"I had a native ambition to rise from obscurity and make myself useful in the world, to shine and be distinguished." So said the Hon. Neil S. Brown, one of the 259 prominent 19th-century Tennesseans profiled in this extraordinary book. It is this kind of unique first-hand biographical information that makes this work unequaled in the canon of Tennessee genealogical literature. Not only did compiler William S. Speer have the unparalleled opportunity to interview a number of the featured Tennesseans himself, he also was able to garner--and include in this book--thousands and thousands of names of their family members, friends, and colleagues. The biographical sketches include numerous details about the lives of the subjects and their families. In addition, the compiler offers insight into the personal, professional, and sometimes even physical characteristics that made each of these men a success.

The history behind one of the oldest all-girls prep schools in the South. During the final days of the Civil War, Dr. William Ward and his wife, Eliza Ward, envisioned a school for young women in Nashville that would evolve into one of the nation’s most prestigious institutions. As the New South dawned, Ward Seminary opened its doors in September 1865. Merging with Belmont College for Young Women in 1913, Ward-Belmont operated as a college preparatory school, music conservatory, and junior college. In 1951, the high school division moved farther west, reopening as the Harpeth Hall School after Ward-Belmont’s sudden closure. Ward Seminary, Belmont College, Ward-Belmont, and Harpeth Hall are simply separate chapters of one continuous story—providing a lens through which to understand the evolution of all-girls education in the United States.

The little-known story of remarkable First Lady Sarah Polk—a brilliant master of the art of high politics and a crucial but unrecognized figure in the history of American feminism. While the Women’s Rights convention was taking place at Seneca Falls in 1848, First Lady Sarah Childress Polk was wielding influence unprecedented for a woman in Washington, D.C. Yet, while history remembers the women of the convention, it has all but forgotten Sarah Polk. Now, in her riveting biography, Amy S. Greenberg brings Sarah’s story into vivid focus. We see Sarah as the daughter of a frontiersman who raised her to discuss politics and business with men; we see the savvy and charm she brandished in order to help her brilliant but unlikeable husband, James K. Polk, ascend to the White House. We watch as she exercises truly extraordinary power as First Lady: quietly manipulating elected officials, shaping foreign policy, and directing a campaign in support of America’s expansionist war against Mexico. And we meet many of the enslaved men and women whose difficult labor made Sarah’s political success possible. Sarah Polk’s life spanned nearly the entirety of the nineteenth-century. But her own legacy, which profoundly transformed the South, continues to endure. Comprehensive, nuanced, and brimming with invaluable insight, Lady First is a revelation of our twelfth First Lady’s complex but essential part in American feminism.

"Sarah Kennedy (1823-1899) was the wife of a wealthy slaveowner, D.N. Kennedy, at the outbreak of the Civil War. D.N. Kennedy was a major supporter of secession in Tennessee who was rewarded for his devotion to the new nation with a job (though vaguely defined) in the Confederate Treasury Department. He shipped off for Mississippi, leaving Sarah Kennedy to care for six young children (including a son, 'Newty,' with special needs) and watch over numerous slaves on a large plantation in Clarksville. She was burdened by ill health (both her own and her children), slaves that, one by one, disappear under federal occupation, and by the lack of consistent contact with her beloved husband owing to the Confederate mail system--which comes under surprising scrutiny here. Her letters are mostly about personal matters, but they offer significant insight into slavery and social relations in Clarksville under occupation"

"John T. Wilder was an entrepreneur, Civil War general, and business leader who would become influential in the development of post-Civil War Chattanooga. A northern transplant who made his early fortune in the iron industry, Wilder would gain notoriety in the Western Theater through his victories at the battles of Chattanooga, Chickamauga, and throughout the Tullahoma and Atlanta Campaigns while leading the famous "Lightning Brigade." After the Civil War, he relocated to Chattanooga and began the Roane Iron Company and fostered southern ironworks throughout the southeast. He was elected mayor of Chattanooga but would fail to be elected to Congress as its representative. Finally, he was instrumental in the establishment of national military parks in Chattanooga and Chickamauga. Nicely's biography captures the life of a man important to the overall development of Chattanooga and East Tennessee and argues that Wilder was influential in bringing both northern and immigrant populations to the area"--

Up from the Mudsills of Hell analyzes agrarian activism in Tennessee from the 1870s to 1915 within the context of farmers’ lives, community institutions, and familial and communal networks. Locating the origins of the agrarian movements in the state’s late antebellum and post-Civil War farm economy, Connie Lester traces the development of rural reform from the cooperative efforts of the Grange, the Agricultural Wheel, and the Farmers’ Alliance through the insurgency of the People’s Party and the emerging rural bureaucracy of the Cooperative Extension Service and the Tennessee Department of Agriculture. Lester ties together a rich and often contradictory history of cooperativism, prohibition, disfranchisement, labor conflicts, and third-party politics to show that Tennessee agrarianism was more complex and threatening to the established political and economic order than previously recognized. As farmers reached across gender, racial, and political boundaries to create a mass movement, they shifted the ground under the monoliths of southern life. Once the Democratic Party had destroyed the insurgency, farmers responded in both traditional and progressive ways. Some turned inward, focusing on a localism that promoted--sometimes through violence--rigid adherence to established social boundaries. Others, however, organized into the Farmers’ Union, whose membership infiltrated the Tennessee Department of Agriculture and the Cooperative Extension Service. Acting through these bureaucracies, Tennessee agrarian leaders exerted an important influence over the development of agricultural legislation for the twentieth century. Up from the Mudsills of Hell not only provides an important reassessment of agrarian reform and radicalism in Tennessee, but also links this Upper South state into the broader sweep of southern and American farm movements emerging in the late nineteenth century.