Inside Alabama: A Personal History of My State / Edition 1

by Harvey H. Jackson III

Overview

An affectionate, irreverent, candid look at the "Heart of Dixie"

This book tells Alabama’s history in a conversational style with an unapologetically subjective approach. Accessible to general readers and students alike, it recounts the history and politics of a state known for its colorful past, told by one of the state’s most noted historians and educators, whose family came to the territory before statehood. A native and resident Alabamian, Harvey Jackson has spent a lifetime discovering and trying to understand his state. Expressing deep love for its people and culture, he is no less critical of its shortcomings.

Inside Alabama, as the title implies, gives Jackson’s insider perspective on the events and conditions that shaped modern-day Alabama. With humor and candor, he explores the state’s cultural, political, and economic development from prehistoric times to the dawning of the new millennium. Mound-builders, Hernando de Soto, William Bartram, Red Sticks, Andy Jackson, Bourbon Democrats, suffragettes, New Dealers, Hugo Black, Martin Luther King Jr., George Wallace, Rosa Parks all play colorful parts in this popular history. By focusing on state politics as the most accessible and tangible expression of these shaping forces, Jackson organizes the fourteen chapters chronologically, artfully explaining why the past is so important today.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817350680
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	01/09/2004
Series:	Fire Ant Books
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Harvey H. Jackson III is Professor and Chair of History and Foreign Languages at Jacksonville State University. He is author of several books, including Rivers of History: Life on the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama and Putting "Loafing Streams" to Work: The Building of Lay, Mitchell, Martin, and Jordan Dams, 1910-1929.

Table of Contents

	Preface	ix
	Acknowledgments	xv
1.	Back When It Belonged to the Indians	1
2.	Frontier Alabama	20
3.	Becoming a State	41
4.	Antebellum Alabama	54
5.	Stumbling toward Secession	72
6.	Secession and Civil War	86
7.	After the War That Never Ended	103
8.	A World Made by Bourbons, for Bourbons	124
9.	White Man's Alabama	147
10.	Depression and War	174
11.	Alabama after the War: "Big Jim" and Beyond	200
12.	Old Times There Should Not Be Forgotten	224
13.	The Age of Wallace	249
14.	The Age of Wallace and After	276
	Epilogue: To Sum It Up	303
	Bibliographical Essay	309
	Index	321

Editorial Reviews

Honest and entertaining . . . Jackson's idiosyncratic voice sets just the right tone for the general reader. . . . Here is one scholar who knows how to tell a good story, and readers will appreciate it.”
—Robert J. Jakeman, Auburn University
 

From the Publisher