Life and Death in a Small Southern Town

Life and Death in a Small Southern Town PDF Author: Gayle Graham Yates
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807129371
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Gayle Graham Yates's hometown sits on the banks of the Chickasawhay River, boasting the live oak, dogwood, and magnolia trees found throughout southern Mississippi. Like any place, Shubuta (population 650) is inhabited by good people and bad, by virtue and vice. Both a literary memoir and a cultural history, this book chronicles Yates's return to the town in which she first knew goodness and came to recognize immorality. Blending folklore and personal impressions with the words of Shubuta people telling their own stories, Yates offers a rich narrative of the town from its Choctaw prehistory through the tremendous economic, political, racial, and social changes that led to its present. The author's pilgrimage leads us to the Hanging Bridge, where some black Shubutans were lynched; to a bank that did not fail during the Great Depression; and to the office of the doctor who tends broken hearts as well as broken arms. Yates takes us to Shubuta's most beautiful gardens and ugliest vacant lots, to all the stores in town, to the new post office, and to the town hall. In the process, we learn how Shubuta evolved from a racially stratified town to one in which the descendants of slaves are now political leaders, librarians, business owners, and police officials. Yates also tells of her own moral journey from judgmental young activist to middle-aged scholar mellowed by experience, travel, and reading who sees her home with newfound compassion. Ultimately, she shows us Small Town southern America: a strong, frail, fascinating, and complex human community.

Life and Death in a Small Southern Town

Life and Death in a Small Southern Town PDF Author: Gayle Graham Yates
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807129371
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Gayle Graham Yates's hometown sits on the banks of the Chickasawhay River, boasting the live oak, dogwood, and magnolia trees found throughout southern Mississippi. Like any place, Shubuta (population 650) is inhabited by good people and bad, by virtue and vice. Both a literary memoir and a cultural history, this book chronicles Yates's return to the town in which she first knew goodness and came to recognize immorality. Blending folklore and personal impressions with the words of Shubuta people telling their own stories, Yates offers a rich narrative of the town from its Choctaw prehistory through the tremendous economic, political, racial, and social changes that led to its present. The author's pilgrimage leads us to the Hanging Bridge, where some black Shubutans were lynched; to a bank that did not fail during the Great Depression; and to the office of the doctor who tends broken hearts as well as broken arms. Yates takes us to Shubuta's most beautiful gardens and ugliest vacant lots, to all the stores in town, to the new post office, and to the town hall. In the process, we learn how Shubuta evolved from a racially stratified town to one in which the descendants of slaves are now political leaders, librarians, business owners, and police officials. Yates also tells of her own moral journey from judgmental young activist to middle-aged scholar mellowed by experience, travel, and reading who sees her home with newfound compassion. Ultimately, she shows us Small Town southern America: a strong, frail, fascinating, and complex human community.

Death in a Small Southern Town

Death in a Small Southern Town PDF Author: Robert L. McKinney
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780912761107
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description


The Little Way of Ruthie Leming

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming PDF Author: Rod Dreher
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 1455521906
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
The Little Way of Ruthie Leming follows Rod Dreher, a Philadelphia journalist, back to his hometown of St. Francisville, Louisiana (pop. 1,700) in the wake of his younger sister Ruthie's death. When she was diagnosed at age 40 with a virulent form of cancer in 2010, Dreher was moved by the way the community he had left behind rallied around his dying sister, a schoolteacher. He was also struck by the grace and courage with which his sister dealt with the disease that eventually took her life. In Louisiana for Ruthie's funeral in the fall of 2011, Dreher began to wonder whether the ordinary life Ruthie led in their country town was in fact a path of hidden grandeur, even spiritual greatness, concealed within the modest life of a mother and teacher. In order to explore this revelation, Dreher and his wife decided to leave Philadelphia, move home to help with family responsibilities and have their three children grow up amidst the rituals that had defined his family for five generations-Mardi Gras, L.S.U. football games, and deer hunting. As David Brooks poignantly described Dreher's journey homeward in a recent New York Times column, Dreher and his wife Julie "decided to accept the limitations of small-town life in exchange for the privilege of being part of a community."

The Death and Life of Main Street

The Death and Life of Main Street PDF Author: Miles Orvell
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807837563
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
For more than a century, the term "Main Street" has conjured up nostalgic images of American small-town life. Representations exist all around us, from fiction and film to the architecture of shopping malls and Disneyland. All the while, the nation has become increasingly diverse, exposing tensions within this ideal. In The Death and Life of Main Street, Miles Orvell wrestles with the mythic allure of the small town in all its forms, illustrating how Americans continue to reinscribe these images on real places in order to forge consensus about inclusion and civic identity, especially in times of crisis. Orvell underscores the fact that Main Street was never what it seemed; it has always been much more complex than it appears, as he shows in his discussions of figures like Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Frank Capra, Thornton Wilder, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans. He argues that translating the overly tidy cultural metaphor into real spaces--as has been done in recent decades, especially in the new urbanist planned communities of Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany--actually diminishes the communitarian ideals at the center of this nostalgic construct. Orvell investigates the way these tensions play out in a variety of cultural realms and explores the rise of literary and artistic traditions that deliberately challenge the tropes and assumptions of small-town ideology and life.

Desiree

Desiree PDF Author: Joseph Inge
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780615808673
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
DESIREE, DEATH IN A SMALL SOUTHERN TOWN is a view into the mind of an aging playboy who has cheated once too often. It's a love story told from an entirely different perspective. Its twists and turns will elicit tears, laughter, and anger. An insightful look at relationships between men and women, DESIREE is not your typical lover's tale! Set in a small military town in southeast Georgia, it is a mystery that peels back enticingly; unraveling slowly until its unforeseen conclusion. It's the story of the romance between Desiree McKensie and Ace Edwards, two lonely people who, after years of searching, find comfort in one another's arms. Married to other people, their comfort is short-lived. And the revelation of their affair changes each of their lives forever. Ace, the unlikely hero seeks solace in booze and women, while Desiree continues her life parallel to, but apart from his. They go on separately for years until the fateful night of her death. It's at this point that our hero begins to question his values; his relationships ...His sanity. With the aid of his life-long gal-pal, Ace sets out to solve the mystery of his lover's death. What he discovers along the way is his own heart-wrenching past, revisited in ways that he could never have imagined. His search forces him to examine the most significant relationships of his life. He, inevitably, learns to appreciate the one woman who has always been there for him. Unfortunately, he may never survive to express his newfound appreciation. DESIREE, death in a small southern town is a thought-provoking page-turner that will transport you to small town Georgia with its tall fragrant pines, stately moss-draped oaks, and whispery, gossipy nights. I know that you'll enjoy reading this beautiful chronicle as much as I've enjoyed presenting it.

Circumstantial Evidence

Circumstantial Evidence PDF Author: Pete Earley
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The bestselling author of The Hot House once again combines the facts, the real people, and the location itself into this true story, a wide-ranging portrait of the interplay of race, sex, and justice in the American South, made all the more real because it takes place in the same small Alabama town that was the fictional "Maycomb" in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Optioned for film by MGM. Photos.

Southern Life, Northern City

Southern Life, Northern City PDF Author: Jennifer A. Lemak
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 0791475816
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
The inspirational story of an African American community that migrated from the Deep South to Albany, New York, in the 1930s.

An Hour To Kill

An Hour To Kill PDF Author: Dale Hudson
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312978358
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
After 17-year-old Crystal Todd was found brutally murdered in her South Carolina hometown in 1991, her best friend, Ken Register, was the last person anyone would suspect. But when DNA tests confirmed he raped and stabbed Crystal, their small town was stunned. photos. Martin's Press.

Secrets of a Small Town

Secrets of a Small Town PDF Author: Jean Buonanno
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595221270
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
This is the story of life in a small southern Baptist town in the 70's. The one general practitioner in town who migrated there in the 50's has become privy to the darkest secrets revealed to him by some of the town's most prominent citizens. When his office is broken into, and the medical records are stolen, the blackmail scenario unfolds. Secrets of incest, adultery and venereal disease are just some of the dirty laundry that the perpetrator threatens to reveal. By the time the story ends, there has been a murder, a suicide, and death by coronary to shake up the tranquility of this small town. Things like this only happen in Miami and not in small towns like Palm Cove.

The Life and Death of Ancient Cities

The Life and Death of Ancient Cities PDF Author: Greg Woolf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190618566
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
The dramatic story of the rise and collapse of Europe's first great urban experiment The growth of cities around the world in the last two centuries is the greatest episode in our urban history, but it is not the first. Three thousand years ago most of the Mediterranean basin was a world of villages; a world without money or writing, without temples for the gods or palaces for the mighty. Over the centuries that followed, however, cities appeared in many places around the Inland Sea, built by Greeks and Romans, and also by Etruscans and Phoenicians, Tartessians and Lycians, and many others. Most were tiny by modern standards, but they were the building blocks of all the states and empires of antiquity. The greatest--Athens and Corinth, Syracuse and Marseilles, Alexandria and Ephesus, Persepolis and Carthage, Rome and Byzantium--became the powerhouses of successive ancient societies, not just political centers but also the places where ancient art and literatures were created and accumulated. And then, half way through the first millennium, most withered away, leaving behind ruins that have fascinated so many who came after. Based on the most recent historical and archaeological evidence, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities provides a sweeping narrative of one of the world's first great urban experiments, from Bronze Age origins to the demise of cities in late antiquity. Greg Woolf chronicles the history of the ancient Mediterranean city, against the background of wider patterns of human evolution, and of the unforgiving environment in which they were built. Richly illustrated, the book vividly brings to life the abandoned remains of our ancient urban ancestors and serves as a stark reminder of the fragility of even the mightiest of cities.