Books in the Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures series

Drawing upon letters, autobiographies and novels, this book examines the strategies that various southern women writers in the USA have used to create their own ""voice"", their own unique expression of mind and selfhood. This book is written within a chronological framework.

The 1954 Brown v Board of Education ruling is a watershed event in the fight against racial segregation in the US. Examining how our historical understanding of segregation has evolved since then, this book suggests that the Brown decree and the civil rights movement have accomplished more than the hard statistics of black progress can reveal.

Considers how Adams (grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams) looked at the region during various phases of his life. This title also explores the cultural and familial impulses behind those views and locates them in American intellectual history.

Explores loyalty in the era of the Civil War, focusing on Robert E. Lee, Stephen Dodson Ramseur, and Jubal A. Early. Looking at levels of allegiance to their native state, the slaveholding South, to the US, and the Confederacy, Gallagher shows how these men represent responses to the mid-nineteenth century crisis.

Kreyling confronts the changing nature of our relationship to the anniversary of the war that nearly split the United States, revealing as much about our sense of place in the present as our conception of the past. These essays explore the mechanisms by which each era has staged, written, and thought about the meaning of the Civil War.

River-cane baskets woven by the Chitimachas of south Louisiana are universally admired for their beauty and workmanship. Recounting friendships that Chitimacha weaver Christine Paul (1874-1946) sustained with two non-Native women at different parts of her life, this book offers a rare vantage point into the lives of American Indians in the segregated South.

With a fresh interpretation of African American resistance to kidnapping and pre-Civil War political culture, Blind No More sheds new light on the coming of the Civil War by focusing on a neglected truism: the antebellum free states experienced a dramatic ideological shift that questioned the value of the Union.

Provides an analysis of the powerful role played by folk culture in 3 major African American novels of the early 20th century: ""The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man"", ""Jonah's Gourd Vine"", and ""Black Thunder"". This book explains how the survival of cultural traditions originating in Africa and in slavery became a means of historical reflection.

Paul Harvey uses four characters that are important symbols of religious expression in the American South to survey major themes of religion, race, and southern history. He uses not only biblical and religious sources but also draws on literature, mythology, and art. He ponders the troubling meaning of 'religious freedom' for slaves and later for blacks in the segregated South.

In this book Bill C. Malone recalls the lost worlds of pioneering fiddlers and pickers, balladeers and yodelers.

Focuses on the religious dimensions of the South's response to slavery, the Civil War, and emancipation. This book shows how southern pro slavery theorists, both clergy and lay, struggled with the intellectual and theological quandaries posed by slavery.

In the role of "historian-detective" Bernard Mayo presents in lecture form three case histories in hero-worship. These abundantly illustrate the uses and abuses of history, revealing how the flesh-and-blood men, humanly fallible yet with the inspiring qualities of greatness, have been distorted and obscured by conflicting interpretations and by myths that defame and myths that glorify.

Provides an overview of the enormous contributions made by African American teachers to the black freedom movement in the United States. Beginning with the close of the Civil War, Adam Fairclough explores the development of educational ideals in the black community up through the years of the civil rights movement.