Bøger udgivet af University of Tennessee Press

"Following the defeat of Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans's Army of the Cumberland at the Battle of Chickamauga, Gen. Braxton Bragg and the Army of Tennessee followed the retreating Federal army to Chattanooga and partially surrounded Rosecrans and his men by occupying Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga Valley, and Missionary Ridge. The Battle of Chattanooga would prove the final defeat of the Confederacy in East Tennessee and open the door to Sherman's Atlanta Campaign. In this newly revised second edition of his classic guidebook, Matt Spruill revisits his standard-setting tours of the Chattanooga National Military Park, providing updates and new directions after twenty years of park improvements. He recounts the story of the November 1863 battle of Chattanooga using official reports and observations by commanding officers in their own words. The book is organized in a format still used by the military on staff rides, allowing the reader to understand how the battle was fought and why leaders made the decisions they did. Unlike other books on the battle of Chattanooga, this work guides the reader through the battlefield, allowing both visitor and armchair traveler alike to see the battle through the eyes of its participants. Numerous tour 'stops' take the reader through the battles for Chattanooga, Wauhatchie, Lookout Mountain, Orchard Knob, Missionary Ridge, and Ringgold Gap. With easy-to-follow instructions, extensive and updated tactical maps, eyewitness accounts, and editorial analyses, the reader is transported to the center of the action. With this second edition, Storming the Heights will continue to be the go-to guide for Civil War enthusiasts interested in touring this sacred ground"--

A decorated World War I veteran, Federal Judge Robert P. Patterson knew all too well the needs of soldiers on the battlefield. He was thus dismayed by America's lack of military preparedness when a second great war engulfed Europe in 1939-40. With the international crisis worsening, Patterson even resumed military training--as a forty-nine-year-old private--before being named assistant secretary of war in July 1940. That appointment set the stage for Patterson's central role in the country's massive mobilization and supply effort which helped the Allies win World War II. In Arming the Nation for War, a previously unpublished account long buried among the late author's papers and originally marked confidential, Patterson describes the vast challenges the United States faced as it had to equip, in a desperately short time, a fighting force capable of confronting a formidable enemy. Brimming with data and detail, the book also abounds with deep insights into the myriad problems encountered on the domestic mobilization front--including the sometimes divergent interests of wartime planners and industrial leaders--along with the logistical difficulties of supplying far-flung theaters of war with everything from ships, planes, and tanks to food and medicine. Determined to remind his contemporaries of how narrow the Allied margin of victory was and that the war's lessons not be forgotten, Patterson clearly intended the manuscript (which he wrote between 1945 and '47, when he was President Truman's secretary of war) to contribute to the postwar debates on the future of the military establishment. That passage of the National Security Act of 1947, to which Patterson was a key contributor, answered many of his concerns may explain why he never published the book during his lifetime. A unique document offering an insider's view of a watershed historical moment, Patterson's text is complemented by editor Brian Waddell's extensive introduction and notes. In addition, Robert M. Morgenthau, former Manhattan district attorney and a protégé of Patterson's for four years prior to the latter's death in a 1952 plane crash, offers a heartfelt remembrance of a man the New York Herald-Tribune called "an example of the public-spirited citizen."

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is one of America's most beautiful and popular national parks. Located in the southern Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina, it is home to more than 100,000 species of plants and animals. The grandeur and sheer scale of the park has been captured in Donald W. Linzey's A Natural History Guide to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which was already the most extensive volume available on the park's natural history. In this second edition, Linzey updates the wildlife story of the park after the recent reintroduction of red wolves and new introduction of reptiles, amphibians, and arachnids to the bioregion, and discusses persisting habitat concerns related to aggressive, non-native species. Written from the perspective of a naturalist who has spent over fifty years conducting research in the park, this volume not only discusses the park's plant and animal life but also explores the impact that civilization has played in altering the area's landscape. Linzey draws from a deep reservoir of research, including the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory, a concentrated effort to determine all species within a given area within a short time frame. His book provides a thorough overview of everything a visitor to the park would need to know, without complex jargon. Both casual readers and those more interested in the ecology of the Great Smoky Mountains will find this book an enlightening and educational guide.

Vicksburg, nicknamed the Gibraltar of the Confederacy, was vital to Confederate supply lines, troop movements, and access to port cities on the Gulf of Mexico. The fortified city had been under constant attack since 1862 as Admiral Farragut assaulted Vicksburg after capturing New Orleans, and Major General Halleck enlisted then Major General Grant to devise an overland campaign to support a naval engagement. As Vicksburg was heavily garrisoned and resupplied regularly, Federal plans came up short again and again. But the pugnacious Grant would eventually devise a bold plan to cross the Mississippi River and advance along the western bank, use a feint by General Sherman's forces and a raid by Colonel Grierson's cavalry to draw out Confederate troops, then recross the river and capture Vicksburg. Decisions of the Vicksburg Campaign explores the critical decisions made by Confederate and Federal commanders during the battle and how these decisions shaped its outcome. Rather than offering a history of the battle, Larry Peterson hones in on a sequence of critical decisions made by commanders on both sides of the contest to provide a blueprint of the battles for Vicksburg at their tactical core. Identifying and exploring the critical decisions in this way allows students of the battles to progress from a knowledge of what happened to a mature grasp of why events unfolded as they did. Complete with maps and a driving tour, Decisions of the Vicksburg Campaign is an indispensable primer, and readers looking for a concise introduction to the battle can tour this sacred ground--or read about it at their leisure--with key insights into the campaign and a deeper understanding of the Civil War itself. Decisions of the Vicksburg Campaign is the twentieth in a series of books that will explore the critical decisions of major campaigns and battles of the Civil War.

"The bombing of Pearl Harbor set off a chain of events that included the race to beat German scientists to build the atomic bomb. A tiny hamlet tucked away in the southern Appalachians proved an unlikely linchpin to win the race. The Manhattan Project required the combination of four secret sites-Clinton Laboratories, Y-12, K-25, and S-50-75,000 workers, and the nation's finest scientists to create the Secret City, Oak Ridge. From the beginning, the effort was aided by the nearby University of Tennessee, which provided expertise to make the weapon possible. Following World War II, it was not clear what role this huge research and development program would play, but pioneering scientists and administrators were determined that one option-dismantling the whole thing-would not happen.Critical Connections chronicles how Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the Y-12 National Security Complex, and their partners became outstanding examples of the military-industrial-educational complex from the Cold War to the present day. At the beginning of the 1950s, Oak Ridge became a flourishing, less-secret city, and the authors show how, decade by decade, ORNL became the source of major breakthroughs in physics, biology, computing, and other fields-and how these achievements required ever-closer connections with UT. By the mid-1990s, after many successful joint initiatives between UT and ORNL, UT was poised to compete to become the manager of ORNL. In 2000, UT-Battelle LLC won the bid from the Department of Energy: UT was charged with providing scientific direction and key personnel; its partner Battelle would oversee ORNL's operations and chart its technology direction. The authors highlight the scientific developments these connections have brought, from nanotechnology to nuclear fission, from cryogenic experiments on mice to the world's fastest supercomputer. The partnerships between a university, a city, and federal facilities helped solve some of the greatest challenges of the twentieth century-and point toward how to deal with those of the twenty-first"--

"When Gilya Gerda Schmidt met him in 1986, Cantor Heiser had spent forty-six of his eighty-one years as a US citizen. He had assumed the cantorate at Congregation B'nai Israel in the East End of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1942. A master of the cantor's art, he was renowned for his style, arrangements, and deeply affecting voice. In this book, Schmidt melds decades of archival research, conservation efforts, family interviews, and trips to Jerusalem and Berlin into a critical reconstruction of the life and vision of Hazzan Mordecai Gustav Heiser in the multiple contexts that shaped him. Coming of age in Berlin in the afterglow of the Second German Empire, young Gustav had tasted European Jewish culture in a rare state of refinement and modernity. But by January 30, 1940, when he reached New York with his wife and two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Cantor Heiser had lost nearly all of his living family relations to the extermination programs of the German Reich, and narrowly survived incarceration at Sachsenhausen himself. While Cantor Heiser's art was steeped in nineteenth-century tradition, Schmidt contends that Heiser's music was a powerful affirmation of Jewish life in the twentieth century. In a final chapter, Schmidt describes his influence on the American cantorate and American culture and society"--

"Travis Stern explores the relationship between professional baseball and professional theater in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He argues that examining theater from this era helps us better understand baseball's development and its transformation from a strictly working-class attraction to an entertainment of the emerging middle class in the US. Stern examines case studies of five players from baseball's pre-Babe Ruth "deadball" era: Cap Anson, Mike "King" Kelly, Christy Mathewson, Ty Cobb, and Rube Waddell, with a concluding study of Babe Ruth himself. While one draw of theatrical performance was the additional profit it promised the players during the off-season, the stage also offered these men an opportunity to take a more active role in shaping their public image. Thus, this book offers not only an intersectional historical study of baseball and theater, but also insight into the creation of celebrity in early twentieth-century America"--

A cup of coffee provided the impetus that changed the futures of the University of Tennessee System and a small, private Methodist school in southern Middle Tennessee. When UT System president Randy Boyd met with Martin Methodist College chancellor Mark La Branche for an early morning discussion of higher education in the state, the topic soon delved into new possibilities with the proposal of "What if . . . ?" This book details the challenges as UT and Martin Methodist College began to explore a merger that would impact future generations of Tennesseans. Faculty and staff members share their thoughts and concerns as well as their preparations for the integration of two institutions of higher education with one passion of expanding educational opportunities for the residents of Tennessee. The acquisition of one university by another is rare, and even rarer still is when it involves a public university system and a faith-based institution. In University of Tennessee Southern: The Rebirth of an Institution, the authors tell this historic story through the many steps taken to bring the new campus into being.

During the Potato Famine of the nineteenth century, about one million Irish people perished from starvation and disease, while more than two million fled the country in fear and desperation, with some 850,000 landing in New York City. After a difficult journey, many found themselves impoverished, taking dangerous jobs, and battling miserable living conditions in an unfamiliar urban landscape. These circumstances resulted in high rates of illness, injury, and death compared with other immigrant groups and native-born Americans. In this profound study, Meredith B. Linn explores three kinds of afflictions--typhus fever, tuberculosis, and work-related injuries--that disproportionately affected Irish immigrants, tracing how existing medical ideas and technologies intersected with American prejudices to further conspire against this once culturally distinct group. Linn makes a compelling case for how Americans' interpretations of the visible bodily changes wrought by typhus fever and injuries contributed to essentializing and dehumanizing biases against these new immigrants, while tuberculosis--with its symptoms of fatigue, pallor, and emaciation--enabled Americans to see individuals beyond stereotypes and to recognize the equal humanity of the Irish. Drawing upon extensive archaeological records, folkloric sources, and historical documents, Linn presents what she terms a "visceral historical archaeology"--a perspective rooted in historical archaeology and medical anthropology--to illuminate the experiences of these immigrants. She investigates their health-related ideas and practices and reveals their efforts to heal themselves using popular remedies from Ireland and several new American commodities. Laden with heartrending stories from real working-class Irish and their American doctors, this richly illustrated book provides new perspectives about urban experience in the context of the Irish diaspora and invites contemplation about how illness, injury, and healing have affected the lives and reception of newcomers to the US.

The Battles of Forts Henry and Donelson took place in February of 1862 and were early indicators of the success the US would have in the Civil War's Western Theater. Due to Kentucky's neutrality at the time, Brig. Gen. Daniel S. Donelson was instructed to find suitable sites for fortification along the Tennessee River but just inside the state boundaries of Tennessee. Forts Henry and Donelson were constructed in the summer of 1861 and were quickly identified by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant as strategic fortifications that, if conquered, would open the Federal Army's path to Alabama and Mississippi. Fort Henry fell to Federal control on February 6, 1862, and Fort Donelson fell six days later. With the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers now open to Federal gunboats, Grant and his army would head southwest to Memphis and on to Vicksburg. Decisions at Forts Henry and Donelson explores the critical decisions made by Confederate and Federal commanders during the battle and how these decisions shaped its outcome. Rather than offering a history of the battle, Hank Koopman hones in on a sequence of critical decisions made by commanders on both sides of the conflict to provide a blueprint of the Battles of Forts Henry and Donelson at their tactical core. Identifying and exploring the critical decisions in this way allows students of the battles to progress from a knowledge of what happened to a mature grasp of why events happened. Complete with maps and a driving tour, Decisions at Forts Henry and Donelson is an indispensable primer, and readers looking for a concise introduction to these battles can tour this sacred ground--or read about it at their leisure--with key insights into the campaigns and a deeper understanding of the Civil War itself. Decisions at Forts Henry and Donelson is the eighteenth in a series of books that will explore the critical decisions of major campaigns and battles of the Civil War.

With a closeness perhaps unique to siblings orphaned young, Orlando and Artimisia "Missie" Palmer exchanged intimate letters throughout their lives. These letters (interspersed with additional letters from Oliver Kennedy, the Palmers' first cousin) offer a clear and entertaining window into the life and times of a junior Confederate officer serving in the Western Theater of the Civil War. Though he initially felt Americans would see "the folly and the madness" of going to war, Orlando enlisted as a private in what would become Company H of the First (later Fifteenth) Arkansas Infantry, informing his sister that he had volunteered "not for position, not for a name, but from patriotic motivation." However, he was ambitious enough to secure an appointment as Maj. Gen. William Joseph Hardee's personal secretary; he then rose to become his regiment's sergeant major, his company's first lieutenant, and later captain and brigade adjutant. Soldier letters typically report only what can be observed at the company level, but Palmer's high-ranking position offers a unique view of strategic rather than tactical operations. Palmer's letters are not all related to his military experience, though, and the narrative is enhanced by his nuanced reflections on courtship customs and personal relationships. For instance, Palmer frequently attempts to entertain Missie with witticisms and tales of his active romantic life: "We have so much to do," he quips, "that we have no time to do anything save to visit the women. I am in love with several dozen of them and am having >The Folly and the Madness adds depth to the genre of Civil War correspondence and provides a window into the lives of ordinary southerners at an extraordinary time.

"This books collects amendments to the Constitution of the United States that Virginians proposed during the secession crisis alongside select speeches of the state's political leaders. Editor Dwight T. Pitcaithley's selection and introduction emphasize that advocates and opponents of secession alike wanted to protect slavery and the interests of enslavers in Virginia. Among the documents are Governor Letcher's January 7, 1861, address to the General Assembly; speeches given at the Washington Peace Conference, US Senate, and House of Representatives; and the state's secession convention. Chapter 6 contains the sixteen constitutional amendments proposed by Virginians. The volume also includes a timeline for Secession Winter and questions for discussion"--

"First published in 1992, this guidebook has served thousands who have explored the 650,000-acre Cherokee National Forest. Now in its third edition, the book has been expanded once again to cover numerous additional trails and the almost 20,000 acres of additional congressionally designated Wilderness in the decades since the second edition. Stretching across the Tennessee-North Carolina state line, the Cherokee National Forest includes much of the western slopes of the southern Appalachian Mountains, north and south of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The area encompasses a tremendous diversity of wildlife, vegetation, and scenic vistas of high mountain peaks and beautiful creeks, waterfalls, and valleys. With over 840 trail miles and 226 trails described and mapped, the book provides specific directions for all the forest's current trails along with general information on wildlife, vegetation, and geology past and present, as well as a history of the forest's human inhabitants-including the political battles that have been waged to protect it"--

"In the 1990s, the NBA was trying to capitalize on the latter part of the Michael Jordan era and reposition the league for an international market. Expansion franchises were granted to two Canadian cities; but while Toronto thrived thanks in large part to the drafting of Vince Carter, Vancouver badly mismanaged its team, leading eventually to the team's relocation to Memphis. Author ¡ukasz Muniowski finds in the shifting fortunes of the Vancouver/Memphis Grizzlies a significant window on a volatile moment in NBA history. He first examines the failure, both financially and culturally, of a prosperous Canadian city to support an NBA expansion team before turning to the Grizzlies' explosive rise in a relatively impoverished southern city starving for national recognition"--

Originally published in 1994, Portrait of a Racist is an astonishing biography of Byron De La Beckwith (1920-2001), who murdered Black civil rights leader Medgar Evers in June 1963. Written by Beckwith's nephew by marriage, the book is based on dozens of exclusive personal interviews with Beckwith and people who knew him--as well as letters Beckwith wrote directly to the author. These unique sources provide as definitive a glimpse into the chilling psychological landscape of a man devoted to murderous intolerance as we will likely ever have. Although the slaying of Evers helped to galvanize the civil rights movement in the South, the killer evaded justice for three decades after the crime. Twice tried for murder in the 1960s--both times by all- male, all-White juries--Beckwith was finally convicted in a third trial in 1994. Accompanied by new illustrations that have never been printed before, this new edition includes an afterword that recounts the author's participation as a witness and his introduction of new evidence in the third trial. It also chronicles Beckwith's last years of declining health behind bars, examines the rich scholarship on Evers and civil rights that has arisen since this book's original appearance, and reflects on the catastrophic persistence of Beckwith's ideology-- Christian nationalism and white supremacy--in our own times.

"While one of the most persistent underlying themes in the historiography of the Civil War is the "brother against brother" one, particularly in states that were deeply divided, Pittsburgh and its citizenry provide an instance of almost universal pro-Union ideological solidarity as the war approached and overtook the country. The city achieved this unity despite forces that might ordinarily tear it apart: an ethnically diverse population, including many new immigrants, a complex industrial-economic situation, and an enormous contribution of soldiers who died in combat. A study of local history during a tumultuous time and of pro-Unionism in which different groups tried to outdo one another in patriotic fervor, this book provides a wide-ranging look at Pittsburgh during the war years"--

"Most of the letters in this collection are to Cox's wife, Helen. This volume's editor, Gene Schmiel, wrote a well-regarded biography of Cox in 2014. In 2012, Schmiel was made aware that Oberlin College had a cache of letters that had been transcribed by Cox's great granddaughter, and the cache turned out to contain 213 letters written to his wife during the Civil War. Well-known for his incredibly detailed postwar writing about campaigns, Cox reveals himself in these letters as an ambitious, warmhearted, and concerned observer of the progress of the war. The letters reflect his service in the Maryland Campaign, Atlanta Campaign, and Franklin-Nashville Campaign"--

"The siege at Port Hudson, largely overshadowed by the longer, large-scale siege of Vicksburg, nevertheless had many parallels to it. Like Vicksburg, Port Hudson involved logistical challenges, an overmatched Confederate defense, and a rough slog in usually adverse conditions. Among many interesting features, the Port Hudson campaign featured widespread participation of African American Federal troops. Drawing on a large body of primary sources and secondary scholarship, Thrasher presents a 'bottom-up' portrayal of the campaign"--

"When NHL commissioner Clarence Campbell announced that Atlanta had received an NHL franchise, ownership was tasked with selling a northern game that most of the city's Black residents had never experienced. The team marketed itself to upper-middle class White residents by portraying a hockey game as an exclusive event-with the whiteness of the players themselves providing critical support for that claim. In a city that had given Hank Aaron a cool reception and had effectively guaranteed the whitening of a successful Black basketball team, the prospect of a sport with White players was an inherent draw that leaders hoped would mitigate White flight from the city and draw residents of the surrounding suburbs back to the city center. The team was ultimately marketed as the Flames, a reference to William Sherman's burning of Atlanta and the city's rise from the ashes to its rightful place as a Deep South hub of culture and economy. It wasn't a name with specific racial coding, but with the city's racial history and the Lost Cause iconography that dotted its landscape, a Civil War name could only add to the impression of a White team playing to White fans in a majority Black city. Thus the politics of civic development and race combined yet again, but this time in a form foreign to most longtime sports enthusiasts in the Deep South"--

"This is an "as-told-to" autobiography of University of Tennessee alumna Monica Abbott, who is a world-renowned professional softball pitcher in the National Professional Fastpitch league-indeed, the first female athlete in softball to sign a million-dollar contract. The narrative relates Abbott's rather humble beginnings, not initially even much interested in sports but finding herself captivated by softball. The story will serve as an inspiration for other athletes, especially girls and women, as they find their way into organized sports"--

The National Football League that celebrated its first Super Bowl in 1967 bore scant resemblance to the league of its obscure origins. In its earliest years, the league was a ragtag collection of locally supported small-town teams that generated attention only in the locales in which they played, if they were lucky. Many teams received no support at all. Only after enduring a slow, often treacherous, journey did the enterprise of professional football reach its position as the king of the sports world by the late 1960s. In From Sandlots to the Super Bowl, Craig R. Coenen recounts the NFL's ascension from a cash-strapped laughingstock to a perennial autumn obsession for millions of sports fans. It offers an in-depth summary of the NFL's early years and its struggles to build an identity. This book shows how the fledgling NFL of the 1920s and 1930s attempted to build support both on a local and national scale. Considered a sport of hooligans and lower-class athletes, professional football paled in comparison to the reputations of competing sports such as college football and professional baseball. Even more difficult for the league, developing civic support for franchises proved an almost impossible task. Teams would spring up and disappear overnight, generating hardly any notice among sports fans.Coenen shows how the league's survival depended on small town franchises being able to tap into the civic pride and larger economic interests of nearby, growing urban centers. This book also details how the league faced challenges from rival leagues, the government, and at times, itself. Finally, it documents how the NFL mastered the use of new technologies like television to market itself, generate new revenue, and secure its financial future.This book approaches the history of the National Football League not only with stats and scores but with what happened beyond the gridiron. Starting in Canton and Massillon and ending in Los Angeles with Super Bowl I, From Sandlots to the Super Bowl offers an entertaining and absorbing look at the first five decades of America's most popular professional sport.

During the civil rights era, Memphis gained a reputation for having one of the South's strongest NAACP branches. But that organization, led by the city's black elite, was hardly the only driving force in the local struggle against racial injustice. In the late sixties, Black Power proponents advocating economic, political, and cultural self-determination effectively mobilized Memphis's African American youth, using an array of moderate and radical approaches to protest and change conditions on their campuses and in the community. While Black Power activism on the coasts and in the Midwest has attracted considerable scholarly attention, much less has been written about the movement's impact outside these hotbeds. In Black Power in the Bluff City, Shirletta J. Kinchen helps redress that imbalance by examining how young Memphis activists, like Coby Smith and Charles Cabbage, dissatisfied by the pace of progress in a city emerging from the Jim Crow era, embraced Black Power ideology to confront such challenges as gross disparities in housing, education, and employment as well as police brutality and harassment. Two closely related Black Power organizations, the Black Organizing Project and the Invaders, became central to the local black youth movement in the late 1960s. Kinchen traces these groups' participation in the 1968 sanitation workers' strike--including the controversy over whether their activities precipitated events that culminated in Martin Luther King's assassination--and their subsequent involvement in War on Poverty programs. The book also shows how Black Power ideology drove activism at the historically black LeMoyne-Owen College, scene of a 1968 administration-building takeover, and at the predominately white Memphis State University, where African American students transformed the campus by creating parallel institutions that helped strengthen black student camaraderie and consciousness in the face of marginalization. Drawing on interviews with activists, FBI files, newspaper accounts from the period, and many other sources, the author persuasively shows not only how an emerging generation helped define the black freedom struggle in Memphis but also how they applied the tenets of Black Power to shape the broader community.

Prior to the nineteenth century, few Americans knew anything more of Egyptian culture than what could be gained from studying the biblical Exodus. Napoleon's invasion of Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century, however, initiated a cultural breakthrough for Americans as representations of Egyptian culture flooded western museums and publications, sparking a growing interest in all things Egyptian that was coined Egyptomania. As Egyptomania swept over the West, a relatively young America began assimilating Egyptian culture into its own national identity, creating a hybrid national heritage that would vastly affect the memorial landscape of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Far more than a study of Egyptian revivalism, this book examines the Egyptian style of commemoration from the rural cemetery to national obelisks to the Sphinx at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Giguere argues that Americans adopted Egyptian forms of commemoration as readily as other neoclassical styles such as Greek revivalism, noting that the American landscape is littered with monuments that define the Egyptian style's importance to American national identity. Of particular interest is perhaps America's greatest commemorative obelisk: the Washington Monument. Standing at 555 feet high and constructed entirely of stone--making it the tallest obelisk in the world--the Washington Monument represents the pinnacle of Egyptian architecture's influence on America's desire to memorialize its national heroes by employing monumental forms associated with solidity and timelessness. Construction on the monument began in 1848, but controversy over its design, which at one point included a Greek colonnade surrounding the obelisk, and the American Civil War halted construction until 1877. Interestingly, Americans saw the completion of the Washington Monument after the Civil War as a mending of the nation itself, melding Egyptian commemoration with the reconstruction of America. As the twentieth century saw the rise of additional commemorative obelisks, the Egyptian Revival became ensconced in American national identity. Egyptian-style architecture has been used as a form of commemoration in memorials for World War I and II, the civil rights movement, and even as recently as the 9/11 remembrances. Giguere places the Egyptian style in a historical context that demonstrates how Americans actively sought to forge a national identity reminiscent of Egyptian culture that has endured to the present day.

This book tells the dramatic story of twenty-eight law students--one of whom was the author--who went south at the height of the civil rights era and helped change death penalty jurisprudence forever. The 1965 project was organized by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which sought to prove statistically whether capital punishment in southern rape cases had been applied discriminatorily over the previous twenty years. If the research showed that a disproportionate number of African Americans convicted of raping white women had received the death penalty regardless of nonracial variables (such as the degree of violence used), then capital punishment in the South could be abolished as a clear violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Targeting eleven states, the students cautiously made their way past suspicious court clerks, lawyers, and judges to secure the necessary data from dusty courthouse records. Trying to attract as little attention as possible, they managed--amazingly--to complete their task without suffering serious harm at the hands of white supremacists. Their findings then went to University of Pennsylvania criminologist Marvin Wolfgang, who compiled and analyzed the data for use in court challenges to death penalty convictions. The result was powerful evidence that thousands of jurors had voted on racial grounds in rape cases.>A Virginia native who studied law at UCLA, BARRETT J. FOERSTER (1942-2010) was a judge in the Superior Court in Imperial County, California. MICHAEL MELTSNER is the George J. and Kathleen Waters Matthews Distinguished Professor of Law at Northeastern University. During the 1960s, he was first assistant counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. His books include The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer and Cruel and Unusual: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment.

"Germantown during the Civil War Era recounts the rise and fall of a nineteenth-century Tennessee town, a community that was not a typical antebellum town in the cotton belt. It's a case study in how social, economic, and political changes affected them, Black and White. Before the Civil War, Germantown had become a thriving cultural, commercial, and political center. Its elite and middle-class White families had full access to the cultural and social life of Memphis, as well as local private academies and collegiate institutions that hosted enriching events. Its appealing inns, taverns, and mineral springs allowed for festive social mixing of all classes. As an emerging industrial and commercial center of a rich cotton-growing district in the 1850s, Germantown's decline after the war would have been unimaginable before the war. Thus, this monograph paints a picture of a vibrant community whose brilliancy was extinguished and almost entirely forgotten. Yet, Germantown's economic and political decline, caused by a number of factors, is not the most interesting part of its story. Meticulously documented and richly illustrated with maps and data, this book reveals the impacts of surviving a theater of guerrilla war, of emancipation, of social and political Reconstruction, and a disastrous Yellow Fever epidemic on all of Germantown's people-psychologically, socially, and culturally. The damage struck far deeper than economic destruction and loss of life. A peaceful and harmonious society crumbled. Germantown during the Civil War Era is sure to be of interest not just to Shelby County residents, or students of the Civil War, but also to anyone interested in the racial and social history of the Volunteer state"--

"William Byrd II was a prominent eighteenth-century Virginian who at the time of his death owned over 180,000 acres of land and employed laborers and enslaved Africans. This book examines a neglected stage in the formation of slavery in Virginia by analyzing the practices and beliefs of one of the more prominent slave owners of the period. Byrd was perhaps the early colonial definition of a patriarch, and author Dennis Todd here grounds the concept of patriarchalism in a series of concrete practices and expectations. Doing so, Todd argues that patriarchal principles, which are often assumed to have justified slavery and to have offered a template for slave management, in fact did neither"--

"John T. Wilder was an entrepreneur, Civil War general, and business leader who would become influential in the development of post-Civil War Chattanooga. A northern transplant who made his early fortune in the iron industry, Wilder would gain notoriety in the Western Theater through his victories at the battles of Chattanooga, Chickamauga, and throughout the Tullahoma and Atlanta Campaigns while leading the famous "Lightning Brigade." After the Civil War, he relocated to Chattanooga and began the Roane Iron Company and fostered southern ironworks throughout the southeast. He was elected mayor of Chattanooga but would fail to be elected to Congress as its representative. Finally, he was instrumental in the establishment of national military parks in Chattanooga and Chickamauga. Nicely's biography captures the life of a man important to the overall development of Chattanooga and East Tennessee and argues that Wilder was influential in bringing both northern and immigrant populations to the area"--