The Deepest South of All PDF Download

Author: Richard Grant
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501177842
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
"Natchez, Mississippi, once had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in America, and its wealth was built on slavery and cotton. Today it has the greatest concentration of antebellum mansions in the South, and a culture full of unexpected contradictions. Prominent white families dress up in hoopskirts and Confederate uniforms for ritual celebrations of the Old South, yet Natchez is also progressive enough to elect a gay black man for mayor with 91 percent of the vote"--

Author: Nola Nance Oliver
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
ISBN: 1465613714
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Natchez derives its name from the sun-worshiping Indian tribe, the Natchez, who were the original owners of the area on which the city is located. It is situated in Adams county, in the southwestern part of the state of Mississippi, on bluffs 200 feet high overlooking the Mississippi River, and is midway between Memphis and New Orleans. It is accessible by railway, steamboat, motor highway and airway. It is particularly proud of the Natchez Trace Parkway, a modern concrete road over an old Indian trace or trail from Nashville to Natchez. This highway is a link in one of the most important commercial and historic highways in the United States reaching from Washington, D. C., to Mexico. Today Natchez is a recognized center of interest because in the city and its vicinity there are a greater number of original ante-bellum mansions than in any other community in America—some 75 or more. Natchez is the second oldest town in the United States, being next in age to St. Augustine, Florida. It has lived under five different flags, each of which contributed romantic flavor to the section. From 1714 to 1763 it was under the flag of France; from 1764 to 1780 under the flag of England; and from 1780 to 1798 under the flag of Spain. In 1798 the first United States flag in the Lower Mississippi Valley was raised in Natchez. Years after the raising of the “stars and stripes”, another flag which some call “the conquered banner”, the beloved flag of the Confederate States of America, floated over Natchez, 1861-’65. Natchez “Under the Hill” applies to that part of the town along the water front and under the bluffs. It flourished during the heyday of steamboating on the Mississippi. The inroads of the river have washed away the streets, and only a few buildings remain. One very interesting home, “Magnolia Vale”, has been preserved and is presented in this book. The majority of these old homes contain original pieces of furniture, china, coin silver service, draperies, carpets, wall decorations of exquisite workmanship, huge mirrors in massive goldleaf frames, paintings bearing authentic signatures of great masters, and hand-carved marble mantels. Laces, silks, and rich costumes are displayed today by third, fourth and fifth generations. It seems hardly possible that the world could move on and leave one small community undisturbed in its ancient grandeur. The hand of destiny seems indeed to uphold and enshrine this hallowed region. The estates have descended from generation to generation, many of them today being owned and occupied by descendants of the original owners.

Author: Paul Hardin Kapp
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496838793
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
Winner of the 2023 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize Winner of the 2023 UMW Center for Historic Preservation Book Prize For over eighty years, tourists have flocked to Natchez, Mississippi, seeking the “Old South,” but what they encounter is invention: a pageant and rewrite of history first concocted during the Great Depression. In Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Created the Old South, author Paul Hardin Kapp reveals how the women of the Natchez Garden Club saved their city, created one of the first cultural tourism economies in the United States, changed the Mississippi landscape through historic preservation, and fashioned elements of the Lost Cause into an industry. Beginning with the first Natchez Spring Pilgrimage of Antebellum Homes in 1932, such women as Katherine Grafton Miller, Roane Fleming Byrnes, and Edith Wyatt Moore challenged the notion that smokestack industries were key to Natchez’s prosperity. These women developed a narrative of graceful living and aristocratic gentlepeople centered on grand but decaying mansions. In crafting this pageantry, they created a tourism magnet based on the antebellum architecture of Natchez. Through their determination and political guile, they enlisted New Deal programs, such as the WPA Writers’ Project and the Historic American Buildings Survey, to promote their version of the city. Their work did save numerous historic buildings and employed both white and African American workers during the Depression. Still, the transformation of Natchez into a tourist draw came at a racial cost and further marginalized African American Natchezians. By attending to the history of preservation in Natchez, Kapp draws on a rich archive of images, architectural documents, and popular culture to explore how meaning is assigned to place and how meaning evolves over time. In showing how and why the Natchez buildings of the “Old South” were first preserved, commercialized, and transformed into a brand, this volume makes a much-needed contribution to ongoing debates over the meaning attached to cultural patrimony.

Author: Richard Grant
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476709645
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
New Yorkers Grant and his girlfriend Mariah decided on a whim to buy an old plantation house in the Mississippi Delta. This is their journey of discovery to a remote, isolated strip of land, three miles beyond the tiny community of Pluto. They learn to hunt, grow their own food, and fend off alligators, snakes, and varmints galore. They befriend an array of unforgettable local characters, capture the rich, extraordinary culture of the Delta, and delve deeply into the Delta's lingering racial tensions. As the nomadic Grant learns to settle down, he falls not just for his girlfriend but for the beguiling place they now call home.

Author: Karen L. Cox
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469635046
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
In 1932, the city of Natchez, Mississippi, reckoned with an unexpected influx of journalists and tourists as the lurid story of a local murder was splashed across headlines nationwide. Two eccentrics, Richard Dana and Octavia Dockery—known in the press as the "Wild Man" and the "Goat Woman"—enlisted an African American man named George Pearls to rob their reclusive neighbor, Jennie Merrill, at her estate. During the attempted robbery, Merrill was shot and killed. The crime drew national coverage when it came to light that Dana and Dockery, the alleged murderers, shared their huge, decaying antebellum mansion with their goats and other livestock, which prompted journalists to call the estate "Goat Castle." Pearls was killed by an Arkansas policeman in an unrelated incident before he could face trial. However, as was all too typical in the Jim Crow South, the white community demanded "justice," and an innocent black woman named Emily Burns was ultimately sent to prison for the murder of Merrill. Dana and Dockery not only avoided punishment but also lived to profit from the notoriety of the murder by opening their derelict home to tourists. Strange, fascinating, and sobering, Goat Castle tells the story of this local feud, killing, investigation, and trial, showing how a true crime tale of fallen southern grandeur and murder obscured an all too familiar story of racial injustice.

Author: Anthony E. Kaye
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807877603
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
In this new interpretation of antebellum slavery, Anthony Kaye offers a vivid portrait of slaves transforming adjoining plantations into slave neighborhoods. He describes men and women opening paths from their owners' plantations to adjacent farms to go courting and take spouses, to work, to run away, and to otherwise contend with owners and their agents. In the course of cultivating family ties, forging alliances, working, socializing, and storytelling, slaves fashioned their neighborhoods into the locus of slave society. Joining Places is the first book about slavery to use the pension files of former soldiers in the Union army, a vast source of rich testimony by ex-slaves. From these detailed accounts, Kaye tells the stories of men and women in love, "sweethearting," "taking up," "living together," and marrying across plantation lines; striving to get right with God; carving out neighborhoods as a terrain of struggle; and working to overthrow the slaveholders' regime. Kaye's depiction of slaves' sense of place in the Natchez District of Mississippi reveals a slave society that comprised not a single, monolithic community but an archipelago of many neighborhoods. Demonstrating that such neighborhoods prevailed across the South, he reformulates ideas about slave marriage, resistance, independent production, paternalism, autonomy, and the slave community that have defined decades of scholarship.

Author: Caroline Eubanks
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493034316
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
You may think you know the South for its food, its people, its past, and its stories, but if there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s that the region tells far more than one tale. It is ever-evolving, open to interpretation, steeped in history and tradition, yet defined differently based on who you ask. This Is My South inspires the reader to explore the Southern States––Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia––like never before. No other guide pulls together these states into one book in quite this way with a fresh perspective on can’t-miss landmarks, off the beaten path gems, tours for every interest, unique places to sleep, and classic restaurants. So come see for yourself and create your own experiences along the way!

Author: Nola Nance Oliver
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
Nola Nance Oliver's book 'Natchez, Symbol of the Old South' delves deep into the historical and cultural significance of the city of Natchez, focusing on its role as a symbol of the Old South. Oliver's writing style is both informative and engaging, providing readers with a comprehensive understanding of Natchez's rich heritage and its impact on Southern identity. Through detailed analysis and vivid descriptions, Oliver brings to life the antebellum splendor of Natchez and explores the complex dynamics of race, class, and power that defined the city in the 19th century. The book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in Southern history, architecture, and culture, offering new insights into the legacy of the Old South. Nola Nance Oliver, an expert on Southern history and architecture, brings a unique perspective to her exploration of Natchez. Drawing on her extensive research and expertise, Oliver paints a nuanced portrait of the city and its place in the collective memory of the American South. Her scholarly approach and in-depth analysis make this book a must-read for students, historians, and anyone with an interest in the complexities of Southern heritage. For a comprehensive and enlightening study of Natchez and its symbolic significance in the Old South, Nola Nance Oliver's 'Natchez, Symbol of the Old South' is a highly recommended read.

Author: Greg Iles
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062311107
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 746

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Book Description
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Greg Iles comes the first novel in his Natchez Burning trilogy—which also includes The Bone Tree and the upcoming Mississippi Blood—an epic trilogy that interweaves crimes, lies, and secrets past and present in a mesmerizing thriller featuring Southern lawyer and former prosecutor Penn Cage. Raised in the southern splendor of Natchez, Mississippi, Penn Cage learned all he knows of duty from his father, Dr. Tom Cage. But now the beloved family doctor has been accused of murdering the African American nurse with whom he worked in the dark days of the 1960s. Once a crusading prosecutor, Penn is determined to save his father, but Tom, stubbornly invoking doctor-patient privilege, refuses even to speak in his own defense. Penn's quest for the truth sends him deep into his father's past, where a sexually charged secret lies. More chilling, this long-buried sin is only one thread in a conspiracy of greed and murder involving the vicious Double Eagles, an offshoot of the KKK controlled by some of the most powerful men in the state. Aided by a dedicated reporter privy to Natchez's oldest secrets and by his fiancée, Caitlin Masters, Penn uncovers a trail of corruption and brutality that places his family squarely in the Double Eagles' crosshairs. With every step costing blood and faith, Penn is forced to confront the most wrenching dilemma of his life: Does a man of honor choose his father or the truth?

Author: D. Clayton James
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807118603
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Antebellum Natchez is most often associated with the grand and romantic aspects of the Old South and its landed gentry. Yet there was, as this book so amply illustrates, another Natchez—the Natchez of ordinary citizens, small businessmen, and free Negroes, and the Natchez under-the-Hill of brawling boatmen, professional gamblers, and bold-faced strumpets. Antebellum Natchez not only takes a critical look at the town’s aristocracy but also examines the depth of its commercial activities and the life of its middle- and lower-class elements. Author D. Clayton James brings the political, economic, and social aspects of antebellum Natchez into perspective and debunks a number of myths and illusions, including the notion that the town was a stronghold of Federalism and Whiggery. Starting with the Natchez Indians and their “Sun God” culture, James traces the development of the town from the native village through the plotting and intrigue of the changing regimes of the French, Spanish, British, and Americans. James makes a perceptive analysis of the aristocrats’ role in restricting the growth of the town, which in 1800 appeared likely to become the largest city in the transmontane region. “The attitudes and behavior of the aristocrats of Natchez during the final three decades of the antebellum period were characterized by escapism and exclusiveness,” says James. “With the aristocrats sullenly withdrawing into their world...Natchez lost forever the opportunity to become a major metropolis, and Mississippi was led to ruin.” Quoting generously from diaries, journals, and other records, the author gives the reader a valuable insight into what life in a Southern town was like before the Civil War. Antebellum Natchez is an important account of the role of Natchez and its colorful figures—John Quitman, Robert Walker, Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, William C. C. Claiborne, and a host of others—in the colonial affairs of the Lower Mississippi Valley and the growth of the Old Southwest.