"Pioneer Imprints from Fifty States" is a historical account of the first printed documents in the United States. The book provides descriptions of the first printed documents, including broadsides, newspapers, individual laws, almanacs, primers, and longer works, and gives a brief statement about the origin of every item.

A biographical, bibliographical, generic, critical, and chronological survey of nineteenth-century Alabama authors. Presents a vivid picture of life in the South in 19th-century America.

Searching for your Alabama ancestors? Looking for historical facts? Dates? Events? This book will lead you to the places where you'll find answers. Here are hundreds of direct sources--governmental, archival, agency, online--that will help you access information vital to your investigation. Tracing Your Alabama Past sets out to identify the means and the methods for finding information on people, places, subjects, and events in the long and colorful history of this state known as the crossroads of Dixie. It takes researchers directly to the sources that deliver answers and information. This comprehensive reference book leads to the wide array of essential facts and data--public records, census figures, military statistics, geography, studies of African American and Native American communities, local and biographical history, internet sites, archives, and more. For the first time Alabama researchers are offered a how-to book that is not just a bibliography. Such complex sources as Alabama's biographical/genealogical materials, federal land records, Civil WarÂ-era resources, and Native American sources are discussed in detail, along with many other topics of interest to researchers seeking information on this diverse Deep South state. Much of the book focuses on national sources that are covered elsewhere only in passing, if at all. Other books only touch on one subject area, but here, for the first time, are directions to the Who, What, When, Where, and Why.

In A Southern Moderate in Radical Times, David I. Durham offers a comprehensive and critical appraisal of one of the South's famous dissenters. Against the backdrop of one of the most turbulent periods in American history, he explores the ideological and political journey of Henry Washington Hilliard (1808--1892), a southern politician whose opposition to secession placed him at odds with many of his peers in the South's elite class. Durham weaves threads of American legal, social, and diplomatic history to tell the story of this fascinating man who, living during a time of unrestrained destruction as well as seemingly endless possibilities, consistently focused on the positive elements in society even as forces beyond his control shaped his destiny. A three-term congressman from Alabama, as well as professor, attorney, diplomat, minister, soldier, and author, Hilliard had a career that spanned more than six decades and involved work on three continents. He modeled himself on the ideal of the erudite statesman and celebrated orator, and strove to maintain that persona throughout his life. As a member of Congress, he strongly opposed secession from the Union. No radical abolitionist, Hilliard supported the constitutional legality of slavery, but working in the tradition of the great moderates, he affirmed the status quo and warned of the dangers of change. For a period of time he and like-minded colleagues succeeded in overcoming the more radical voices and blocking disunion, but their success was short-lived and eventually overwhelmed by the growing appeal of sectional extremism. As Durham shows, Hilliard's personal suffering, tempered by his consistent faith in Divine Providence, eventually allowed him to return to his ideological roots and find a lasting sense of accomplishment late in life by becoming the unlikely spokesman for the Brazilian antislavery cause. Drawing on a large range of materials, from Hilliard's literary addresses at South Carolina College and the University of Alabama to his letters and speeches during his tenure in Brazil, Durham reveals an intellectual struggling to understand his world and to reconcile the sphere of the intellectual with that of the church and political interests. A Southern Moderate in Radical Times opens a window into Hilliard's world, and reveals the tragedy of a visionary who understood the dangers lurking in the conflicts he could not control.

The most thorough history of Alabama’s Madison County region, widely available for the first time The 1956 dissertation by Frances Cabaniss Roberts is a classic text on Alabama history that continues to be cited by southern historians. Roberts was the first woman to earn a PhD from the University of Alabama’s history department. In the 1950s, she was the only full-time faculty member at what is now the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she was appointed chair of the history department in 1966. Roberts’s dissertation, “Background and Formative Period in the Great Bend and Madison County,” remains the most thorough history of the region yet produced. While certainly a product of its era, Roberts work is visionary in its own way and offers a useful look at Alabama’s rise to statehood. Thomas Reidy, editor of this edition, has kept Roberts’s words intact except for correction of minor typographical errors and helpful additions to the notes and citations. His introduction describes both the value of Roberts’s decades of service to UAH and the importance of her dissertation over time. While highlighting the great intrinsic value of Roberts’s research and writing, Reidy also notes its significance in demonstrating how the practice of history—its methods, priorities, and values—has evolved over the intervening decades. In her examination of Madison County, Roberts spotlights exemplars of civic performance and good community behavior, giving readers one of the earliest accountings of the antebellum southern middle class. Unlike many historians of her time, Roberts displays an interest in both the “common folks” and leaders who built the region—rural and urban—and created the institutions that shaped Madison County. She examines the contributions of merchants, shopkeepers, lawyers, doctors, architects, craftsmen, planters, farmers, elected and appointed officials, board members, and entrepreneurs.

Annotation "When these words were written everybodyhadread or heard of Simon Suggs, the shifty man whose antics had been recorded in many a gusty tale of Alabama frontier life which had drawn laughter and applause from newspaper readers throughout the United States. And everybody, at least in Alabama in the 1850s, knew something about his creator, Johnson Jones Hooper. . . . The immortal Suggs, his alter ego, has kept his name alive and renewed its luster, in a biography that deserves almost unqualified praise. Dr. Hoole'sAlias Simon Suggsis a noteworthy achievement. . . . A milestone in contemporary Alabama scholarship, it will become a standard reference work on the literary and political scene [and] as a distinguished piece of biographical writing, skillfully organized and deftly presented."--AlabamaReview