Huntsville Textile Mills Villages Linthead Legacy

In the early 1900s, Huntsville, Alabama, had more spindles than any other city in the South. Cotton fields and mills made the city a major competitor in the textile industry. Entire mill villages sprang up around the factories to house workers and their families. Many of these village buildings are now iconic community landmarks, such as the revitalized Lowe Mill arts facility and the Merrimack Mill Village Historic District. The "lintheads," a demeaning moniker villagers wore as a badge of honor, were hard workers. Their lives were fraught with hardships, from slavery and child labor to factory fires and shutdowns. They endured job-related injuries and illnesses, strikes and the Great Depression. Author Terri L. French details the lives, history and legacy of the workers.

Most of the American textile manufacturing business is now either bankrupt or has moved offshore. This leaves what used to be the Carolina textile belt riddled with former company villages which are having to scamper to provide water, housing and utilities for the mill villages services that once were provided by the plants themselves. "Carolina Linthead" hopes to tell what basic, warm communities these once were. The author, who was born and reared in the Southern textile belt, gives such a glance. And while he's at it, he tells of his determination to get out of the insular surroundings and join the "real world." He tells of growing up in the age when life was simpler and even radio was a new-fangled thing. The biggest recreation for most people was visiting each other. They didn't invent front porches, but these came in mighty handy. Also, it gave a big impetus to textile village baseball. You might even say that most cotton mill people either spent most of their lives either visiting neighbors or going to ballgames. Just maybe such recollections will prompt other former lintheads to sit down and jot a few things about their own histories.

Keepers is a delightful romp through religion, rebellion and rambunctiousness. French's haibun offer an artful fusion of memory tied to parenting her two boys along with her imagination steeped in regional awareness of rural Alabama where she has lived for the last thirty years. The haibun capture the authentic voice of 11-year-old JT Blankenship and are reminiscent of Twain's Huck Finn. This collection of coming-of-age stories is strengthened by French's haiku, which have the power to stand on their own. Keepers is a book that will tickle the funny bones and pull at the heart strings of young and old alike.

An ear-opening exploration of music's New World, from Puritan psalmody to Hamilton

Cormac McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, won the William Faulkner Award. His other books - Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, and Blood Meridian - have drawn a cult readership and the praise of such writers as Annie Dillard and Shelby Foote. "There are so many people out there who seem to have a hunger to know more about McCarthy's work," says McCarthy scholar Vereen Bell. Helping to satisfy such a need, this collection of essays, one of the few critical studies of Cormac McCarthy, introduces his work and lays the groundwork for study of an important but underrecognized American novelist, winner in 1992 of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for All the Pretty Horses. The essays explore McCarthy's historical and philosophical sources, grapple with the difficult task of identifying the moral center in his works, and identify continuities in his fiction. Included too is a bibliography of works by and about him. As they reflect critical perspectives on the works of this eminent writer, these essays afford a pleasing introduction to all his novels and his screenplay, "The Gardener's Son."

From boot-legging to ghosts and everything in between, this collection of stories shows the other side of Huntsville and its development in unexpected ways. Utilizing illustrations and advertisements, anecdotes and stories, Tom Carney has created a virtual time machine that doesn't always land where you would expect it.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Harriette Arnow’s search for truth as early American settlers knew it began as a child—the old songs, handed-down stories, and proverbs that colored her world compelled her on a journey that informs her depiction of the Cumberland River Valley in Kentucky and Tennessee. Arnow drew from court records, wills, inventories, early newspapers, and unpublished manuscripts to write Seedtime on the Cumberland, which chronicles the movement of settlers away from the coast, as well as their continual refinement of the “art of pioneering.” A companion piece, this evocative history covers the same era, 1780–1803, from the first settlement in what was known as “Middle Tennessee” to the Louisiana Purchase. When Middle Tennessee was the American frontier, the men and women who settled there struggled for survival, land, and human dignity. The society they built in their new home reflected these accomplishments, vulnerabilities, and ambitions, at a time when America was experiencing great political, industrial, and social upheaval.