Issue 37, Summer 1995
On the cover: Detail from Xanthus Smith’s 1876 painting of the historic sea battle between CSS Alabama and USS Kearsarge. (Courtesy AmSouth Bank, Mobile)
Features
The Saga of CSS Alabama
By Christopher M. Henze
This issue chronicles the adventures of the CSS Alabama, the Confederacy’s deadliest raider, including the discovery of her wreck off the coast of France and recent salvage efforts. Though the Alabama never once berthed in a Confederate port, her exploits boosted the morale of Southerners as she made an epic–and deadly–maritime journey around the world. During the Alabama’s 22-month campaign, her commander, Captain Raphael Semmes of Mobile and his crew captured or sank 65 Union merchant vessels at a cost of approximately $6 million to the Union. Author Christopher Henze, a U. S. diplomat for 25 years, served as a cultural attaché at the American embassy in Paris and acted as liaison between the French and the American sides in negotiations over ownership of the Alabama artifacts.
USS Kearsarge: The Last of a Legend
By Eugene Alvarez
A companion piece, this article recounts a little-known story of the final days of USS Kearsarge, which ran aground in the Caribbean in 1894. Her captain and navigator were brought up on charges of “inefficiency in the performance of duty” and “negligence.” Both were found guilty.
Ann Hodges and the Hand of Fate
By John C. Hall and Harold Povenmire
Ann Hodges of Sylacauga is the only documented case of a person being injured by a meteorite. Her remarkable story attracted national media attention. In Alabama, the publicity focused on a law suit brought by Hodges’ landlady, who claimed that she was the rightful owner of the meteorite. The public sided with Mrs. Hodges, who told the pres, “I think God intended it for me. After all, it hit me!” Although the landlady won the lawsuit, Hodges, after a modest private settlement, was able to reclaim the meteorite, which she later donated to the Alabama Museum of Natural History at the University of Alabama. The 8 1/2 pound meteorite remains there today on display. Another 3-3/4 pound fragment of the same meteorite found by a farmer nearby is on display at the Hall of Meteorites at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
Departments
From the Archives
“The Gold Star Book-Personal Memories of Alabamians Who Died in the Great War”
By Joan S. Clemens
In 1920 Marie Bankhead Owen, succeeded her late husband, Thomas M. Owen, as director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History. Part of her purpose was to complete her husband’s dream of creating a Gold Star book in honor of American soldiers killed during the Great War. However, she was never able to complete the project; after World War I, Americans turned their attention inward and did not want to be reminded of the European conflict. Neither did the Alabama legislature, which did not provide the necessary funding to support the project. The results of Mrs. Owen’s extensive research, however, are with us still, buried in the midst of a records series at the Alabama Department of Archives and History called the Public Information Subject Files–Alabamians at War.
The Nature Journal
Chestnut Blight
The common Alabama woodland plant jack-in-the-pulpit follows a complex sexual scenario known as sequential hermaphroditism in which an individual plant will “choose” to be either male or female depending on its reproductive potential. L.J. Davenport examines this complex reproductive cycle.