A true classic of American humor.
Joseph Glover Baldwin left his native Virginia as a young man in 1836 for the booming frontier of the Old Southwest, settling first in DeKalb, Mississippi, and then in 1839 in Gainesville and later Livingston, Sumter County, Alabama. Blessed with a lively imagination and a good library, Baldwin prospered as a local officeholder and attorney and produced a series of sketches for the "Southern Literary Messenger." These essays were gathered with others into this collection of 26 and published as a book in New York by D. Appleton and Company in 1853.
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Original copies of the first, 1817, edition of this work are so rare that even the Library of Congress does not have an undamaged copy. Consequently scholars and students of Jackson have had to rely on later, incomplete or bowdlerized editions. It is therefore all the more valuable to have Owsley s critical restoration of the original edition, complete with its useful maps.The work is a straightforward history of Jackson s military career, begun by John Reid, Jackson s military aide throughout the War of 1812 and the ensuing Creek War. Reid wrote the first four chapters, and after his death...

When these words were written everybody "had "read or heard of Simon Suggs, the shifty man whose antics had been recorded in many a gusty tale of Alabama frontier life which had drawn laughter and applause from newspaper readers throughout the United States. And everybody, at least in Alabama in the 1850s, knew something about his creator, Johnson Jones Hooper. . . . The immortal Suggs, his alter ego, has kept his name alive and renewed its luster, in a biography that deserves almost unqualified praise. Dr. Hoole s "Alias Simon Suggs "is a noteworthy achievement. . . . A milestone in...

This delightful divertissement is a lampoon of dueling culture set in southeastern Alabama, penned by a cousin of the better known humorist Johnson Jones Hooper. Interestingly George W. Hooper did not identify himself as the author, perhaps for fear that some enterprising duelist would decide he had been personally lampooned and take umbrage.The main character is a figure familiar in outline to readers of John Gorman Barr, J. J. Hooper, Joseph G. Baldwin, and other practitioners of what is known as the humor of the Old Southwest. This tetchy blowhard is able to find a personal slight in every...

In the middle of WWII, John Temple Graves, a syndicated columnist for the Birmingham Age-Herald, analyzed the South's eager support for England during the war's early days. He explored the South's military traditions, its poverty, and its allegiance to honor and duty.

The Fighting South reveals as much about Graves as his region, and he apprears as a thoughtful yet loyal Southerner in the mold of Jonathan Daniels, Clarence Cason, Ralph McGill, and Wilbur Cash.

Delpar provides a history of Colombia s liberal party covering a period in which it was first the dominant party (1863-1885) and then the party of opposition (1886-1899). Delpar s study is well written and firmly grounded in extensive research and] will occupy a prominent position in the sparse historiography of the late 19th century Colombia. Hispanic American Historical Review (HAHR) Delpar has given us a book that is disarmingly unpretentious yet offers considerably more than the title implies. As a discussion of the Liberal Party during the latter part of the 19th century, it is more...