Searching for your Alabama ancestors? Looking for historical facts? Dates? Events? This book will lead you to the places where you'll find answers. Here are hundreds of direct sources--governmental, archival, agency, online--that will help you access information vital to your investigation. Tracing Your Alabama Past sets out to identify the means and the methods for finding information on people, places, subjects, and events in the long and colorful history of this state known as the crossroads of Dixie. It takes researchers directly to the sources that deliver answers and information. This comprehensive reference book leads to the wide array of essential facts and data--public records, census figures, military statistics, geography, studies of African American and Native American communities, local and biographical history, internet sites, archives, and more. For the first time Alabama researchers are offered a how-to book that is not just a bibliography. Such complex sources as Alabama's biographical/genealogical materials, federal land records, Civil WarÂ-era resources, and Native American sources are discussed in detail, along with many other topics of interest to researchers seeking information on this diverse Deep South state. Much of the book focuses on national sources that are covered elsewhere only in passing, if at all. Other books only touch on one subject area, but here, for the first time, are directions to the Who, What, When, Where, and Why.

Though slavery was widespread and antislavery sentiment rare in Alabama, there emerged a small loyalist population, mostly in the northern counties, that persisted in the face of overwhelming odds against their cause. Margaret M. Storey’s welcome study uncovers and explores those Alabamians who maintained allegiance to the Union when their state seceded in 1861—and beyond. Storey’s extensive, groundbreaking research discloses a socioeconomically diverse group that included slaveholders and nonslaveholders, business people, professionals, farmers, and blacks. By considering the years 1861–1874 as a whole, she clearly connects loyalists’ sometimes brutal wartime treatment with their postwar behavior.

Lists and describes battlefields, forts, historic mansions, pioneer settlements, civil rights monuments, and other historic sites

Alabama's is a story, believes author Virginia V. Hamilton, that bears scrutiny by Alabamians and outsiders alike if they would understand the present. Pause for a moment before a gallery of fading portraits, and you will sense the beginnings of Alabama's troubled history--homespun pioneers gripped by "Alabama fever," chained and manacled black people quietly awaiting a slave trader's order to move on, newly rich planters and iron barons holding tightly to the reins of power. You will also be caught in the tangled web of the South's past.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist reveals the little-known story of the Union soldiers from Alabama who played a decisive role in the Civil War, and how they were scrubbed from the history books. “It is my sincere hope that this compelling and submerged history is integrated into our understanding of our nation, and allows us to embrace new heroes of the past.”—Imani Perry, professor, Harvard University, and National Book Award–winning author of South to America We all know how the Civil War was won: Courageous Yankees triumphed over the South. But is there more to the story? As Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Howell Raines shows, it was not only soldiers from northern states who helped General William Tecumseh Sherman burn Atlanta to the ground but also an unsung regiment of 2,066 Alabamian yeoman farmers—including at least one member of Raines’s own family. Called the First Alabama Cavalry, U.S.A., this regiment of mountain Unionists, which included sixteen formerly enslaved Black men, was the point of the spear that Sherman drove through the heart of the Confederacy. The famed general hailed their skills and courage. So why don’t we know anything about them? Silent Cavalry is part epic American history, part family saga, and part scholarly detective story. Drawing on the lore of his native Alabama and investigative skills honed by six decades in journalism, Raines brings to light a conspiracy that sought to undermine the accomplishments of these renegade southerners—a key component of the Lost Cause effort to restore glory to white southerners after the war, even at the cost of the truth. In this important new contribution to our understanding of the Civil War and its legacy, Raines tells the thrilling tale of the formation of the First Alabama while exposing the tangled web of how its wartime accomplishments were silenced, implicating everyone from a former Confederate general to a gaggle of Lost Cause historians in the Ivy League and a sanctimonious former keeper of the Alabama state archives. By reversing the erasure of the First Alabama, Silent Cavalry is a testament to the immense power of historians to destroy as well as to redeem.