Images of America: Phenix City (review)

Phenix City takes its place as one of the latest Alabama offerings in Arcadia's Images of America series. The Arcadia website lists about seventy books on Alabama topics, covering cities, counties, companies, and universities. The nature and structure of the books in this series provide a photographic history of the topic. This format means that the written information is necessarily limited almost exclusively to the captions of the photographs.

For historians, a major hindrance of such a format is that the reader has little sense of transition, continuity, context, or relative importance of the entries. The unfortunate lack of transition even within chapters is unavoidable but still distracting if a reader is expecting a balanced history. In this specific case, another weakness is that the book ends with the chapter "Sin City, 1954-1956"; the last photograph is one of Lurleen Wallace in the 1966 gubernatorial campaign. Given the careful attention to the industrial development of the region in previous chapters, a concluding chapter bringing Phenix City at least into the late twentieth century would have been welcome.

Despite the limitations, Phenix City is useful for the photographs themselves, which is in fact the "thesis" of this work. The entries include not only people and places but also reproductions of letters, maps, and newspaper articles. Alabama historians must applaud a collection that leads to the preservation and dissemination of local history. Indeed, the title is misleading and too limiting. Phenix City became a city only in 1889, yet the first three chapters of the book cover Russell County and the general region beginning in 1680. The accompanying captions provide excellent, concise information on the antebellum period and even of the Alabama Territory. For example, author John Lyles explores both the close connection between east Alabama and Georgia and the Native American presence and influence, especially during the Creek War and immediate postwar period. Another major theme is industrial development along the Chattahoochee River and Phenix City's role in those changes.

Books such as Phenix City cannot replace a more comprehensive and interpretive history but can serve well as an adjunct to a more formal approach. Occasionally a photograph can vividly illustrate an important crossroads in history, providing at a glance a truth that is better viewed than read. One such example is a wonderful photograph of the nineteenth-century transportation giants of river and rail transport. The photograph shows a sternwheeler on the river with a train in the near background crossing the river bridge (p. 57). Given the importance of the Chattahoochee River in the history of the region, such a photograph evokes many of the elements of Alabama history associated with rivers as highways of transportation and communication, power sources for textile mills, and boundary lines. Such books as Phenix City must also provoke an increased historical interest in the local community because of the greater awareness of history fostered by publication of this work. Indeed, the real value of the series is not in a single volume but rather in the totality of volumes, helping to preserve scenes and documents from Alabama's past. Whatever the drawbacks for historians of a "picture book," this series does open a wide, inviting door that encourages one to look deeper, ask questions, and ultimately appreciate more fully the history that surrounds us.