Story Of A Rivertown

A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the Kiriyama Book Prize In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. Hessler taught English and American literature at the local college, but it was his students who taught him about the complex processes of understanding that take place when one is immersed in a radically different society. Poignant, thoughtful, funny, and enormously compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a city that is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be.

An illustrated history of Little Rock, Arkansas, paired with histories of the local companies.

Rugged and Sublime explores Arkansas's major clashes and locales of the Civil War. Richly illustrated with maps and photographs and containing an appendix of Civil War properties in Arkansas, it is especially useful as a guidebook to the Civil War battlefields of Arkansas.

In this panoramic survey of urbanization in the American South from its beginnings in the colonial period through the "Sunbelt" era of today, Lawrence Larsen examines both the ways in which southern urbanization has paralleled that of other regions and the distinctive marks of "southernness" in the historical process. Larsen is the first historian to show that southern cities developed in "layers" spreading ever westward in response to the expanding transportation needs of the Cotton Kingdom. Yet in other respects, southern cities developed in much the same way as cities elsewhere in America, despite the constraints of regional, racial, and agrarian factors. And southern urbanites, far from resisting change, quickly seized upon technological innovations- most recently air conditioning- to improve the quality of urban life. Treating urbanization as an independent variable without an ideological foundation, Larsen demonstrates that focusing on the introduction of certain city services, such as sewerage and professional fire departments, enables the historian to determine points of urban progress. Larsen's landmark study provides a new perspective not only on a much ignored aspect of the history of the South but also on the relationship of the distinctive cities of the Old South to the new concept of the Sunbelt city. Carrying his story down to the present, he concludes that southern cities have gained parity with others throughout America. This important work will be of value to all students of the South as well as to urban historians.

Operating under an outmoded system of urban development and faced by the vicissitudes of the Civil War and Reconstruction, southerners in the nineteenth century built a network of cities that met the needs of their society. In this pioneering exploration of that intricate story, Lawrence H. Larsen shows that in the antebellum period, southern entrepreneurs built cities in layers to facilitate the movement of cotton. First came the colonial cities, followed by those of the piedmont, the New West, the Gulf Coast, and the interior. By the Civil War, cotton could move by a combination of road, rail, and river through a network of cities -- for example, from Jackson to Memphis to New Orleans to Europe. In the Gilded Age, building on past practices, the South continued to make urban gains. Men like Henry Grady of Atlanta and Henry Watterson of Louisville used broader regional objectives to promote their own cities. Grady successfully sold Atlanta, one of the most southern of cities demographically, as a city with a northern outlook; Watterson tied Louisville to national goals in railroad building. The New South movement did not succeed in bringing the region to parity with the rest of the nation, yet the South continued to rise along older lines. By 1900, far from being a failure in terms of the general course of American development, the South had created an urban system suited to its needs, while avoiding the promotional frenzy that characterized the building of cities in the North. Based upon federal and local sources, this book will become the standard work on nineteenth-century southern urbanization, a subject too long unexplored.