Debunking the Yule Log Myth

Debunking the Yule Log Myth
Author: Robert E. May
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2024-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN:

According to an oft repeated legend, during Christmas before the Civil War, all enslaved people in the American South enjoyed lengthy vacations of a week or more depending on how long an oversized “Yule log” burned in their master’s fireplace. As long as the log held out, slaves escaped heavy labor and their masters’ whips and enjoyed a rare freedom of movement to go and do what they wished as well as gorge themselves on food and drink they never got the rest of the year. No wonder they soaked those logs in swamps to make them burn even longer. But is it true? In this book historian Robert May takes readers on a detective caper as he investigates a story that reaches back to colonial America and continues today. May finds no evidence of the Yule log tradition in the historical record, instead showing that it originated with pro-Confederate Lost Cause propagandists attempting to present the South’s prewar system of human bondage in as soft tones as possible. Tales about good-natured masters and unresentful slaves jovially sharing Christmases played to this impulse beautifully. Debunking the Yule Log Myth does more than correct the historical record. It serves as a highly instructive case study in the process of historical mythmaking. This captivating tale will appeal to all readers interested in African American history and the long struggle to support white supremacy by creating a mythical antebellum American South.

Yule and Christmas

Yule and Christmas
Author: Alexander Tille
Publisher:
Total Pages: 238
Release: 1899
Genre: Calendar, Germanic
ISBN:

Christmas: Tradition, Truth and Total Baubles

Christmas: Tradition, Truth and Total Baubles
Author: Nick Page
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2020-10-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1529334098

Why is Christmas the way it is? How did we get from the birth of Jesus to everyone pushing their credit card and their belts to their maximum extent? Starting with the events surrounding Jesus' birth, this book takes us through centuries of commemoration, celebration and over-consumption. Along the way we'll find out why we eat turkey, how an obscure Turkish saint turned into a man flying a sleigh, and why that tree in your house should really contain an apple and a snake. Combining in-depth historical research, cheerfully irreverent humour and cutting-edge guesswork, Nick Page explores what this festival really means, and how we can get back to something real and true beneath all that wrapping.

The Alabama Knights of Pythias of North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia

The Alabama Knights of Pythias of North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia
Author: Marilyn T. Peebles
Publisher: University Press of America
Total Pages: 71
Release: 2012-08-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0761858156

The Knights of Pythias fraternal organization was founded in 1865 by an Act of Congress. When African American men were denied membership, they created their own organization in Vicksburg, MS, in 1880. Its founder, Thomas Stringer, believed that fraternal organizations could provide the black community with business networks, economic safety nets, and political experience at a time when Jim Crow laws were being constructed all around them. In Birmingham, Alabama, these Pythians became the cornerstone of an African American business community that included the first black-owned and operated bank in the state. They provided burial, life, and disability insurance for members and became a source of civic pride and racial solidarity. When their right to exist was challenged, they took the case to the Supreme Court in 1912 and won. This strategy would be used decades later in Brown v. Board of Education.

The Wesleys and the Anglican Mission to Georgia, 1735–1738

The Wesleys and the Anglican Mission to Georgia, 1735–1738
Author: John Thomas Scott
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2020-10-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1611463114

The Wesleys and the Anglican Mission to Georgia, 1735-1738 considers the fascinating early history of a small group of men commissioned by trustees in England to spread Protestantism both to new settlers and indigenous people living in Georgia. Four minister-missionaries arrived in 1736, but after only two years these men detached themselves from the colonial enterprise, and the Mission effectively ended in 1738. Tracing the rise and fall of this endeavor, Scott’s study focuses on key figures in the history of the Mission including the layman, Charles Delamotte, and the ministers, John and Charles Wesley, Benjamin Ingham, and George Whitefield. In Scott’s innovative historical approach, neglected archival sources generate a detailed narrative account that reveals how these men’s personal experiences and personal networks had a significant impact on the inner-workings and trajectory of the Mission. The original group of missionaries who traveled to Georgia was composed of men already bound together by family relations, friendships, and shared lines of mentorship. Once in the colony, the missionaries’ prospects altered as they developed close ties with other missionaries (including a group of Moravians) and other settlers (John Wesley returned to England after his romantic relationship with Sophy Hopkey soured). Structures of imperialism, class, and race underlying colonial ideology informed the Anglican Mission in the era of trustee Georgia. The Wesleys and the Anglican Mission to Georgia enriches this historical picture by illuminating how a different set of intricacies, rooted in personal dynamics, was also integral to the events of this period. In Scott’s study, the history of the expansive eighteenth-century Atlantic world emerges as a riveting account of life unfolding on a local and individual level.

Mixed-Race Identity in the American South

Mixed-Race Identity in the American South
Author: Julia Sattler
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2021-05-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 179362707X

This interdisciplinary investigation argues that since the 1990s, discourses about mixed-race heritage in the United States have taken the shape of a veritable literary genre, here termed “memoir of the search.” The study uses four different texts to explore this non-fictional genre, including Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family and Shirlee Taylor Haizlip's The Sweeter the Juice. All feature a protagonist using methods from archival investigation to DNA-testing to explore an intergenerational family secret; photographs and family trees; and the trip to the American South, which is identified as the site of the secret’s origin and of the family’s past. As a genre, these texts negotiate the memory of slavery and segregation in the present. In taking up central narratives of Americanness, such as the American Dream and the Immigrant story, as well as discourses generating the American family, the texts help inscribe themselves and the mixed-race heritage they address into the American mainstream. In its outlook, this book highlights the importance of the memoirs’ negotiations of the past when finding ways to remember after the last witnesses have passed away. and contributes to the discussion over political justice and reparations for slavery.

Cotton and Race in the Making of America

Cotton and Race in the Making of America
Author: Gene Dattel
Publisher: Government Institutes
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2009-09-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1442210192

Since the earliest days of colonial America, the relationship between cotton and the African-American experience has been central to the history of the republic. America's most serious social tragedy, slavery and its legacy, spread only where cotton could be grown. Both before and after the Civil War, blacks were assigned to the cotton fields while a pervasive racial animosity and fear of a black migratory invasion caused white Northerners to contain blacks in the South. Gene Dattel's pioneering study explores the historical roots of these most central social issues. In telling detail Mr. Dattel shows why the vastly underappreciated story of cotton is a key to understanding America's rise to economic power. When cotton production exploded to satiate the nineteenth-century textile industry's enormous appetite, it became the first truly complex global business and thereby a major driving force in U.S. territorial expansion and sectional economic integration. It propelled New York City to commercial preeminence and fostered independent trade between Europe and the United States, providing export capital for the new nation to gain its financial "sea legs" in the world economy. Without slave-produced cotton, the South could never have initiated the Civil War, America's bloodiest conflict at home. Mr. Dattel's skillful historical analysis identifies the commercial forces that cotton unleashed and the pervasive nature of racial antipathy it produced. This is a story that has never been told in quite the same way before, related here with the authority of a historian with a profound knowledge of the history of international finance. With 23 black-and-white illustrations.

Freedom Libraries

Freedom Libraries
Author: Mike Selby
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1538115549

Freedom Libraries: The Untold Story of Libraries for African-Americans in the South. As the Civil Rights Movement exploded across the United States, the media of the time was able to show the rest of the world images of horrific racial violence. And while some of the bravest people of the 20th century risked their lives for the right to simply order a cheeseburger, ride a bus, or use a clean water fountain, there was another virtually unheard of struggle—this one for the right to read. Although illegal, racial segregation was strictly enforced in a number of American states, and public libraries were not immune. Numerous libraries were desegregated on paper only: there would be no cards given to African-Americans, no books for them read, and no furniture for them to use. It was these exact conditions that helped create Freedom Libraries. Over eighty of these parallel libraries appeared in the Deep South, staffed by civil rights voter registration workers. While the grassroots nature of the libraries meant they varied in size and quality, all of them created the first encounter many African-Americans had with a library. Terror, bombings, and eventually murder would be visited on the Freedom Libraries—with people giving up their lives so others could read a library book. This book delves into how these libraries were the heart of the Civil Rights Movement, and the remarkable courage of the people who used them. They would forever change libraries and librarianship, even as they helped the greater movement change the society these libraries belonged to. Photographs of the libraries bring this little-known part of American history to life.

Racial Cleansing in Arkansas, 1883–1924

Racial Cleansing in Arkansas, 1883–1924
Author: Guy Lancaster
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2014-07-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0739195484

Even before the end of Reconstruction in Arkansas, the state already possessed a long-standing reputation for violence, including lynchings, duels, and feuds. However, the years following Reconstruction witnessed the creation of new forms of mob violence. All across the state, gangs of whites sought to drive African Americans from their homes, their jobs, and their positions of authority, creating communities shamelessly advertised as “100% white.” This happened not only in the highland regions, the Ozarks and the Ouachitas, where the expulsion of African Americans created so-called “sundown towns,” but it also occurred in the low-lying Delta lands of eastern Arkansas, where cotton was king and where masked mobs of landless “whitecappers” and “nightriders” regularly dealt terror and murder to black sharecroppers. Racial Cleansing in Arkansas, 1883–1924: Politics, Land, Labor, and Criminality by Guy Lancaster is the first book to examine the phenomenon of racial cleansing within the context of one particular state, illustrating how violence relates to geography and economic development. Lancaster analyzes the wholesale expulsion of African Americans and the emergence of “sundown towns” together with a survey of more limited deportations, including those with blatant political goals as well as vigilante violence. The book has broader implications not only for the study of Southern and American history but also for a deeper understanding of ethnic and racial conflict, local politics, and labor history