Issue 19, Winter 1991
On the cover: In August 1944, Mrs. B. F. Slaughter, dressed in her American Women’s Volunteer Service uniform, posed in the Jeep she used to drive visiting naval personnel around the Alabama Dry Docks in Mobile. [University of South Alabama Archives]
Features
Alabama Women and the Home Front, World War II
By Mary Martha Thomas
World War II changed American society. With the men fighting overseas, it fell to women–formerly excluded from many areas of life–to take up the slack. And so they did. All over America, women went to work–in shipyards and in Foundries, in gin companies and at the TVA. The labors of these women carried America through the war. But the question remains: after the war, after the fighting, when the men had returned home at last, what really changed?
This article includes sidebars featuring the personal stories of many of the women who went to work during the war.
Alabama Sheet Music, 1890-1925
By Cheryl Taranto
In 1990 Wade Hall, an avid collector of books, manuscripts, music, and photographs that document the South and its people, donated his collection of sheet music to the William Stanley Hoole Special Collections Library, University of Alabama, greatly enriching the University’s extensive sheet music collection. The Hall collection contains rare items and music dating from the early twentieth century, including many items related to Alabama–either published in the state by native composers or containing lyrics about Alabama. This article offers a look inside the collection.
Excerpts from Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression
By Robin D.J. Kelley
Between 1929 and 1941, the Communist Party organized and led a militantly antiracist movement in Alabama–the center of Party activity in the Depression South. Built from scratch by working people, the Alabama Communist Party was composed largely of poor blacks, most of whom were semiliterate and devoutly religious, but it also attracted a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, iconoclastic youth and women, and renegade liberals.
In Hammer and Hoe, published by the University of North Carolina Press, Professor Robin Kelley documents the efforts of the Communist Party to secure economic and political reforms in Alabama during the Great Depression. This excerpt deals with the beginnings of the Communist Party in Birmingham and rural Alabama, particularly Tallapoosa County.