Author : Jonathan Judaken
Publisher : Susan Schadt Press LLC
Page : 184 pages
File Size : 42,59 MB
Release : 2019-06-17
Category : History
ISBN : 9781733634106
This anthology about Memphis covering 200 years of its history, politics, culture, business, music, food, and art presents essays that break down barriers and help to better understand the community.
Author : Court Carney
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 41,30 MB
Release : 2024-09-17
Category : History
ISBN : 0807183091
Court Carney’s Reckoning with the Devil grapples with the troubled, complex legacy of Nathan Bedford Forrest—a slave trader, Confederate general, and prominent Klansman. More than a century after his death, Forrest’s image continues to resonate with certain groups and bear varied interpretations, reflecting the intricate interplay of history, memory, and a contested past. Carney explores how historical omissions and erasures continually reshape perceptions of Forrest as well as the Civil War. Central to Forrest’s narrative is his involvement in the slave trade, a key to his ascent in the southern social hierarchy. Carney traces Forrest’s trajectory from a prosperous slave trader in Memphis to a politician and eventual military leader in the Confederacy during the Civil War. Forrest’s postwar years reveal his struggle to rebuild his life, leading him to engage in various economic ventures and eventually join the Ku Klux Klan. Carney argues that the slave trade, the Fort Pillow massacre, and his Klan affiliation were the fundamental elements shaping Forrest’s image. Those elements, although steeped in racism and white supremacy, were marked by an ambiguity and malleability that allowed Forrest to attract admirers as well as detractors as his image was memorialized in postwar white southern culture. Carney covers distinct phases of Forrest’s memorialization, from the unveiling of statues in Memphis in 1905 to his representation in literature and media and the controversies surrounding his monuments in the 2010s. That history culminates with the removal of the Memphis statue in 2017, reflecting the evolving societal perspectives on symbols tied to racism. Forrest’s significance lies in his capacity to encompass conflicting narratives—hero and villain, rebel and patriot. Carney contends that understanding Forrest’s legacy is essential for comprehending the intricacies of the southern past and its enduring impact on American society. By exploring the fluidity of Forrest’s image, Carney’s work illuminates the nuanced interplay of history, memory, and the ongoing struggle to reckon with a tumultuous past.
Author : [Business men's club, Memphis, Tenn. Industrial department] [from old catalog]
Publisher :
Page : 48 pages
File Size : 29,7 MB
Release : 1908
Category : Memphis (Tenn.)
ISBN :
Author : Memphis Tenn [Business Men's Club
Publisher : Legare Street Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,63 MB
Release : 2023-07-18
Category :
ISBN : 9781019572078
Take a journey through time to the bustling city of Memphis in 1908 with this illuminating yearbook that captures the essence of the era with vivid descriptions, historical tidbits, and colorful illustrations. From business and industry to culture and entertainment, this charming volume offers a glimpse into a bygone era of American history. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Author : Miriam Thaggert
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 174 pages
File Size : 50,14 MB
Release : 2022-06-28
Category : History
ISBN : 0252053524
Miriam Thaggert illuminates the stories of African American women as passengers and as workers on the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century railroad. As Jim Crow laws became more prevalent and forced Black Americans to "ride Jim Crow" on the rails, the train compartment became a contested space of leisure and work. Riding Jane Crow examines four instances of Black female railroad travel: the travel narratives of Black female intellectuals such as Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell; Black middle-class women who sued to ride in first class "ladies’ cars"; Black women railroad food vendors; and Black maids on Pullman trains. Thaggert argues that the railroad represented a technological advancement that was entwined with African American attempts to secure social progress. Black women's experiences on or near the railroad illustrate how American technological progress has often meant their ejection or displacement; thus, it is the Black woman who most fully measures the success of American freedom and privilege, or "progress," through her travel experiences.
Author : Stephen V. Ash
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 19,79 MB
Release : 2013-10-15
Category : History
ISBN : 0809067986
An unprecedented account of one of the bloodiest and most significant racial clashes in American history In May 1866, just a year after the Civil War ended, Memphis erupted in a three-day spasm of racial violence that saw whites rampage through the city's black neighborhoods. By the time the fires consuming black churches and schools were put out, forty-six freed slaves had been murdered. Congress, furious at this and other evidence of white resistance in the conquered South, launched what is now called Radical Reconstruction, policies to ensure the freedom of the region's four million blacks-and one of the most remarkable experiments in American history. Stephen V. Ash's A Massacre in Memphis is a portrait of a Southern city that opens an entirely new view onto the Civil War, slavery, and its aftermath. A momentous national event, the riot is also remarkable for being "one of the best-documented episodes of the American nineteenth century." Yet Ash is the first to mine the sources available to full effect. Bringing postwar Memphis, Tennessee to vivid life, he takes us among newly arrived Yankees, former Rebels, boisterous Irish immigrants, and striving freed people, and shows how Americans of the period worked, prayed, expressed their politics, and imagined the future. And how they died: Ash's harrowing and profoundly moving present-tense narration of the riot has the immediacy of the best journalism. Told with nuance, grace, and a quiet moral passion, A Massacre in Memphis is Civil War-era history like no other.
Author : Business Men's Club (Memphis, Tenn.)
Publisher :
Page : 80 pages
File Size : 36,66 MB
Release : 1915
Category :
ISBN :
Author : Tara M. Stringfellow
Publisher : Dial Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 29,8 MB
Release : 2022-04-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0593230493
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY • A spellbinding debut novel tracing three generations of a Southern Black family and one daughter’s discovery that she has the power to change her family’s legacy. “A rhapsodic hymn to Black women.”—The New York Times Book Review “I fell in love with this family, from Joan’s fierce heart to her grandmother Hazel’s determined resilience. Tara Stringfellow will be an author to watch for years to come.”—Jacqueline Woodson, New York Times bestselling author of Red at the Bone LONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Boston Globe, NPR, BuzzFeed, Glamour, PopSugar Summer 1995: Ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father’s explosive temper and seek refuge at her mother’s ancestral home in Memphis. This is not the first time violence has altered the course of the family’s trajectory. Half a century earlier, Joan’s grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglass—only to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city. Joan tries to settle into her new life, but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected. As she grows up, Joan finds relief in her artwork, painting portraits of the community in Memphis. One of her subjects is their enigmatic neighbor Miss Dawn, who claims to know something about curses, and whose stories about the past help Joan see how her passion, imagination, and relentless hope are, in fact, the continuation of a long matrilineal tradition. Joan begins to understand that her mother, her mother’s mother, and the mothers before them persevered, made impossible choices, and put their dreams on hold so that her life would not have to be defined by loss and anger—that the sole instrument she needs for healing is her paintbrush. Unfolding over seventy years through a chorus of unforgettable voices that move back and forth in time, Memphis paints an indelible portrait of inheritance, celebrating the full complexity of what we pass down, in a family and as a country: brutality and justice, faith and forgiveness, sacrifice and love.
Author : Wesley Wright
Publisher :
Page : 120 pages
File Size : 42,74 MB
Release : 2012-12-12
Category :
ISBN : 9780615742588
The Memphis Book is a love letter to a city you thought you knew. It is not a history book about rock and roll, the blues, BBQ, Elvis and FedEx. It is about much more. It shows us a city that survived the Yellow Fever (twice), sustains racial discord and hangs in the balance for new development and industry. With a few missteps along the way Memphis can still be a great city, but some proactive measures must be taken that acknowledge our past and present state with objectivity. We have leadership seemingly not well traveled (displayed ad infinitum via TV, editorials and more), provincial and unaware that the world has moved on and we have been passed by other metropolitan areas that are self sustaining, eco-friendly, commercially proactive and globally competitive. This book will highlight what is overlooked and offer remedies to what ails our city on the bluff. An excerpt: As people move in from other areas of the US (large portions in Midtown and in the outlying towns of Bartlett, Collierville and others) ) they bring with them appetites, expectations, established patterns and traditions that Memphis has always been slow to accommodate. Memphis has been slow in change mainly due to demographic restrictions propagated by many sources (media, politicians, etc) that we are not diverse, nor heterogeneous and not cosmopolitan. We need forums of commerce, transportation and education that reflect those of other large bourgeoning metropolitan areas across the US. It is necessary for legislation, leadership, private entities and others to get with the program, coordinate in their own fashion and usher Memphis into the 21st century.
Author : John E. Harkins
Publisher : American Chronicles
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 16,67 MB
Release : 2009
Category : History
ISBN : 9781596297142
Take a break from the bustle of Poplar and Beale and enjoy this easy ride down memory lane, recalling days when downtown gridlock was caused by streetcars and wagons and the Mid-South was ruled by the likes of the Chickasaws, Confederates, King Cotton and Crump. Few know Shelby County and its history like lifelong Memphian John E. Harkins, who expertly chronicles the city's unparalleled heritage and the individuals and groups who have kept its past alive through the decades. Discover the origins of the yellow fever epidemic, Memphis in May, Elmwood Cemetery, the heroes of Shelby County history and so much more in Memphis Chronicles.
