Issue 12, Spring 1989

Issue 12, Spring 1989

On the cover: Snow covered tulips on University of Alabama campus. [Photograph by Chip Cooper]


Features

Doctor Koch and his “Immense Antediluvian Monsters”

By Douglas E. Jones

Albert Koch was one of the more ingenious showmen of the nineteenth century. He was also a keen observer of geologic phenomena and a competent natural historian, although he was not professionally trained. His museum drew large crowds only when strange and spectacular creatures were displayed, keeping the peripatetic Koch busy searching for new specimens. Among his specimens was a 114-long “sea serpent”–a crazy-quilt monster assembled by Koch himself from the bones of multiple fossil whales. Fraud, showman, scientist–this is the story of Albert Koch and his fabulous creatures.


Punishment Seven Times More: The Convict Lease System in Alabama

By Robert David Ward and William Warren Rogers

For sixty-two years–from 1846 to 1928–and longer than any other state in the Union, Alabama leased its prisoners either to individuals or, more generally, to large coal mining companies. The practice began as a practical measure designed to help the state pay for its prison system by forcing prisoners to earn their own living. In time, however, it became clear that the convict lease system was badly broken. After the Civil War, convicts were put to work rebuilding railroads. These prisoners died in awful numbers as contractors worked and starved them to death. Even at the best of times, the system provided a life of utter filth, degradation, and vicious punishment. This is the story of that system.


Rammed-Earth Houses Mount Olive

By Leigh Anne Roach

To help pull America out of the quagmire of the Great Depression, the federal government paid artists to paint post office walls. It paid photographers to take pictures of poor farmers. It paid men to plant trees, to build parks. And in one state–Alabama–the federal government even paid workers to construct houses out of dirt. Those dirt houses still stand today in Mount Olive, Alabama–monuments to a time when widespread poverty in America prompted many of the nation’s leaders to dream of creating a new society. 

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