Brown Thrasher Books – serie

Since it first appeared in 1956, Mrs. Vanstory's rich narrative of the barrier islands from Ossabaw to Cumberland—and the mainland towns along the way—has become the standard popular history of Georgia's golden coast.Thoroughly revised and with over forty new illustrations, this edition traces the crucial and colorful role these islands have played from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. Home, at one time or another, to the American Indians, the French, the Spanish, and the English; to buccaneers, friars, and priests; to Puritans and Scottish Highlanders; to slave traders, planters, soldiers, statesmen, and millionaires, these islands are as rich in history as they are in natural beauty.Georgia's Land of the Golden Isles now takes the reader through the years from General James Oglethorpe to President Jimmy Carter, unfolding the stories of the lives that have touched, or been touched by, the golden isles of Georgia.

Originally published in 1863, out-of-print and unavailable for almost a century, Frances Anne Kemble's Journal has long been recognized by historians as unique in the literature of American slavery and invaluable for obtaining a clear view of the "peculiar institution" and of life in the antebellum South.Fanny Kemble was one of the leading lights of the English stage in the nineteenth century. During a tour of America in the 1830s she met and married a wealthy Philadelphian, Pierce Butler, part of whose fortune derived from his family's vast cotton and rice plantation on the Sea Islands of Georgia. After their marriage she spent several months living on the plantation. Profoundly shocked by what she saw, she recorded her observations of plantation life in a series of journal entries written as letters to a friend. But she never sent the letters, and not until the Civil War was on and Fanny was divorced from Pierce Butler and living in England were they published.This Brown Thrasher edition incorporates the valuable introduction written by John A. Scott for the 1961 edition published by Alfred A. Knopf, together with the editor's appendices to that edition. It provides the modern reader with the historical and biographical background to move freely and with ease in Mrs. Kemble's world.

Throughout her life, Catharine Littlefield Greene struggled to clear her own place as an individual within a society that was itself fighting for its place as an independent nation. In Caty, John and Janet Stegeman follow the life of a woman whose spirit and determination led her far beyond the domestic concerns of most women of her day.The wife of Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene, Caty was a close friend of George and Martha Washington, a business partner of Eli Whitney, and mistress of two Georgia plantations. As a voracious reader who preferred the company of men to that of women, Caty courted gossip and near scandal as she, unlike most of the women of her time, maintained friendships with men, most of whom were friends of her husband. Indeed, Nathanael Greene encouraged Caty to join in the political discussions he and his friends enjoyed, and at such gatherings Caty found herself at the center of the tumultuous activity of the Revolution.Caty also came to know firsthand the effects of the political discussions. As a devoted wife and the mother of five children, Caty faced the challenges of trying to maintain a semblance of normal family life in the cruel circumstances of war, of shouldering in the absence of her husband the financial responsibilities and burdens usually reserved for men.Although many of Caty’s concerns reflected those of other women of her time, her story, Harvey Jackson suggests in his forward, has importance even beyond the study of women in the years surrounding the Revolution. Caty witnessed and at times participated in some of the most crucial events in the history of the new nation, and her story adds an additional degree of definition to our knowledge of our national origins.

Set against the background of the antebellum slave trade, Drums and Shadows traces the persistence of African heritage in the culture of blacks living on the Georgia coast in the 1930s. In the later years of the depression, members of the Georgia Writers' Project visited and interviewed blacks, many of whose grandparents, smuggled into slavery as late as 1858, had passed on the customs and beliefs of their African past. Seeking evidence of African traditions, the project's workers questioned the blacks about conjure—the curses and potions responsible for turns of luck, illnesses, and even death—about dreams that often determine the course of daily life, and about spirits and other apparitions as real as walking, breathing people.

For the first time since the early years of the American republic, the period following emancipation held out the promise of a true colorblind democracy. The freed slaves hoped for forty acres and a mule by which they could work as small farmers, erect houses, establish families, and live free from the gaze of planter and overseer. In this first light of freedom, blacks needed help to learn how to function in a democracy and how to protect themselves from whites eager to find a new way to exploit their labor. In Freedom's Shore, Russell Duncan tells of the efforts of Tunis Campbell, a black carpetbagger and fellow abolitionist and friend of Frederick Douglass, to lift his race to equal participation in American society. Duncan focuses on Campbell's determined work to push radical reforms, draft a new constitution for Georgia, and pass laws designed to ensure equality for all citizens of the state. Campbell made significant contributions at the state level, but his true importance was in his home district of Liberty and McIntosh counties on the Georgia coast. There he forged the black majority into a powerful political machine that controlled county elections for years. He successfully protected black rights, always promoting freedom-in-fact, not merely freedom-by-law. Yet, as many black politicians throughout the South were discovering, radical strength at the local level was insufficient to stop the growing strength of reactionary white politics at the state level. After years of struggle, Campbell was finally defeated by the white Democrats. Charged with political corruption, he was removed from his state and local political offices; at the age of sixty-four, over the protests of President Grant among others, Campbell was sentenced to Georgia's hire-out convict labor program. The black machine in McIntosh County, however, was not destroyed in Campbell's defeat, but instead remained an active force in county politics for forty years, returning a black legislator to the General Assembly in every election, except for the decade of the 1890s, until 1907.Presenting the beginnings of the battle for civil rights in the South, Freedom's Shore tells of the tenacity and achievements of one black political figure, of the hopes and dreams of a legally free people amid the political and social realities of Reconstruction Georgia.

Growing up in the rural South, Bessie Jones sang her way through long hours of field work and child tending, entertaining her young companions with chants and riddles or joining them for a rousing evening of ring dances and singing plays. These songs and games, recorded in Step It Down by folklorist Bess Lomax Hawes, capture the shape and color of the crowded, impoverished, life-demanding, and life-loving days of the black family of sixty years ago, revealing the strength and vitality of African and slave traditions in black American life.The power of music and motion to transform a world of scarcity and hardship into one of laughter and joy echoes throughout Bessie Jones's words:"And the other childrens and I would go in the bottom and have a frolic, instead of going to bed. I was just up for that singing, and I remembered they used to say . . . 'Come on, Lizzie!' and we'd go down a way and we'd have a dance. Oh it was pretty. . . . You know, it was just as good as the blues—better, better in a way. When the old folks would go to work or go off or something, we'd put on them long dresses and, boy, we'd have a time."Step It Down weaves together the lyrics, music, and description of traditional Afro-American children's songs as well as Jones's comments on their meaning and "feel." Whether reciting "Tom, Tom, Greedy Gut" or demonstrating the more complex steps of "Ranky Tank" and "Buzzard's Lope," Bessie Jones always viewed the amusements of the young as preparation for adult roles and relationships, and as a teacher, she developed her own philosophy of how a black child is socialized into the larger community. Grounded in the values of black society, her songs taught children about cooperative interaction and mutual concern, not about competition and individual achievement, showing them how to create fun out of nothing more than their hands, feet, voices, and imaginations.

Bawdy and sometimes horrifying, hilarious on the way to being tragic, Raymond Andrews's Muskhogean County novels tell of black life in the Deep South from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the 1960s, from the days of mules and white men with bullwhips to the moment when the pendulum began to swing.This second novel in the trilogy begins in 1906, on the day when a beautiful "acorn-brown" woman arrives in the small North Georgia community of Appalachee asking directions to "the house of the richest white man living in this heah town." Forty years, one hundred acres, four children, numerous grandchildren, and many legends later, Rosiebelle Lee is on her deathbed—and ready to reveal her secrets.

Set in the mysterious shadowed city of New Orleans in the years immediately following the Louisiana Purchase, George Washington Cable's classic novel of the Old South traces the declining fortunes of a family and their society as they struggle with long-standing divisions of race and class and with the ideals of democracy and liberty imposed by their new American rulers. The hero of the novel, Joseph Frowenfeld, is a young scientist who moves to Louisiana to make his fortune. An outsider, Frowenfeld learns the ways of the Creoles and of the few Americans in the city through his acquaintance with the proud Grandissime family. He comes to know Honore Grandissime, the young leader of the clan, as well as his half-brother, a prosperous free man of color also named Honore, who has the power to rescue his relations from financial ruin.

Creating a sort of periodic table of the southern populace, Southern Folk, Plain and Fancy catalogs and describes the several social types—gentleman and lady, "lord of the lash" and cunning belle, fun-loving "good old boy," depraved redneck, and other figures—that have animated the region since antebellum times.

Bawdy and sometimes horrifying, hilarious on the way to being tragic, Raymond Andrews's Muskhogean County novels tell of black life in the Deep South from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the 1960s, from the days of mules and white men with bullwhips to the moment when the pendulum began to swing.This story tells of a venture between John Morgan Jr., the dissolute heir to Appalachee's leading white family, and Baby Sweet Jackson, owner of the once-vibrant Red's Cafe in Dark Town. On Independence Day, 1966, the partners open Muskhogean County's first bordello, with two dark-skinned black women, Lana Lips and Fig, ready for the expected white clientele. Then a mysterious woman, announcing herself as the 'third whore,' arrives—and proclaims that her body will be 'for colored only.'

An astute and stimulating account of the people and forces that shaped the development of Georgia and, by implication, other areas of the South, The Creation of Modern Georgia is a provocative reinterpretation of the transition from the Old South to the New. Rejecting previous analyses, Bartley describes the persistence and ultimate collapse of a plantation-oriented colonial society and the emergence of a modern Georgia. In the second edition, Bartley has enlarged and updated the book with two new chapters to place greater emphasis on the expanded urbanization, industrialization, and diversification of Georgia.

In the South, one can find any number of bronze monuments to the Confederacy featuring heroic images of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, J. E. B. Stuart, and many lesser commanders. But while the tarnish on such statues has done nothing to color the reputation of those great leaders, there remains one Confederate commander whose tarnished image has nothing to do with bronze monuments. Nowhere in the South does a memorial stand to Lee's intimate friend and second-in-command James Longstreet.In Lee's Tarnished Lieutenant, William Garrett Piston examines the life of James Longstreet and explains how a man so revered during the course of the war could fall from grace so swiftly and completely. Unlike other generals in gray whose deeds are familiar to southerners and northerners alike, Longstreet has the image not of a hero but of an incompetent who lost the Battle of Gettysburg and, by extension, the war itself. Piston's reappraisal of the general's military record establishes Longstreet as an energetic corps commander with an unsurpassed ability to direct troops in combat, as a trustworthy subordinate willing to place the war effort above personal ambition. He made mistakes, but Piston shows that he did not commit the grave errors at Gettysburg and elsewhere of which he was so often accused after the war.In discussing Longstreet's postwar fate, Piston analyzes the literature and public events of the time to show how the southern people, in reaction to defeat, evolved an image of themselves which bore little resemblance to reality. As a product of the Georgia backwoods, Longstreet failed to meet the popular cavalier image embodied by Lee, Stuart, and other Confederate heroes. When he joined the Republican party during Reconstruction, Longstreet forfeited his wartime reputation and quickly became a convenient target for those anxious to explain how a "superior people" could have lost the war. His new role as the villain of the Lost Cause was solidified by his own postwar writings. Embittered by years of social ostracism resulting from his Republican affiliation, resentful of the orchestrated deification of Lee and Stonewall Jackson, Longstreet exaggerated his own accomplishments and displayed a vanity that further alienated an already offended southern populace.Beneath the layers of invective and vilification remains a general whose military record has been badly maligned. Lee's Tarnished Lieutenant explains how this reputation developed—how James Longstreet became, in the years after Appomattox, the scapegoat for the South's defeat, a Judas for the new religion of the Lost Cause.

Covering basketry, musical instruments, wood carving, quilting, pottery, boatbuilding, blacksmithing, architecture, and graveyard decoration, John Vlach seeks to trace and substantiate African influences in the traditional arts and crafts of black Americans. It is a widespread tradition, he observes, readily visible in areas such as the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia but discernible as well in places far to the west and north. With the aid of more than two hundred photographs and numerous maps, diagrams, and drawings, Vlach not only examines the form and content of the artifacts and structures but also relates them to the complex cultural context from which they sprang—the interwoven strands of African and European influence.Originally published in 1978 as the catalog to a major exhibit by the Cleveland Museum of Art, this book was among the first to describe and analyze the achievements of African American artisans. It is now recognized as a landmark work, the standard in its field, and is widely used by historians, folklorists, anthropologists, and sociologists.

Storytellers, a rich collection of more than 250 authentic folktales, confirms the oral tradition of the South. Rising out of a shared rural past, the legends and myths, the jests and trickster tales presented here are as diverse and inventive as the tellers themselves.Edited and introduced by John A. Burrison and selected from more than twenty years of recorded interviews conducted in the lower Southeast by folklore students, Storytellers brings together for the first time in one book a broad variety of tales told in voices of African American, Anglo-Saxon, and Native American heritage. Describing the storytelling communities, the book re-creates the social settings—from a circle of tellers in a small town to three generations of a single family—where folktales circulate like living currency, changed and increased as they pass from person to person. The book visits individuals who give new voice to the oral tradition of their childhoods, telling again how the cricket trimmed the possum's tail, recasting an old tale of Master and John as "John Meets Lester Maddox," and spinning outrageous tall tales from out of the still mysterious frontier of the Okefenokee Swamp.Ranging from "vulga" tales swapped by men and overheard by women to the adventures of Jack the Rogue, from the unbelievable stupidity of "fool Irishmen" to the horror of witches bounding through the darkened countryside, from instructive tales to illogical jests and puns, the oral record brought together in Storytellers speaks of the South—not one South but many, a region whose diversity is revealed and preserved in the telling of tales.

Based on the photographs and writings of Francis Harper, a naturalist who visited the Okefinokee Swamp repeatedly between 1912 and 1951, Okefinokee Album recalls life in the "land of trembling earth" before the outside world encroached in the 1940s. Filled with profiles of the swamp dwellers, their wisdom, superstitions, songs, stories, and folkways, as well as a wealth of information about the natural history of the swamp, Okefinokee Album richly documents a vanished age and the heritage of a remarkable people.

My life has been incredible, Katherine Anne Porter used to say, "I don't believe a word of it." Author of the best-selling novel, Ship of Fools, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her short stories, Porter was both the first lady of American letters and a woman whose indomitable will forged a life that, as biographer Joan Givner makes clear, was not only incredible but may have been her most creative fiction of all.Born Callie Porter in the log-cabin poverty of rural Texas, she, like Jay Gatsby, invented her own history, changing her name and "acquiring" a lineage of statesmen to become an aristocratic daughter of the Old South. Strikingly beautiful and gilded by her idealized background, Porter lived a life of drama and passion that spanned nine decades and witnessed some of this century's most tumultuous events. She traveled from revolutionary Mexico in the 1920s to Berlin at Hitler's rise and to Paris at the start of World War II; from Hollywood in the forties to Washington during the Kennedy era. Somehow, by design or coincidence, she was always right in the eye of the storm when history was being made. By the end of her life, she had risen from rags to riches, anonymity to renown—all on her own terms, all on the strength of her talent, her miraculous stamina, her wit, grit, and often ruthless determination.As evocative of her era as it is of the woman herself, this book is a remarkable portrait of an artist who crafted her life to appear as elegant and structured as her short stories and who, in so doing, sometimes edited out of her experience the hard, cold facts that until now have remained obscure. Givner has recovered that experience to reveal the true version of Porter's childhood and family background, her first "hidden" marriage, her innumerable love affairs, her quarrels with Hart Crane and other friends, and her ultimate achievement of wealth and celebrity.For this revised edition, Givner has provided an updated prologue and epilogue, incorporating new material to further illuminate Porter's life and fiction. Givner offers accurate information on Porter's battle with tuberculosis, an account of Porter's betrayal of her close friend Josephine Herbst during a mendacious interview with FBI agents, and new insight into her relationship with William Goyen. Recently discovered candid photographs of Porter have also been included.

Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin was born into a prominent Georgia family and raised in a southern society intent on preserving the economic and racial status quo. But as a young woman working with the poor in the sand hills of South Carolina, she began to question what she had been taught. In The Making of a Southerner, Lumpkin re-creates the South of her childhood and records the journey she took from her early instruction as a daughter of the "Lost Cause" to the liberal viewpoints she championed as an adult.

In this widely heralded book first published in 1986, four historians consider the popularly held explanations for southern defeat—state-rights disputes, inadequate military supply and strategy, and the Union blockade—undergirding their discussion with a chronological account of the war's progress. In the end, the authors find that the South lacked the will to win, that weak Confederate nationalism and the strength of a peculiar brand of evangelical Protestantism sapped the South's ability to continue a war that was not yet lost on the field.

This widely hailed study examines the reasons behind the quick demise of Radical Reconstruction in Georgia. Edmund L. Drago shows that a primary factor was, ironically, the extraordinary fairness on the part of the state's black leaders in dealing with their former masters.Lacking the sizable and experienced antebellum free-black class that existed in such states as South Carolina and Louisiana, Georgia's former slaves turned to their ministers for political leadership. Otherworldly and fatalistic, the ministers preached a message in which all people, even slaveholders, were deserving of God's mercy. Translated into politics, this message quickly and predictably brought disaster. Shortly after the black delegation to the state constitutional convention of 1867-1868 refused to support a provision guaranteeing blacks the right to hold office, blacks were expelled from the state legislature. Only then did the minister-politicians realize that they would have to become more militant and black-oriented if they were to challenge white supremacy. Propelled by this newfound toughness, they were soon able to achieve a limited success by bringing about the Second Reconstruction of Georgia.In the preface to this new edition, Drago surveys recent writing on Reconstruction and, drawing upon his own research on black leadership in South Carolina, compares experiences in that state to those in Georgia. It is time, he says, to give greater consideration to the role black women played in shaping politics and to the emergence of a black conservative political tradition. He also suggests that revisionists, in reacting to the racism in traditional histories, have sometimes glossed over issues of corruption and the black politician.

A wide-ranging blend of autobiography and history, The South and the Southerner is one prominent newspaperman's statement on his region, its heritage, its future, and his own place within it. Ralph McGill (1898-1969), the longtime editor and later publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, was one of a handful of progressive voices heard in southern journalism during the civil rights era. From the podium of his front-page columns, he delivered stinging criticisms of ingrained southern bigotry and the forces marshaled against change; yet he retained throughout his career—and his writing—a deep affection for all southerners, even those who declared themselves his enemies.In The South and the Southerner, originally published in 1963, McGill moves freely from personal anecdotes about his Tennessee upbringing and Vanderbilt education to reflections on the decline of the plantation economy and his hopes for racial justice. Scattered throughout are vividly rendered biographical vignettes of the South's diverse sons and daughters—figures ranging from demagogues like Mississippi's James Vardaman to Lucy Randolph Mason, the Virginia-born clergyman's daughter who became a tireless crusader for organized labor. Poignant and eloquent, the book remains a compelling meditation on southern identity and culture.

In the hope of avoiding removal from their much coveted homelands in the Southeast, the Cherokees began to adopt broad aspects of Anglo-American culture in the early nineteenth century. Despite their general acquiescence to government policies and their efforts to fulfill the expectations of white philanthropists, the Cherokees ultimately fared worse than less acculturated native peoples in similar circumstances. In 1838 Cherokees in Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina were forced at gunpoint to leave their homes, farms, schools, and churches. Their demoralizing journey to a reservation in the Oklahoma Territory—during which thousands died or were killed—came to be known as the Trail of Tears.The first interdisciplinary survey of Cherokee removal, this volume brings together essays by eight prominent scholars (including three of Cherokee descent) in the fields of history, geography, sociology, and law. They address such topics as Cherokee politics, class structure, and land-use patterns before the removal; Andrew Jackson's Indian policies; Cherokee population losses; the effects of removal on the few Cherokees allowed to remain in North Carolina; and the Cherokees' immediate and long-term problems following their relocation.The most current general work on the causes and effects of the Cherokee removal, this volume is certain to stimulate the continuing debate on United States Indian policy and to encourage further study.

First published in 1950, Better a Dinner of Herbs is a compellingly dramatic tale of twisted, often violent human relationships. Taking its title from a biblical passage dealing with the power of love and hate within a household, the novel counterbalances its grim narrative with a poetic prose that evokes a reverence for the rhythm of the seasons and the continuity of life.Byron Herbert Reece situates the story in the isolated hills of the agrarian South where he spent most of his life, but it could have occurred in any rural setting at any time. An unmarried girl dies in childbirth. Her brother, swearing revenge on the father of the child, sells the family farm and turns toward the open world with his nephew. In search of a wife and a different livelihood, he chances to encounter his enemy. An intentional act of brutality symbolizes an end to his passion and summons him again away from all that he cherishes.Born at the foot of Blood Mountain in north Georgia and reared in the isolated mountain area near Blairsville, Byron Herbert Reece (1917-1958) was the author of four volumes of poetry and two novels that are tied deeply to the spirit and traditions of Appalachia. Journalist Bill Shipp has called Reece "perhaps the greatest balladeer of the Appalachians." His first volume of poems was published in 1945 to wide critical acclaim, and the publication of his remaining work brought him recognition far beyond north Georgia.

Ghosts and Goosebumps is a rich collection of folktales and superstitions that capture the oral traditions of central and southeastern Alabama. In its pages one can glimpse the long-lost horse-and-buggy times, when people sat up all night with the dead and dying, hoed and handpicked cotton, drew water from wells, and met the devil rather regularly.The book is divided into three parts—tales, superstitions, and slave narratives. The spirits of treasure-keepers, poltergeists, murderers and the murdered, wicked men and good-men-and-true float through the book's first section. Sue Peacock, for example, recalls seeing the ghost of her brother, and E.C. Nevin describes a mysterious light in a swamp. In other tales, reports of supernatural experiences are proved to be rationally explicable—Lee Wilson's devil in the cemetery turns out to be a cow and chains rattling near New Tabernacle Church in Coffee County belong not to specters but to hogs.The superstitions are arranged according to subject and include such topics as love and marriage, weather and the seasons, wish making, bad luck, signs, and portents. Anonymous tellers confide that it is bad luck to carry ashes out after dark, to let a locust holler in your hand, to rock an empty rocking chair, to let your fishing pole cross someone else's, or to have a two-dollar bill (unless one corner has been removed).The slave narratives, selected from the Works Progress Administration Folklore Collection, are substantial and yield a fascinating view of nineteenth century African-American folk life, replete with sillies and lazy men, preachers and witches, brave little boys, and reluctant bridegrooms. Although the times and places have changed, the spirit of the folk is unaltered. Taken together, these folktales are marvelously diverse—by turns fearsome, fantastical, witty, ribald, charmingly innocent—showing people from all backgrounds, their endless vices and occasional virtues, their hopes, fears, and loves.

Ain't You Got a Right to the Tree of Life? presents an oral, musical, and photographic record of the venerable Gullah culture in modern times. With roots stretching back to their slave forebears, the Johns Islanders and their folk traditions are a vital link between black Americans and their African and Caribbean ancestors.When first published in 1966, this book conveyed islanders' trepidation and jubilation upon the arrival of the civil rights movement to their isolated home. In this edition, which is updated through the late 1980s, the stories and songs of an older day blend with the voices of an empowered younger generation determined to fight the overdevelopment of their land by resort builders.

Set in the small-town, pre-civil rights South, The Hawk and the Sun is the story of one day in the life of Dandelion, a physically impaired man who is the sole black resident in the town of Tilden.Years before, the birth of a mixed-race child to a white prostitute had precipitated an outpouring of hatred against Tilden's black citizens, all of whom but Dandelion had been driven from town. In this atmosphere of smoldering self-righteousness, Dandelion survives on handouts and what little he can earn from odd jobs. Finally, the town turns against him as well.Seen hurrying from the house of the neurotic Miss Ella as her screams fill the air of an August morning, Dandelion is apprehended and falsely accused of rape. Before the day's end, he is tortured and lynched. In his rendering of Dandelion, of those who murdered him, of those who looked the other way, and of the lone white man who stood futilely against the mob, Byron Herbert Reece brings his readers face to face with the horrifying spectacle of collective fear and racism.

Set during the Depression in the depleted farmlands surrounding Augusta, Georgia, Tobacco Road was first published in 1932. It is the story of the Lesters, a family of white sharecroppers so destitute that most of their creditors have given up on them. Debased by poverty to an elemental state of ignorance and selfishness, the Lesters are preoccupied by their hunger, sexual longings, and fear that they will someday descend to a lower rung on the social ladder than the black families who live near them.

Like Tobacco Road, this novel chronicles the final decline of a poor white family in rural Georgia. Exhorted by their patriarch Ty Ty, the Waldens ruin their land by digging it up in search of gold. Complex sexual entanglements and betrayals lead to a murder within the family that completes its dissolution. Juxtaposed against the Waldens' obsessive search is the story of Ty Ty's son-in-law, a cotton mill worker in a nearby town who is killed during a strike.First published in 1933, God's Little Acre was censured by the Georgia Literary Commission, banned in Boston, and once led the all-time best-seller list, with more than ten million copies in print.

First published in 1956, Segregation is a collection of Robert Penn Warren's informal conversations with southerners in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Warren, who in his own writings often explored the theme of race in American life, traveled through his native region to talk with scores of individuals—taxi drivers, NAACP leaders, members of White Citizens groups, college students, preachers—to report their responses to the Court's decision.

In the middle years of the Great Depression, Erskine Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke-White spent eighteen months traveling across the back roads of the Deep South—from South Carolina to Arkansas—to document the living conditions of the sharecropper. Their collaboration resulted in You Have Seen Their Faces, a graphic portrayal of America's desperately poor rural underclass. First published in 1937, it is a classic comparable to Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, and James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which it preceded by more than three years.Caldwell lets the poor speak for themselves. Supported by his commentary, they tell how the tenant system exploited whites and blacks alike and fostered animosity between them. Bourke-White, who sometimes waited hours for the right moment, captures her subjects in the shacks where they lived, the depleted fields where they plowed, and the churches where they worshipped.