Bøger udgivet af University of Tennessee Press

What was served at President James K. Polk's White House dinners? What foods graced the table of John Sevier, Tennessee's First Governor? In Taproots of Tennessee, Lynne Drysdale Patterson answers these questions and more, exploring nearly two centuries of Tennessee foodways.

A unique book that combines a narrative history of pre-Civil War Knoxville, the war years and continuing construction of Fort Sanders, the failed attempts to preserve the postwar fort, and the events which led to its almost total destruction.

Based on extensive interviews with mostly former cult members, this book chronicles the history of the Church of God of Union Assembly from its beginning around World War I up to recent times. Founded by a charismatic, unlettered leader, C.T. Pratt, the church eventually found its home base in Dalton, Georgia.

Intended for a general readership, Decisions of the Atlanta Campaign introduces readers to critical decisions made by both Union and Confederate commanders who faced harrowing situations and attempted to achieve strategic and tactical victories.

Throughout the Upland South, the banjo has become an emblem of white mountain folk, who are generally credited with creating the short-thumb-string banjo, developing its downstroking playing styles and repertory, and spreading its influence to the national consciousness. In this groundbreaking study, however, Cecelia Conway demonstrates that these European Americans borrowed the banjo from African Americans and adapted it to their own musical culture. Like many aspects of the African-American tradition, the influence of black banjo music has been largely unrecorded and nearly forgotten--until now. Drawing in part on interviews with elderly African-American banjo players from the Piedmont--among the last American representatives of an African banjo-playing tradition that spans several centuries--Conway reaches beyond the written records to reveal the similarity of pre-blues black banjo lyric patterns, improvisational playing styles, and the accompanying singing and dance movements to traditional West African music performances. The author then shows how Africans had, by the mid-eighteenth century, transformed the lyrical music of the gourd banjo as they dealt with the experience of slavery in America. By the mid-nineteenth century, white southern musicians were learning the banjo playing styles of their African-American mentors and had soon created or popularized a five-string, wooden-rim banjo. Some of these white banjo players remained in the mountain hollows, but others dispersed banjo music to distant musicians and the American public through popular minstrel shows. By the turn of the century, traditional black and white musicians still shared banjo playing, and Conway shows that this exchange gave rise to a distinct and complex new genre--the banjo song. Soon, however, black banjo players put down their banjos, set their songs with increasingly assertive commentary to the guitar, and left the banjo and its story to white musicians. But the banjo still echoed at the crossroads between the West African griots, the traveling country guitar bluesmen, the banjo players of the old-time southern string bands, and eventually the bluegrass bands. The Author: Cecelia Conway is associate professor of English at Appalachian State University. She is a folklorist who teaches twentieth-century literature, including cultural perspectives, southern literature, and film.

At the heart of Memphis lies Overton Park, a 342-acre public space. Founded in 1901, the park has been at the centre of both celebration and controversy. This delightfully informative book, filled with historic photos, offers a history of the park from the perspective of those who lived it.

This wide-ranging book chronicles the founding and growth of Nashville's institutions of higher education and their impressive impact on the city, region, and nation at large. Local colleges and universities also heavily influenced Nashville's brand of modernity as evidenced by the construction of a Parthenon replica, the centrepiece of the 1897 Centennial Exposition.

After Major General William Tecumseh Sherman's forces ravaged Atlanta in 1864, Ulysses S. Grant urged him to complete the primary mission Grant had given him: to destroy the Confederate Army in Georgia. Attempting to draw the Union army north, General John Bell Hood's Confederate forces focused their attacks on Sherman's supply line, the railroad from Chattanooga, and then moved across north Alabama and into Tennessee. As Sherman initially followed Hood's men to protect the railroad, Hood hoped to lure the Union forces out of the lower South and, perhaps more important, to recapture the long-occupied city of Nashville. Though Hood managed to cut communication between Sherman and George H. Thomas's Union forces by placing his troops across the railroads south of the city, Hood's men were spread over a wide area and much of the Confederate cavalry was in Murfreesboro. Hood's army was ultimately routed. Union forces pursued the Confederate troops for ten days until they recrossed the Tennessee River. The decimated Army of Tennessee (now numbering only about 15,000) retreated into northern Alabama and eventually Mississippi. Hood requested to be relieved of his command. Less than four months later, the war was over. Written in a lively and engaging style, The Western Confederacy's Final Gamble presents new interpretations of the critical issues of the battle. James Lee McDonough sheds light on how the Union army stole past the Confederate forces at Spring Hill and their subsequent clash, which left six Confederate generals dead. He offers insightful analysis of John Bell Hood's overconfidence in his position and of the leadership and decision-making skills of principal players such as Sherman, George Henry Thomas, John M. Schofield, Hood, and others. McDonough's subjects, both common soldiers and officers, present their unforgettable stories in their own words. Unlike most earlier studies of the battle of Nashville, McDonough's account examines the contributions of black Union regiments and gives a detailed account of the battle itself as well as its place in the overall military campaign. Filled with new information from important primary sources and fresh insights, Nashville will become the definitive treatment of a crucial battleground of the Civil War.

Founded in eastern Arkansas during the Great Depression, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) has long fascinated historians, who have emphasized its biracial membership and the socialist convictions of its leaders. However, as James Ross notes in this compelling revisionist history, such accounts have largely ignored the perspective of the union's rank and file.

In this innovative, copiously illustrated guide, Thomas C. Hubka considers why most ordinary, working-class houses in the US lack an adequate identifying nomenclature and proposes new ways to name and classify these anonymous structures, shedding a fresh light on their role in the development of American domestic culture and its housing landscape.

The first collection of original essays on the author and her magnum opus. Written for scholars as well as general readers, it is an accessible collection on one of America's most important novels and its often enigmatic creator.

Based in part on the author's extensive collection of oral histories from the remote highlands of West Virginia, Signs, Cures, and Witchery describes various occult practices, symbols, and beliefs; how they evolved within New World religious contexts; how they arrived on the Appalachian frontier; and the prospects of those beliefs continuing in the contemporary world.

Consolidates the lore of the older dyers with the author's own first-hand experience to produce both a history of natural dyes and a practical manual for using pre-synthetic era processes on all the natural fibres - cotton, linen, silk, and wool.

"An invaluable resource for the home or commercial gardener who wishes to plant native species."--Edward W. Chester, Austin Peay State University The natural landscape of Tennessee represents a unique treasure for gardeners and nature lovers. Encompassing several geographically distinctive regions, from the 6,000-foot peaks of the Unaka Mountains to the swampy floodplain of the Mississippi River, the state boasts nearly 3,000 native plant species. This stunning diversity of life owes much to Tennessee's prime location at the crossroads of mountain and prairie ecosystems and in the transition area between northern and southern climate patterns. In Gardening with the Native Plants of Tennessee, Margie Hunter gives gardeners the knowledge they need in order to nurture this natural heritage in their own gardens. Beginning with a survey of the state's ecology--including geology, geography, plant life and animal species--Hunter takes a holistic approach to the process of gardening with native plants. The book's main section provides detailed accounts of 450 species of wildflowers, ferns, grasses, vines, shrubs, and trees native to Tennessee and adjacent states. These descriptions, arranged according to plant type, include both scientific and common name, flowering and fruiting times, propagation methods, soil and light requirements, and distribution patterns within the state. Nearly 400 color photographs illustrate the species discussions. No other book designed for the home gardener includes such area-specific information on native species or such a comprehensive listing of plants. Appendixes refer readers to other sources of information and seeds, including mail-order nurseries, botanical gardens, state agencies, native plant organizations, and subject-specific conferences. A detailed bibliography also contributes to the reference value of this book for gardeners, landscapers, and nature lovers throughout Tennessee and in neighboring states. The Author: Margie Hunter, a long-time volunteer at Cheekwood Botanical Garden, lives in Nashville.

Guided by memory and experience, reading and conversations, Linda Flowers offers a perceptive and often painful rendering of the changes industrialization has brought to her native region of eastern North Carolina since 1960.

In August 1962, the island nation of Jamaica achieved independence from Great Britain. In this provocative social and political history of the first decade of independence, Obika Gray explores the impact of radical social movements on political change in Jamaica during a turbulent formative era. Led by a minority elite and a middle class of mixed racial origins, two parties, each with its associated workers' union, emerged to dominate the postcolonial political scene. Gray argues that party leaders, representing the dominant social class, felt vulnerable to attack and resorted to dictatorial measures to consolidate their power. These measures, domestic social crises, and the worldwide rise of Black Power and other Third World ideologies provoked persistent challenges to the established parties' political and moral authority. With students, radical intellectuals, and the militant urban poor in the vanguard, the protest movement took many forms. Rastafarian religious symbolism, rebel youth's cultural innovations, efforts to organize independent labor unions, and the intelligentsia's varied attempts to use mass media to reach broader audiences-all influenced the course of political events in this period. Grounding his tale in relevant theory, Gray persuasively contends that, despite its narrow social and geographical base of support, this urban protest movement succeeded in moving the major parties toward broader and more progressive agendas.

Although the Voting Rights Act of 1965 removed the last legal barriers to voting in the South, the anticipated increase in black political power has not been realized. In his analysis of black political participation in three predominantly black Georgia counties between 1960 and 1982, Lawrence J. Hanks seeks to explain why black political empowerment has not increased as expected but also why it has met with such widely varying degrees of success. Why did blacks in come counties achieve empowerment while others sis not? Arguing that models that focus on individual voting patterns or on political barriers to empowerment fail to account for the varying rates of black participation, hanks draws instead on the literature of collective action. He finds that only in those counties where there was a successful black political organization, backed by strong leaders and sufficient resources, did blacks achieve political empowerment. Once established, such an organization gained popular support through programs of economic development and was able to overcome barriers like ignorance, poverty, and fear and thus promote effective political mobilization. Approaching his subject historically, Hanks tells the real story of real people working for political change at the local level. He concludes that the franchise alone does not insure political effectiveness, and that blacks need to work toward greater organizational, economic, and political sophistication in order to reap the benefits of the vote.

Widely recognized as one of the major works on eastern archaeology published during the first half of the twentieth century, The Adena People remains a standard reference work on the prehistory of the Ohio Valley. The result of the collaboration between the eminent archaeologists William S. Webb and Charles E. Snow, the work is largely concerned with the burial customs and earth mounds erected over the remains of the Adena dead in Kentucky. This study serves as a sourcebook for all archaeologists and provides a clear view of American archaeology as earlier practiced.

>"This unique and extremely valuable book adds considerably to the area of folklore studies in the United States. The material which Montell obtained in his field work is superb.">"This book is to be recommended to both folklorists and those non-folklorists who read folklore for enjoyment alone. It makes an important contribution to the study of deathlore and, it is to be hoped, will draw added attention to this multi-generic subject area.">"Professor Montell's book can well be viewed as a standard of excellence: a direct, articulate and cataloged approach for future study and implementation in the fields of folklore and oral history.">"The book gives fascinating accounts of death beliefs, death omens, folk beliefs associated with the dead, and in the major section, ghosts narratives. A fine combination of scholarship and chilling narration to be relished by firelight in an old deserted house in the hills.">"Professor Montell has arranged beliefs and experiences about death of a particular group of people in such a way that a whole new aspect of the people's lives comes to focus.">

Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was created by the U.S. government during World War II to aid in the construction of the first atomic bomb. Drawing on oral history and previously classified material, this book portrays the patterns of daily life in this unique setting.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, which ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, has always been vitally important in southern and black history. With the publication of this book, the boycott becomes a milestone in the history of American women as well. "This autobiographical account of the creation of the boycott is the most important document on that highly significant episode since Martin Luther King's own version, Stride Towards Freedom. I feel certain that scholars and students will refer to this unique historical source for generations to come.">"This valuable first-hand account of the historic Montgomery Bus Boycott, written by an important, behind-the-scenes organizer, evokes the emotional intensity of the civil rights struggle. It ought to be required reading for all Americans who value their freedom and the contribution of black women to our history.">"A sharply remembered addition to the literature on what has become an event of mythic proportions, and a sound primer for those interested in community organizing. The author is scrupulously honest, modest, and gives unsung heroes much deserved praise.">"This fascinating memoir provides new evidence on the origins and sustaining force of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56).">"There's no substitute for this intimate memoir; it provides an immediacy and graphic intensity never before available.">"This powerful memoir is a milestone in the history of that boycott and in the American Civil Rights Movement.">"This absorbing study may become a minor classic in the literature of the Montgomery bus boycott. . . . Garrow correctly states in his Foreword that this book is the most important participant-observer account of the Montgomery protest available to students and scholars of the black freedom movement. . . . This straightforward, sensitive memoir is must reading for students of the civil rights movement. It is a powerful commentary on how a woman and the group she led rose up to throw off an injustice thrust upon them. When Jo Ann Robinson and other Montgomery women decided no longer to play the role of contented black Southerners, they gave blacks everywhere renewed hope, and they helped to create a national leader who took them closer to the promised land.">"In an absorbing, first-hand narrative, the dignified and unassuming Robinson focuses on the role of the Women's Political Council (WPC) and details the WPC's plans to engineer a boycott months before the heralded arrest of Rosa Parks. . . . The value of this primary source will endure long after many best-selling, secondary accounts of national politics during this period have disappeared."--Keith D. Miller and Elizabeth Vander Lei, Explorations in Sight and Sound