Issue 114, Fall 2014

Issue 114, Fall 2014

On the cover: Cher and friends gather in front of Muscle Shoals Sound. [Stephen Paley]


Features

Creating “The Muscle Shoals Sound”

By Charles L. Hughes

Many of the musical hits over the past fifty years have been linked to Muscle Shoals and its production studios. Thanks to the efforts and enthusiasms of several men—including Rick Hall, James Joiner, Billy Sherrill, and Tom Stafford—the “Muscle Shoals sound” soon pervaded radio waves across the United States. Artists as varied as Cher, Wilson Pickett, the Osmonds, and Bob Dylan travelled to Alabama in pursuit of musical excellence, and today the area still hosts acts such as The Black Keys. It has also attracted attention from organizations such as Beats Electronics, which aims to restore some of the original studios and partner in music education efforts for community children—proof that Muscle Shoals and its legendary sound continue to influence the musical world.


An Invisible Map Revealed: The First State Seal of Alabama

By David M. Robb Jr.

Thanks to advances in technology, historians have recently discovered an early state seal of Alabama. The discovery of this seal, which has the rare use of a map in its center, opens new lines of historical exploration and allows scholars to reflect in new ways on the values of Alabama’s founders. Alabama’s first governor helped shape this seal, which features the state’s major waterways, and it was created by Moritz Furst, a prominent nineteenth-century medal-maker. David M. Robb Jr. traces the history of this seal, exploring its influence on later iterations of seals and what it suggests about the state’s early history.


Alabama’s Jewish Servicemen in World War II

By Dan J. Puckett

During the Second World War, Jewish servicemen faced a particularly challenging set of circumstances, as their efforts were directly tied to the fate of their people. In this article, based on his new book, Dan Puckett explores Alabama’s Jewish servicemen, considering their history, their wartime actions, their post-war lives, and the contributions they made to Alabama and the broader world.


Coming of Age in Gee’s Bend

By Mary Stanton

When anthropologist Olive Stone first discovered Gee’s Bend, it was a little-known and under-studied community. The Bend, as it was called, remained shielded from the full extent of the Great Depression by its residents’ unique community values and practices. When the Depression’s effects did reach the Bend, federal officials found a different kind of life than they anticipated; the independent and self-sufficient Benders did not always embrace the restrictions tied to federal intervention. Throughout that era, the Benders found ways to adapt to changing circumstances while maintaining a unique and compelling heritage—a challenge they continue to meet today. 


Places in Peril 2014

By Michael Panhorst

Each year, Alabama Heritage, the Alabama Historical Commission, and the Alabama Trust for Historic Preservation identify historic structures in dire need of restoration or other intervention. This year’s list included six such structures that require urgent action to help preserve their historic significance. 


Departments

Southern Architecture and Preservation

Birmingham’s Boutwell Auditorium

By Glenn T. Eskew

For ninety years, Birmingham’s Boutwell Auditorium has stood at the center of a wide swath of history, hosting events that represent the cultural transitions of twenty- and twenty-first-century America. For music, sporting events, politics, and civil and human rights causes, the structure has been a central landmark. Historian Glenn T. Eskew recounts the building’s rich history and makes a compelling case for its designation as a National Historic Landmark.


Becoming Alabama

Quarter by Quarter

By Joseph W. Pearson, Megan L. Bever, and Matthew Downs

This quarter’s installment of “Becoming Alabama” returns to the fate of Big Warrior and his people. It explores the effects of the Civil War on Alabama’s white women, considering the hardships of life under the blockade—and the innovation those hardships prompted. It also explores the lives of women such as Kate Cumming, who supported the war effort as nurses. And the column’s look at the civil rights movement revisits the 1964 elections in Tuskegee, in which community members tried out very different strategies for securing local government offices for African Americans.

Editor’s Note: Alabama Heritage, the Summersell Center for Study of the South, the University of Alabama Department of History, and the Alabama Tourism Department offer this department as a part of the statewide “Becoming Alabama” initiative—a cooperative venture of state organizations to commemorate Alabama’s experiences related to the Creek War, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement. Quarter by quarter we will take you to the corresponding seasons 200, 150, and 50 years ago—sometimes describing the most pivotal events, sometimes describing daily life, but always illuminating a world in flux. We will wait for the ultimate outcomes as our forbears did—over time.


Alabama Governors

Alabama’s Territorial Governors

By Samuel L. Webb

From the Editor: With great pleasure, we introduce the long-awaited “Alabama Governors” department, which will offer Alabama Heritage readers “nutshell” biographies of our historic heads of state. Dr. Samuel L. Webb will be creating the biographical capsules, based on the book he coedited with Margaret E. Armbrester, Alabama Governors: A Political History of the State—now in its second edition with the University of Alabama Press. This quarter, we begin with Webb’s introduction to the gubernatorial experience in Alabama and a synopsis of the administrations of the men who served as governors during Alabama’s pre-statehood years. In upcoming issues, we will present the governors one by one, in the order in which they served. We would like to thank Samuel Webb, Margaret Armbrester, the numerous scholars who developed the material, the University of Alabama Press, and the Comer Foundation for their roles in the creation and support of the book. We also thank the Alabama Department of Archives and History for partnering with us in funding Robin McDonald’s new photographs of the state-era governors’ portraits.

In the first installment of this column, Samuel L. Webb explores the first men who governed Alabama prior to statehood, first when it was part of the Mississippi Territory and then when it was established on its own as the Alabama Territory. In this era, Alabama received little government focus, but these men—William Wyatt Bibb in particular—helped shape its course into statehood.


Revealing Hidden Collections

Glimpses of the Great War at Home and Abroad

By Donnelly Lancaster Walton

While history most notably gets recorded through official documents, many valuable insights emerge from the ephemera of the everyday lives of people living through significant events. This quarter’s installment of “Revealing Hidden Collections” highlights several such items from the University of Alabama Libraries Division of Special Collections. By exploring the collection’s letters, photographs, and mementoes, researchers gain an important understanding of how average Americans experienced World War I. 


Portraits & Landscapes

Remembering A Female Civil War POW

By Greg Starnes

Although one of the only women memorialized by a marker commemorating her time as a Civil War POW, Lizzie Stewart remains little-known today. Author Greg Starnes reflects on her life, particularly the hardships she faced in raising a family during the war.


The Nature Journal

Mrs. Royall’s Judge, or, a Tale of Two Historical Markers

By L. J. Davenport

The location of two different historical markers in Moulton, Alabama, causes Larry Davenport to ruminate on the intersection between several distinct parts of history: the 1819 trip Anne Newport Royall made to the area, and local Judge Thomas Minott Peters. The lives of these two individuals highlight the diverse and often divisive topics of their time, from legal precedents to the rights of women, new fern species to the role of slavery in the state. 


Reading the Southern Past

William Bartram, Naturalist and Traveler

By Stephen Goldfarb

Stephen Goldfarb looks back at the life and work of William Bartram through several new books: The Golden Age of Botanical Art (University of Chicago Press, 2013) by Martyn Rix; Fields of Vision: Essays on the Travels of William Bartram (University of Alabama Press, 2010), edited by Kathryn E. Holland Braund and Charlotte M. Porter; and Bartram’s Living Legacy: The Travels and the Nature of the South (Mercer University Press, 2010), edited by Dorinda Dallmeyer.

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