Author: W. E. Clement Publisher: Pelican Publishing ISBN: 9781455610570 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
One day in 1852, The Princess, one of the finest steamboats afloat on the Mississippi River one hundred years ago was rounding the bend a Duncan�s Point about ten miles below Baton Rouge, when the boilers exploded with a frightful loss of life. The disaster occurred in front of the Conrad cottage where a descendant, the late G. Mather Conrad, of New Orleans, was born and lived as a youth. Lyle Saxon in his Old Louisiana tells of having known an old gentleman who remembered the awful holocaust. Then a little boy, this old gentleman was awaiting the return of his mother and father from New Orleans. He saw the Princess come around the bend and then turn in toward the bank. As he watched he heard a terrific explosion and saw the steamboat burst into flames. Mr. F. D. Conrad, plantation owner of that generation, so Saxon tells us, sent his slaves out in skiffs to rescue the men and women who crew struggling in the water. Many of them were frightfully scalded by steam from the broken boilers. Sheets were spread on the ground under the oak trees on the lawn and barrels of flour were broken open and the contents poured on the sheets. As the scalded people were pulled from the river, they were stripped and rolled in the flour, where they writhed and shrieked in agony. The little boy went from one sufferer to another seeking his father and mother. They were not there. They returned from New Orleans on a later boat, but he never forgot the anguish of his search.
Author: Thomas C. Buchanan Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 0807876569 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
All along the Mississippi--on country plantation landings, urban levees and quays, and the decks of steamboats--nineteenth-century African Americans worked and fought for their liberty amid the slave trade and the growth of the cotton South. Offering a counternarrative to Twain's well-known tale from the perspective of the pilothouse, Thomas C. Buchanan paints a more complete picture of the Mississippi, documenting the rich variety of experiences among slaves and free blacks who lived and worked on the lower decks and along the river during slavery, through the Civil War, and into emancipation. Buchanan explores the creative efforts of steamboat workers to link riverside African American communities in the North and South. The networks African Americans created allowed them to keep in touch with family members, help slaves escape, transfer stolen goods, and provide forms of income that were important to the survival of their communities. The author also details the struggles that took place within the steamboat work culture. Although the realities of white supremacy were still potent on the river, Buchanan shows how slaves, free blacks, and postemancipation freedpeople fought for better wages and treatment. By exploring the complex relationship between slavery and freedom, Buchanan sheds new light on the ways African Americans resisted slavery and developed a vibrant culture and economy up and down America's greatest river.
Author: Alan Huffman Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi ISBN: 1604737549 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 342
Book Description
When wealthy Mississippi cotton planter Isaac Ross died in 1836, his will decreed that his plantation, Prospect Hill, should be liquidated and the proceeds from the sale be used to pay for his slaves' passage to the newly established colony of Liberia in western Africa. Ross's heirs contested the will for more than a decade, prompting a deadly revolt in which a group of slaves burned Ross's mansion to the ground. But the will was ultimately upheld. The slaves then emigrated to their new home, where they battled the local tribes and built vast plantations with Greek Revival-style mansions in a region the Americo-Africans renamed “Mississippi in Africa.” In the late twentieth century, the seeds of resentment sown over a century of cultural conflict between the colonists and tribal people exploded, begetting a civil war that rages in Liberia to this day. Tracking down Prospect Hill's living descendants, deciphering a history ruled by rumor, and delivering the complete chronicle in riveting prose, journalist Alan Huffman has rescued a lost chapter of American history whose aftermath is far from over.
Author: Clyde Woods Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 1844675610 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 385
Book Description
A new edition of a classic history of the Mississippi River Delta Development Arrested is a major reinterpretation of the 200-year-old conflict between African American workers and the planters of the Mississippi Delta. The book measures the impact of the plantation system on those who suffered its depredations firsthand, while tracing the decline and resurrection of plantation ideology in national public policy debate. Despite countless defeats under the planter regime, African Americans in the Delta continued to push forward their agenda for social and economic justice. Throughout this remarkably interdisciplinary book, ranging across fields as diverse as rural studies, musicology, development studies, and anthropology, Woods demonstrates the role of music—including jazz, rock and roll, soul, rap and, above all, the blues—in sustaining a radical vision of social change.
Author: Johnny B. Thomas Publisher: Xlibris Corporation ISBN: 1543457088 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 188
Book Description
Glendora is a small rural town located in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Th e people of the town take pride in living in a quiet, close-knit community where everybody knows their neighbors. However, like many small rural towns in the South, Glendora inherited the eff ects of slavery, Jim Crow, and poverty, in addition to having the unfortunate experience of being the town where a fourteen-year-boy named Emmett Till was brutally murdered and thrown into the Black Bayou that energized the Civil Rights Movement in America. Th is book tells a story about the struggle of this small town to rise above a mountain of despair that plagued the town for decades to a stone of hope that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. mentioned in his famous I Have A Dream speech in Washington, DC, in August 1963. For the past four decades, Glendoras hope for a brighter future has rested in the hands of Johnny B. Th omas, who rose from the son of sharecroppers on a local plantation to the mayor of the town. When Th omas became mayor, he inherited a town that had been ravaged by the eff ects of poverty, neglect, isolation, a heritage of plantation sharecropping servitude, and a culture of racial suppression of the civil rights of African Americans. Th is book provides a historical account of the struggles and challenges that Mayor Th omas faced in building the Emmett Till Museum to promote education about civil rights, and to promote cultural tourism to generate much needed revenue for community development in Glendora. Th is book also includes much information about the rich history and culture of the people of Glendora as they continue their journey to become one of the stones of hope in the Mississippi Delta.
Author: Sally Senzell Isaacs Publisher: Capstone Classroom ISBN: 9781588103017 Category : Juvenile Nonfiction Languages : en Pages : 36
Book Description
Learn basic history by visiting communities from our past. Each book is filled with photos and reconstruction artwork covering topics such as food, clothing, shelter, education, play, communication, and family life. View important political and geographical events through the lens of everyday life.
Author: W. E. Clement
Author: Thomas C. Buchanan
Author: Julia Tigner Noland Noland
Author: Alan Huffman
Author: Dunbar Rowland
Author: Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Author: Clyde Woods
Author: Mark Twain
Author: Johnny B. Thomas
Author: Sally Senzell Isaacs