Issue 7, Winter 1988
On the cover: Bedraggled members of Rommel’s Afrika Korps arrive in Aliceville, Alabama, c. 1943, for detention in a prisoner-of-war camp. [Courtesy Alabama Department of Archives and History]
Features
Inside the Wire: Aliceville and the Afrika Korps
By Randy Wall
For British and Commonwealth forces, the crushing defeat of the Germans at El Alamein, Egypt, in October 1942, was a long-awaited turning point in the war in North Africa. That same victory, however, had exacerbated prisoner-of-war problems for the British. They were already holding over 190,000 Italian prisoners. At El Alamein alone they picked up an additional 30,000 Germans, and new prisoners were being captured daily, among them large numbers of Hitler’s Afrika Korps. The space-pressed British needed help, and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff responded to urgent pleas, agreeing to accept prisoners on American soil. Thus was set in motion a series of events that would bring the Afrika Korps to the countryside of Alabama.
Traditional Pottery of Mobile Bay
By Joey Brackner
In nineteenth-century Alabama, the potter’s work was essential to every settlement. If a family needed a crock, a churn, a chamber pot, or a storage jar, they obtained it from their nearest potter. While traditional potters took pride in their craftsmanship, they wasted little time in decorating their product. What mattered to the average nineteenth-century Alabamian was the item’s utilitarian value. Thus, folk pottery reveals much about the workings of everyday life in the community in which it was made. This article examines the pottery of Mobile Bay, asking what these crocks, churns, and jars can tell us about their area of origin.
Lella Warren: Alabama’s Margaret Mitchell?
By Nancy G. Anderson
In the mid-1930s, readers for Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., advised the publisher to obtain the rights to Foundation Stone, a novel by Lella Warren. This book, they predicted, would be “an American epic” and a great commercial success. They were right. Foundation Stone, the saga of the pioneering Whetstone family who settled in Alabama in the 1820s, took the country by storm when it appeared in September 1940. Within weeks of its publication, the novel moved quickly up the nation’s best-seller lists where it remained throughout 1940 and 1941, at times selling at the rate of one thousand copies a day. The book was a success, and its author–forty-one-year-old Lella Warren–was a national celebrity. This period would be the pinnacle of Warren’s career, and though both she and her novel were destined to slip into obscurity, their story is one that is tied closely to the story of Alabama itself.
