Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - State & Local - General

A long-ignored prehistoric moundbuilding people.

By the 14th century more than a dozen accretional burial mounds reaching heights of 12 to 15 feet marked the floodplains of interior Virginia. Today, none of these mounds built by the nearly forgotten Monacan Indians remain on the landscape, having been removed over the centuries by a variety of natural and cultural causes. This study uses what remains of the mounds excavated from the 1890s to the 1980s to gain a new understanding of the Monacans and to gauge their importance in the realm of the late prehistoric period in the...

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

A 17th-century trading post and Indian town in central Georgia reveal evidence of culture contact and change.

Ocmulgee Old Fields near Macon, Georgia, is the site of a Lower Creek village and associated English trading house dating from the late 17th and early 18th centuries. It was excavated in the early 1930s as part of a WPA project directed by A. R. Kelly, which focused primarily on the major Mississippian temple mounds of Macon Plateau. The specific data for the Old Fields was not analyzed until nearly 30 years...

A comprehensive study that rescues the Westo from obscurity.

The Westo Indians, who lived in the Savannah River region during the second half of the 17th century, are mentioned in few primary documents and only infrequently in secondary literature. There are no known Westo archaeological sites; no artifacts can be linked to the group; and no more than a single word of their language is known to us today. Yet, from the extant evidence, it is believed that the Westos, who migrated from around Lake Erie by 1656, had a profound effect on the development of the colonial...

The Shiloh Indian Mounds archaeological site, a National Historic Landmark, is a late prehistoric community within the boundaries of the Shiloh National Military Park on the banks of the Tennessee River, where one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War was fought in April 1862. Dating between AD 1000 and 1450, the archaeological site includes at least eight mounds and more than 100 houses. It is unique in that the land has never been plowed, so visitors can walk around the area and find the collapsed...

First major work to deal solely with the Plaquemine societies.

Plaquemine, Louisiana, about 10 miles south of Baton Rouge on the banks of the Mississippi River, seems an unassuming southern community for which to designate an entire culture. Archaeological research conducted in the region between 1938 and 1941, however, revealed distinctive cultural materials that provided the basis for distinguishing a unique cultural manifestation in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Plaquemine was first cited in the archaeological literature by James Ford and Gordon Willey in their 1941...

In 1733, General James Edward Oglethorpe officially established the colony of Georgia, and within three years had fortified the coast southward toward St. Augustine. Although this region, originally known as the provinces of Guale and Mocama, had previously been under Spanish control for more than a century, territorial fighting had emptied the region of Spanish missionaries, soldiers, and their Indian allies. Spanish officials maintained that the long history of Spanish authority over the territory guaranteed Spain the right to defy and repel the English intruders. By 1739, with...

At its height the Moundville ceremonial center was a densely occupied town of approximately 1,000 residents, with at least 29 earthen mounds surrounding a central plaza. Today, Moundville is not only one the largest and best-preserved Mississippian sites in the United States, but also one of the most intensively studied. This volume brings together nine Moundville specialists who trace the site's evolution and eventual decline.

This widely hailed study examines the reasons behind the quick demise of Radical Reconstruction in Georgia. Edmund L. Drago shows that a primary factor was, ironically, the extraordinary fairness on the part of the state's black leaders in dealing with their former masters.

Lacking the sizable and experienced antebellum free-black class that existed in such states as South Carolina and Louisiana, Georgia's former slaves turned to their ministers for political leadership. Otherworldly and fatalistic, the ministers preached a message in which all people, even slaveholders, were deserving...

A wide-ranging blend of autobiography and history, "The South and the Southerner" is one prominent newspaperman's statement on his region, its heritage, its future, and his own place within it. Ralph McGill (1898-1969), the longtime editor and later publisher of the "Atlanta Constitution," was one of a handful of progressive voices heard in southern journalism during the civil rights era. From the podium of his front-page columns, he delivered stinging criticisms of ingrained southern bigotry and the forces marshaled against change; yet he retained throughout his career--and his writing--a...