The Journal of Archibald C. McKinley

The Journal of Archibald C. McKinley PDF Author: Archibald Carlisle McKinley
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820311876
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
A valuable document from the Reconstruction era, The Journal of Archibald C. McKinley offers the modern reader a rare glimpse of daily life on Sapelo Island, Georgia, as seen through the eyes of an upper-class farmer. A descendant of Scottish settlers, Archibald McKinley was born in Lexington, Georgia, in 1842 and served as a Confederate officer during the Civil War. Just after the war, he began farming near Milledgeville, Georgia, and within a year had met and married Sarah Spalding, a granddaughter of Thomas Spalding, who had built his plantation empire on Sapelo Island. In 1869, the McKinleys moved to Sapelo to raise cotton, sugar cane, and other crops. The bulk of this journal is a sustained account of their sojourn on the island through 1876, before their return to Milledgeville. The brief, matter-of-fact entries that make up McKinley's journal focus mainly on the small occurrences that filled his days: farm work, hunting and fishing expeditions, sailing excursions, church services, changes in the weather, the disposition of his crops, the development of the Darien timber shipping trade. Scattered throughout, however, are intriguing references to dramatic events--shootings, trials, tensions between whites and the recently freed blacks--and to the processes of Reconstruction, as when McKinley notes that "a company of Yankee soldiers" had arrived at the penitentiary to ensure equal treatment of black and white convicts. The longest entry in the journal is a eulogy for a freedman named Scott, who, as McKinley's slave, had remained "true as steel" during McKinley's service in the Civil War. Editor Robert L. Humphries has included with the journal several of the McKinley family letters, written after Archibald and Sarah left Sapelo Island. In the introduction, historian Russell Duncan places the story in context, focusing on the larger events of Reconstruction as they pertained to Sapelo Island and to the relations between blacks and whites there.

The Journal of Archibald C. McKinley

The Journal of Archibald C. McKinley PDF Author: Archibald Carlisle McKinley
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820311876
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
A valuable document from the Reconstruction era, The Journal of Archibald C. McKinley offers the modern reader a rare glimpse of daily life on Sapelo Island, Georgia, as seen through the eyes of an upper-class farmer. A descendant of Scottish settlers, Archibald McKinley was born in Lexington, Georgia, in 1842 and served as a Confederate officer during the Civil War. Just after the war, he began farming near Milledgeville, Georgia, and within a year had met and married Sarah Spalding, a granddaughter of Thomas Spalding, who had built his plantation empire on Sapelo Island. In 1869, the McKinleys moved to Sapelo to raise cotton, sugar cane, and other crops. The bulk of this journal is a sustained account of their sojourn on the island through 1876, before their return to Milledgeville. The brief, matter-of-fact entries that make up McKinley's journal focus mainly on the small occurrences that filled his days: farm work, hunting and fishing expeditions, sailing excursions, church services, changes in the weather, the disposition of his crops, the development of the Darien timber shipping trade. Scattered throughout, however, are intriguing references to dramatic events--shootings, trials, tensions between whites and the recently freed blacks--and to the processes of Reconstruction, as when McKinley notes that "a company of Yankee soldiers" had arrived at the penitentiary to ensure equal treatment of black and white convicts. The longest entry in the journal is a eulogy for a freedman named Scott, who, as McKinley's slave, had remained "true as steel" during McKinley's service in the Civil War. Editor Robert L. Humphries has included with the journal several of the McKinley family letters, written after Archibald and Sarah left Sapelo Island. In the introduction, historian Russell Duncan places the story in context, focusing on the larger events of Reconstruction as they pertained to Sapelo Island and to the relations between blacks and whites there.

The Darien Journal of John Girardeau Legare, Ricegrower

The Darien Journal of John Girardeau Legare, Ricegrower PDF Author: John Girardeau Legare
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820343706
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
In 1877, John Girardeau Legare of Adams Run, South Carolina, arrived in Darien on the Georgia tidewater. Legare managed Darien-area rice plantations, first at Generals Island, then at Champneys. Nearby was Butler's Island, made famous by Fanny Kemble Butler in her antebellum Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation. Legare also served as the clerk of the city of Darien during the first three decades of the twentieth century, maintaining detailed records of public business and documenting local commercial and civic affairs. Almost to the day of his death in 1932, Legare kept a journal containing his observations and commentary on the development of Darien as a center for timber exports and the gradual decline of the rice industry. South Carolina and Georgia led the world in rice production in the mid-nineteenth century, and Legare's detailed accounts of planting and management provide one of the outstanding contemporary sources for what was becoming a vanishing way of life in tidewater Georgia. Legare's journals are a microcosmic history of Darien and its environs during a time that was perhaps the most compelling in the town's history. The industrial development of Darien in the postbellum era was the essence of Henry Grady's vision of the progressive New South, a factor not lost on Legare. He reflects on the difficulties associated with rice planting; Darien's soaring, then plummeting, fortunes with yellow pine timber; prominent community members; and the development of local railroads. Legare records these developments against the larger backdrop of America, as his journal contains many observations on contemporary national events. Buddy Sullivan has placed the Journal in context with an introduction and comprehensive endnotes identifying the people and events referred to by Legare. There is also considerable African American history in the volume, as reflected both in Legare's writings and in the editor's introduction and supplementary notes.

Subduing Satan

Subduing Satan PDF Author: Ted Ownby
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469615878
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
The Praying South and the Fighting South are two of our most popular images of white southern culture. In Subduing Satan, Ted Ownby details the tensions between these complex--and often opposing--attitudes. "Ownby's re-creation of male recreation is rich and fascinating. He paints the saloon and the street, the cockfighting and dogfighting rings as realms of distinctly male vices, enjoyed lustily by men seeking to escape the sweet virtue of the Southern Christian home.--Nation "A bold new thesis. . . . [Ownby] gives us guideposts in the ongoing search for the meaning of southern history.--Journal of Southern History "I suspect that for many years ahead Ted Ownby's Subduing Satan will serve as the standard guide on how to write religious social history.--Bertram Wyatt-Brown, University of Florida "This is one of the freshest and most interesting books written about the American South in years. By focusing on the cultural conflicts of everyday life, Ownby gets us right to the heart of white culture in the South between Reconstruction and the 1920s.--Edward L. Ayers, University of Virginia

Hell's Broke Loose in Georgia

Hell's Broke Loose in Georgia PDF Author: Scott Walker
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820329338
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Darling, I never wanted to gow home as bad in my life as I doo now and if they don’t give mee a furlow I am going any how. Written in December 1862 by Private Wright Vinson in Tennessee to his wife, Christiana, in Georgia, these lines go to the heart of why Scott Walker wrote this history of the Fifty-seventh Georgia Infantry, a unit of the famed Mercer’s Brigade. All but a few members of the Fifty-seventh lived within a close radius of eighty miles from each other. More than just an account of their military engagements, this is a collective biography of a close-knit group. Relatives and neighbors served and died side by side in the Fifty-seventh, and Walker excels at showing how family ties, friendships, and other intimate dynamics played out in wartime settings. Humane but not sentimental, the history abounds in episodes of real feeling: a starving soldier’s theft of a pie; another’s open confession, in a letter to his wife, that he may desert; a slave’s travails as a camp orderly. Drawing on memoirs and a trove of unpublished letters and diaries, Walker follows the soldiers of the Fifty-seventh as they push far into Unionist Kentucky, starve at the siege of Vicksburg, guard Union prisoners at the Andersonville stockade, defend Atlanta from Sherman, and more. Hardened fighters who would wish hell on an incompetent superior but break down at the sight of a dying Yankee, these are real people, as rarely seen in other Civil War histories.

Deep Souths

Deep Souths PDF Author: J. William Harris
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801875811
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in HistoryCo-winner of the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American HistoriansWinner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Prize from the Agricultural History Society Deep Souths tells the stories of three southern regions from Reconstruction to World War II: the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, the eastern Piedmont of Georgia, and the Georgia Sea Islands and Atlantic coast. Though these regions initially shared the histories and populations we associate with the idea of a "Deep South"—all had economies based on slave plantation labor in 1860—their histories diverged sharply during the three generations after Reconstruction. With research gathered from oral histories, census reports, and a wide variety of other sources, Harris traces these regional changes in cumulative stories of individuals across the social spectrum. Deep Souths presents a comparative and ground-level view of history that challenges the idea that the lower South was either uniform or static in the era of segregation. By the end of the New Deal era, changes in these regions had prepared the way for the civil rights movement and the end of segregation.

Searching for Black Confederates

Searching for Black Confederates PDF Author: Kevin M. Levin
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469653273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth. Moreover, Levin shows that belief in the existence of black Confederate soldiers largely originated in the 1970s, a period that witnessed both a significant shift in how Americans remembered the Civil War and a rising backlash against African Americans’ gains in civil rights and other realms. Levin also investigates the roles that African Americans actually performed in the Confederate army, including personal body servants and forced laborers. He demonstrates that regardless of the dangers these men faced in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield, their legal status remained unchanged. Even long after the guns fell silent, Confederate veterans and other writers remembered these men as former slaves and not as soldiers, an important reminder that how the war is remembered often runs counter to history.

Early Days on the Georgia Tidewater

Early Days on the Georgia Tidewater PDF Author: Buddy Sullivan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 792

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Book Description


Sapelo Island's Hog Hammock

Sapelo Island's Hog Hammock PDF Author: Michele Nicole Johnson
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 9780738568478
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
Hog Hammock, located on Georgia's Sapelo Island, is only accessible by ferry or private boat. It is one of the last island-based Gullah-Geechee communities in America--a living connection to West African languages, folkways, and spiritual traditions. With its dirt roads and tin-roofed houses, Hog Hammock is the site of a social hall, two historic Baptist churches, and a former schoolhouse, all built by descendants of slaves. The nearby Behavior Cemetery has burial sites that date back 200 years. Much has been written about the people of Hog Hammock and Sapelo Island, mostly documenting their lives as slaves and then as landowning free people working for millionaires who reshaped Sapelo Island into their own personal retreats. But there is another part of the island's story, one filled with entrepreneurs, skilled craftsmen, and community leaders, that is told here in Images of America: Sapelo Island's Hog Hammock.

Lowcountry Hurricanes

Lowcountry Hurricanes PDF Author: Walter J. Fraser, Jr.
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820333335
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
At once sobering and thrilling, this illustrated history recounts how, for the past three hundred years, hurricanes have altered lives and landscapes along the Georgia-South Carolina seaboard. A prime target for the fierce storms that develop in the Atlantic, the region is especially vulnerable because of its shallow, gradually sloping sea floor and low-lying coastline. With an eye on both natural and built environments, Fraser's narrative ranges from the first documented storm in 1686 to recent times in describing how the lowcountry has endured some of the severest effects of wind and water. This chronology of the most notable lowcountry storms is also a useful primer on the basics of hurricane dynamics. Fraser tells how the 800-ton Rising Sun foundered in open water near Charles Town during the hurricane of 1700. About one hundred persons were aboard. All perished. Drawing on eyewitness accounts, he describes the storm surge of an 1804 hurricane that submerged most of Tybee Island and swept over the fort on nearby Cockspur Island, drowning soldiers and civilians. Readers may have their own memories of Hurricanes Andrew, Opal, and Hugo. Although hurricanes frequently lead to significant loss of life, Fraser recounts numerous gripping instances of survival and rescue at sea and ashore. The author smoothly weaves the lowcountry's long social, political, and economic history with firsthand reports and data accumulated by the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Generously illustrated with contemporary and historical photographs, this is a readable and informative resource on one of nature's most awesome forces.

Sapelo

Sapelo PDF Author: Buddy Sullivan
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820350168
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Sapelo, a state-protected barrier island off the Georgia coast, is one of the state’s greatest treasures. Presently owned almost exclusively by the state and managed by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Sapelo features unique nature charac­teristics that have made it a locus for scientific research and ecological conservation. Beginning in 1949, when then Sapelo owner R. J. Reynolds Jr. founded the Sapelo Island Research Foundation and funded the research of biologist Eugene Odum, UGA’s study of the island’s fragile wetlands helped foster the modern ecology movement. With this book, Buddy Sullivan covers the full range of the island’s history, including Native American inhabitants; Spanish missions; the antebellum plantation of the innovative Thomas Spalding; the African American settlement of the island after the Civil War; Sapelo’s two twentieth-century millionaire owners, Howard E. Coffin and R. J. Reynolds Jr., and the development of the University of Georgia Marine Institute; the state of Georgia acquisition; and the transition of Sapelo’s multiple African American communities into one. Sapelo Island’s history also offers insights into the unique cultural circumstances of the residents of the community of Hog Hammock. Sullivan provides in-depth examination of the important correlation between Sapelo’s culturally significant Geechee communities and the succession of private and state owners of the island. The book’s thematic approach is one of “people and place”: how prevailing environmental conditions influenced the way white and black owners used the land over generations, from agriculture in the past to island management in the present. Enhanced by a large selection of contemporary color photographs of the island as well as a selection of archival images and maps, Sapelo documents a unique island history.