"Jerry Brown (1942-2016) was a nationally recognized folk potter based in Hamilton, Alabama, whose family has been making pottery in the South since the 1830s. Traditionally, southern potters made utilitarian objects necessary for rural life. As a boy, Brown and his brother learned the family's timeworn methods and techniques helping their father in his shop, including tending the mule that drove the mill that mixed clay. Business suffered as demand for stoneware churns, jugs, and chamber pots waned in the postwar years, and manufacture ceased following the deaths of Brown's father and brother in the mid-1960s. Brown turned to logging for his livelihood, his skill with mules proving useful in working difficult and otherwise inaccessible terrain. In the early 1980s, he returned to the family trade and opened a new shop that relied on the same methods of production with which he had grown up, including a mule-powered mill for mixing clay and the use of a wood-fired rather than gas-fueled kiln. He stayed in logging for a few more years, but pottery soon became Brown's main occupation. Folklorist Joey Brackner met Brown in 1983 while researching traditional Alabama pottery for the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and the Alabama State Council for the Arts. The two quickly became close friends and collaborated together on a variety of documentary and educational projects in succeeding years-efforts which led to greater exposure, commercial success, and Brown's recognition as a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992. These developments were part of a larger overall trend as the utilitarian origins of traditional craft practices evolved into more explicitly creative and cultural forms of practice. Arts and crafts fairs cropped up around the country, and Brown adapted accordingly, specializing in collectible crowd-pleasers like face jugs and eventually launching the Jerry Brown Arts Festival, which takes place in Hamilton every spring. For years, Brown spoke of the urge to write a book, but never set pen to paper. In 2015, Brackner took the bull by the horns, interviewing Brown and recording his life story over the course of a weekend. Although Brown died suddenly the following year, Jerry Brown Pottery remains in operation, managed by Brown's wife, stepson, and his family. Of Mules and Mud is the story of Jerry Brown's life in his words as recounted in those recorded sessions, lightly edited and elaborated, and illustrated with photos from all phases of Brown's life"--

Collection of war cartoons from World War II.

"This book places historic Alabama pottery-making into a national and international context and describes the technologies that distinguish Alabama potters from the rest of the Southeast. It explains how a blending and borrowing among cultural groups that settled the state nurtured its rich regional traditions. In addition to providing a detailed discussion of pottery types, clays, glazes, slips, and firing methods, the book presents a geographic survey of the state's pottery regions with a comprehensive list of Alabama potters - a valuable resource for collectors, scholars, and curators."--BOOK JACKET.

What measures success or failure when you come from the workhouse? Mules; Masters & Mud is about what happened to our two cotton mill apprentices, the Quarry Bank runaways, during the Industrial Revolution. It tells their story as qualified young mule spinners with future hopes, and later when they are full grown. By the start of the Victorian period the fates and their ambitions would have collided. Serious events and incidents, personal and national, including the Peterloo Massacre, were about to impinge upon the lives of Thomas Priestley and Joseph Sefton. What would cause a qualified mule spinner to give up his comparatively safe job and risk failure, ridicule or destitution? Ambitious and determined working class individuals like Tommy and Joe had to carefully step through a pathway involving love and loyalty; persecution and prejudice, from within the social hierarchy of the times.

Horses and mules served during the Civil War in greater number and suffered more casualties than the men of the Union and Confederate armies combined. Using firsthand accounts, this history addresses the many uses of equines during the war, the methods by which they were obtained, their costs, their suffering on the battlefields and roads, their consumption by soldiers, and such topics as racing and mounted music. The book is supplemented by accounts of the "Lightning Mule Brigade," the "Charge of the Mule Brigade," five appendices and 37 illustrations. More than 700 Civil War equines are identified and described with incidental information and identification of their masters.

A companion and sequel to Brothers in Clay--deepens and enriches Burrison's earlier study by focusing on the northeast corner of Georgia, which has maintained a continuous tradition of pottery making since the early nineteenth century.

After the American Civil War ended, George W. Peck (1840–1916) became a newspaper publisher. His weekly newspaper, "Peck’s Sun," contained Peck’s humorous writings, including his famous semi-autobiographical “Peck’s Bad Boy” stories. Peck died in 1916 at age 75, but his writing continued to win fans for years. The "Peck’s Bad Boy" stories became the basis for several films and a short-lived television show. Included in this volume are: PECK’S BAD BOY AND HIS PA THE GROCERY MAN AND PECK’S BAD BOY PECK’S BAD BOY ABROAD PECK’S BAD BOY WITH THE COWBOYS PECK’S BAD BOY WITH THE CIRCUS PECK’S UNCLE IKE AND THE RED HEADED BOY PECK’S SUNSHINE PECK’S COMPENDIUM OF FUN HOW PRIVATE GEORGE W. PECK PUT DOWN THE REBELLION If you enjoy this volume, please search this ebook store for "Wildside Press Megapack" to see more entries in the series, collecting great tales of adventure, mystery, science fiction, westerns, ghost stories, and much more. (Sort by publication date to see the most recent additions.)

Cracker Westerns are rip-roarin, action-packed, can't-put-'em-down tales set in the frontier days of Florida. They are full of adventure, real heroes, and vivid, authentic details that bring Florida's history to life. With enough shoot-outs and stampedes for any good Western story, Alligator Gold adds its unique Florida twist with an alligator in a deep blue spring. The Civil War is over and Caleb Hawkins is finally on his way home from a Northern prisoner-of-war camp. Hawk's been trying to get his mind off giving the rotten Snake Barber part of the secret to finding his family's hidden cache of gold when he was delirious with malaria at the camp. Now he's focused on getting back to the D-Wing, his Florida cattle ranch, and Travis, his only son. But his code of honor intervenes when he encounters a very pregnant Madelaine Wilkes along the trail. Hawk is duty-bound to help her, which comes to include taking her home with him. What he learns about the father of her baby tarnishes his clear attraction to her. Maddy Wilkes has her own code of honor, which gets in the way of her strong attraction to Hawk. And Snake Barber's singular lack of moral code gets in the way of any normal life on the D-Wing. See all of the books in this series

Zora Neale Hurston brings us Black America’s folklore as only she can, putting the oral history on the written page with grace and understanding. This new edition of Mules and Men features a new cover and a P.S. section which includes insights, interviews, and more. For the student of cultural history, Mules and Men is a treasury of Black America’s folklore as collected by Zora Neale Hurston, the storyteller and anthropologist who grew up hearing the songs and sermons, sayings and tall tales that have formed and oral history of the South since the time of slavery. Set intimately within the social context of Black life, the stories, “big old lies,” songs, voodoo customs, and superstitions recorded in these pages capture the imagination and bring back to life the humor and wisdom that is the unique heritage of Black Americans.