"Instead of interpreting the 1850 Saline County Federal Census...I have chosen to present it in its original state, so that each researcher can determine for themself what it says. This was possible because the...census was fairly well written...and has survived in good enough shape to photocopy well"--Pref.
Volume I. Quilts and textiles, Ceramics, Silver, Weaponry, Furniture, Vernacular architecture, Native American art -- volume II. Photography, Fine art.
Offers a guide to census indexes, including federal, state, county, and town records, available in print and online; arranged by year, geographically, and by topic.
Billingsley reminds us that, contrary to the accepted notion of rugged individuals heeding the proverbial call of the open spaces, kindred groups accounted for most of the migration to the South's interior and boundary lands. In addition, she discusses how, for antebellum southerners, the religious affiliation of one's parents was the most powerful predictor of one's own spiritual leanings, with marriage being the strongest motivation to change them. Billingsley also looks at the connections between kinship and economic and political power, offering examples of how Keesee family members facilitated and consolidated their influence and wealth through kin ties.
Long out of print and found only in rare-book stores, it is now available to a contemporary audience with this new paperback edition. When slavery was abolished by the Emancipation Proclamation, there were slaves in every county of the state, and almost half the population was directly involved in slavery as either a slave, a slaveowner, or a member of an owner’s family. Orville Taylor traces the growth of slavery from John Law’s colony in the early eighteenth century through the French and Spanish colonial period, territorial and statehood days, to the beginning of the Civil War. He describes the various facets of the institution, including the slave trade, work and overseers, health and medical treatment, food, clothing, housing, marriage, discipline, and free blacks and manumission. While drawing on unpublished material as appropriate, the book is, to a great extent, based on original, often previously unpublished, sources. Valuable to libraries, historians in several areas of concentration, and the general reader, it gives due recognition to the signficant place slavery occupied in the life and economy of antebellum Arkansas.
In the first book-length study of Arkansas slavery in more than sixty years, A Weary Land offers a glimpse of enslaved life on the South’s western margins, focusing on the intersections of land use and agriculture within the daily life and work of bonded Black Arkansans. As they cleared trees, cultivated crops, and tended livestock on the southern frontier, Arkansas’s enslaved farmers connected culture and nature, creating their own meanings of space, place, and freedom. Kelly Houston Jones analyzes how the arrival of enslaved men and women as an imprisoned workforce changed the meaning of Arkansas’s acreage, while their labor transformed its landscape. They made the most of their surroundings despite the brutality and increasing labor demands of the “second slavery”—the increasingly harsh phase of American chattel bondage fueled by cotton cultivation in the Old Southwest. Jones contends that enslaved Arkansans were able to repurpose their experiences with agricultural labor, rural life, and the natural world to craft a sense of freedom rooted in the ability to own land, the power to control their own movement, and the right to use the landscape as they saw fit.
Mary Gordon Duffee wrote: "When the drums beat, and the bugles called for men to march to the front, I tell you old Blount responded nobly, and sent hundreds of her gallant sons to march, fight, suffer and die for the flag that now lies furled forever." This series of books attempts to identify all the Confederate soldiers who enlisted in organizations from the Blount County area, along with those who moved to Blount County after the Civil War. Whole company rosters are captured and entire service records, pension applications, birth dates, spouses and marriage dates, newspaper clippings and obituaries, and dozens of pictures are contained in these volumes. This is the first time ever all this information has been available in a single reference book. Volume 3 contains information on soldiers who enlisted in other Alabama organizations and those who moved to Blount County after the Civil War. These books are vital to any serious student of Blount County, Alabama genealogy and history.