Stephen Doster – författare

Cumberland Island is the southernmost and largest barrier island on the Georgia coast, with a history that predates the arrival of Western civilization in the Americas. Currently, it has few full- time residents, but its beauty brings thousands of visitors each year from around the world. Day hikers and overnight campers bask in Cumberland’s tranquility and marvel at its natural treasures, walking beneath canopies of live oak trees draped in Spanish moss.Comprising three major ecosystem regions, Cumberland is home to large areas of salt marshes and a dense maritime forest, but its most famous ecosystem is its beach, which stretches over seventeen miles. The island is also home to many native and nonnative species, such as white-tailed deer, turkey, feral hogs and horses, wild boar, nine-banded armadillos, and American alligators, as well as many species of birds.Aside from wild horses and the remains of Thomas M. Carnegie’s estate, most visitors are unaware of the details of the island’s varied history. Cumberland’s past tells a rich and complex story, one of conquest by indigenous tribes, French and Spanish explorers, English settlers, cotton planters, and occupation by British and Union naval forces.Cumberland Island: Footsteps in Time is the first book about the island that offers readers a complete history of the island combined with stunning photography and historical images. Richly illustrated with more than 250 color and black-and-white photographs, it is a comprehensive history, from native occupation to the present. Author Stephen Doster takes the reader on a chronological journey, outlining the key events and influential inhabitants that have left their mark on this stretch of Georgia’s coast.Each chapter focuses on a specific era: indigenous occupation; Spanish occupation; English occupation; the colonial period and War of 1812; the planter era and Civil War; the Gilded Age; north-end settlements and hotels; and the creation of a protected national seashore.

In Palms, Priests, and Pirates: The Epic History of Amelia Island, Florida, Stephen Doster offers the first comprehensive examination of the rich and captivating history of this unique barrier island off the northeast coast of Florida. Drawing on extensive research and a deep personal connection to the region, Doster has chronicled Amelia Island’s remarkable story—from its initial Native American settlement, through the Spanish colonial era and the founding of Fernandina, to the island’s tumultuous periods of pirate raids, American “patriot” invasions, Civil War upheaval, and devastating yellow fever outbreaks.By weaving together these diverse threads of Amelia Island’s past, with spectacular images by acclaimed photographer Benjamin Galland, Doster aims to offer readers an unparalleled understanding of the island’s pivotal role in the broader history of Florida and the early formation of the United States. From the cultural clashes between Indigenous populations and European colonizers to the strategic military significance of this Atlantic coastal outpost, Doster’s book provides a fresh and illuminating perspective on an often-overlooked corner of American history. Ultimately, Palms, Priests, and Pirates celebrates the remarkable resilience and enduring spirit of Amelia Island, a place whose dramatic saga from its earliest occupation to the present has remained largely untold—until now.

Mile for mile, St. Simons Island—one of Georgia’s Golden Isles—boasts as much history as any community on the East Coast. Originally an Indian hunting ground, it has been occupied or invaded by Spanish missionaries, British settlers, planters and their slaves, the Union army, the United States Navy, and developers and tourists. The seventeen narratives in Voices from St. Simons represent an “oral archaeological dig,” writes editor Stephen Doster. Many of those interviewed are descendants of masters and slaves. Surprisingly, they speak of racial issues with greater compassion than bitterness. But the volume encompasses much more than that. Here, the people of the Golden Isles recall waving farewell to Paul Redfern when his airplane took off from a sandy beach on his ill-fated attempt to outdo Charles Lindbergh. They describe jumping into a fast boat and riding to the rescue of merchant sailors torpedoed by a German U-boat. They tell of playing childhood sports—and dominating the competition—alongside future NFL legend Jim Brown, who was raised on St. Simons. They remember piloting the ship that, due to a helmsman’s error, hit the Sidney Lanier Bridge, causing one of the worst such disasters in American history. “In some respects, the narratives reveal a plot of ground that time forgot,” Doster writes. “They present the reflections of a cross-section of ordinary people who lived during extraordinary times.”Stephen Doster was born in 1959 in Kingston-Upon-Thames, England, and moved with his parents and four siblings to St. Simons Island, Georgia, in the early 1960s. His ties to the island date to the early 1900s, when his father’s family vacationed there before the construction of a mainland causeway. His grandparents permanently moved to St. Simons in the 1940s, building on the grounds where a Spanish mission once stood. Growing up on the island, Doster remembers the place as a “Mayberry with tides,” where he and neighborhood kids played baseball on the beach, sneaked into a resort hotel pool after football practices, and explored the island’s woods and tidal creeks. His early recollections include seeing navy hurricane hunters fly over the Atlantic in search of storms before the days of satellites, viewing open Indian graves during an archaeological dig, evacuating the island at Hurricane Dora’s approach, and returning to the destruction left in its wake. After graduating from the University of Georgia with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in 1983, Doster headed to Nashville, Tennessee where he has lived and worked since. Though he has been a resident of Nashville for over 20 years, St. Simons has always been close to his heart. In 2002, John F. Blair published his debut novel, Lord Baltimore, about a young man’s journey on the Georgia coast between Savannah and St. Simons. Voices from St. Simons is essentially Doster’s effort to preserve the legacy of the area. For decades, he heard “local residents utter the famous sentiment that someone should have recorded so-and-so’s recollections before she died.” Reading the obituary of a former elementary school teacher inspired him to set up face-to-face and telephone interviews that began his oral archaeological dig. Doster works at Vanderbilt University and lives in Nashville with his wife, Anne.

Mile for mile, St. Simons Island—one of Georgia’s Golden Isles—boasts as much history as any community on the East Coast. Originally an Indian hunting ground, it has been occupied or invaded by Spanish missionaries, British settlers, planters and their slaves, the Union army, the United States Navy, and developers and tourists. The seventeen narratives in Voices from St. Simons represent an “oral archaeological dig,” writes editor Stephen Doster. Many of those interviewed are descendants of masters and slaves. Surprisingly, they speak of racial issues with greater compassion than bitterness. But the volume encompasses much more than that. Here, the people of the Golden Isles recall waving farewell to Paul Redfern when his airplane took off from a sandy beach on his ill-fated attempt to outdo Charles Lindbergh. They describe jumping into a fast boat and riding to the rescue of merchant sailors torpedoed by a German U-boat. They tell of playing childhood sports—and dominating the competition—alongside future NFL legend Jim Brown, who was raised on St. Simons. They remember piloting the ship that, due to a helmsman’s error, hit the Sidney Lanier Bridge, causing one of the worst such disasters in American history. “In some respects, the narratives reveal a plot of ground that time forgot,” Doster writes. “They present the reflections of a cross-section of ordinary people who lived during extraordinary times.”

Stephen Doster was born in 1959 in Kingston-Upon-Thames, England, and moved with his parents and four siblings to St. Simons Island, Georgia, in the early 1960s. His ties to the island date to the early 1900s, when his father’s family vacationed there before the construction of a mainland causeway. His grandparents permanently moved to St. Simons in the 1940s, building on the grounds where a Spanish mission once stood. Growing up on the island, Doster remembers the place as a “Mayberry with tides,” where he and neighborhood kids played baseball on the beach, sneaked into a resort hotel pool after football practices, and explored the island’s woods and tidal creeks. His early recollections include seeing navy hurricane hunters fly over the Atlantic in search of storms before the days of satellites, viewing open Indian graves during an archaeological dig, evacuating the island at Hurricane Dora’s approach, and returning to the destruction left in its wake. After graduating from the University of Georgia with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in 1983, Doster headed to Nashville, Tennessee where he has lived and worked since. Though he has been a resident of Nashville for over 20 years, St. Simons has always been close to his heart. In 2002, John F. Blair published his debut novel, Lord Baltimore, about a young man’s journey on the Georgia coast between Savannah and St. Simons. Voices from St. Simons is essentially Doster’s effort to preserve the legacy of the area. For decades, he heard “local residents utter the famous sentiment that someone should have recorded so-and-so’s recollections before she died.” Reading the obituary of a former elementary school teacher inspired him to set up face-to-face and telephone interviews that began his oral archaeological dig. Doster works at Vanderbilt University and lives in Nashville with his wife, Anne.

Drawing on the voices of residents from across the state, this oral history reflects on life in Georgia as it evolved throughout the twentieth century. Author Stephen Doster grew up on St. Simons Island, one of Georgia’s Golden Isles. He began interviewing fellow island residents and captured their personal histories in the book Voices from St. Simons. Now, Doster has expanded the scope of his work to encompass the entire state of Georgia. In Georgia Witness, Doster records the stories of residents from all across the state, capturing the unique life and history of its many communities. Here are the voices of influential figures and ordinary residents, individuals of varying backgrounds and ethnicities, all of whom remember and contribute to the legacy and lifeblood of the peach state.

In this WWII memoir, a woman recounts her struggle to survive and serve her country in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Marjorie Terry Smith was a teenage girl living in the suburbs of London when the Second World War began. Before it was over, her family would be bombed out of three homes, her fiancé would be killed fighting Rommel’s forces in North Africa, and she would join the WAAF. Stationed in the operations rooms on seven different Royal Air Force bases, she encountered RAF legends Douglas Bader and Leonard Cheshire, as well as the indomitable Winston Churchill. In Her Finest Hour, Smith recounts a youth in England leading up to the war, her six years of service, and life in a recovering England, in which she worked for the British Overseas Airways Corporation as well as the BBC. Vividly recalling how the war changed her life and the world around her, Smith offers a rare insider’s view of WWII military operations from a woman’s perspective, as told to her son, Stephen Doster.

A Black man wrongly convicted of murder attempts to rebuild his life and bring the real killer to justice, in this historical novel based on a true story. In the summer of 1932, Ben Jordan was wrongfully accused of killing a white pastor in Georgia. After a hasty trial, he was sentenced to a life of grueling labor on a chain gang and abuse at the hands of brutal wardens. But now, with his forty-year prison sentence completed, Ben is finally returning home. As he struggles to understand the profound changes the world has undergone, some things remain painfully the same—including the hateful animosity towards Black people and the fact that the real murderer is still living the life of a genteel southerner. Working to rebuild his life and see justice served, Ben faces one confrontation after another—with friend, foe, and a daughter who thinks he is dead. In this novel based on a real Depression Era murder case, author and Georgia historian Stephen Doster presents a vividly accurate depiction of Jim Crow’s long and painful legacy.