Tennessee Books

mr nall has written the most factual of many works on the subject to date . when doing research on the night rider activities in the black patch you will always see a thank you to dr. nall for his work it is the definative work on this very unique time in history. !!!!!!!!a must for every true scholar on the tobacco night riders of kentucky and tenn.

Nall's is the story one of the greatest movements in the history of the American spirit. It well covers the facts in the agricultural price war that changed the farm economy of the region forever. Faced with economic starvation tobacco farmers united, then had to defend with force their right to live and farm and make a descent return on their labor. In doing so they changed the future for tobacco farmers and instituted price and acreage/poundage allotments to control tobacco production that have remained until this present day. My family was involved in the tobacco wars, my grandfather lived in the town of Cobb, Kentucky next door to the firey Dr. Dave Amoss who led the farmer's army, the "silent brigade....yet the full story has not been told. Expect it to be futher told when "The Last Nightrider" a novel based on the exploits of my family during this time is subsequently published. Nall's book is required reading for the history buff and for the economist, the romantic and those with courage enough to secure their own fate....

This and it's sister publications are some of the most detailed, informative tour guides you will find! We simply love this series and the way it is written. There are few commercial details, i.e. hotel recommendations, restaurants etc.If you need that buy the Frommer's or Fodor's books but this one will take you way off the beaten path and bring you back again much more informed than when you left. You can't go wrong with any of the books in this entire series.....I know, I have them all!

This is a must for anyone wanting to see East Tennessee and get everything you can out of it! The book is easy to read and very informative. Maps are at the beginning of each section showing your possible journey, so you can take the entire journey or a portion and know exactly what you will find and see. The directions are excellent so you can't get lost. Now the only downfall...it is very similar to another book I purchased so don't waste your money this book has it all.

Cathy and I looked through many guide books before attempting to write Traveling Tennessee. We found none covered the state in our easy helpful style (see Traveling the Trace and Traveling the Southern Highlands).

We followed the pioneers through the state from east to west giving you a brief history of the people and the area, and what you would find there today. Tennessee offers many pleasant surprises along its highways from scenic sites to activies you may participate in. For instance, you know of the Great Smoky Mountains but do you know the quite side of the Smokies? where Tennessee's first gold rush was? about a failed Utopia brought back to life? the courthouse stolen in the middle of the night? or where you can swim at the end of a scale model of the Misssissippi River?

We strove to give you information and details about interesting attractions all across Tennessee as well as B&Bs, dining, shopping, special events, camping, and where to get more information. More than 200 photos help tell the stories in this 316-page guide.

This guidebook never leaves my car! It always tells me something new to discover about Tennessee!

this helps clarify some of the questions we had about road we live on, which was once main road between Banner Elk and Boone,NC. The railroad line was adjacent to our road before the great flood wiped it out.Interesting.

In addition to telling the unique and colorful history of the ET&WNC, this book is a fine reference for ET&WNC fans or modelers. It has many illustrations of the line and rolling stock. Photos and sketches in this book were used as prototypes for several model railroad items in G-scale narrow gauge.

This book did something really extraordinary for me. The period of antebellum literature, as I studied it in graduate school, was always difficult to get through because much of it seemed fairly formulaic and lacked depth. Paul Jones has remapped the territory to include the incredibly important subversive voices in antebellum Southern literature. He does an insightful study of the dominant ideology at the time and the way that the works usually considered representative reinforced and recreated the dominant values of the time. Working counter to those forceful trends were creative voices who did not uphold the creation of southern nationalism and were openly critical to the plantation ideology. I am very grateful to Jones for shining a different ray of light on this period and finally providing readers with a scaffolding to classify a writer like Edgar Allan Poe. I recommend this work very highly.

Jones departs from the "story of southern literature that was constructed by literary critics early in the twentieth century" to identify five authors falling outside of the conventional understanding of antebellum southern literature. In different ways according to their creativities and chosen literary forms, these five authors evidence countervailing views of southern society from the one pictured in the predominating literature heavily influenced by the romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott. Poe with his horror tales vividly disclosing the anxieties embedded in the slave-owning society that was being increasingly challenged and Frederick Douglass with his heroic slave characters giving a different formulation and image of African Americans from the one maintained by the slave-owners put forth clear alternatives to the southern propaganda about a harmonious, peaceful southern society. James Heath, John Pendleton Kennedy, and E.D.E.N. Southworth employed within the familiar form of the novel the relatively subtle, partly ambiguous elements of character, dialogue, description, and narrative to question the prevailing southern values and class structure based on slavery. The five authors Jones studies with considerable originality are "probably only the tip of the iceberg of writers and texts that offer a dissenting voice to the dominant one that has been established in literary histories." Jones is an assistant professor of English at Ohio University whose articles have appeared in Southern Literary Journal and other periodicals. This study of his shifts the perspective on the antebellum southern literature, while at the same time it encourages further study of other aspects of the little-known and under-appreciated alternative literature.

A very revealing book by an extraordinary man. In the course of telling his family's story, Mr. Lytle makes the South's colorful past and its original characters come alive. He has a gift for simply seeing the world in a very different way than most of ever can, but he is also able to put the experience on paper in such a way that we can all soak it in.

Some of Mr. Lytle's prose can be almost too thick--The Velvet Horn. But his short stories in Alchemy are very good, well crafted but still juicy. The bio on Forrest is good also, its beginning as artistic a rendering of a portrait as I have ever read, quite unique. But in A Wake for the Living, he shows--I think to some extent like Hemingway in A Movable Feast--that he writes extremely well about nonfiction that is intimate. I would recommend his short stories in Alchemey and also this book as good first ones of Lytle to start-out with.

The book is like a magnet. It does not want to leave your hands untill the last page. Gives a different prospective of the civil war and reconstruction, along with a great story. I would forsee a movie.

I am an adult and unable to find the adult form so let me say here whan I started this book I was unable to put it down.
The detail and accuracy of history shows the ammount of research that went into this book.Aside from history it was a great book that covered more than I expected.If your interest is the civil war,the development and eveloution of the guns of that era or romance,you will love this book

Mark Royden Winchell, the leading scholar of the Southern Agrarians of his generation, studied under the last of the Agrarians at Vanderbilt, and was thus perfectly suited to prepare this outstanding bio. Sadly, Winchell died on May 8, 2008 at the young age of 59. This work will stand as a testament.

The lack of attention Donald Davidson has received since his death is scandalous. No doubt it stems in part from his racicialist views and resistance to the civil rights movement. Well Davidson was a flawed man--but to call him a "Racist" ( His old friend Robert Penn Warren's daughter says that his name was never spoken in their house on that account--I find it hard to believe) is simply to miss the measure of the man. He was a fine poet (just a notch below Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom) and a brilliant literary critic and teacher. His "Attack on Leviathan" is essential reading for those who confuse conservatism with Newt Gingrich, and his poem "Lee in the Mountains" is a tribute not only to a lost cause, but to all lost causes, and should therefore resonate with all but the incurable narcissist. Winchell has done us a great service by presenting the man warts and allto us. If we ever get beyond the name calling that passes for political and literary judgement these days it will be due in large measure to books like this one.

In the library of Civil War literature the Battle of Stones River, December 31, 1862 to January 2, 1863, is one of the most under represented large scale battles of the war. One can easily count the number of volumes dedicated solely to the battle on the fingers of one hand.

Having moved to Murfreesboro nearly five years ago I am a regular visitor to Stones River National Battlefield, but I have never been able to make much sense of the battle by my battlefield visits, even when using the park brochure's guided tour. I suppose my confusion about the battle stems from the fact that the park's current 600 acres represents only about 15% of the total area where fighting took place.

Matt & Lee Spruill have come to my rescue with their book, Winter Lightning: A Guide to the Battle of Stones River. With twenty-one tour stops (as opposed to the National Park's six) the Spruill's lead you on a driving tour over the ground, both outside and inside of the park, where the three day battle between the Confederate Army of the Tennessee with General Braxton Bragg at its head, and the Federal Army of the Cumberland under General William S. Rosecrans.

The evening of December 30, 1862 found both armies facing each other northwest of Murfreesboro, Tennessee in opposing lines of battle, stretching diagonally from the town's west to its north, and each preparing to attack the other's right. Which ever side to launch their attack first would have the advantage. At sunrise, Bragg and his Confederate Army was the first to strike.

The Spruill's follow the battle chronologically as it progressed, following the action as the Confederate troops rolled up the Federal right and sending Union regiments, one after another, fleeing to the rear, to the Federal's stand at The Round Forrest, and finally to the fighting at McFadden's Ford on January 2nd. At each stop we are provided narration by the authors, giving the reader an overview of what happened, and then we are presented with a balanced view of the action from both sides with first hand accounts from the soldiers who were there, usually from official reports, but some times from diaries or letters.

The book contains 41 maps, which vary widely in scale from theater maps down to maps on the regimental level, depending on the situation or topic being covered. One only reading the book may find the maps a little cumbersome as north is not always oriented to the top of the page. This book was intended to be a tour guide, and the maps are presented to the reader at each of the stops as the reader would see the landscape that is in front of him. Therefore if you are directed to look to the southeast, southeast would be oriented to the top of the page. Not only do the historic roads appear in the maps but also the roads of the present and are clearly marked, for example: "Medical Center Pkwy (today)."

Not only have Matt & Lee Spruill added a book to the small library shelf dedicated to the battle, they have also given me a greater understanding of it. I can now point to a spot of land just south of the present day Medical Center Parkway and say with confidence that is where my great great grandfather, Walter E. Partridge (Company F, 36th Illinois Infantry) was during the battle.

At the end of 1862 after a series of defeats, the Union won a clear victory here. This is one of those under reported battles and more important than we think. Lincoln thanked Rosecrans saying that the nation could not have taken another defeat. Additionally, Lincoln said he would remember this victory as long as he lived.

The Spruills continue the tradition of excellent Civil War battlefield guides that are so valuable to walkers. These detailed guides contain directions, participant's accounts and good historical information telling us what we are looking at after telling us how to get there. Each one is a required addition to my library and packed for any trip to the field.

This is truly the "don't leave home without it" item.

Dr. Bradley does a marvelous job of showing the level of brutality used by the US Army in its unsuccessful attempt to pacify the Tennessee countryside during the Civil War. Murder, starvation, kidnapping, intimidation were among the Army's tools of the trade, but they never stopped Southerners from shooting at trains and boats. Americans did not make a good occupying force in the 19th Century and we don't make a good one today -- thankfully.

A very strongly recommended addition to personal, academic, and community library Civil War Studies collections, With Blood & Fire: Life Behind Union Lines In Middle Tennessee, 1863-65 by Civil War expert Michael R. Bradley is a brutal and candid accounting of the devastating toll Union occupation took upon Middle Tennesee. Graphic in its detail of murder, robbery, looting, sexual assault, and more, With Blood & Fire is an expertly researched, deftly written, presentation of the hardships of war and scars that could not fully heal.