Product Code: P511
ISBN: 9780881465532
Price: $16.00
In spring 1962, a young black girl named Etta Hemsley is killed at a civil rights demonstration on a university campus in Atlanta. The next day, the home of Jovita Curry, a black woman in Overton, Georgia, is burned.
Both events are etched into the memory of Cole Bishop and eerily play out the predictions of a former classmate named Marie Fitzpatrick. Both Cole and Marie are high school seniors when they first meet in fall 1954. Cole, like his classmates, is a native-born Southerner influenced by the traditions of segregation as a way of life. Marie is a recent transplant from Washington, DC, a brilliant and assertive nonconformist with bold predictions about a new world that is about to be ushered in by the force of desegregation. Included in her prophecy is a warning for Cole that will cause him to leave the South to live and teach in Vermont. The odd friendship between the two of them continues after high school in a series of tender and revealing letters.
THE BOOK OF MARIE is the story of a generation—whites and blacks—who ignited the war of change. Yet, it is also as much about the power of place— the finding of home—as it is about the history of events.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P526
ISBN: 9780881465655
Price: $18.00
Novelist Raymond L. Atkins offers a lighthearted change of pace in this collection of humorous essays. He explores a diverse range of topics as seen from the porch of his home on the southern bank of the mighty Etowah River in northern Georgia.
From this lofty height he holds forth on holidays, parenthood, cars, home ownership, aging, travel, medicine, technology, ballet, movies, marriage, Shakespeare, dogs, cats, music, swimming pools, vintage television, nicknames, amusement parks, restaurants, school projects, language, computers, hair, bad jobs, William Faulkner, weddings, advertising, Broadway plays, yard work, hospitals, cooking, Elvis Presley, moving, money, art, college, dinner theater, and a variety of other subjects.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H912
ISBN: 9780881465624
Price: $35.00
John Fletcher Hanson was a rare combination of industrialist, journalist, and orator who spent most of his life in Macon, Georgia, rising from the ashes of the Civil War to become the leading voice of the New South. Many have assigned that role to Henry Grady, but while Grady was talking about a New South, Hanson was building one, by creating jobs, promoting Southern industrialization, and advancing educational opportunities.
Georgia’s post–Civil War history cannot be fully understood without examining the life of J. F. Hanson, its most important New South advocate and industrialist. In bringing this remarkable man and his accomplishments to light for the first time, CRACKING THE SOLID SOUTH paints an absorbing picture of the economic, political, and social struggles that confronted Georgia after the Civil War and of the many ways one man shaped the course of the state’s history.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P527
ISBN: 9780881465679
Price: $20.00
In her second book of essays, Kathy Bradley continues her examination of the natural world as a prism through which to understand the human experience. With her family farm in the coastal plains of South Georgia serving as the anchor, Bradley uses her observations of animal life, agriculture, and the seasons to create what others have called parables, but what she calls “a map key or decoder ring” for some of the dilemmas of twenty-first-century life.
The chronological stories, four years’ worth of tales that began life as newspaper columns, are inhabited by wild and unpredictable animals, civilized and unpredictable people, moons and cornfields, tides and floods and droughts—each described in sensory detail, each a metaphor rich in meaning. Bradley invites readers along on her wanderings in order that they might find their own meaning in the recounting of commonplace events and the lives of ordinary people.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P529
ISBN: 9780881465723
Price: $18.00
Bill Merritt grew up in Atlanta, Georgia during the turbulent years between the end of World War II and the Vietnam War. A joyously unreconstructed Southerner, he looks on with amazement as Atlanta changes from a sleepy Southern town into the City Too Busy to Hate. This was the time of Martin Luther King and Ivan Allen, but also the time of Lester Maddox, the Temple Bombing, great moral certainties, Elvis, Klan rallies, the Cuban Missile Crisis, a corrupt political system keeping some of America’s finest statesmen in office (some since the Teddy Roosevelt administration), and a man named Armstrong walking on the moon.
Merritt’s family is eccentric and colorful, occasionally courageous, often self-centered. This is the story of the way the Civil Rights Revolution looked to Southerners: to decent people trying to honor their heritage while realizing the time had come to let go of parts of that heritage, and how difficult that letting go was made by the outsiders who most wanted change. This is the story the way Southerners remember it—and tell each other.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H916
ISBN: 9780881465747
Price: $29.00
The story of the first airplane flight in Georgia has not been told correctly in more than one hundred years. The year given for this flight, 1907, is not correct, the plane identified as the first to fly never got off the ground, and Ben T. Epps, Sr. is incorrectly credited, solely, with achieving this feat. TO LASSO THE CLOUDS sets the historical record straight and brings to light the complete, incredible story of the two young men from Athens, Georgia who achieved their dream of flight. Epps and Zumpt A. Huff were described by one newspaper after that first flight as a “second pair of Wright brothers.”
Most surprising of all, this book reveals their flight was the first flight of a monoplane in the United States—a record of which even they were not aware.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P531
ISBN: 9780881465754
Price: $17.00
SIDETRACKED is a series of stories which chronicle the zigzag adventures of two authors searching for a better understanding of their state. Milam Propst and Jaclyn White are good friends who enjoy the creative process, love to chat, dine, and explore out-of-the-way places.
Their initial plan was to trace Sherman’s March to the Sea and visit some of Georgia’s 3,000 plus historic markers along the way. While the journey would not necessarily spotlight the Civil War, Sherman’s path would provide them with a specific route.
There was one slight disadvantage to the plan. Neither of the writers have any sense of direction. Because of this, they got sidetracked often, made countless U-turns, and frequently found fascinating stories by accident.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H920
ISBN: 9780881465860
Price: $35.00
In 1975, Jimmy Carter announced he would run for President. Under the new Federal Election Laws only $21.8 million would be provided for the General Election Campaign. A trivial amount compared to future campaigns.
An army of loyal supporters, friends, neighbors, and elected officials, known as the Peanut Brigade, joined the campaign. They traveled across the country, joining Jimmy and Rosalynn, knocking on doors, standing at factory gates, walking streets, asking voters to vote for Jimmy Carter for President. In 1976, Carter was elected the 39th President of the United States and served one term.
While the basics of his story are well known, they have never been told from the perspective of a “soldier” in the Peanut Brigade. Dorothy “Dot” Padgett, with an earthy, honest, and Southern voice, tells the story as if new to all of us. Humor and insight abound in this direct telling of how a peanut farmer from Georgia became President and leader of the United States. The secret is in his character, his morality, and in his being truly human.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H921
ISBN: 9780881465877
Price: $29.00
ANDREW YOUNG AND THE MAKING OF MODERN ATLANTA tells the story of the decisions that shaped Atlanta’s growth from a small, provincial Deep South city to an international metropolis impacting and influencing global affairs. When Mayor William Hartsfield coined the term “City too Busy to Hate” in the 1950s, who would have imagined that within fifty years Atlanta would have the world’s busiest airport, rank as the eighth largest metropolitan area in the United States or, that this once racially-segregated city would host the Centennial Olympic Games and play host to the world in 1996?
Atlanta provides a unique case study for an alternative vision of the relationships among leaders in corporations, government, and communities. The book tracks the development of the Atlanta Way, a strategy for economic development that features cross-racial cooperation—from the foundation in Reconstruction era Atlanta to the Olympic Games.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P537
ISBN: 9780881465938
Price: $19.00
What is the purpose of public education? Writing from his experience as a father, small business owner, and policymaker, Georgia’s Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle presents a comprehensive vision to transform the way that public schools educate our students. Beginning with an idea which unites all Americans—that public education establishes the foundational promise of opportunity for all individuals by empowering us with the ability to learn, develop, and obtain anything we are willing to work for—Cagle makes the case for reforming our schools and rethinking the premise behind how we set and measure goals for student achievement. This is truly the challenge of a generation.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P538
ISBN: 9780881465945
Price: $30.00
Fair-minded and comprehensive, C. Mildred Thompson’s RECONSTRUCTION IN GEORGIA (1915) has long been considered among the best of the state studies to emerge from Columbia University’s Dunning School. This coterie of graduate students in Professor William A. Dunning’s famed Reconstruction seminar produced studies of Reconstruction in their native states. Widely admired and appreciatively reviewed in their time, they were increasingly pilloried by revisionist scholars after mid-century.
This new edition reintroduces Thompson’s classic to new readers as the Reconstruction Sesquicentennial gets underway. It corrects the major flaw of the original by including a full index, and also offers a detailed biographical sketch of the author.
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By author: Evan Kutzler Photographs by: Jill Stuckey
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H926
ISBN: 9780881466034
Price: $45.00
Ossabaw Island has meant many things to many people. For its earliest residents, Ossabaw was a bountiful place to live and gather yaupon holly. For relative latecomers it has been a source of live oak lumber, a series of brutal slave plantations, a winter retreat for northern industrialists, a cattle ranch, an artists’ retreat, and Georgia’s first Heritage Preserve. Despite the long history of a give-and-take relationship between humans and nature, Ossabaw now exudes a strong sense of untamed wildness that is part of its appeal to artists, scientists, and nature lovers alike.
This book takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining photography and public history to delve into the island’s layered human and natural past and present.
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