Trail of Tears

Trail of Tears
Author: John Ehle
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2011-06-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307793834

A sixth-generation North Carolinian, highly-acclaimed author John Ehle grew up on former Cherokee hunting grounds. His experience as an accomplished novelist, combined with his extensive, meticulous research, culminates in this moving tragedy rich with historical detail. The Cherokee are a proud, ancient civilization. For hundreds of years they believed themselves to be the "Principle People" residing at the center of the earth. But by the 18th century, some of their leaders believed it was necessary to adapt to European ways in order to survive. Those chiefs sealed the fate of their tribes in 1875 when they signed a treaty relinquishing their land east of the Mississippi in return for promises of wealth and better land. The U.S. government used the treaty to justify the eviction of the Cherokee nation in an exodus that the Cherokee will forever remember as the “trail where they cried.” The heroism and nobility of the Cherokee shine through this intricate story of American politics, ambition, and greed. B & W photographs

Men of Mark and Representative Citizens of Harrisonburg and Rockingham County, Virginia

Men of Mark and Representative Citizens of Harrisonburg and Rockingham County, Virginia
Author: John W. Wayland
Publisher: Genealogical Publishing Com
Total Pages: 451
Release: 2009-06
Genre: Harrisonburg (Va.)
ISBN: 0806348348

In 1850 and again in 1860, the U.S. government carried out a census of slave owners and their property. Jack F. Cox's transcription of the 1850 slave owners' census is arranged in alphabetical order according to the surname of the slave owner and gives his/her full name, number of slaves owned, and the county of residence. It may be just possible that more persons with slave ancestors will be able to trace them via other records (property records, for example) pertaining to the 37,000 slave owners enumerated in this new volume.

Unconquerable

Unconquerable
Author: John M. Oskison
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2022-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496230965

This biography of John Ross, the most famous principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, also tells the story of the Cherokee Nation through some of its most dramatic events in the nineteenth century.

Georgia Voices

Georgia Voices
Author: Spencer Bidwell King
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2010-06-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820335401

Published in 1966, this documentary history examines the history of Georgia from the first appearance of Spanish explorers to the hardships of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Through the accounts of those who experienced the events firsthand, Spencer Bidwell King Jr. allows the reader to experience colonialism, Revolution, and statehood. Within these distinctive eras, King discusses society, education, religion, literature, and the economic and cultural pursuits of the people. He combines extensive quotes from primary sources with historical information to create a continuous narrative. By using the voices of Georgians, King reveals the state's unique character and individuality.

Toward Cherokee Removal

Toward Cherokee Removal
Author: Adam J. Pratt
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2020-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820358266

Cherokee Removal excited the passions of Americans across the country. Nowhere did those passions have more violent expressions than in Georgia, where white intruders sought to acquire Native land through intimidation and state policies that supported their disorderly conduct. Cherokee Removal and the Trail of Tears, although the direct results of federal policy articulated by Andrew Jackson, were hastened by the state of Georgia. Starting in the 1820s, Georgians flocked onto Cherokee land, stole or destroyed Cherokee property, and generally caused havoc. Although these individuals did not have official license to act in such ways, their behavior proved useful to the state. The state also dispatched paramilitary groups into the Cherokee Nation, whose function was to intimidate Native inhabitants and undermine resistance to the state’s policies. The lengthy campaign of violence and intimidation white Georgians engaged in splintered Cherokee political opposition to Removal and convinced many Cherokees that remaining in Georgia was a recipe for annihilation. Although the use of force proved politically controversial, the method worked. By expelling Cherokees, state politicians could declare that they had made the disputed territory safe for settlement and the enjoyment of the white man’s chance. Adam J. Pratt examines how the process of one state’s expansion fit into a larger, troubling pattern of behavior. Settler societies across the globe relied on legal maneuvers to deprive Native peoples of their land and violent actions that solidified their claims. At stake for Georgia’s leaders was the realization of an idealized society that rested on social order and landownership. To achieve those goals, the state accepted violence and chaos in the short term as a way of ensuring the permanence of a social and political regime that benefitted settlers through the expansion of political rights and the opportunity to own land. To uphold the promise of giving land and opportunity to its own citizens—maintaining what was called the white man’s chance—politics within the state shifted to a more democratic form that used the expansion of land and rights to secure power while taking those same things away from others.

Modern Cronies

Modern Cronies
Author: Kenneth H. Wheeler
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2021-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820357510

Modern Cronies traces how various industrialists, thrown together by the effects of the southern gold rush, shaped the development of the southeastern United States. Existing historical scholarship treats the gold rush as a self-contained blip that—aside from the horrors of Cherokee Removal (admittedly no small thing) and a supply of miners to California in 1849—had no other widespread effects. In fact, the southern gold rush was a significant force in regional and national history. The pressure brought by the gold rush for Cherokee Removal opened the path of the Western & Atlantic Railroad, the catalyst for the development of both Atlanta and Chattanooga, Tennessee. Iron makers, attracted by the gold rush, built the most elaborate iron-making operations in the Deep South near this railroad, in Georgia’s Etowah Valley; some of these iron makers became the industrial talent in the fledgling postbellum city of Birmingham, Alabama. This book explicates the networks of associations and interconnections across these varied industries in a way that newly interprets the development of the southeastern United States. Modern Cronies also reconsiders the meaning of Joseph E. Brown, Georgia’s influential Civil War governor, political heavyweight, and wealthy industrialist. Brown was nurtured in the Etowah Valley by people who celebrated mining, industrialization, banking, land speculation, and railroading as a path to a prosperous future. Kenneth H. Wheeler explains Brown’s familial, religious, and social ties to these people; clarifies the origins of Brown’s interest in convict labor; and illustrates how he used knowledge and connections acquired in the gold rush to enrich himself. After the Civil War Brown, aided by his sons, dominated and modeled a vigorous crony capitalism with far-reaching implications.

Atlanta and Environs

Atlanta and Environs
Author: Franklin M. Garrett
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 990
Release: 2011-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820339024

Atlanta and Environs is, in every way, an exhaustive history of the Atlanta Area from the time of its settlement in the 1820s through the 1970s. Volumes I and II, together more than two thousand pages in length, represent a quarter century of research by their author, Franklin M. Garrett—a man called “a walking encyclopedia on Atlanta history” by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. With the publication of Volume III, by Harold H. Martin, this chronicle of the South’s most vibrant city incorporates the spectacular growth and enterprise that have characterized Atlanta in recent decades. The work is arranged chronologically, with a section devoted to each decade, a chapter to each year. Volume I covers the history of Atlanta and its people up to 1880—ranging from the city’s founding as “Terminus” through its Civil War destruction and subsequent phoenixlike rebirth. Volume II details Atlanta’s development from 1880 through the 1930s—including occurrences of such diversity as the development of the Coca-Cola Company and the Atlanta premiere of Gone with the Wind. Taking up the city’s fortunes in the 1940s, Volume III spans the years of Atlanta’s greatest growth. Tracing the rise of new building on the downtown skyline and the construction of Hartsfield International Airport on the city’s perimeter, covering the politics at City Hall and the box scores of Atlanta’s new baseball team, recounting the changing terms of race relations and the city’s growing support of the arts, the last volume of Atlanta and Environs documents the maturation of the South’s preeminent city.