Showing results for "Memphis" in United States

Memphis Mayhem weaves the tale of the racial collision that led to a cultural, sociological, and musical revolution. Beginning with the 1870s yellow fever epidemics that created racial imbalance as wealthy whites fled the city, David Less moves from W. C. Handy's codification of blues in 1909 to the mid-century advent of interracial musical acts like Booker T. & the M.G.'s, the birth of punk, and finally to the growth of a music tourism industry.

In May 1866, just a year after the Civil War ended, Memphis erupted in a three-day spasm of racial violence that saw whites rampage through the city's black neighborhoods. By the time the fires consuming black churches and schools were put out, forty-six freed people had been murdered. This is a portrait of a Southern city that opens an entirely new view onto the Civil War and its aftermath. A momentous national event, the riot is also remarkable for being "one of the best-documented episodes of the American nineteenth century."

Prohibition, with all its crime, corruption, and cultural upheaval, ran its course after 13 years in most of the rest of the country - but not in Memphis, where it lasted 30 years. Patrick O'Daniel takes a fresh look at those responsible for the rise and fall of Prohibition, its effect on Memphis, and the impact events in the city made on the rest of the state and country.

Following the Civil War, Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, thrived as a cauldron of sex and song, violence and passion. But out of this turmoil emerged a center of black progress, optimism, and cultural ferment. Preston Lauterbach tells this vivid, fascinating story through the multigenerational saga of a family whose ambition, race pride, and moral complexity indelibly shaped the city that would loom so large in American life.

On Palm Sunday 1964, at the Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis, a group of black and white students began a "kneel-in" to protest the church's policy of segregation, a protest that would continue in one form or another for more than a year and eventually force the church to open its doors to black worshippers. In The Last Segregated Hour, Stephen Haynes tells the story of this dramatic yet little studied tactic which was the strategy of choice for bringing attention to segregationist policies in Southern churches.

"Alice + Freda Forever is a gut-wrenching story of love, death, and the dangers of intolerance."--Bustle In 1892, America was obsessed with a teenage murderess, but it wasn't her crime that shocked the nation--it was her motivation. Nineteen-year-old Alice Mitchell had planned to pass as a man...