Many of the people and events in Blount County history are well documented. Others, not so much. This book of essays is an attempt to revisit some of the well known events of our county's past, add a little more background, and present our history from a Blount County point of view. In addition to illuminating some familiar topics, this book attempts to bring to light people and events who played significant roles in the development of Blount, but were somehow overlooked or skimmed over by the primary reference books-people and events which were the topic of conversation among our ancestors but over time, have been forgotten. These fun to read tales will promote a greater understanding of the history of Blount County.
Amazing Alabama: A Potpourri of Fascinating Facts, Tall Tales and Storied Stories chronicles a brief history of the state, famous personages associated with Alabama, a discussion of state firsts, unique occurrences, antiquated laws and other fascinating topics.
The Blount Count Journal published in Oneonta from 1909 to 1918. Compared to other Blount County papers, the Journal was only a small blip on the journalistic radar in Blount County. However, it is an often overlooked and untapped source of great genealogical and historical knowledge. While some of the articles mirror those published in its contemporary publications, often the Journal captured other obituaries and news missed by the Democrat. Most of the original copies of the Journal were found in the court house in Oneonta. These were reviewed for notices of births, marriages, obituaries and interesting news items. Missing issues from the court house were reviewed at the State Archives in Montgomery. This book will add to the body of knowledge of Blount County, Alabama and will serve as a useful tool for area genealogists and historians.
Known for antebellum mansions and sunny beaches, Alabama also claims an abundance of fascinating mysteries and legends. The White Thang is a Sasquatch-like creature that has terrorized Alabamians for generations. For a brief period in the 1980s, Needham gained national attention because of its "crying pecan tree." In 1854, a farmer named Orion Williamson simply vanished in a field in Selma. From the aquatic beast known as the Coosa River Monster to the story of the Leprechaun of Mobile, these stories have evolved over generations. Author Alan Brown presents some of the strangest stories from this collective tradition.
Alabamians in Blue offers an in-depth scholarly examination of Alabama’s black and white Union soldiers and their contributions to the eventual success of the Union army in the western theater. Christopher M. Rein contends that the state’s anti-Confederate residents tendered an important service to the North, primarily by collecting intelligence and protecting logistical infrastructure. He highlights an underappreciated period of biracial cooperation, underwritten by massive support from the federal government. Providing a broad synthesis, Rein’s study demonstrates that southern dissenters were not passive victims but rather active participants in their own liberation. Ecological factors, including agricultural collapse under levies from both armies, may have provided the initial impetus for Union enlistment. Federal pillaging inflicted further heavy destruction on plantation agriculture. The breakdown in basic subsistence that ensued pushed Alabama’s freedmen and Unionists into federal camps in garrison cities in search of relief and the opportunity for revenge. Once in uniform, Alabama’s Union soldiers served alongside northern regiments and frustrated Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s attempts to interrupt the Union supply efforts in the 1864 Atlanta campaign, which led to the collapse of Confederate arms in the western theater and the eventual Union victory. Rein describes a “hybrid warfare” of simultaneous conventional and guerilla battles, where each significantly influenced the other. He concludes that the conventional conflict both prompted and eventually ended the internecine warfare that largely marked the state’s experience of the war. A comprehensive analysis of military, social, and environmental history, Alabamians in Blue uncovers a past of biracial cooperation in the American South, and in Alabama in particular, that postwar adherents to the “Myth of the Lost Cause” have successfully suppressed until now.
"The Cullman Democrat was established about 25 years after the first newspaper to publish in the town named for the famous German settler, John G. Cullman. While it came relatively late on the scene, its circulation soon grew to match that of the most successful Alabama weekly newspapers. The Democrat was first published by Major W.F. Palmer in June of 1901. Palmer sold the paper to R.L. and J.E. Griffin in 1902, but by the end of January of 1903, the paper was purchased by Joseph Robert Rosson. The Democrat remained in control of the Rosson family for man years after."--Publisher's description
Drawing on vast amounts of new data from live, unscripted radio and TV broadcasts, and the internet, this is a brilliant and original analysis of colloquial English, revealing unusual and largely unreported types of clause structure. Andrew Radford debunks the myth that colloquial English has a substandard, simplified grammar, and shows that it has a coherent and complex structure of its own. The book develops a theoretically sophisticated account of structure and variation in colloquial English, advancing an area that has been previously investigated from other perspectives, such as corpus linguistics or conversational analysis, but never before in such detail from a formal syntactic viewpoint.
" 'As Birmingham goes, so goes the nation,' Fred Shuttlesworth observed when he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to the city for the transformative protests of 1963. From the height of the civil rights movement through its long aftermath, the images of police dogs and fire hoses turned against protestors, and the four girls murdered when Ku Klux Klan members bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, made the city an uncomfortable racial mirror for the nation. But like many white people who came of age in the civil rights movement's wake, Julie Buckner Armstrong knew little about her hometown's history growing up with her single, working class mother in 1960s and 70s. It was only after moving away and discovering writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker that she began to realize that her hometown and her family were part of a larger story of racial injustice and struggle. In recent years, however, Birmingham has rebranded itself as a vibrant, diverse destination for civil rights heritage tourism. Former sites of violence have been transformed into a large moving National Park Service memorial complex that includes a museum, public art, churches, and multiple walking tours. But beyond the tourist map, one can see in Birmingham--just like Anytown, USA--a new Jim Crow reemerging in the place where the old one supposedly died. Returning home decades later to care for her aging mother, Shuttlesworth's admonition rang in her mind. By then an accomplished scholar and civil rights educator, Armstrong found herself pondering the lessons Birmingham has for America in the twenty-first century, where a 2014 Teaching Tolerance report characterized a common understanding of the civil rights movement in "two names and four words: Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, and 'I have a dream.'" Seeking to better understand her hometown's complicated history, its connection to other stories of oppression and resistance, and her own place in relation to it, Armstrong embarked on a journey to unravel the standard Birmingham narrative to see what she would find instead. Beginning at the center, with her family's arrival in 1947 in a neighborhood near the color line, within earshot of what would become known as Dynamite Hill, Armstrong works her way out in time and across the map. Pulling at strings and weaving in the personal stories of her white working-class family, classmates, and other local characters not traditionally associated with Birmingham's civil rights history, she expands the cast and forges connections between the stories that have been told about Birmingham as well as those that haven't. From a "funny" cousin whose closeted community was also targeted by Bull Conner's police force to an aunt who served on the jury that finally convicted Robert Chambliss of murdering Denise McNair, Armstrong combines intimate personal stories, archival research, and cultural geography to reframe the lessons of Birmingham through the intersections of race, class, gender, faith, education, culture, place, and mobility. The result is more than a pageant of Birmingham and its people; it's also a portrait of Birmingham rendered on the ground over time--as seen in old plantations, in segregated neighborhoods, across contested boundary lines, over mountains, along increasingly polluted waterways, under the gaze of Vulcan, beneath airport runways, on the highways cutting through and running out of town. In her search for truth and beauty in the veins of Birmingham, Armstrong draws on the powers of place and storytelling to dig into the cracks, complicating the easy narrative of Black triumph and overcoming. Among other discoveries found in the mirror, Armstrong finds a white America that, for too long, has failed to recognize itself in the horrific stories and symbols from Birmingham's past or accept the continuing inequalities from which it unfairly benefits. A literary scholar, Armstrong observes that "many of the best writings on civil rights and race relations describe racism as a wound, a poison, or a sickness--without offering easy prescriptions." Citing James Baldwin, Armstrong knows stories have the power to touch the human heart but warns that resistance to injustice only begins there. Once engaged, it is up to each of us to look again and consider what our stories really reveal about the world and ourselves. In "Learning From Birmingham," Armstrong reminds us that the stories of civil rights, structural oppression, privilege (whether intentional or unconscious), abuse, and inequity are difficult and complicated, but that their telling, especially from multiple stakeholder perspectives, is absolutely necessary"--
