One of the earliest public historically black universities, Alabama State University is a vital source of African American excellence situated directly in the Heart of Dixie. From Marion to Montgomery tells the little-known story of the university's origin as the Reconstruction-era Lincoln Normal School in Marion, Alabama. How did a little school in Lowndes County become one of the world's most renowned HBCUs?
Founded in 1841 in Marion, Alabama, Howard College provided a Christian liberal arts education for young men living along the old southwestern frontier. The founders named the school after eighteenth-century British reformer John Howard, whose words and deeds inspired the type of enlightened moral agent and virtuous Christian citizen the institution hoped to produce. In From Every Stormy Wind That Blows, S. Jonathan Bass provides a comprehensive history of Howard College, which in 1965 changed its name to Samford University. According to Bass, the “idea” of Howard College emanated from its founders’ firm commitment to orthodox Protestantism, the tenets of Scottish philosophy, the British Enlightenment’s emphasis on virtue, and the moral reforms of the age. From the Old South, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the New South, Howard College adapted to new conditions while continuing to teach the necessary ingredients to transform young southern men into useful and enlightened Christian citizens. Throughout its history, Howard College faced challenges both within and without. As with other institutions in the South, slavery played a central role in its founding, with most of the college’s principal benefactors, organizers, and board of trustees earning financial gains from enslaved labor. The Civil War swept away the college’s large endowment and growing student enrollment, and the school never regained a solid financial footing during the subsequent decades—barely surviving bankruptcy and public auction. In 1887, with the continued decline of southern agriculture, Howard College moved to a new campus on the outskirts of Birmingham, where its president, Rev. Benjamin Franklin Riley, a well-known New South economic booster, fought to restore the college’s financial health. Despite his best efforts, Howard struggled economically until local bankers offered enough assistance to allow the institution to enter the twentieth century with a measure of financial stability. The challenges and changes wrought by the years transformed Howard College irrevocably. While the original “idea” of the school endured through its classical curriculum, by the 1920s the school had all but lost its connections to John Howard and its founding principles. From Every Stormy Wind That Blows is a fascinating look into this storied institution’s history and Samford University’s origins.
As an elementary teacher, I searched high and low for a book to teach alliteration, rhyming words and repetition all in one story. But I couldn't find it! So I wrote the book I needed. I wrote a story that teaches not only foundational reading principles, but also the character, history and legacy of the wonderful people, places and things in Montgomery, Alabama--my home.
"While Puckett offers a valuable perspective on schooling in the twentieth-century rural South, she also captures the essence of daily life in the communities in which she taught. We read of how she sometimes boarded with the parents of her pupils; of how teachers, students, and parents joined together in observance of holidays; and of how schooling managed to continue through the busy growing seasons. Personal details of Puckett's life also emerge, from her relationship with her parents to her life at home with her husband and their eight children.".
Transcending the standard critique of the politically correct university, Marion Montgomery reveals the ancient sources of our educational chaos. There can be no reform, he insists, without a new openness to the truth of things, which marks the character and work of the good teacher.
From Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery, the story of a Texas man who, during the Great Depression, walked around the world -- backwards. Like most Americans at the time, Plennie Wingo was hit hard by the effects of the Great Depression. When the bank foreclosed on his small restaurant in Abilene, he found himself suddenly penniless with nowhere left to turn. After months of struggling to feed his family on wages he earned digging ditches in the Texas sun, Plennie decided it was time to do something extraordinary -- something to resurrect the spirit of adventure and optimism he felt he'd lost. He decided to walk around the world -- backwards. In The Man Who Walked Backward, Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery charts Plennie's backwards trek across the America that gave rise to Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck, and the New Deal. With the Dust Bowl and Great Depression as a backdrop, Montgomery follows Plennie across the Atlantic through Germany, Turkey, and beyond, and details the daring physical feats, grueling hardships, comical misadventures, and hostile foreign police he encountered along the way. A remarkable and quirky slice of Americana, The Man Who Walked Backward paints a rich and vibrant portrait of a jaw-dropping period of history.
While Flannery O'Connor is hailed as one of the most important writers of the twentieth-century American south, few appreciate O'Connor as a philosopher as well. In Return to Good and Evil, Henry T. Edmondson introduces us to a remarkable thinker who uses fiction to confront and provoke us with the most troubling moral questions of modern existence. 'Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul, ' O'Connor once said, in response to the nihilistic tendencies she saw in the world around her. Nihilism--Nietzche's idea that 'God is dead'--preoccupied O'Connor, and she used her fiction to draw a tableau of human civilization on the brink of a catastrophic moral, philosophical, and religious crisis. Again and again, O'Connor suggests that the only way back from this precipice is to recognize the human need for grace, redemption, and God. She argues brilliantly and persuasively through her novels and short stories that the Nietzschean challenge to the notions of good and evil is an ill-conceived effort that will result only in disaster. With rare access to O'Connor's correspondence, prose drafts, and other personal writings, Edmondson investigates O'Connor's deepest motivations through more than just her fiction and illuminates the philosophical and theological influences on her life and work. Edmondson argues that O'Connor's artistic brilliance and philosophical genius reveal the only possible response to the nihilistic despair of the modern world: a return to good and evil through humility and grace.
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