Download or read book Boom Town written by Sam Anderson and published by Crown. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant, kaleidoscopic narrative of Oklahoma City—a great American story of civics, basketball, and destiny, from award-winning journalist Sam Anderson NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • NPR • Chicago Tribune • San Francisco Chronicle • The Economist • Deadspin Oklahoma City was born from chaos. It was founded in a bizarre but momentous “Land Run” in 1889, when thousands of people lined up along the borders of Oklahoma Territory and rushed in at noon to stake their claims. Since then, it has been a city torn between the wild energy that drives its outsized ambitions, and the forces of order that seek sustainable progress. Nowhere was this dynamic better realized than in the drama of the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team’s 2012-13 season, when the Thunder’s brilliant general manager, Sam Presti, ignited a firestorm by trading future superstar James Harden just days before the first game. Presti’s all-in gamble on “the Process”—the patient, methodical management style that dictated the trade as the team’s best hope for long-term greatness—kicked off a pivotal year in the city’s history, one that would include pitched battles over urban planning, a series of cataclysmic tornadoes, and the frenzied hope that an NBA championship might finally deliver the glory of which the city had always dreamed. Boom Town announces the arrival of an exciting literary voice. Sam Anderson, former book critic for New York magazine and now a staff writer at the New York Times magazine, unfolds an idiosyncratic mix of American history, sports reporting, urban studies, gonzo memoir, and much more to tell the strange but compelling story of an American city whose unique mix of geography and history make it a fascinating microcosm of the democratic experiment. Filled with characters ranging from NBA superstars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook; to Flaming Lips oddball frontman Wayne Coyne; to legendary Great Plains meteorologist Gary England; to Stanley Draper, Oklahoma City's would-be Robert Moses; to civil rights activist Clara Luper; to the citizens and public servants who survived the notorious 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, Boom Town offers a remarkable look at the urban tapestry woven from control and chaos, sports and civics.

Download or read book Sundown Towns written by James W. Loewen and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Powerful and important . . . an instant classic." —The Washington Post Book World The award-winning look at an ugly aspect of American racism by the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, reissued with a new preface by the author In this groundbreaking work, sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the classic bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative, sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of "sundown towns"—almost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken rule that blacks weren't welcome—that cropped up throughout the twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South. Written with Loewen's trademark honesty and thoroughness, Sundown Towns won the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and launched a nationwide online effort to track down and catalog sundown towns across America. In a new preface, Loewen puts this history in the context of current controversies around white supremacy and the Black Lives Matter movement. He revisits sundown towns and finds the number way down, but with notable exceptions in exclusive all-white suburbs such as Kenilworth, Illinois, which as of 2010 had not a single black household. And, although many former sundown towns are now integrated, they often face "second-generation sundown town issues," such as in Ferguson, Missouri, a former sundown town that is now majority black, but with a majority-white police force.

Download or read book Snake Eyes written by Bitty Martin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-05-15 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By 1966, Hot Springs, Arkansas wasn’t your typical sleepy little Southern town. Once a favorite destination for mobsters like Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, illegal activities continued to lure out-of-state gamblers, flim-flam men, and high rollers to its racetracks, clubs, and bordellos. Still, the town was shaken to its core after a girl was found dead on a nearby ranch. The ranch owner claimed it was an accident. Then the rancher was found to be the killer of another woman – his fourth wife. The story begins when 13-year-old Cathie Ward was found dead after horseback riding at Blacksnake Ranch on the outskirts of Hot Springs, Arkansas. Frank Davis, the owner of the ranch, tells authorities Cathie’s death is an accident. He claims her foot caught in a stirrup and she was dragged to her death despite his pursuit of the runaway horse. People who know the 42-year-old skilled horseman don’t believe his story, and soon rumors of her rape and murder begin swirling around town. The rumors reach a crescendo after Davis viciously guns down his fourth wife and mother-in-law in broad daylight outside of a laundromat. Davis is arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Soon after, Hot Springs authorities re-open the investigation into Cathie Ward’s death. Snake Eyes is the first book to examine this decades-old murder and cover-up, and the only in-depth account of the man who would become the town’s most notorious villain. Featuring personal interviews, crime scene records, court documents, and Davis’ own prison files, author and lifelong Hot Springs resident Bitty Martin reveals the true story for the first time.

Download or read book Vietnam s Southern Revolution written by David Hunt and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author uses released Rand interviews with 'Viet Cong' defectors and prisoners of war and past work involving the province of M? Tho to create a more up-to-date social framework for the Vietnam War at the village level.

Download or read book Blood Done Sign My Name written by Timothy B. Tyson and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “riveting”* true story of the fiery summer of 1970, which would forever transform the town of Oxford, North Carolina—a classic portrait of the fight for civil rights in the tradition of To Kill a Mockingbird *Chicago Tribune On May 11, 1970, Henry Marrow, a twenty-three-year-old black veteran, walked into a crossroads store owned by Robert Teel and came out running. Teel and two of his sons chased and beat Marrow, then killed him in public as he pleaded for his life. Like many small Southern towns, Oxford had barely been touched by the civil rights movement. But in the wake of the killing, young African Americans took to the streets. While lawyers battled in the courthouse, the Klan raged in the shadows and black Vietnam veterans torched the town’s tobacco warehouses. Tyson’s father, the pastor of Oxford’s all-white Methodist church, urged the town to come to terms with its bloody racial history. In the end, however, the Tyson family was forced to move away. Tim Tyson’s gripping narrative brings gritty blues truth and soaring gospel vision to a shocking episode of our history. FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD “If you want to read only one book to understand the uniquely American struggle for racial equality and the swirls of emotion around it, this is it.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “Blood Done Sign My Name is a most important book and one of the most powerful meditations on race in America that I have ever read.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer “Pulses with vital paradox . . . It’s a detached dissertation, a damning dark-night-of-the-white-soul, and a ripping yarn, all united by Tyson’s powerful voice, a brainy, booming Bubba profundo.”—Entertainment Weekly “Engaging and frequently stunning.”—San Diego Union-Tribune

Download or read book The History of North America The rise of the New South by P A Bruce written by Guy Carleton Lee and published by . This book was released on 1905 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Ghosts of the Confederacy written by Gaines M. Foster and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1987-04-23 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After Lee and Grant met at Appomatox Court House in 1865 to sign the document ending the long and bloody Civil War, the South at last had to face defeat as the dream of a Confederate nation melted into the Lost Cause. Through an examination of memoirs, personal papers, and postwar Confederate rituals such as memorial day observances, monument unveilings, and veterans' reunions, Ghosts of the Confederacy probes into how white southerners adjusted to and interpreted their defeat and explores the cultural implications of a central event in American history. Foster argues that, contrary to southern folklore, southerners actually accepted their loss, rapidly embraced both reunion and a New South, and helped to foster sectional reconciliation and an emerging social order. He traces southerners' fascination with the Lost Cause--showing that it was rooted as much in social tensions resulting from rapid change as it was in the legacy of defeat--and demonstrates that the public celebration of the war helped to make the South a deferential and conservative society. Although the ghosts of the Confederacy still haunted the New South, Foster concludes that they did little to shape behavior in it--white southerners, in celebrating the war, ultimately trivialized its memory, reduced its cultural power, and failed to derive any special wisdom from defeat.

Download or read book Greetings from New Nashville written by Steve Haruch and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1998, roughly 2 million visitors came to see what there was to see in Nashville. By 2018, that number had ballooned to 15.2 million. In that span of two decades, the boundaries of Nashville did not change. But something did. Or rather, many somethings changed, and kept changing, until many who lived in Nashville began to feel they no longer recognized their own city. And some began to feel it wasn't their own city at all anymore as they were pushed to its fringes by rising housing costs. Between 1998 and 2018, the population of Nashville grew by 150,000. On some level, Nashville has always packaged itself for consumption, but something clicked and suddenly everyone wanted a taste. But why Nashville? Why now? What made all this change possible? This book is an attempt to understand those transformations, or, if not to understand them, exactly, then to at least grapple with the question: What happened?

Download or read book Homeplace written by John Lingan and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intimate account of country music, social change, and a vanishing way of life as a Shenandoah town collides with the twenty-first century Winchester, Virginia is an emblematic American town. When John Lingan first traveled there, it was to seek out Jim McCoy: local honky-tonk owner and the DJ who first gave airtime to a brassy-voiced singer known as Patsy Cline, setting her on a course for fame that outlasted her tragically short life. What Lingan found was a town in the midst of an identity crisis. As the U.S. economy and American culture have transformed in recent decades, the ground under centuries-old social codes has shifted, throwing old folkways into chaos. Homeplace teases apart the tangle of class, race, and family origin that still defines the town, and illuminates questions that now dominate our national conversation—about how we move into the future without pretending our past doesn't exist, about what we salvage and what we leave behind. Lingan writes in “penetrating, soulful ways about the intersection between place and personality, individual and collective, spirit and song.”* * Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

Download or read book Downtown written by Robert M. Fogelson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation Downtown is the first history of what was once viewed as the heart of the American city. Urban historian Robert Fogelson gives a riveting account of how downtown--and the way Americans thought about it--changed between 1880 and 1950. Recreating battles over subways and skyscrapers, the introduction of elevated highways and parking bans, and other controversies, this book provides a new and often starling perspective on downtown's rise and fall.

Download or read book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming written by Rod Dreher and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Little Way of Ruthie Leming follows Rod Dreher, a Philadelphia journalist, back to his hometown of St. Francisville, Louisiana (pop. 1,700) in the wake of his younger sister Ruthie's death. When she was diagnosed at age 40 with a virulent form of cancer in 2010, Dreher was moved by the way the community he had left behind rallied around his dying sister, a schoolteacher. He was also struck by the grace and courage with which his sister dealt with the disease that eventually took her life. In Louisiana for Ruthie's funeral in the fall of 2011, Dreher began to wonder whether the ordinary life Ruthie led in their country town was in fact a path of hidden grandeur, even spiritual greatness, concealed within the modest life of a mother and teacher. In order to explore this revelation, Dreher and his wife decided to leave Philadelphia, move home to help with family responsibilities and have their three children grow up amidst the rituals that had defined his family for five generations-Mardi Gras, L.S.U. football games, and deer hunting. As David Brooks poignantly described Dreher's journey homeward in a recent New York Times column, Dreher and his wife Julie "decided to accept the limitations of small-town life in exchange for the privilege of being part of a community."

Download or read book The Negro Motorist Green Book written by Victor H. Green and published by Colchis Books. This book was released on with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Negro Motorist Green Book was a groundbreaking guide that provided African American travelers with crucial information on safe places to stay, eat, and visit during the era of segregation in the United States. This essential resource, originally published from 1936 to 1966, offered a lifeline to black motorists navigating a deeply divided nation, helping them avoid the dangers and indignities of racism on the road. More than just a travel guide, The Negro Motorist Green Book stands as a powerful symbol of resilience and resistance in the face of oppression, offering a poignant glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of the African American experience in the 20th century.

Download or read book The Origins of the Southern Middle Class 1800 1861 written by Jonathan Daniel Wells and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-11-16 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a fresh take on social dynamics in the antebellum South, Jonathan Daniel Wells contests the popular idea that the Old South was a region of essentially two classes (planters and slaves) until after the Civil War. He argues that, in fact, the region had a burgeoning white middle class--including merchants, doctors, and teachers--that had a profound impact on southern culture, the debate over slavery, and the coming of the Civil War. Wells shows that the growth of the periodical press after 1820 helped build a cultural bridge between the North and the South, and the emerging southern middle class seized upon northern middle-class ideas about gender roles and reform, politics, and the virtues of modernization. Even as it sought to emulate northern progress, however, the southern middle class never abandoned its attachment to slavery. By the 1850s, Wells argues, the prospect of industrial slavery in the South threatened northern capital and labor, causing sectional relations to shift from cooperative to competitive. Rather than simply pitting a backward, slave-labor, agrarian South against a progressive, free-labor, industrial North, Wells argues that the Civil War reflected a more complex interplay of economic and cultural values.

Download or read book Southern Discomfort written by Tena Clark and published by Atria Books. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Southern Discomfort is a raw, thought-provoking examination of privilege, racism, sexism, the masks we wear to conform to society’s expectations, and the journey toward authentic identity.” —Read with Us: Caste, An Oprah’s Book Club Discussion Guide For fans of beloved memoirs like Educated and The Glass Castle, a “raw and deeply honest” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) true story set in rural Mississippi during the Civil Rights era about a white girl coming of age in a repressive society and the woman who gave her the strength to forge her own path—the black nanny who cared for her. In her memoir that is a “story of love and fury” (Jackson Clarion-Ledger), Grammy Award-winning songwriter and producer Tena Clark recounts her chaotic childhood in a time fraught with racial and social tension. Tena was born in 1953 in a tiny Mississippi town close to the Alabama border, where the legacy of slavery and racial injustice still permeated every aspect of life. On the outside, Tena’s childhood looked like a fairytale. Her father was one of the richest men in the state; her mother was a regal beauty. The family lived on a sprawling farm and had the only swimming pool in town; Tena was given her first car—a royal blue Camaro—at twelve. But behind closed doors, Tena’s family life was deeply lonely and dysfunctional. By the time she was three, her parents’ marriage had dissolved into a swamp of alcohol, rampant infidelity, and guns. Adding to the turmoil, Tena understood from a very young age that she was different from her three older sisters, all of whom had been beauty queens and majorettes. Tena knew she didn’t want to be a majorette—she wanted to marry one. On Tena’s tenth birthday, her mother, emboldened by alcoholism and enraged by her husband’s incessant cheating, walked out for good, instantly becoming an outcast in their society. Tena was left in the care of her nanny, Virgie, even though she was raising nine of her own children and was not allowed to eat from the family’s plates or use their bathroom. It was Virgie’s acceptance and unconditional love that gave Tena the courage to stand up to her domineering father, the faith to believe in her mother’s love, and the strength to be her true self. Combining the spirit of brave coming-of-age memoirs such as The Glass Castle and vivid, evocative Southern fiction like To Kill a Mockingbird, Southern Discomfort is “an unforgettable southern story… [that] sings brightly to the incredible strength of family ties and the great power of love” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) and is destined to become a new classic.

Download or read book Cool Town written by Grace Elizabeth Hale and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-02-13 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer of 1978, the B-52's conquered the New York underground. A year later, the band's self-titled debut album burst onto the Billboard charts, capturing the imagination of fans and music critics worldwide. The fact that the group had formed in the sleepy southern college town of Athens, Georgia, only increased the fascination. Soon, more Athens bands followed the B-52's into the vanguard of the new American music that would come to be known as "alternative," including R.E.M., who catapulted over the course of the 1980s to the top of the musical mainstream. As acts like the B-52's, R.E.M., and Pylon drew the eyes of New York tastemakers southward, they discovered in Athens an unexpected mecca of music, experimental art, DIY spirit, and progressive politics--a creative underground as vibrant as any to be found in the country's major cities. In Athens in the eighties, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible. Cool Town reveals the passion, vitality, and enduring significance of a bohemian scene that became a model for others to follow. Grace Elizabeth Hale experienced the Athens scene as a student, small-business owner, and band member. Blending personal recollection with a historian's eye, she reconstructs the networks of bands, artists, and friends that drew on the things at hand to make a new art of the possible, transforming American culture along the way. In a story full of music and brimming with hope, Hale shows how an unlikely cast of characters in an unlikely place made a surprising and beautiful new world.

Download or read book Big House on the Prairie written by John M. Eason and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-03-06 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now more than ever, we need to understand the social, political, and economic shifts that have driven the United States to triple its prison construction in just over three decades. John Eason goes a very considerable distance here in fulfilling this need, not by detailing the aftereffects of building huge numbers of prisons, but by vividly showing the process by which a community seeks to get a prison built in their area. What prompted him to embark on this inquiry was the insistent question of why the rapid expansion of prisons in America, why now, and why so many. He quickly learned that the prison boom is best understood from the perspective of the rural, southern towns where they tend to be placed (North Carolina has twice as many prisons as New Jersey, though both states have the same number of prisoners). And so he sets up shop, as it were, in Forrest City, Arkansas, where he moved with his family to begin the splendid fieldwork that led to this book. A major part of his story deals with the emergence of the rural ghetto, abetted by white flight, de-industrialization, the emergence of public housing, and higher proportions of blacks and Latinos. How did Forrest City become a site for its prison? Eason takes us behind the decision-making scenes, tracking the impact of stigma (a prison in my backyard-not a likely desideratum), economic development, poverty, and race, while showing power-sharing among opposed groups of elite whites vs. black race leaders. Eason situates the prison within the dynamic shifts rural economies are undergoing, and shows how racially diverse communities can achieve the siting and building of prisons in their rural ghetto. The result is a full understanding of the ways in which a prison economy takes shape and operates."

Download or read book Upstate written by and published by Daylight Books. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Upstate" records the imprint of American industrial and agricultural history left on settings in and around Hudson, including the rural communities of Germantown and Livingston. Combining poetry with realism, the images express a quiet beauty and mystery in the vernacular architecture and artifacts reflecting the industrial era and rural settings in upstate New York and the shifting economic realities over time.