Considered to be one of the all-time classic studies of southeastern Native peoples, Powhatan's Mantle proves more topical, comprehensive, and insightful than ever before in this revised edition for twenty-first century scholars and students.

With a few notable exceptions, historians have tended to ignore the role that science and medicine played in the antebellum South. The fourteen essays in Science and Medicine in the Old South help to redress that neglect by considering scientific and medical developments in the early nineteenth-century South and by showing the ways in which the South’s scientific and medical activities differed from those of other regions. The book is divided into two sections. The essays in the first section examine the broad background of science in the South between 1830 and 1860; the second section addresses medicine specifically. The essays frequently counterpoint each other. In the first section, Ronald Numbers and Janet Numbers argue that he South’s failure to “keep pace” with the North in scientific areas resulted from demographic factors. William Scarborough asserts that slavery produced a social structure that encouraged agricultural and political careers rather than scientific and industrial ones. Charles Dew offers a strong indictment of slavery, suggesting that the conservative influence of the institution severely discouraged the adoption of modern technologies. Other essays examine institutions of higher learning in the South, southern scientific societies, and the relationship between science and theology. The section on medicine in the Old South also examines the ways in which the medical needs and practices of the Old South were both similar to and distinct from those of other regions. K. David Patterson argues that slavery in effect imported African diseases into the Southeast and created a “modified West African disease environment.” James H. Cassedy points out that land-management policies determined by slavery—land clearing, soil exhaustion—also helped created a distinctive disease environment. Other contributors discuss southern public health problems, domestic medicine, slave folk beliefs, and the special medical needs of blacks. Science and Medicine in the Old South is a long-overdue examination of these segments of the southern cultural milieu. These essays will do much to clarify misconceptions about the time and the region; moreover, they suggest directions for future research.

The story of Richard Arrington Jr., the first African American mayor of Birmingham, Alabama During the 1960s, Birmingham, Alabama was the central battleground in the struggle for human rights in the American South. As one of the most segregated cities in the United States, the city of Birmingham became infamous for its suppression of civil rights and for official and vigilante violence against its African American citizens, most notoriously the use of explosives in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing and the bombing of the home of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. In October of 1979, Birmingham elected its first Black mayor, Richard Arrington Jr. He was born in the rural town of Livingston, Alabama. His family moved to Birmingham when he was a child. A man of quiet demeanor, he was nevertheless destined to bring to fruition many of the fundamental changes that the Civil Rights Movement had demanded. This is his story. Not a conventional political or Civil Rights history, Back to Birmingham is the story of a man who demonstrated faith in his region and people. The work illuminates Arrington's sense of place, a quality that enables a person to claim sentimentally a portion of the natural and human environment. Franklin passionately underscores the importance of the attachment of Southern Blacks to their land and place. Back to Birmingham will appeal to both the general reader and the serious student of American society. The book endeavors to bridge the gap between popular and scholarly history. It is guided by the assumption that Americans of whatever description can find satisfaction in comprehending social change and that they are buoyed by the individual triumph of those who beat the odds.