Literature

Set in South Alabama The Second Head of Chocalata is a series of short stories written about a man and a boy. The author wrote a few of these short stories as the boy recalled tales the man had told him about the hunting and fishing adventures of his youth around the Mobile area. Then the author tells the boy's life as he grew up hunting, fishing, water skiing, and frog gigging in and about the rivers and marshes of the Mobile River Delta and Mobile Bay. Some of the stories are serious, some...

The Slave Who Went To Congress celebrates the life of a man who rejected bitterness even as he pursued his own dreams and worked to make possible the dreams of others, regardless of their race or background. His is a story of determination and strength, the story of a true American hero. The first African American from Alabama to be elected in the US Congress | Author: Marti Rosner & Frye Gaillard | Illustrated: Jordana Haggard | Audience: Grades 4-6 ...

Joining the ranks of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Zora Neale Hurston’s rediscovered classic Barracoon, an immersive and revelatory history of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on US soil, told through the stories of its survivors—the last documented survivors of any slave ship—whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways. The Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on American soil, docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in July 1860—more than half a century...

Amanda Walker is a longtime columnist with AL.com, the Wilcox Progressive Era in Camden, Alabama, several regional papers. Her writing explores the elusive ups and downs of everyday life. She weaves and dances along the heartstrings thread through us all. She can be quite opinionated and delightfully humorous.Her book "The Tears and Laughter of a Southern Voice Calling" is a collection of short stories, writing, and collumns based off of experiences from life growing up in the south. ...

The Tombigbee River flows through the history of Alabama and Mississippi, connecting the Black Prairie cotton belt of northeast Mississippi and west Alabama to Mobile and the Gulf of Mexico. In the early 1800s, it became the regional artery of commerce and trade, with steamboats carrying cotton to the port of Mobile and then returning upriver with farm supplies and consumer goods. Today, the "rollodores," who rolled cotton bales down slides to the decks of boats; the sunken logs, or "dead...

One shot fired deep in the pine forests of her youth was all it took to change Hattie's life forever. At the age of fourteen, Hattie learns that her mother, Addie, is dead, and her father, Hubbard, stands accused of Addie's murder, along with countless other shocking betrayals. Overnight, Hattie becomes mother to her three siblings while still very much a child herself. The life she had dreamt of now seems impossible to achieve. How will Hattie break away from the father who prevents her from...

This Bright Light of Ours offers a tightly focused insider’s view of the community-based activism that was the heart of the civil rights movement. A celebration of grassroots heroes, this book details through first-person accounts the contributions of ordinary people who formed the nonviolent army that won the fight for voting rights.Combining memoir and oral history, Maria Gitin fills a vital gap in civil rights history by focusing on the neglected Freedom Summer of 1965 when hundreds of...

Through Others' Eyes includes descriptions of traveling to and from Montgomery, but it focuses on the travelers' descriptions of Montgomery itself. The twenty-eight published accounts between 1825 and 1861 were written by Americans and Europeans with a variety of backgrounds. A few are as objective as can reasonably be expected considering the short durations of the writers' visits. Some are prone to display their preconceptions and prejudices. Most exaggerate-they had to make their books...

In Visions of the Black Belt, Robin McDonald and Valerie Pope Burnes offer a richly illustrated tour of the Black Belt, the fertile arc that represents the cultural efflorescence of Alabama’s heartland. Like knowledgeable friends, McDonald and Burnes guide readers through the Black Belt’s towns and architecture and introduce the region’s great panoply of citizens, farmers, craftspeople, cooks, writers, and musicians.A constellation of Black Belt towns arose during Alabama’s territorial...

In 1910, Orville and Wilbur Wright opened the first American civilian flight school in Montgomery, Alabama. The Wright brothers hoped to find a climate warmer and more hospitable to flying than their company base of snowy Dayton, Ohio. Forward-thinking Montgomerians welcomed the Wrights and heralded the school as a way to rise above the shadow of the Civil War. Author Julie Hedgepeth Williams chronicles the short life of this flight school as seen mainly through the eyes of the Alabama press,...