As the reader is sure to discover, the division between combatant and civilian at the local level is not always clear. With a natural curiosity to unearth the unknown, local Milledgeville author and historian Hugh T. Harrington has put forth a collection of tales and personalities that have until now gone untold or forgotten. Civil War Milledgeville shows that it is these often these forgotten events and people that have shaped our larger understanding of the Civil War. From a women's riot to a Confederate cavalry rescue, Hugh recounts local stories of heroism and cowardice, success and strife, which illuminate the history of Milledgeville.
"Whew! They going to send around here and tie you up and drag you off to Milledgeville. Them fat blue police chasing tomcats around alleys." —Berenice in The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers A scathing and original look at the racist origins of the field of modern psychiatry, told through the story of what was once the largest mental institution in the world, by the prize-winning author of Memoir of a Race Traitor After a decade of research, Mab Segrest, whose Memoir of a Race Traitor forever changed the way we think about race in America, turns sanity itself inside-out in a stunning book that will become an instant classic. In December 1841, the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum was founded on land taken from the Cherokee nation in the then-State capitol of Milledgeville. A hundred years later, it had become the largest insane asylum in the world with over ten thousand patients. To this day, it is the site of the largest graveyard of disabled and mentally ill people in the world. In April, 1949, Ebony magazine reported that for black patients, "the situation approaches Nazi concentration camp standards . . . unbelievable this side of Dante's Inferno." Georgia's state hospital was at the center of psychiatric practice and the forefront of psychiatric thought throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in America—centuries during which the South invented, fought to defend, and then worked to replace the most developed slave culture since the Roman Empire. A landmark history of a single insane asylum at Milledgeville, Georgia, A Peculiar Inheritance reveals how modern-day American psychiatry was forged in the traumas of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, when African Americans carrying "no histories" entered from Freedmen's Bureau Hospitals and home counties wracked with Klan terror. This history set the stage for the eugenics and degeneracy theories of the twentieth century, which in turn became the basis for much of Nazi thinking in Europe. Segrest's masterwork will forever change the way we think about our own minds.
A valuable document from the Reconstruction era, The Journal of Archibald C. McKinley offers the modern reader a rare glimpse of daily life on Sapelo Island, Georgia, as seen through the eyes of an upper-class farmer. A descendant of Scottish settlers, Archibald McKinley was born in Lexington, Georgia, in 1842 and served as a Confederate officer during the Civil War. Just after the war, he began farming near Milledgeville, Georgia, and within a year had met and married Sarah Spalding, a granddaughter of Thomas Spalding, who had built his plantation empire on Sapelo Island. In 1869, the McKinleys moved to Sapelo to raise cotton, sugar cane, and other crops. The bulk of this journal is a sustained account of their sojourn on the island through 1876, before their return to Milledgeville. The brief, matter-of-fact entries that make up McKinley's journal focus mainly on the small occurrences that filled his days: farm work, hunting and fishing expeditions, sailing excursions, church services, changes in the weather, the disposition of his crops, the development of the Darien timber shipping trade. Scattered throughout, however, are intriguing references to dramatic events--shootings, trials, tensions between whites and the recently freed blacks--and to the processes of Reconstruction, as when McKinley notes that "a company of Yankee soldiers" had arrived at the penitentiary to ensure equal treatment of black and white convicts. The longest entry in the journal is a eulogy for a freedman named Scott, who, as McKinley's slave, had remained "true as steel" during McKinley's service in the Civil War. Editor Robert L. Humphries has included with the journal several of the McKinley family letters, written after Archibald and Sarah left Sapelo Island. In the introduction, historian Russell Duncan places the story in context, focusing on the larger events of Reconstruction as they pertained to Sapelo Island and to the relations between blacks and whites there.
The fifth edition of James Bonner's classic history of Georgia's Antebellum capital features a new cover, an introduction by noted historian Bob Wilson and a completely revised and expanded index. A must-have for anyone with an interest in Milledgeville or the Antebelleum South.
As the reader is sure to discover, the division between combatant and civilian at the local level is not always clear. With a natural curiosity to unearth the unknown, local Milledgeville author and historian Hugh T. Harrington has put forth a collection of tales and personalities that have until now gone untold or forgotten. Civil War Milledgeville shows that it is these often these forgotten events and people that have shaped our larger understanding of the Civil War. From a women's riot to a Confederate cavalry rescue, Hugh recounts local stories of heroism and cowardice, success and strife, which illuminate the history of Milledgeville.
Darling, I never wanted to gow home as bad in my life as I doo now and if they don’t give mee a furlow I am going any how. Written in December 1862 by Private Wright Vinson in Tennessee to his wife, Christiana, in Georgia, these lines go to the heart of why Scott Walker wrote this history of the Fifty-seventh Georgia Infantry, a unit of the famed Mercer’s Brigade. All but a few members of the Fifty-seventh lived within a close radius of eighty miles from each other. More than just an account of their military engagements, this is a collective biography of a close-knit group. Relatives and neighbors served and died side by side in the Fifty-seventh, and Walker excels at showing how family ties, friendships, and other intimate dynamics played out in wartime settings. Humane but not sentimental, the history abounds in episodes of real feeling: a starving soldier’s theft of a pie; another’s open confession, in a letter to his wife, that he may desert; a slave’s travails as a camp orderly. Drawing on memoirs and a trove of unpublished letters and diaries, Walker follows the soldiers of the Fifty-seventh as they push far into Unionist Kentucky, starve at the siege of Vicksburg, guard Union prisoners at the Andersonville stockade, defend Atlanta from Sherman, and more. Hardened fighters who would wish hell on an incompetent superior but break down at the sight of a dying Yankee, these are real people, as rarely seen in other Civil War histories.
General William Tecumseh Sherman has come down to us as the implacable destroyer of the Civil War, notorious for his burning of Atlanta and his brutal march to the sea. A probing biography that explains Sherman's style of warfare and the threads of self-possession and insecurity that made up his character. Photos.
"The Wartime Journal of a Georgia Girl" is Eliza Frances Andrews' diary in which she describes in detail the situation in Georgia during the last year of the Civil War. Andrews wrote about the anger and despair of Confederate citizens, caused by the General Sherman's devastation.
