Southern Sons

Publisher description

In a new edition, the history of a regional record company and the blues, gospel, and R&B greats it launched nationally

In A City Called Heaven, gospel announcer and music historian Robert Marovich shines a light on the humble origins of a majestic genre and its indispensable bond to the city where it found its voice: Chicago. Marovich follows gospel music from early hymns and camp meetings through the Great Migration that brought it to Chicago. In time, the music grew into the sanctified soundtrack of the city's mainline black Protestant churches. In addition to drawing on print media and ephemera, Marovich mines hours of interviews with nearly fifty artists, ministers, and historians--as well as discussions with relatives and friends of past gospel pioneers--to recover many forgotten singers, musicians, songwriters, and industry leaders. He also examines how a lack of economic opportunity bred an entrepreneurial spirit that fueled gospel music's rise to popularity and opened a gate to social mobility for a number of its practitioners. As Marovich shows, gospel music expressed a yearning for freedom from earthly pains, racial prejudice, and life's hardships. In the end, it proved to be a sound too mighty and too joyous for even church walls to hold.

Established in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the University of Virginia was known as "The University" throughout the South for most of the nineteenth century, and today it stands as one of the premier universities in the world. This volume provides an in-depth look at the founding of the University and, in the process, develops new and important insights into Jefferson’s contributions as well as into the impact of the University on the history of higher education. The contributors depict the students who were entering higher education in the early republic--their aspirations, their juvenile and often violent confrontations with authority, and their relationships with enslaved workers at the University. Contributors then turn to the building of the University, including its unique architectural plan as an "Academical Village" and the often-hidden role of African Americans in its construction and day-to-day life. The next set of essays explore various aspects of Jefferson’s intellectual vision for the University, including his innovative scheme for medical education, his dogmatic view of the necessity of a "republican" legal education, and the detailed plans for the library by Jefferson, one of America’s preeminent bibliophiles. The book concludes by considering the changing nature of education in the early nineteenth century, in particular the new focus on research and discovery, in which Jefferson, again, played an important role. Providing a fascinating and important look at the development of one of America’s oldest and most preeminent educational institutions, this book provides yet another perspective from which to appreciate the extraordinary contributions of Jefferson in the development of the new nation.

Ty Cobb called baseball a “red-blooded game for red-blooded men,” warning that “molly coddles had better stay out.” By this, Cobb meant that baseball was the ultimate expression of the masculine ideal – a game of aggression, rivalry, physical and mental dexterity, self-reliance, and primal honor. For over twenty years, Cobb expressed his fierce brand of manhood in ballparks throughout the American Northeast, gaining for himself a level of celebrity that was unsurpassed in the early twentieth century. Fans idolized Cobb not only because he was the best player in the game, but because his boisterous and combative style of play satisfied their desire for exhibitions of visceral manhood. They found in Cobb an antidote for what they feared were the corrupting influences of over-civilization. With balance, precision, and empathy, Steven Elliott Tripp brings the era to life in a narrative Publisher’s Weekly has called “stunning.” In contrast to recent biographies of Cobb that have tried to minimize his more brutish behavior and minimize his racial antipathies, Tripp contextualizes Cobb, placing him squarely within the cultural milieu of both the rural South of his birth and the Northern sporting culture of his professional career. Moreover, Tripp’s reconstruction of early twentieth-century sporting culture isolates an important source of modern America’s culture of hyper-masculinity. Ty Cobb, Baseball, and American Manhood is both an important work of social and cultural history and an absorbing tale of ambition and the quest for dominance. Tripp has written the rare narrative that is as appealing to scholars as it is to general readers and sports enthusiasts.

In this in-depth and detailed history, Timothy J. Williams reveals that antebellum southern higher education did more than train future secessionists and proslavery ideologues. It also fostered a growing world of intellectualism flexible enough to marry the era's middle-class value system to the honor-bound worldview of the southern gentry. By focusing on the students' perspective and drawing from a rich trove of their letters, diaries, essays, speeches, and memoirs, Williams narrates the under examined story of education and manhood at the University of North Carolina, the nation's first public university. Every aspect of student life is considered, from the formal classroom and the vibrant curriculum of private literary societies to students' personal relationships with each other, their families, young women, and college slaves. In each of these areas, Williams sheds new light on the cultural and intellectual history of young southern men, and in the process dispels commonly held misunderstandings of southern history. Williams's fresh perspective reveals that students of this era produced a distinctly southern form of intellectual masculinity and maturity that laid the foundation for the formulation of the post–Civil War South.

The venerable Dixie Hummingbirds stand at the top of the black gospel music pantheon as artists who not only significantly shaped that genre but, in the process, also profoundly influenced emerging American pop music genres from Rhythm & Blues and Doo-Wop to Rock 'n' Roll, Soul, and Hip-Hop. Great God A'Mighty! The Dixie Hummingbirds shows how, in a career spanning more than nine decades, they pointed the way from pure a cappella harmony to guitar-driven soul to pop-stardom crossover, collaborating with artists like Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon along the way. Drawing on interviews with founding and quintessential members as well as many of the pop luminaries influenced by the Hummingbirds, author Jerry Zolten tells their story from rising up and out of the segregated South in the twenties and thirties to success on Philadelphia radio and the New York City stage in the forties to grueling tours in the fifties and over the long haul a brilliant recording career that carried well over into the 21st century. The story of the Dixie Hummingbirds is a tale of determined young men who navigated the troubled waters of racial division and the cutthroat business of music on the strength of raw talent, vision, character, and perseverance, and made an indelible name for themselves in American cultural history. This heavily edited 2nd edition features brand new photographs, expanded historical context, and a full new chapter on the Hummigbirds' trajectory up to the 21st century.

From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian comes a brilliant, absorbing study of Thomas Jefferson’s campaign to save Virginia through education. By turns entertaining and tragic, this beautifully written history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. It offers an incisive portrait of Thomas Jefferson set against a social fabric of planters in decline, enslaved black families torn apart by sales, and a hair-trigger code of male honor. A man of “deft evasions” who was both courtly and withdrawn, Jefferson sought control of his family and state from his lofty perch at Monticello. Never quite the egalitarian we wish him to be, he advocated emancipation but shrank from implementing it, entrusting that reform to the next generation. Devoted to the education of his granddaughters, he nevertheless accepted their subordination in a masculine culture. During the revolution, he proposed to educate all white children in Virginia, but later in life he narrowed his goal to building an elite university. In 1819 Jefferson’s intensive drive for state support of a new university succeeded. His intention was a university to educate the sons of Virginia’s wealthy planters, lawyers, and merchants, who might then democratize the state and in time rid it of slavery. But the university’s students, having absorbed the traditional vices of the Virginia gentry, preferred to practice and defend them. Opening in 1825, the university nearly collapsed as unruly students abused one another, the enslaved servants, and the faculty. Jefferson’s hopes of developing an enlightened leadership for the state were disappointed, and Virginia hardened its commitment to slavery in the coming years. The university was born with the flaws of a slave society. Instead, it was Jefferson’s beloved granddaughters who carried forward his faith in education by becoming dedicated teachers of a new generation of women.