Beale Street Dynasty

Beale Street Dynasty PDF Author: Preston Lauterbach
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0393082571
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The vivid history of Beale Street—a lost world of swaggering musicians, glamorous madams, and ruthless politicians—and the battle for the soul of Memphis. Following the Civil War, Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, thrived as a cauldron of sex and song, violence and passion. But out of this turmoil emerged a center of black progress, optimism, and cultural ferment. Preston Lauterbach tells this vivid, fascinating story through the multigenerational saga of a family whose ambition, race pride, and moral complexity indelibly shaped the city that would loom so large in American life. Robert Church, who would become “the South’s first black millionaire,” was a mulatto slave owned by his white father. Having survived a deadly race riot in 1866, Church constructed an empire of vice in the booming river town. He made a fortune with saloons, gambling, and—shockingly—white prostitution. But he also nurtured the militant journalism of Ida B. Wells and helped revolutionize American music through the work of composer W.C. Handy, the man who claimed to have invented the blues. In the face of Jim Crow, the Church fortune helped fashion the most powerful black political organization of the early twentieth century. Robert and his son, Bob Jr., bought and sold property, founded a bank, and created a park and auditorium for their people finer than the places whites had forbidden them to attend. However, the Church family operated through a tense arrangement with the Democrat machine run by the notorious E. H. “Boss” Crump, who stole elections and controlled city hall. The battle between this black dynasty and the white political machine would define the future of Memphis. Brilliantly researched and swiftly plotted, Beale Street Dynasty offers a captivating account of one of America’s iconic cities—by one of our most talented narrative historians.

Beale Street Dynasty

Beale Street Dynasty PDF Author: Preston Lauterbach
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0393082571
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The vivid history of Beale Street—a lost world of swaggering musicians, glamorous madams, and ruthless politicians—and the battle for the soul of Memphis. Following the Civil War, Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, thrived as a cauldron of sex and song, violence and passion. But out of this turmoil emerged a center of black progress, optimism, and cultural ferment. Preston Lauterbach tells this vivid, fascinating story through the multigenerational saga of a family whose ambition, race pride, and moral complexity indelibly shaped the city that would loom so large in American life. Robert Church, who would become “the South’s first black millionaire,” was a mulatto slave owned by his white father. Having survived a deadly race riot in 1866, Church constructed an empire of vice in the booming river town. He made a fortune with saloons, gambling, and—shockingly—white prostitution. But he also nurtured the militant journalism of Ida B. Wells and helped revolutionize American music through the work of composer W.C. Handy, the man who claimed to have invented the blues. In the face of Jim Crow, the Church fortune helped fashion the most powerful black political organization of the early twentieth century. Robert and his son, Bob Jr., bought and sold property, founded a bank, and created a park and auditorium for their people finer than the places whites had forbidden them to attend. However, the Church family operated through a tense arrangement with the Democrat machine run by the notorious E. H. “Boss” Crump, who stole elections and controlled city hall. The battle between this black dynasty and the white political machine would define the future of Memphis. Brilliantly researched and swiftly plotted, Beale Street Dynasty offers a captivating account of one of America’s iconic cities—by one of our most talented narrative historians.

Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis

Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis PDF Author: Preston Lauterbach
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393246752
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
"All aspects of [Beale Street's] complex, fascinating history are told…with verve and vivid erudition." —Wall Street Journal Between Reconstruction and Prohibition, Beale Street in Memphis thrived as a strip with a unique soul that reshaped American culture. Preston Lauterbach recounts the rise and fall of Beale Street through the life of the South’s first black millionaire, an ex-slave who built an underworld dynasty in the booming river town and created a space for black culture to flourish. A thrilling narrative history, Beale Street Dynasty tells an intriguing, previously unknown story about race in an American city.

Bluff City: The Secret Life of Photographer Ernest Withers

Bluff City: The Secret Life of Photographer Ernest Withers PDF Author: Preston Lauterbach
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393247937
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
The little-known story of an iconic photographer, whose work captured—and influenced—a critical moment in American history. Ernest Withers took some of the most legendary images of the 1950s and ’60s: Martin Luther King, Jr., riding a newly integrated bus in Montgomery, Alabama; Emmett Till’s uncle pointing an accusatory finger across the courtroom at his nephew’s killer; scores of African-American protestors carrying a forest of signs reading “i am a man.” But at the same time, Withers was working as an FBI informant. In this gripping narrative history, Preston Lauterbach examines the complicated political and economic forces that informed Withers’s seeming betrayal of the people he photographed, and “does a masterful job of telling the story of civil rights in Memphis in the 1960s” (Ed Ward, Financial Times), including the events surrounding Dr. King’s tumultuous final march in Memphis.

Memphis Mayhem

Memphis Mayhem PDF Author: David A. Less
Publisher: ECW Press
ISBN: 1773055674
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Memphis gave birth to music that changed the world — Memphis Mayhem is a fascinating history of how music and culture collided to change the state of music forever “David Less has captured the essence of the Memphis music experience on these pages in no uncertain terms. There's truly no place like Memphis and this is the story of why that is. HAVE MERCY!” — Billy F Gibbons, ZZ Top Memphis Mayhem weaves the tale of the racial collision that led to a cultural, sociological, and musical revolution. David Less constructs a fascinating narrative of the city that has produced a startling array of talent, including Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Al Green, Otis Redding, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Justin Timberlake, and so many more. Beginning with the 1870s yellow fever epidemics that created racial imbalance as wealthy whites fled the city, David Less moves from W.C. Handy’s codification of blues in 1909 to the mid-century advent of interracial musical acts like Booker T. & the M.G.’s, the birth of punk, and finally to the growth of a music tourism industry. Memphis Mayhem explores the city’s entire musical ecosystem, which includes studios, high school band instructors, clubs, record companies, family bands, pressing plants, instrument factories, and retail record outlets. Lively and comprehensive, this is a provocative story of finding common ground through music and creating a sound that would change the world.

Alice + Freda Forever

Alice + Freda Forever PDF Author: Alexis Coe
Publisher: Millbrook Press
ISBN: 1541581679
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Alice + Freda Forever is a gut-wrenching story of love, death, and the dangers of intolerance."—Bustle In 1892, America was obsessed with a teenage murderess, but it wasn't her crime that shocked the nation—it was her motivation. Nineteen-year-old Alice Mitchell had planned to pass as a man in order to marry her seventeen-year-old fiancée Freda Ward, but when their love letters were discovered, they were forbidden from ever speaking again. Freda adjusted to this fate with an ease that stunned a heartbroken Alice. Her desperation grew with each unanswered letter—and her father's razor soon went missing. On January 25, Alice publicly slashed her ex-fiancée's throat. Her same-sex love was deemed insane by her father that very night, and medical experts agreed: This was a dangerous and incurable perversion. As the courtroom was expanded to accommodate national interest, Alice spent months in jail—including the night that three of her fellow prisoners were lynched (an event which captured the attention of journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells). After a jury of "the finest men in Memphis" declared Alice insane, she was remanded to an asylum, where she died under mysterious circumstances just a few years later. Alice + Freda Forever recounts this tragic, real-life love story with over 100 illustrated love letters, maps, artifacts, historical documents, newspaper articles, courtroom proceedings, and intimate, domestic scenes.

Our Kind of People

Our Kind of People PDF Author: Lawrence Otis Graham
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061870811
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Now a TV series on FOX starring Morris Chestnut, Yaya DaCosta, Nadine Ellis, and Joe Morton. "Fascinating. . . . [Graham] has made a major contribution both to African-American studies and the larger American picture." —New York Times Debutante cotillions. Million-dollar homes. Summers in Martha's Vineyard. Membership in the Links, Jack & Jill, Deltas, Boule, and AKAs. An obsession with the right schools, families, social clubs, and skin complexion. This is the world of the black upper class and the focus of the first book written about the black elite by a member of this hard-to-penetrate group. Author and TV commentator Lawrence Otis Graham, one of the nation's most prominent spokesmen on race and class, spent six years interviewing the wealthiest black families in America. He includes historical photos of a people that made their first millions in the 1870s. Graham tells who's in and who's not in the group today with separate chapters on the elite in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Nashville, and New Orleans. A new Introduction explains the controversy that the book elicited from both the black and white communities.

Bishop Charles H. Mason in the Age of Jim Crow

Bishop Charles H. Mason in the Age of Jim Crow PDF Author: Elton H. Weaver
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498595170
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Bishop Charles H. Mason in the Age of Jim Crow profiles the life and career of Charles Harrison Mason. Mason was the founder of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), which from its Memphis roots, grew into the most significant black Pentecostal denomination in the United States, with profound theological and political ramifications for poor and working-class black Memphians. Bishop Charles H. Mason in the Age of Jim Crow is grounded in the history of the Jim Crow era. The book traces the origins of COGIC in Memphis; it reveals just how Mason’s new black Pentecostal denomination grew, gained social and political power, and earned a permanent place in Memphis’s black religious pantheon. This book tells how a son of slaves transformed a rural migrant movement into an urban phenomenon, how unusual religious demonstrations exemplified infrapolitical religious protests, and how these rituals of resistance changed black lives and helped strengthen and sustain blacks fighting for freedom in segregated Memphis. The author reveals why Charles H. Mason was an important pre-civil rights religious leader who laid the groundwork for integrated churches.

The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Music Industry Studies

The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Music Industry Studies PDF Author: David Arditi
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031640136
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 635

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Book Description


Spying on Students

Spying on Students PDF Author: Gregg L. Michel
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807182877
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Gregg L. Michel’s Spying on Students focuses on the law enforcement campaign against New Left and progressive student activists in the South during the 1960s. Often overlooked by scholars, white southern students worked alongside their Black peers in the civil rights struggle, drove opposition to the Vietnam War, and embraced the counterculture’s rejection of conventions and norms. While African Americans bore the brunt of police surveillance and harassment, federal agencies such as the FBI and local police intelligence units known as Red Squads subjected white student activists to wide-ranging, intrusive, and illegal monitoring. By examining the experiences of white students in the South, Michel provides fresh insights into the destructive, weaponized spying tactics deployed by state actors in their attempts to quash dissent in the region. Drawing on previously secret FBI files and records of other investigative agencies, Michel demonstrates that authorities at all levels of government turned the full power of their offices against white activists—listening to their conversations, infiltrating their meetings, and sowing discord within their families and schools. Efforts to surveil and repress social activism reflected officials’ fear of growing unrest on the part of white students who questioned the southern racial status quo and recoiled as the horrors of Vietnam laid bare the shibboleth of American exceptionalism. As white students revolted on campuses elsewhere, most notably at Berkeley and Columbia, law enforcement sought to curtail such disruptions in the South. In their view, white students threatened domestic tranquility and therefore warranted close monitoring. Spying on Students presents a unique perspective on state actors’ war on dissent, exposing their suspicion of opposing political beliefs and revealing their paranoia as they sought to preserve the existing racial order. The work complicates further the dominant narrative of the era that casts white southern students as opponents of social change. The counterintelligence operations employed against them show not only that white students valued political engagement and social activism but also that authorities considered them a menace to the country as a whole.

The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, 2019 and 2021

The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, 2019 and 2021 PDF Author: William M. Simons
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476647143
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Selected from the two most recent proceedings of the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture (2019 and 2021), this collection of essays explores subject matter centered both inside and beyond the ballpark. Fifteen contributors offer critical commentary on a range of topics, including controversial decisions on the field and in Hall of Fame elections; baseball's historical role as a rite of passage for boys; two worthy catchers who never received their due; the genesis and development of the minor leagues; and baseball's place in popular culture.