federal Road was key to the development of the region and the growth of cities. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




The Mississippi Encyclopedia


Book Description

Recipient of the 2018 Special Achievement Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters and Recipient of a 2018 Heritage Award for Education from the Mississippi Heritage Trust The perfect book for every Mississippian who cares about the state, this is a mammoth collaboration in which thirty subject editors suggested topics, over seven hundred scholars wrote entries, and countless individuals made suggestions. The volume will appeal to anyone who wants to know more about Mississippi and the people who call it home. The book will be especially helpful to students, teachers, and scholars researching, writing about, or otherwise discovering the state, past and present. The volume contains entries on every county, every governor, and numerous musicians, writers, artists, and activists. Each entry provides an authoritative but accessible introduction to the topic discussed. The Mississippi Encyclopedia also features long essays on agriculture, archaeology, the civil rights movement, the Civil War, drama, education, the environment, ethnicity, fiction, folklife, foodways, geography, industry and industrial workers, law, medicine, music, myths and representations, Native Americans, nonfiction, poetry, politics and government, the press, religion, social and economic history, sports, and visual art. It includes solid, clear information in a single volume, offering with clarity and scholarship a breadth of topics unavailable anywhere else. This book also includes many surprises readers can only find by browsing.




The Payne-Butrick Papers, Volumes 4, 5, 6


Book Description

This landmark two-volume set is the richest and most important extant collection of information about traditional Cherokee culture. Because many of the Cherokees own records were lost during their forced removal to the west, the Payne-Butrick Papers are the most detailed written source about the Cherokee Nation during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the 1830s John Howard Payne, a respected author, actor, and playwright, and Daniel S. Butrick, an American Board missionary, hastened to gather information on Cherokee life and history, fearing that the cultural knowledge would be lost forever. Butrick, who was conversant with the Cherokees culture and language after having spent decades among them, recorded what elderly Cherokees had to say about their lives. The collection also contains much of the Cherokee leaders correspondence, which had been given to Payne for safekeeping. This amazing repository of information covers nearly all aspects of traditional Cherokee culture and history, including politics, myths, early and later religious beliefs, rituals, marriage customs, ball play, language, dances, and attitudes toward children. It will inform our understanding and appreciation of the history and enduring legacy of the Cherokees.




John Howard Payne Papers, 3-volume Set


Book Description

This collection of John Howard Payne’s Papers is a significant recovery of firsthand political and social histories of Indigenous cultures, particularly the Cherokees, a southeastern tribe, whose ancestral lands included parts of the present-day states of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina. The papers enable readers to understand how the Cherokees and many other American Indians endured and persevered as they encountered forced removal in the 1830s due to the Indian Removal Act. The papers are also a source of cultural revitalization, elucidating the work of Sequoyah, a Cherokee genius, who in 1821 introduced his syllabary, a phonemic system with eighty-five symbols. John Howard Payne (1791–1852), an American actor, poet, and playwright, was so taken by the Cherokees’ story that he lobbied Congress to forgo their removal and wrote articles in contemporary newspapers supporting Cherokees. In 1835 Payne journeyed to the Cherokee Nation and met with John Ross, Cherokee chief from 1828 to 1866, who found in Payne a colleague to assist him and other Cherokees with their cause against removal and in preserving their ancient social, spiritual, and political heritages. Payne gathered and recorded correspondence between Cherokees such as Ross, who was fluent in English, and U.S. officials. These papers include multiple correspondences, ratified and unratified treaties, contemporary newspaper articles, and resolutions sent to Congress appealing for justice for the Cherokees. Payne also assembled letters and writings by New England Congregationalist missionaries who resided in mission stations throughout the Cherokee Nation. Available in print for the first time, this remarkable repository of information provides a fuller understanding of the political climates Cherokees encountered throughout the early to mid-nineteenth century.




Georgia's Frontier Women


Book Description

Ranging from Georgia's founding in the 1730s until the American Revolution in the 1770s, Georgia's Frontier Women explores women's changing roles amid the developing demographic, economic, and social circumstances of the colony's settling. Georgia was launched as a unique experiment on the borderlands of the British Atlantic world. Its female population was far more diverse than any in nearby colonies at comparable times in their formation. Ben Marsh tells a complex story of narrowing opportunities for Georgia's women as the colony evolved from uncertainty toward stability in the face of sporadic warfare, changes in government, land speculation, and the arrival of slaves and immigrants in growing numbers. Marsh looks at the experiences of white, black, and Native American women-old and young, married and single, working in and out of the home. Mary Musgrove, who played a crucial role in mediating colonist-Creek relations, and Marie Camuse, a leading figure in Georgia's early silk industry, are among the figures whose life stories Marsh draws on to illustrate how some frontier women broke down economic barriers and wielded authority in exceptional ways. Marsh also looks at how basic assumptions about courtship, marriage, and family varied over time. To early settlers, for example, the search for stability could take them across race, class, or community lines in search of a suitable partner. This would change as emerging elites enforced the regulation of traditional social norms and as white relationships with blacks and Native Americans became more exploitive and adversarial. Many of the qualities that earlier had distinguished Georgia from other southern colonies faded away.







Zamumo's Gifts


Book Description

In 1540, Zamumo, the chief of the Altamahas in central Georgia, exchanged gifts with the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto. With these gifts began two centuries of exchanges that bound American Indians and the Spanish, English, and French who colonized the region. Whether they gave gifts for diplomacy or traded commodities for profit, Natives and newcomers alike used the exchange of goods such as cloth, deerskin, muskets, and sometimes people as a way of securing their influence. Gifts and trade enabled early colonies to survive and later colonies to prosper. Conversely, they upset the social balance of chiefdoms like Zamumo's and promoted the rise of new and powerful Indian confederacies like the Creeks and the Choctaws. Drawing on archaeological studies, colonial documents from three empires, and Native oral histories, Joseph M. Hall, Jr., offers fresh insights into broad segments of southeastern colonial history, including the success of Florida's Franciscan missionaries before 1640 and the impact of the Indian slave trade on French Louisiana after 1699. He also shows how gifts and trade shaped the Yamasee War, which pitted a number of southeastern tribes against English South Carolina in 1715-17. The exchanges at the heart of Zamumo's Gifts highlight how the history of Europeans and Native Americans cannot be understood without each other.




Green Gold


Book Description

Green Gold is a thorough and valuable compilation of information on Alabama’s timber and forest products industry, the largest manufacturing industry in the sta Alabama has the third-largest commercial forest in the nation, after only Georgia and Oregon. Fully two-thirds of the state’s land supports the growth of over fifteen billion trees on twenty-two million acres, which explains why Alabama looks entirely green from space. Green Gold presents the story of human use of and impact on Alabama’s forests from pioneer days to the present, as James E. Fickle chronicles the history of the industry from unbridled greed and exploitation through virtual abandonment to revival, restoration, and enlightened stewardship. As the state’s largest manufacturing industry, forest products have traditionally included naval stores such as tar, pitch, and turpentine, especially in the southern longleaf stands; sawmill lumber, both hardwood and pine; and pulp and paper milling. Green Gold documents all aspects of the industry, including the advent of “scientific forestry” and the development of reforestation practices with sustained yields. Also addressed are the historical impacts of Native Americans and of early settlers who used axes, saws, and water- and steam-powered sawmills to clear and utilize forests. Along with an account of railroad logging and the big mills of the lumber bonanza days of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the book also chronicles the arrival of professional foresters to the state, who began to deal with the devastating legacy of “cut out and get out” logging and to fight the perennial curse of woods arson. Finally, Green Gold examines the rise of the tree farm movement, the rebirth of large-scale lumbering, the advent of modern environmental concerns, and the movement toward the “Fourth Forest” in Alabama.




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