Mr. Brandon's School Bus
Mr. Brandon's School Bus

Author: Tom Brandon

Publisher: NewSouth Books

Published: 2017-02-01

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 1603064125

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A delightful new book from Tom Brandon, "2013 Steve Harvey Bus Driver of the Year," reminds us of the wisdom of children and their uncanny ability to teach adults a thing or two. Mr. Brandon's School Bus, published by NewSouth Books, collects in one volume the insightful and often humorous conversations children have had while riding on Brandon's big yellow school bus over the years. You know the things your child hears at home that you don't want repeated elsewhere? Tom Brandon says you can count on them to be told with gusto on the way to school. So climb on board and, as "Mr. Mucus" would say, "Sit back and enjoy the ride." Hey, there are some things you just can't make up. Of author Tom Brandon, Larry Lee, Alabama's foremost education blogger, says, "Each school bus is a little magic kingdom where fantasies come alive and the sweet innocence of childhood sometimes meets reality. With the keen eye and ear of a good storyteller, Tom Brandon has chronicled the great adventures of his riders with a talent that makes you see the smile and hear the giggles. Thanks to him for doing so."

The Founding of Alabama
The Founding of Alabama

Author: Frances Cabaniss Roberts

Publisher: University Alabama Press

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0817320431

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The most thorough history of Alabama’s Madison County region, widely available for the first time The 1956 dissertation by Frances Cabaniss Roberts is a classic text on Alabama history that continues to be cited by southern historians. Roberts was the first woman to earn a PhD from the University of Alabama’s history department. In the 1950s, she was the only full-time faculty member at what is now the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she was appointed chair of the history department in 1966. Roberts’s dissertation, “Background and Formative Period in the Great Bend and Madison County,” remains the most thorough history of the region yet produced. While certainly a product of its era, Roberts work is visionary in its own way and offers a useful look at Alabama’s rise to statehood. Thomas Reidy, editor of this edition, has kept Roberts’s words intact except for correction of minor typographical errors and helpful additions to the notes and citations. His introduction describes both the value of Roberts’s decades of service to UAH and the importance of her dissertation over time. While highlighting the great intrinsic value of Roberts’s research and writing, Reidy also notes its significance in demonstrating how the practice of history—its methods, priorities, and values—has evolved over the intervening decades. In her examination of Madison County, Roberts spotlights exemplars of civic performance and good community behavior, giving readers one of the earliest accountings of the antebellum southern middle class. Unlike many historians of her time, Roberts displays an interest in both the “common folks” and leaders who built the region—rural and urban—and created the institutions that shaped Madison County. She examines the contributions of merchants, shopkeepers, lawyers, doctors, architects, craftsmen, planters, farmers, elected and appointed officials, board members, and entrepreneurs.

Shaking the Gates of Hell
Shaking the Gates of Hell

Author: John Archibald

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2021-03-09

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0525658114

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On growing up in the American South of the 1960s—an all-American white boy—son of a long line of Methodist preachers, in the midst of the civil rights revolution, and discovering the culpability of silence within the church. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and columnist for The Birmingham News. "My dad was a Methodist preacher and his dad was a Methodist preacher," writes John Archibald. "It goes all the way back on both sides of my family. When I am at my best, I think it comes from that sermon place." Everything Archibald knows and believes about life is "refracted through the stained glass of the Southern church. It had everything to do with people. And fairness. And compassion." In Shaking the Gates of Hell, Archibald asks: Can a good person remain silent in the face of discrimination and horror, and still be a good person? Archibald had seen his father, the Rev. Robert L. Archibald, Jr., the son and grandson of Methodist preachers, as a moral authority, a moderate and a moderating force during the racial turbulence of the '60s, a loving and dependable parent, a forgiving and attentive minister, a man many Alabamians came to see as a saint. But was that enough? Even though Archibald grew up in Alabama in the heart of the civil rights movement, he could recall few words about racial rights or wrongs from his father's pulpit at a time the South seethed, and this began to haunt him. In this moving and powerful book, Archibald writes of his complex search, and of the conspiracy of silence his father faced in the South, in the Methodist Church and in the greater Christian church. Those who spoke too loudly were punished, or banished, or worse. Archibald's father was warned to guard his words on issues of race to protect his family, and he did. He spoke to his flock in the safety of parable, and trusted in the goodness of others, even when they earned none of it, rising through the ranks of the Methodist Church, and teaching his family lessons in kindness and humanity, and devotion to nature and the Earth. Archibald writes of this difficult, at times uncomfortable, reckoning with his past in this unadorned, affecting book of growth and evolution.

Stickwork
Stickwork

Author: Patrick Dougherty

Publisher: Chronicle Books

Published: 2013-07-02

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1616891955

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Using minimal tools and a simple technique of bending, interweaving, and fastening together sticks, artist Patrick Dougherty creates works of art inseparable with nature and the landscape. With a dazzling variety of forms seamlessly intertwined with their context, his sculptures evoke fantastical images of nests, cocoons, cones, castles, and beehives. Over the last twenty-five years, Dougherty has built more than two hundred works throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia that range from stand-alone structures to a kind of modern primitive architecture--every piece mesmerizing in its ability to fly through trees, overtake buildings, and virtually defy gravity. Stickwork, Dougherty's first monograph, features thirty-eight of his organic, dynamic works that twist the line between architecture, landscape, and art. Constructed on-site using locally sourced materials and local volunteer labor, Dougherty's sculptures are tangles of twigs and branches that have been transformed into something unexpected and wild, elegant and artful, and often humorous. Sometimes freestanding, and other times wrapping around trees, buildings, railings, and rooms, they are constructed indoors and in nature. As organic matter, the stick sculptures eventually disintegrate and fade back into the landscape. Featuring a wealth of photographs and drawings documenting the construction process of each remarkable structure, Stickwork preserves the legend of the man who weaves the simplest of materials into a singular artistic triumph.

Why Is It Named That?
Why Is It Named That?

Author: Dex Nilsson

Publisher: Twinbrook Communications

Published: 2018-03-17

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 9780962917080

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Contains stories behind over 300 of the place names of Huntsville and Madison County, Alabama -- streets and roads, buildings, parks, mountains and streams, schools, and more. This edition of the book is specially issued in time for Alabama's bicentennial in 2019. From these stories, the 200-year history of the area emerges.

Haunted North Alabama
Haunted North Alabama

Author: Jessica Penot

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2010-08-27

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 1614232016

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The Deep South reveals its dark past, as the author of the Tattooed Girl series investigates the hauntings of her home state. Nestled in the scenic foothills of southern Appalachia, in the center of the Tennessee Valley, north Alabama is known for its natural beauty. Peppered with antebellum mansions and historic homesteads, it is a region rich in history, brimming with a unique cultural heritage. Yet amidst the beauty of these rolling hills and historic features, something dark lurks below the surface. The haunted spirits of the past run as wild as the Tennessee River through the region. Join author and Huntsville resident Jessica Penot on a terrifying trip through the chilling destinations of north Alabama, teeming with ghostly activity. From Florence to Huntsville to Albertville and points in between, Haunted North Alabama offers a broad survey of the history of haunted destinations in the upper regions of Alabama. Packed with over twenty haunted locales, this book is required reading for anyone interested in learning about the history of the phantom spirits that call the heart of Dixie home. Includes photos! “Marvelous . . . Good, reliable information on a number of Huntsville’s hauntings plus information on locations that were not included in the few articles on the subject.” —Southern Spirit Guide

Hillslope Form and Process
Hillslope Form and Process

Author: M. A. Carson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-06-18

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780521109116

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Hillslopes occupy most the landscape. Studies of process mechanisms and rates have become sufficiently numerous to allow a systematic study of slopes. Only by making a synthesis of quantitative process studies and relating them to the development of slope forms can the shape of the landscape be understood and the separate effects of lithology and climate assessed. In the introductory part of this book, the choice of appropriate system and scale is discussed, and models for uplift and erosion evaluated. Attention is thus focused on the dynamic equilibrium of the slope profile and its erosional development over time. Part I then examines the forces encouraging hillslope movement and the resistances opposing movement. Part 2 considers processes of rock instability, soil instability, wash, solution and soil creep. Each is discussed in terms of its mechanism and rate of operation, and the slope provides it produces. Part 3 outlines how this systematic approach may be applied to areas of different climate and the extent to which there is an assemblage of processes characteristic of each area. In part 4, the process evidence and models are combined into theoretical sequences of slope profile development, and the effect of contour curvature in modifying these profiles on spurts and in hollows is examined.