An insider's perspective in a conversational, yet unapologetic style on the events and conditions that shaped modern-day Alabama.

Descended from early pioneers of Florence and Lauderdale County, Alabama, the author has collected historical information about Muscle Shoals for more than a half-century. His research has involved personal interviews with Civil War veterans, former slaves, and descendants of both Native Americans and frontier families.

A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Kelley reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.

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.

"Jackson weaves a seamless tale stretching from the Native-American river settlements ... to the paper mills and hydroelectric plants of the late twentieth century". -- Southern Historian

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.

"Author Wade Hall, the first of his family to graduate from high school, is a native of Bullock County. In the 1970s and early 1980s, during visits back to his home county, he recorded the memories of some of the county's oldest inhabitants, including the nineteen people who now speak from these pages. What they shared were recollections of a culturally and technologically isolated time - in which life was hard but honest and people persevered with stoicism and a simple, unfettered religious faith."--Jacket.