Shelton Family Settlement at Possum Trot

This beautifully written book, now in its second edition, tells the haunting saga of a quintessentially American family. In the late 1790s, Shoe Boots, a famed Cherokee warrior and successful farmer, acquired an African slave named Doll. Over the next thirty years, Shoe Boots and Doll lived together as master and slave and also as lifelong partners who, with their children and grandchildren, experienced key events in American history--including slavery, the Creek War, the founding of the Cherokee Nation and subsequent removal of Native Americans along the Trail of Tears, and the Civil War. This is the gripping story of their lives, in slavery and in freedom. Meticulously crafted from historical and literary sources, Ties That Bind vividly portrays the members of the Shoeboots family. Doll emerges as an especially poignant character, whose life is mostly known through the records of things done to her--her purchase, her marriage, the loss of her children--but also through her moving petition to the federal government for the pension owed to her as Shoe Boots's widow. A sensitive rendition of the hard realities of black slavery within Native American nations, the book provides the fullest picture we have of the myriad complexities, ironies, and tensions among African Americans, Native Americans, and whites in the first half of the nineteenth century. Updated with a new preface and an appendix of key primary sources, this remains an essential book for students of Native American history, African American history, and the history of race and ethnicity in the United States.

The 1838 expulsion of the Cherokee Nation from the state of Georgia culminated a decade of oppressive policies and more than two decades of federal pressure on Native Americans to give up their homelands to white settlement. The expulsion occurred over six weeks under the supervision of soldiers stationed at fourteen sites in north Georgia. Evidence from each site documents the individual and institutional abuse spawned by the state’s policies, locates the sources of white citizen aggression, and remembers the Cherokees who navigated the treacherous road of removal.

The state of Georgia is quite unusual in the US in that much of the state's territory was sdistributed through a series of land lotteries. A corruption scandal in the 1790s provoked such outrage that the Georgia Legislature opted to use lotteries as methods of distribution land from then forward. The first lottery took place in 1805 and the last ones were held in the early 1830s.

The state's insatiable hunger for Cherokee land and gold made Georgia indifferent to Cherokee rights, and in 1832 and 1833 their nation was gambled away in Georgia's sixth and final land lottery. The following account not only examines the impact of the lottery of the Cherokees but also demonstrates how lottery winners and mining companies became struck with "gold fever" and were absorbed by the prospect of instant riches to such an extent that the native Cherokees were regarded as less than human.

The 18 essays in this collection recognize not only a far greater African American presence in the highland South than was once assumed, but a wider variety of interaction between Black and white people during the 19th century. Of particular interest are Jennifer Lund Smith's essay "Negotiating the Terms of Freedom: The Quest for Education in an African American Community in Reconstruction North Georgia" and W. Fitzhugh Brundage's essay "Racial Violence, Lynching and Modernization in the Modern South."

Through an examination of various couples who were forced to live in slavery, Rebecca J. Fraser argues that slaves found ways to conduct successful courting relationships. In its focus on the processes of courtship among the enslaved, this study offers further insight into the meanings that structured intimate lives. Establishing their courtships, often across plantations, the enslaved men and women of antebellum North Carolina worked within and around the slave system to create and maintain meaningful personal relationships that were both of and apart from the world of the plantation. They claimed the right to participate in the social events of courtship and, in the process, challenged and disrupted the southern social order in discreet and covert acts of defiance. Informed by feminist conceptions of gender, sexuality, power, and resistance, the study argues that the courting relationship afforded the enslaved a significant social space through which they could cultivate alternative identities to those which were imposed upon them in the context of their daily working lives.

From the eighteenth century to the eve of the Civil War, Georgia's racial order shifted from the somewhat fluid conception of race prevalent in the colonial era to the harsher understanding of racial difference prevalent in the antebellum era. In Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750-1860, Watson W. Jennison explores the centrality of race in the development of Georgia, arguing that long-term structural and demographic changes account for this transformation. Jennison traces the rise of rice cultivation and the plantation complex in low country Georgia in the mid-eighteenth century and charts the spread of slavery into the up country in the decades that followed. Cultivating Race examines the "cultivation" of race on two levels: race as a concept and reality that was created, and race as a distinct social order that emerged because of the specifics of crop cultivation. Using a variety of primary documents including newspapers, diaries, correspondence, and plantation records, Jennison offers an in-depth examination of the evolution of racism and racial ideology in the lower South.

Floyd County was settled in anticipation of railroad construction and attracted a larger percentage of wealthy households than other counties in the region. Even before the territory was officially ceded by the Cherokees, several of the more prominent settlers selected a site for the county seat at the intersection of two rivers and actively promoted its development into a regional marketing center.

In this examination of the rise of agrarian radicalism in the late 19th-century South, Hahn focuses on social change and popular consciousness while exploring populism's kinship with other movements such as labor radicalism.

Slavery's Descendants brings together contributors from a variety of racial backgrounds, all members or associates of a national racial reconciliation organization called Coming to the Table, to tell their stories of dealing with America's racial past through their experiences and their family histories. Some are descendants of slaveholders, some are descendants of the enslaved, and many are descendants of both slaveholders and slaves. What they all have in common is a commitment toward collective introspection, and a willingness to think critically about how the nation's histories of oppression continue to ripple into the present, affecting us all. Includes Karen Stewart-Ross's essay "Not a Wound Too Deep" research on her ancestors Jonas "Joe" Cathey and Delse Barry, who have both Freemantown & Possum Trot connections.

Examining how labor and economy shaped the family life of bondwomen and bondmen in the antebellum South Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe compares the work, family, and economic experiences of enslaved women and men in upcountry and lowland Georgia during the 19th century. Mining planters' daybooks, plantation records, and a wealth of other sources, Daina Ramey Berry shows how slaves' experiences on large plantations, which were essentially self-contained, closed communities, contrasted with those on small plantations, where planters' interests in sharing their workforce allowed enslaved people more open, fluid communications. By inviting readers into the internal lives of enslaved people through her detailed examination of domestic violence, separation and sale, and forced breeding, Berry also reveals important new ways of understanding what it meant to be a female or male slave, as well as how public and private aspects of slave life influenced each other on the plantation.

As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta--the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south--in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers' domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post-Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception--and at the heart--of the new south.

The Politics of Whiteness presents the first sustained analysis of white racial identity among workers in what was the South's largest industry--the textile industry--for much of the twentieth century. Grounding her work in a study of Rome, Georgia, and surrounding Floyd County from the Great Depression to the 1970s, Michelle Brattain paints a richly textured local portrait of how the varied social benefits of whiteness shaped the experience of textile millhands and, as a result, Southern politics. In doing so, she challenges traditional views of Southern politics as dominated by elites and marked by passivity among Southern workers. Brattain uncovers considerable white working-class political influence and activism for decades starting in the 1930s--which, by re-creating and defending Southern institutions grounded in the idea of racial difference, helped pave the way for resistance to the civil rights movement.