Historian G. Ward Hubbs first encountered the Confederate soldiers known as the Greensboro Guards through their Civil War diaries and letters. Later he discovered that the Guards had formed some forty years before the war, soon after the founding of the Alabama town that was their namesake. "Guarding Greensboro" examines how the yearning for community played itself out across decades of peace and war, prosperity and want.

Greensboro sprang up as a wide-open frontier town in Alabama's Black Belt, an exceptionally fertile part of the Deep South where people who dreamed of making it rich as...

An unprecedented contribution to the field of Civil War history, "Voices from Company D" collects writings from the diaries of eight members of the Greensboro Guards, Fifth Alabama Infantry Regiment. Woven into a single chronological narrative, these writings provide a unique perspective not only on many of the war's battles and campaigns but also on aspects of life and culture in the nineteenth-century South, including friendship and kinship, duty and honor, and commitment and sacrifice.

As part of the Army of Northern Virginia, the Guards marched under Stonewall Jackson and Jubal Early...

The rollicking tales of Old Southwestern humor were a distinctive contribution to American folk culture provided by the frontiersmen of the South and Southwest, a tradition brought to its highest form in the work of Mark Twain.Among the precursors of Twain was John Gorman Barr of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.Like Twain, Barr grew up in a river town, worked in a printing office, and traveled widely; and again like Twain, Barr drew upon the people and places of his home region as the primary sources for his tales.
In addition to the pure entertainment Barr s stories provide, they also furnish a...