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An important story of one man's life, lived with courage and principle.

During the decades of Bourbon ascendancy after 1874, Alabama institutions like those in other southern states were dominated by whites. Former slave and sharecropper Jack Turner refused to accept a society so structured. Highly intelligent, physically imposing, and an orator of persuasive talents, Turner was fearless before whites and emerged as a leader of his race. He helped to forge a political alliance between blacks and whites that defeated and humiliated the Bourbons in Choctaw County, the heart...

Alabama's agrarian protest began in the decades after the Civil War when individual farmers found themselves in an economic regression, unable to understand or partake in the forces behind the New South prosperity enjoyed by a few professional men, merchants, industrialists, and large planters. In reaction to this situation, yeomen farmers began to venture into the economic and business realm through the formation of such organizations as the Farmers' Alliance, the Agricultural Wheel, and the Grange.

Initially apolitical, these groups were the germ of the turbulent agrarian upheaval...

In the late 1870s, Jefferson County, Alabama, and the town of Elyton (near the future Birmingham) became the focus of a remarkable industrial and mining revolution. Together with the surrounding counties, the area was penetrated by railroads. Surprisingly large deposits of bituminous coal, limestone, and iron ore--the exact ingredients for the manufacture of iron and, later, steel--began to be exploited. Now, with transportation, modern extractive techniques, and capital, the region's geological riches began yielding enormous profits.

Once the home of aboriginal inhabitants, Alabama was claimed and occupied by European nations, later to become a permanent part of the United States. A cotton and slave state for more than half of the 19th century, Alabama declared its independence and joined another nation, the Confederate States of America, for its more than four-year history. The state assumed an uneasy and uncertain place in the 19th century's last 35 years. Its role in the 20th century has been tumultuous but painfully predictable. This comprehensive history, written in the last decade of that century, presents,...