Library of Alabama Classics – serie

Unfinished Cathedral is the third volume of T.S. Stribling’s Southern trilogy and was originally published in 1934. The trilogy, Stribling’s greatest literary achievement, is set in and around Florence, Alabama, and spans six decades of social, economic, and political change from the Civil War and Reconstruction to the 1920s. In each of the novels Stribling brings together the various social classes of the period, revealing their interdependency. The Forge is the story of the South during the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction, while The Store chronicles the changing social and economic landscape of the post-Reconstruction period and the rise to power of the mercantile class in the reconstructed South. In Unfinished Cathedral, Stribling continues the story of the dramatic transformation in the social structure of the South. The 1920s saw the control of society shift from the wealthy landowners and merchants to the rising middle class. This period also saw significant changes in the status of Southern women and blacks, and economically, a surge of prosperity was evident that was brought on by the land boom and the resulting influx of Northern dollars. The University of Alabama Press reissued the first two novels in T.S. Stribling’s trilogy, The Forge and The Store, in 1985.

Offers to American historiography a microcosmic view of an early French colonial settlement in the United States, recreating the lives of the fort occupants in minute detail. Higginbotham has made extensive use of Spanish archives in the research of early American history.

St. Elmo was the most famed and beloved novel by Augusta Jane Evans, a June 2015 inductee into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. First published in 1866, Evans’s rich tale of the relationship between the dashing and worldly St. Elmo and Edna Earl, an exemplar of virtuous Southern womanhood, sold over a million copies in four months and became one of the nineteenth century’s most influential novels.This edition includes an introduction by Evans scholar Diane Roberts about the enduring relevance and legacy of St. Elmo as a work of literature as well as a reflection of gender roles and the seismic societal changes taking place in the United States in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Examines the social and economic aspects of slavery in Alabama. After a discussion of slavery under the imperial rulers of the colonial and territorial periods, Sellers focuses on the transplantation of the slavery system from the Atlantic seaboard states to Alabama.

Written by a scholar who lived and worked in both the South and the North of the US during and after the time of Jim Crow laws, this study on higher education for African-Americans in Alabama is derived from his 1937 prize-winning dissertation.

This annotated edition of George Strother Gaines' ""Reminiscences"" provides a glimpse into the early history of the Mississippi-Alabama Territory and antebellum Alabama.

Confederate proclamation of nationhood was backed by an energetic and reasonably well equipped land defense. Not so for its coastal and sea defenses; much of its hope of tipping the balance in its contention with the Union rested on international support, trade, and naval defense. In search of a naval arm to counter Northern superiority on the seas, the South turned to foreign sources for a seaborne arm. Confederate agents in England cagily used scarce gold, promises of cotton, and British sympathy to obtain the devastating naval weapons of speedy and deadly raiders. Foremost among these was the Alabama, a screw steamer with full sail power, launched in May 1862. In only twenty-two months of action, this ship engaged nearly 300 vessels and destroyed 55 Northern merchant ships worth millions of dollars.

Written as a case study of the causes of the Alabama miner's strike in 1894, this book explains how during an economic depression period, the strong trade union of the United Mineworkers of Alabama was founded and it was this that became instrumental in the coal miners and railway worker's strike. This book recalls the particular conditions under which the strike was started and the connected issues of the racial problem and the struggle between the Bourbon Democrats and the Populists.

The Road to Wildcat recounts the travels in North Alabama in the mid-1920s of Eleanor Risley (suffering from diabetes), her asthmatic husband, Pierre, their dog, John, and a Chinese wheelbarrow named Sisyphus that held their travel goods. Advised to make the walking tour for improvement of their health, the group left Fairhope in south Alabama and walked hundreds of miles in the southern Appalachians for months, sleeping out under the stars at night, or in a canvas tent or an abandoned building, cooking their fresh-caught foods over campfires, and accepting the generosity and advice of the mountain people they met, some of them moonshiners and outlaws. During their sojourn across the rural wilderness, they enjoyed fiddlin' dances in rickety halls, joined Sacred Harp singers, learned about the grapevine telegraph, saw the dreadful effects of inbreeding, and attended ""Snake Night"" at Posey Holler (a religious revival that included snake handling). Published in segments in the Atlantic Monthly in 1928 and 1929 and then reorganized into book form, the travelogue is a colorful record of the culture, customs, and dialect of the southern mountaineers of that era.

During the decades of Bourbon ascendancy after 1874, Alabama institutions - like those in other southern states - were dominated by whites. Former slave and sharecropper Jack Turner refused to accept a society so structured. Highly intelligent, physically imposing, and an orator of persuasive talents, Turner was fearless before whites and emerged as a leader of his race. He helped to forge a political alliance between blacks and whites that defeated and humiliated the Bourbons in Choctaw County, the heart of the Black Belt, in the election of 1882. That summer, after a series of bogus charges and arrests, Turner was accused of planning to lead his private army of blacks in a general slaughter of the county whites. Justice was forgotten in the resultant fear and hysteria.

At the Moon's Inn, first published in 1941, provides a fictional account of De Soto's famous Spanish expedition to La Florida and through the southeastern United States between 1539 and 1543. The novel begins in Spain in 1538, where De Soto and his chief lieutenants, veterans of the campaigns in South America, pledge themselves to a new enterprise to explore and exploit La Florida. The narrative follows them on their voyage to Cuba, where they rest and obtain additional supplies, then set sail for the area now known as Tampa Bay. Lytle's brilliant historical novel takes the readers with the conquistadores through the hot, humid land, where despite their advantage in military technology they found they must rely on the Indians for food. The author explores the cultural confrontation that seriously weakened the Indians, while the Spaniards' dreams of gold gradually turned to hopes of survival in the hostile environment. Drawing his facts from the 1939 United States De Soto Commission Report and from the surviving historical chronicles of the expedition, Lytle weaves a fascinating tale that brings to life the history of Spanish efforts to establish a controlling presence in the New World during the first half of the 16th century. In his introduction, Douglas Jones places At the Moon's Inn within the context of the documentary record, as well as within the framework of its distinguished author's career.

William March's debut novel, Company K, introduced him to the reading public as a gifted writer of modern fiction. Of that World War I classic, Graham Greene wrote: ""It is the only war book I have read which has found a new form to fit the novelty of the protest. The prose is bare, lucid, without literary echoes."" After Company K, March brought his same unerring style to a cycle of novels and short stories–his ""Pearl County"" series–inspired in part by his childhood in the vicinity of Mobile, Alabama. The University of Alabama Press is pleased to be bringing these three novels back into print.In The Tallons, the second novel in the ""Pearl County"" series, March tells the story of two farm boys, Andrew and Jim Tallon. Their placid and predictable life is upended by a girl from Georgia, Myrtle Bickerstaff. The conflict which engulfs these three arises from a series of carefully chosen and extraordinarily telling incidents to a dramatic climax which will be remembered long after the book is set aside. March framed the novel as ""a study in paranoia"" and to the end of his life considered it one of his strongest works.