Book Notes

Book Notes Alabama Illustrated: Engravings from 19th Century Newspapers. By James L. BaggettandKelseyScoutenBates.Nashville:TurnerPublishingCompany, 2009. viii, 98 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-1-59652-536-8. Photographs rarely appeared in newspapers before the 1890s; newspapers relied on engravings to illustrate news, stories, and other published material. Alabama Illustrated contains almost fifty illustrations of the state from the 1850s to the 1890s, depicting city and country scenes, politics, war, agriculture, entertainment, and everyday life. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920. By Charles Reagan Wilson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. xx, 256 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-8203-3425-7. Wilson’s examination of how the loss of the dream of an independent southern nation became a civil religion known as the Lost Cause was first published in 1980. This edition includes a new preface by the author. Foot Soldiers for Democracy: The Men, Women, and Children of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement. Edited by Horace Huntley and John W. McKerley. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. xxxi, 222 pp. $25.00. ISBN 978-0-252-07668-8. This collection of oral histories of the Civil Rights movement is drawn from the archives of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. These tales are from the movement’s “foot soldiers”—individuals of varying ages and occupations who participated in the movement on a grassroots level. This Day in Civil Rights History. By Horace Randall Williams and Ben Beard. Montgomery: NewSouth Books, 2009. xi, 405 pp. $19.95. ISBN 978-158838 -241-2. This catalog of civil rights history presents 366 civil rights events in America, one for each day of the year (plus Leap Day). Topics range from the founding of the nation’s first abolition society in 1775 to race riots disrupting Louisiana’s Reconstruction-era Constitutional Convention in 1866, from the murder of Emmett Till and the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 to the first black mayor of Selma being elected in 2000. This Day in Civil Rights History serves as an overview of civil rights and an invitation to learn more about an important topic in America and the South. ...