Author: Richard Grant Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1501177842 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 288
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: Richard Grant Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1476709645 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 320
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: Paul Theroux Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN: 0544323521 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 485
Book Description
"Paul Theroux has spent fifty years crossing the globe, adventuring in the exotic, seeking the rich history and folklore of the far away. Now, for the first time, in his tenth travel book, Theroux explores a piece of America--the Deep South. He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and yet also some of the nation's worst schools, housing, and unemployment rates. It's these parts of the South, so often ignored, that have caught Theroux's keen traveler's eye."--
Author: Adam Rothman Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674266870 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
Slave Country tells the tragic story of the expansion of slavery in the new United States. In the wake of the American Revolution, slavery gradually disappeared from the northern states and the importation of captive Africans was prohibited. Yet, at the same time, the country's slave population grew, new plantation crops appeared, and several new slave states joined the Union. Adam Rothman explores how slavery flourished in a new nation dedicated to the principle of equality among free men, and reveals the enormous consequences of U.S. expansion into the region that became the Deep South. Rothman maps the combination of transatlantic capitalism and American nationalism that provoked a massive forced migration of slaves into Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. He tells the fascinating story of collaboration and conflict among the diverse European, African, and indigenous peoples who inhabited the Deep South during the Jeffersonian era, and who turned the region into the most dynamic slave system of the Atlantic world. Paying close attention to dramatic episodes of resistance, rebellion, and war, Rothman exposes the terrible violence that haunted the Jeffersonian vision of republican expansion across the American continent. Slave Country combines political, economic, military, and social history in an elegant narrative that illuminates the perilous relation between freedom and slavery in the early United States. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in an honest look at America's troubled past.
Author: Gerald Horne Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 0814790739 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 348
Book Description
During its heyday in the nineteenth century, the African slave trade was fueled by the close relationship of the United States and Brazil. The Deepest South tells the disturbing story of how U.S. nationals - before and after Emancipation -- continued to actively participate in this odious commerce by creating diplomatic, social, and political ties with Brazil, which today has the largest population of African origin outside of Africa itself. Proslavery Americans began to accelerate their presence in Brazil in the 1830s, creating alliances there—sometimes friendly, often contentious—with Portuguese, Spanish, British, and other foreign slave traders to buy, sell, and transport African slaves, particularly from the eastern shores of that beleaguered continent. Spokesmen of the Slave South drew up ambitious plans to seize the Amazon and develop this region by deporting the enslaved African-Americans there to toil. When the South seceded from the Union, it received significant support from Brazil, which correctly assumed that a Confederate defeat would be a mortal blow to slavery south of the border. After the Civil War, many Confederates, with slaves in tow, sought refuge as well as the survival of their peculiar institution in Brazil. Based on extensive research from archives on five continents, Gerald Horne breaks startling new ground in the history of slavery, uncovering its global dimensions and the degrees to which its defenders went to maintain it.
Author: Richard Grant Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1501177834 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
“A delicious profile of a city that both glorifies and grapples with its Old South legacy”—from the New York Times–bestselling author (NPR, “Best Books of 2020”). Built on slavery and cotton, today’s Natchez, Mississippi, has 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% of the vote. Much as John Berendt did for Savannah in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and the hit podcast S-Town did for Woodstock, Alabama, so Richard Grant does for Natchez in The Deepest South of All. With humor and insight, he depicts a strange, eccentric town with an unforgettable cast of characters. There’s Buzz Harper, a six-food-five gay antique dealer famous for swanning around in a mink coat with a uniformed manservant and a very short German bodybuilder. There’s Ginger Hyland, “The Lioness,” who owns 500 antique eyewash cups and decorates 168 Christmas trees with her jewelry collection. And there’s Nellie Jackson, a Cadillac-driving brothel madam who became an FBI informant about the KKK before being burned alive by one of her customers. Interwoven through these stories is the more somber and largely forgotten account of Abd al Rahman Ibrahima, a West African prince who was enslaved in Natchez and became a cause célèbre in the 1820s, eventually gaining his freedom and returning to Africa. Deepest South of All offers a gripping portrait of a complex American place, as it struggles to break free from the past and confront the legacy of slavery.
Author: Richard Grant Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1416534407 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
A narrative portrait of the Sierra Madre describes the author's numerous journeys into its ungoverned regions, where he consulted with a folk healer and witnessed local violence and lawlessness that eventually threatened his own survival. Original. 75,000 first printing.
Author: John S. Lupold Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 0820355380 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 352
Book Description
Horace King (1807-1885) built covered bridges over every large river in Georgia, Alabama, and eastern Mississippi. That King, who began life as a slave in Cheraw, South Carolina, received no formal training makes his story all the more remarkable. This is the first major biography of the gifted architect and engineer who used his skills to transcend the limits of slavery and segregation and become a successful entrepreneur and builder. John S. Lupold and Thomas L. French Jr. add considerably to our knowledge of a man whose accomplishments demand wider recognition. As a slave and then as a freedman, King built bridges, courthouses, warehouses, factories, and houses in the three-state area. The authors separate legend from facts as they carefully document King’s life in the Chattahoochee Valley on the Georgia-Alabama border. We learn about King’s freedom from slavery in 1846, his reluctant support of the Confederacy, and his two terms in Alabama’s Reconstruction legislature. In addition, the biography reveals King’s relationship with his fellow (white) contractors and investors, especially John Godwin, his master and business partner, and Robert Jemison Jr., the Alabama entrepreneur and legislator who helped secure King’s freedom. The story does not end with Horace, however, because he passed his skills on to his three sons, who also became prominent builders and businessmen. In King’s world few other blacks had his opportunities to excel. King seized on his chances and became the most celebrated bridge builder in the Deep South. The reader comes away from King’s story with respect for the man; insight into the problems of financing, building, and maintaining covered bridges; and a new sense of how essential bridges were to the southern market economy.
Author: Dudley J. Hughes Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi ISBN: 9780878056156 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 310
Book Description
Prevented the oil and gas from crossing into adjoining states. This is the first book to document the history of the petroleum business in Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. It records a statistical and chronological summary and highlights the many people and companies involved in the oil industry during its early days in this region. After too many discouraging years of exploration, success finally came in 1939. The big payoff was the discovery of the Tinsley Oil Field.
Author: Richard Grant
Author: Richard Grant
Author: Paul Theroux
Author: Rick Bragg
Author: Adam Rothman
Author: Gerald Horne
Author: Richard Grant
Author: Richard Grant
Author: John S. Lupold
Author: Dudley J. Hughes