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Article Abstracts and Supplements
The Dixie Art Colony
By Lynn Barstis Williams
The ruins of a lone cabin at Lake Jordan are all that is left to commemorate the Dixie Art Colony. This bohemian retreat, founded by local artist J. Kelly Fitzpatrick, helped to instruct and mold many well-known southern artists of the 1930s and 40s. Lynn Barstis Williams chronicles the many struggles involved in creating the atmosphere and mission of the Dixie Art Colony, from its inception to its eventual home near Wetumpka. Williams presents photographs from the colony as well as interviews with colony participants and their letters to fully detail the daily workings and familial atmosphere of this summer camp for aspiring artists. Glimpses into the lives and accomplishments of some of the colony’s most successful participants, such as Warree LeBron, Mildred Wolfe, and Arthur Stewart, accompany this history of the colony.
The World of Kelly Fitzpatrick
By Margaret Lynne Ausfeld and Christine C. Neal
One of the South’s most celebrated artists of the 1930s and 40s, J. Kelly Fitzpatrick overcame many personal trials before immersing himself in a world of art and creative growth. The trauma of a gruesome battle in WWI led him to forsake a privileged material life for a spiritual one dedicated to art. Margaret Lynne Ausfeld and Christine C. Neal recount how Fitzpatrick managed to channel his love for art into a public service by taking a large role in creating institutions like the Alabama Art League and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.
Man and Mission: E. B. Gaston and the Fairhope Single Tax Colony
By Paul M. Gaston
In the late nineteenth century, E. B. Gaston took his desire for social and political reform to the Gulf Coast of Alabama and founded the single tax community of Fairhope. Only one of many attempts to create a utopian secular society by social reformists at the turn of the century, Fairhope, having lasted over one hundred years, is the most successful of these attempts. Paul Gaston tells how the town’s founder, a man from Des Moines, Iowa, orchestrated and managed this community-owned town and succeeded where so many others had failed. Fairhope has faced many social and ethical problems, from deciding to segregate the colony at its beginning, through the turbulence of the Civil Rights movement, to the lack of community-owned land today that threatens the town’s ability to expand while maintaining its original ideals. Fairhope has evolved in a very peculiar way, from a utopian society that advocated social reform, to a typically conservative southern town.
General Cleburne and the Emancipation of Slaves
By Mark M. Hull
Determined to put an end to the Civil War, Irish-born Patrick Ronayne Cleburne put forth a proposal that many regarded as treasonous: He proposed that slaves be trained and armed to fight for the South with the promise of emancipation of every slave in the South at the conclusion of the war. Mark Hull explores how this Irish immigrant worked his way up from poor soldier to successful lawyer and renowned hero of the Army of Tennessee. After years of great leadership and heroic assaults, the lack of manpower and excessive loss of life on the Confederate side led Cleburne to draft a proposal that may have changed the outcome of the war. Cleburne’s suggestions were first ridiculed, and then plagiarized, by another Confederate leader to try and mask his own strategic inefficiency. Cleburne’s daring proposal had negative, and eventually fatal, effects on his military career and personal life.
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