Issue 1, Summer 1986

Issue 1, Summer 1986

Detail from the Lanford album quilt. [Photo provided by the Birmingham Museum Art and Robert and Helen Cargo]


Features

Stitches in Time: The Lanford Album Quilt

By Robert Cargo and G. Ward Hubbs

An old quilt invites questions: When was it made? Why, and by whom? One answers such questions hesitantly, if at all, for quilts, like most personal items  whose histories trail along with them from one generation to the next, are difficult to document. In rare instances, however, one comes upon a quilt whose story is stitched into the fabric itself, left there by the artisans years earlier for anyone interested enough to look. Such is the case with the Lanford quilt, and the story it tells offers a rare glimpse into the life of one small community in the Alabama Black Belt three years before the Civil War began.


The Sporting Life

By Fred Hobson

Southerners, taken as a whole, seem to take sports more seriously than people in other parts of America. Stock car racing, football, baseball and basketball bulk large in the South as important entertainments. These sports provide a lens through which to view the changing nature of Southern society as it moved from agrarian to industrialized. Fred Hobson argues that high school and college sports, in particular, provide the South with an organic, indigenous, almost religious experience. It is an experience that is, he argues, uniquely Southern.


Feuds, Factions, and Reform: Politics in Early Birmingham

By Leah Rawls Atkins

Since the birth of Birmingham in a cornfield after the Civil War, the politicos who controlled city government have been the subject of local and sometimes national controversies.  Through the 115 years of Birmingham’s history to 1986, its government has been surrounded by charges of corruption, of demagogy, of political payoffs. The conflicts have been colorful and fierce. In this article, Leah Rawls Atkins traces the history of Birmingham politics from the creation of the city in the Reconstruction South until the eve of the Civil Rights movement. 


The Conquests of Europe: The Remarkable Career of James Reese Europe

By Reid Badger

James Reese Europe was an African American arranger, orchestrator, conductor, and songwriter–a star of the early twentieth century. He took jazz from the saloons and made it respectable; New York’s elite learned to stumble through the tango and the maxixe to the music of Europe’s Society Orchestra. During World War I, Europe led a brass band for the army, and when the war ended huge crows lined Fifth Avenue in New York to watch Europe’s regiment–dubbed the “Hellfighters”–return. Europe’s reputation has suffered in part because he was a transitional figure, difficult for historians to place. He had, however, a pioneering role as the initiator of a number of important directions in American and Afro-American musical history.

Back to top arrow