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.

The history of Mobile, Alabama's first city.

By: James E. Saunders, Pub. 1899, Reprinted 2015, 556 pages, Index, ISBN #0-89308-061-6. This excellent book on the history of northern Alabama and most especially of Lawrence County is a MUST. The volume is in two parts, part one being "Recollections of the Early Settlers of North Alabama ", written by Col. Saunders. This part contains a brief history of Lawrence County, AL. and the Tennessee River Valley, sketches of many early families and personalities of the area and their origins as well as Col. Saunders writings on the Civil War. Part two, "Notes and Genealogies", was compilied by Mrs. Elizabeth Saunders Blair Stubbs, a granddaughter of Col. Saunders. The genealogies cover not only families in Northern Alabama but in other areas of the state, and also other states as well, giving much detail and family origins in this country and abroud. Among the families covered are: Banks, Bankhead, Bibbs, Billups, Blair, Cantzon, Clark, Clay, Coleman, Cox, DuBose, Dudley, Dunn, Eliott, Flint, Foster, Fry, Gholson, Goode, Gray, Harris, Hill, Hopkins, Kennedy, Lanier, Ligon, Lowe, Maclin, Manning, Maury, McCarthy, McGehee, Moore, Oliver, O'Neal, Phelan, Poellnitz, Ray, Richardson, Saunders, Shelton, Sherrod, Shorter, Speed, Swoope, Tait, Taliaferro, Thompson, Tillman, Urquhart, Walthall, Waykins, Webb, Weeden, Wells, White, Withers, Yates, and Young

A native son and accomplished historian does not flinch from pointing out Alabama's failures from the past 100 years; neither is he restrained in calling attention to the state's triumphs in this authoritative, popular history of the past 100 years.

The tranquil waters of the Tennessee River hide a horrible tragedy that took place one steamy July day when co-workers took an excursion aboard the SCItanic. Lawrence County resident Jenny Brooks used the skull of one of her victims to wash her hands, but her forty-year quest for revenge cost more than she bargained for. Granville Garth jumped to his watery grave with a pocketful of secrets--did anyone collect the $10,000 reward for the return of the papers he took with him? Historian Jacquelyn Procter Reeves transports readers deep into the shadows of the past to learn about the secret of George Steele's will, the truth behind the night the "Stars Fell on Alabama" and the story of the Lawrence County boys who died in the Goliad Massacre. Learn these secrets--and many more--in Hidden History of North Alabama.