Kaolin, a rare white clay used for porcelain and cosmetics, is mined heavily in central Georgia. This book traces the often contensious relationship between the mining industry and the landowners who have signed away their mineral rights.

More than a third of the houses in the world are made of clay. Clay vessels were instrumental in the invention of cooking, wine and beer making, and international trade. Our toilets are made of clay. The first spark plugs were thrown on the potter’s wheel. Clay has played a vital role in the health and beauty fields. Indeed, this humble material was key to many advances in civilization, including the development of agriculture and the invention of baking, architecture, religion, and even the space program. In Clay, Suzanne Staubach takes a lively look at the startling history of the mud beneath our feet. Told with verve and erudition, this story will ensure you won’t see the world around you in quite the same way after reading the book.

Providence Canyon State Park, also known as Georgia’s “Little Grand Canyon,” preserves a network of massive erosion gullies allegedly caused by poor farming practices during the nineteenth century. It is a park that protects the scenic results of an environmental disaster. While little known today, Providence Canyon enjoyed a modicum of fame in the 1930s. During that decade, local boosters attempted to have Providence Canyon protected as a national park, insisting that it was natural. At the same time, national and international soil experts and other environmental reformers used Providence Canyon as the apotheosis of human, and particularly southern, land abuse. Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies uses the unlikely story of Providence Canyon—and the 1930s contest over its origins and meaning—to recount the larger history of dramatic human-induced soil erosion across the South and to highlight the role that the region and its erosive agricultural history played in the rise of soil science and soil conservation in America. More than that, though, the book is a meditation on the ways in which our persistent mental habit of separating nature from culture has stunted our ability to appreciate places like Providence Canyon and to understand the larger history of American conservation.

Circling Faith is a collection of essays by southern women that encompasses spirituality and the experience of winding through the religiously charged environment of the American South. Mary Karr, in “Facing Altars,” describes how the consolation she found in poetry directed her to a similar solace in prayer. In “Chiaroscuro: Shimmer and Shadow,” Susan Cushman recounts how her dissatisfaction with a Presbyterian upbringing led her to hold her own worship services at home and eventually to join the Eastern Orthodox Church. “Magic” by Amy Blackmarr depicts a religious practice that occurs wholly outside of any formal setting—she recognizes places, such as a fishing shack in south Georgia, and things, such as crystal Cherokee earrings, as reminders that God exists everywhere and that a Great Comforter is always present. In “The Only Jews in Town,” Stella Suberman gives her account of growing up as a religious minority in Tennessee, connecting her story to a larger narrative of Eastern European Jews who moved away from the Northeast, often to found and run “Jew stores” in midwestern and southern towns. Alice Walker, in an interview with Valerie Reiss titled “Alice Walker Calls God ‘Mama,’” relates her dynamic relationship with her God, which includes meditation and yoga, and explains how she views the role of faith in her work, including her novel The Color Purple. These essays showcase the large spectrum of spirituality that abides in the South, as well as the equally large spectrum of individual women who hold these faiths.

Legacy is about loss of inheritance and what we can do to reclaim it. The introduction summarizes the psychological tyranny inflicted on Africans and their descendants over the course of enslavement and Jim Crow. Legacy brings the past into the present with the story of Jeff Carter, a Black man born during "slavery" who, by 1916, acquired over 800 acres of mineral-rich land in the Middle District of Georgia. In this particular region, a mineral known as "chalk" to the locals, has produced a multi-billion dollar, foreign-owned and operated industry. Kaolin, as it is officially known, is predominately used in the paper and paint industries (National Geographic is about 30% kaolin), but is also used as a filler in ceramics, cosmetics, medicine, rubber, toothpaste, etc. The majority of the mineral-laden land is owned by Black farmers, who have seen very little, if any, of the profits garnered from their land. Ninety-nine (99) year mineral leases and outright theft have kept these farmers from reaping any amount of the wealth. The heirs of Jeff Carter are one such family, who were brutally evicted from their 800 acre estate in 1950. In 1980, after many failed attempts to reclaim their estate, they were solicited by kaolin-industry agents and attorneys who represented the family who stole their land! The heirs of Jeff Carter are not unique in their story of land loss. The quantity of land that Black farmers have lost in the last one-hundred years alone is staggering. One of the most detrimental legacies of enslavement and Jim Crow is the challenge of passing an inheritance on to our children. As a result, subsequent generations have to "reinvent the wheel," because they have neither the business nor the finances to pick up where there ancestors left off. In recent years, a settlement was to be made to the descendants of the Rosewood massacre in Florida, but each alleged descendant was required to prove their ancestry. For this reason, we encourage all people of color to research their family's genealogy. We dedicate an entire chapter to beginning this process. Uncovering our family history is a pivotal step in healing from centuries of psychological, economic and physical rape. If for no other reason, our children should know something about the ancestors they are a legacy of.

An essay collection exploring the history of 5,000-year relationship between human culture and nature on the Georgia coast. One of the unique features of the Georgia coast today is its thorough conservation. At first glance, it seems to be a place where nature reigns. But another distinctive feature of the coast is its deep and diverse human history. Indeed, few places that seem so natural hide so much human history. In Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture, editors Paul S. Sutter and Paul M. Pressly have brought together work from leading historians as well as environmental writers and activists that explores how nature and culture have coexisted and interacted across five millennia of human history along the Georgia coast, as well as how those interactions have shaped the coast as we know it today. The essays in this volume examine how successive communities of Native Americans, Spanish missionaries, British imperialists and settlers, planters, enslaved Africans, lumbermen, pulp and paper industrialists, vacationing northerners, Gullah-Geechee, nature writers, environmental activists, and many others developed distinctive relationships with the environment and produced well-defined coastal landscapes. Together these histories suggest that contemporary efforts to preserve and protect the Georgia coast must be as respectful of the rich and multifaceted history of the coast as they are of natural landscapes, many of them restored, that now define so much of the region. Contributors: William Boyd, S. Max Edelson, Edda L. Fields-Black, Christopher J. Manganiello, Tiya Miles, Janisse Ray, Mart A. Stewart, Drew A. Swanson, David Hurst Thomas, and Albert G. Way.