Old South

Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes listeners to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. From the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields, Twitty tells his family story.

The hospital has seen it all. New life coming into the world, welcomed with tears of joy. Lives that have run their course now leaving it, causing tears of sorrow and grief. The pain of physical and emotional trauma. Wounds that may never be healed. Dedicated medical professionals, doing their best to put broken people back together again. When the hospital closed its doors for the final time…when the last patient had moved on...when the lights went out and darkness fell…something remained. Join Richard Estep as he investigates the haunting of the infamous South Pittsburg Hospital.

Brought up amid the luxury of plantation life, Marianne Johnston never questions her sheltered life until, driven by her conscience, she joins the Underground Railroad. Soon Marianne is living a dangerous double life, helping slaves flee by night and acting the belle by day. And nothing is riskier than her attraction to wild, heartless young Southerner Yves Chamard - while being courted by his noble older brother.

In this deeply researched and well-written study, Donald P. McNeilly examines how moderately wealthy planters and sons of planters immigrated into the virtually empty lands of Arkansas, seeking their fortune and to establish themselves as the leaders of a new planter aristocracy west of the Mississippi River. These men, sometimes alone, sometimes with family, and usually with slaves, sought the best land possible, cleared it, planted their crops, and erected crude houses and other buildings.

From the onset of the war, Basil L. Gildersleeve, native of Charleston, South Carolina, a scholar, and professor of Greek at the University of Virginia left his students every Spring to return to the army until he was wounded during a skirmish in the Shenadoah Valley in 1864. Thirty years later he authored The Creed of the Old South, and A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War included in this audiobook.

Alabama endured warfare, slave trading, squatting, and speculating on its path to becoming America’s 22nd state, and Daniel S. Dupre brings its captivating frontier history to life in Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South. Dupre’s vivid narrative begins when Hernando de Soto first led hundreds of armed Europeans into the region during the fall of 1540. Although this early invasion was defeated, Spain, France, and England would each vie for control over the area’s natural resources.

In 1823, Tennessee historian John Haywood encapsulated a foundational sentiment among the white citizenry of Tennessee when he wrote of a "long continued course of aggression and sufferings" between whites and Native Americans. According to F. Evan Nooe, "aggression" and "sufferings" are broad categories that can be used to represent the framework of factors contributing to the coalescence of the white South.

For over eighty years, tourists have flocked to Natchez, Mississippi, seeking the "Old South," but what they encounter is invention: a pageant and rewrite of history first concocted during the Great Depression. Paul Hardin Kapp explores how meaning is assigned to place and how meaning evolves over time. In showing how and why the Natchez buildings of the "Old South" were first preserved, commercialized, and transformed into a brand, this volume makes a much-needed contribution to debates over the meaning attached to cultural patrimony.

They say history is written by the victors. In the case of the Civil War, that's largely true. But historian Samuel Mitcham brings the Southern point of view to life in Voices from the Confederacy. In it, you will learn about the heroic, the scoundrels, the clever, the vanquished, and the hungry. Rich or poor, black or white, Voices from the Confederacy shares hundreds of poignant and revealing moments during the war between the states.

Within this audiobook, the listener will meet a 19-year-old Texas Ranger figuratively dying to shoot his gun. He does get to shoot at people, but soon realizes what he thought was a bargain, exacted a steep price. Another tale is of an old-school cowman who shut down illicit traffic in stolen livestock that had existed for years on the Llano Estacado. He was tough, salty, and had no quarter for cow thieves, or sympathy for any mealy-mouthed politicians. He cleaned house, maybe not too nicely, but he was unarguably successful.

Coin Street Chronicles is a memoir that paints a picture of Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, as seen though the eyes of one for whom it was the backdrop of her childhood. The story is set in and around Coin Street, on the south bank of the River Thames. The area is now a cultural showcase known as The South Bank, but was then a gritty, Cockney-like corner of London.

John Snyder's memoir of growing up the the Depression era south evokes a time gone by. It is written with affection and non-judgmental understanding of people dealing with hard times, sometimes with cruelty, sometimes with violence, including an unsolved case of arson that changed the author's life. In three parts, it is about early childhood among North Carolina mountaineers, living for a time with two eccentric aunts, and growing up on a sharecropper farm before the author went away to the University of Chicago.

It was the Depression, and very few areas were as economically depressed as the rural South. The road in front of our house was dirt (mud when it rained), and with no electric lights and no plumbing, we lived a bare and stark existence.

These unforgettable characters are depicted so clearly and accurately as to leave the listener guessing which stories are fact and which are imagined. And whether the teachers in these tales are smudged with the dust of chalk or caked with the mud of the field, their lives and lessons are faithfully recorded here in straightforward prose that evokes a special time and place.

Remember the stories your grandfather used to tell you about way back when? Remember laughing out loud as the stories got deeper? If you like to LOL, then this really is a book for you. Here you'll find some observations on life in general and people in particular, as seen through a collection of newspaper columns, presenting skewed, offbeat, semiserious, and sometimes amusing views of the world.

David Roberts describes the culture of the Anasazi - the name means "enemy ancestors" in Navajo - who once inhabited the Colorado Plateau and whose modern descendants are the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Archaeologists, Roberts writes, have been puzzling over the Anasazi for more than a century, trying to determine the environmental and cultural stresses that caused their society to collapse 700 years ago. He guides us through controversies in the historical record, among them the haunting question of whether the Anasazi committed acts of cannibalism.

In this thrilling story of intellectual and archaeological discovery, David Roberts recounts his last 20 years of far-flung exploits in search of spectacular prehistoric ruins and rock art panels known to very few modern travelers. His adventures range across Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado, and illuminate the mysteries of the Ancestral Puebloans and their contemporary neighbors the Mogollon and Fremont, as well as of the more recent Navajo and Comanche.

Shoot Me, Jesus is a “novel in short stories”, what writer Jane Lawless called “erotic magic realism with a Southwestern spiciness.” Humor is an essential element of each story. The 11 linked tales move forward and backward in time in the manner of flashbacks and foreshadowing in a novel, though the plots are always character-driven. It is their realizations, insights, and inner changes that move the collection along.

Helen and Frank Schreider's dream was to drive the length of the Americas; from the town of Circle, Alaska (just outside the Arctic Circle), to the world's southernmost town, Ushuaia, in Tierra del Fuego. With their German shepherd Dinah along for the ride, they were the first people in history to have made this trip.