Voices from Alabama


Book Description

A mosaic constructed by Alabamians remembering their past. Lofton traveled the length and breadth of the state listening as miners, mill workers, bank executives, homemakers, sharecroppers, businessmen, and college presidents told about their lives in the 1920s, the Great Depression, and World War II.




Voices of the Enslaved


Book Description

In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men--like the testimony of free colonists--was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded. Focusing on four especially dramatic court cases, Voices of the Enslaved draws us into Louisiana's courtrooms, prisons, courtyards, plantations, bayous, and convents to understand how the enslaved viewed and experienced their worlds. As they testified, these individuals charted their movement between West African, indigenous, and colonial cultures; they pronounced their moral and religious values; and they registered their responses to labor, to violence, and, above all, to the intimate romantic and familial bonds they sought to create and protect. Their words--punctuated by the cadences of Creole and rich with metaphor--produced riveting autobiographical narratives as they veered from the questions posed by interrogators. Carefully assessing what we can discover, what we might guess, and what has been lost forever, Sophie White offers both a richly textured account of slavery in French Louisiana and a powerful meditation on the limits and possibilities of the archive.




Twenty-five Years in the Black Belt


Book Description




Speaking of Alabama


Book Description

Informative and entertaining essays on the accents, dialects, and speech patterns particular to Alabama Thomas E. Nunnally’s fascinating volume presents essays by linguists who examine with affection and curiosity the speech varieties occurring both past and present across Alabama. Taken together, the accounts in this volume offer an engaging view of the major features that characterize Alabama’s unique brand of southern English. Written in an accessible manner for general readers and scholars alike, Speaking of Alabama includes such subjects as the special linguistic features of the Southern drawl, the “phonetic divide” between north and south Alabama, “code-switching” by African American speakers in Alabama, pejorative attitudes by Alabama speakers toward their own native speech, the influence of foreign languages on Alabama speech to the vibrant history and continuing influence of non-English languages in the state, as well as ongoing changes in Alabama’s dialects. Adding to these studies is a foreword by Walt Wolfram and an afterword by Michael B. Montgomery, both renowned experts in southern English, which place both the methodologies and the findings of the volume into their larger contexts and point researchers to needed work ahead in Alabama, the South, and beyond. The volume also contains a number of useful appendices, including a guide to the sounds of Southern English, a glossary of linguistic terms, and online sources for further study. Language, as presented in this collection, is never abstract but always examined in the context of its speakers’ day-to-day lives, the driving force for their communication needs and choices. Whether specialist or general reader, Alabamian or non-Alabamian, all readers will come away from these accounts with a deepened understanding of how language functions between individuals, within communities, and across regions, and will gain a new respect for the driving forces behind language variation and language change.




Singing Through Change


Book Description

A BOOK FOR ALL WOMEN WHO LOVE TO SING AND ARE STRUGGLING WITH CHANGESinging Through Changes , Women's Voices in Midlife, Menopause and Beyond is a must read for anyone who is a singer, voice teacher , singing specialist, choral director, or medical professional. "Readers will find a bounty of information which, for the first time, summarizes current research on adult female voice change, while allowing a glimpse into the lives of women who have faced the results of adult female voice change. Written in an accessible style, the book provides case studies which enable a better understanding of adult female voice change and its effects physically, vocally, emotionally, psychologically and socially. This book will be an invaluable resource to singers, voice teachers, choral directors and any woman who loves to sing!" -- Lynne Gackle, Ph.D., Baylor University, President, ACDA, Author, Finding Ophelia's Voice, Opening Ophelia's Heart: Nurturing the Adolescent Female Voice"A thorough, thoughtful, and compassionate look into the complexities surrounding the singing voice for women during midlife and the menopausal transition, interwoven with stories that inform, encourage and inspire us to keep singing. This will no doubt be a tremendous resource for the singing and medical communities for years to come." -- Lori L. Sonnenberg, Clinical Speech Pathologist, Singing Voice Specialist, Soprano - Sonnenberg Voice "This book is a beacon of light for all women who sing and for whom singing is important. It provides information, objective data, resources, suggestions, and many individual anecdotes from women who have openly shared their experiences singing while going through perimenopause, menopause and postmenopause. It fills a gaping hole in our knowledge and opens a path to new dialog on this vital topic. Every expert in all the related voice disciplines needs to know what is in this excellent book." -- Jeanie LoVetri, Director, The Voice Workshop, New York, NY NANCY BOS, JOANNE BOZEMAN, AND CATE FRAZIER-NEELY are known experts in the field of voice. Their cumulative teaching and writing careers of over a century form a broad scope of experience in voice health and pedagogy. Singing Through Change is the culmination of over two years of joint research of female midlife singing voice.www.singingthroughchange.com




Waste


Book Description

The MacArthur grant–winning environmental justice activist’s riveting memoir of a life fighting for a cleaner future for America’s most vulnerable A Smithsonian Magazine Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020 Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur “genius,” grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowers’s life’s work—a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this “powerful and moving book” (Booklist), she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West. In this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards—not only those of poor minorities.




Opening the Doors


Book Description

Opening the Doors is a wide-ranging account of the University of Alabama’s 1956 and 1963 desegregation attempts, as well as the little-known story of Tuscaloosa, Alabama’s, own civil rights movement. Whereas E. Culpepper Clark’s The Schoolhouse Door remains the standard history of the University of Alabama’s desegregation, in Opening the Doors B. J. Hollars focuses on Tuscaloosa’s purposeful divide between “town” and “gown,” providing a new contextual framework for this landmark period in civil rights history. The image of George Wallace’s stand in the schoolhouse door has long burned in American consciousness; however, just as interesting are the circumstances that led him there in the first place, a process that proved successful due to the concerted efforts of dedicated student leaders, a progressive university president, a steadfast administration, and secret negotiations between the U.S. Justice Department, the White House, and Alabama’s stubborn governor. In the months directly following Governor Wallace’s infamous stand, Tuscaloosa became home to a leader of a very different kind: twenty-eight-year-old African American reverend T. Y. Rogers, an up-and-comer in the civil rights movement, as well as the protégé of Martin Luther King Jr. After taking a post at Tuscaloosa’s First African Baptist Church, Rogers began laying the groundwork for the city’s own civil rights movement. In the summer of 1964, the struggle for equality in Tuscaloosa resulted in the integration of the city’s public facilities, a march on the county courthouse, a bloody battle between police and protesters, confrontations with the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a bus boycott, and the near-accidental-lynching of movie star Jack Palance. Relying heavily on new firsthand accounts and personal interviews, newspapers, previously classified documents, and archival research, Hollars’s in-depth reporting reveals the courage and conviction of a town, its university, and the people who call it home.




Politics and Power in a Slave Society


Book Description

More than three decades after its initial publication, J. Mills Thornton's Politics and Power in a Slave Society remains the definitive study of political culture in antebellum Alabama. Controversial when it first appeared, the book argues against a view of prewar Alabama as an aristocratic society governed by a planter elite. Instead, Thornton claims that Alabama was an aggressively democratic state, and that this very egalitarianism set the stage for secession. White Alabamians had first-hand experiences with slavery, and these encounters warned them to guard against the imposition of economic or social reforms that might limit their equality. Playing upon their fears, the leaders of the southern rights movement warned that national consolidation presented the danger that fanatic northern reformers would force alien values upon Alabama and its residents. These threats gained traction when national reforms of the 1850s gave state government a more active role in the everyday life of Alabama citizens; and ambitious young politicians were able to carry the state into secession in 1861. Politics and Power in a Slave Society continues to inspire scholars by challenging one of the fundamental articles of the American creed: that democracy intrinsically produces good. Contrary to our conventional wisdom, slavery was not an un-American institution, but rather coexisted with and supported the democratic beliefs of white Alabama.




Voices from Company D


Book Description

An unprecedented contribution to the field of Civil War history, Voices from Company D collects writings from the diaries of eight members of the Greensboro Guards, Fifth Alabama Infantry Regiment. Woven into a single chronological narrative, these writings provide a unique perspective not only on many of the war's battles and campaigns but also on aspects of life and culture in the nineteenth-century South, including friendship and kinship, duty and honor, and commitment and sacrifice. As part of the Army of Northern Virginia, the Guards marched under Stonewall Jackson and Jubal Early and fought throughout the war in such battles as Seven Pines, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania, and finally Petersburg, where all but one of the Guards were captured. Readers will find singular descriptions of the towns and countryside the men saw, of battlefields and camps, of civilians caught in the path of the war. The diarists also commented on such topics as politics, religion, the home front, the presence of slaves alongside the troops, prices and inflation, troop morale, and leisure activities from reading to gambling. While the diaries impart a wealth of information about critical military engagements, they also convey the full range of the wartime experience: from terror to boredom, pride to regret, victory to defeat.




Voices of Campus Sexual Violence Activists


Book Description

The stories and strategies of student activists fighting against sexual violence in the #MeToo era. The global #MeToo movement that began in 2017 sparked an explosion of activism to address systemic problems of discrimination, harassment, and sexual violence. In Voices of Campus Sexual Violence Activists, Ana M. Martínez-Alemán and Susan B. Marine share the important stories of college student activists fighting sexual violence. Based on research and interviews, this timely book provides a close examination of the promise and perils of activism on today's college campuses. Martínez-Alemán and Marine map the terrain of student activists whose work to influence institutional, state, and federal policy represents a testament to the rich legacies of 1960s activism and signals a new wave of social media–centered work in the #MeToo era. These students share their strategies for addressing sexual violence on their campuses and organizing and rallying other students to their work. They describe their motivations, their experiences dealing with the police and campus administrations, and their goals as well as the effects of activism on their mental health and physical well-being. Gen Z students describe how they use collective mobilization and activism through social media in addition to long-established campus organizing techniques in the service of eradicating sexual violence on campus. Unlike other explorations of the #MeToo movement, this book highlights the experiences of prominent campus activists and their allies and the policy and practice implications of their movements for campus leaders, including senior student affairs administrators and faculty. Martínez-Alemán and Marine conclude with recommendations for institutional decision-making and practices that incorporate the experiences and opinions of student activists. Voices of Campus Sexual Violence Activists calls for a cultural reset in institutional cultures to end sexual violence on campuses.