Book Notes

Born Southern: Childbirth, Motherhood, and Social Networks in the Old South. By V. Lynn Kennedy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. viii, 277 pp. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-8018-9417-6.

Birth and motherhood intersect with race, gender, and class in this exploration of antebellum slaveholding southern families. Kennedy first examines the household and the relationships among its members, integrating the experiences of southern women—white and black, rich and poor. Then she moves to an examination of birth and motherhood in the public sphere, exploring how southerners used birth and motherhood to negotiate public, professional, and political identities.

Coming of Age in Utopia: The Odyssey of an Idea. By Paul M. Gaston. Montgomery: NewSouth Books, 2010. 358 pp. $27.95. ISBN: 978-1-58838-225-2.

Gaston grew up in Fairhope, the Baldwin County town founded in 1894 by Ernest B. Gaston, the author's grandfather—a journalist, Populist, and communitarian reformer. The utopian community had slowly transformed into a reactionary resort by the 1950s, and Gaston left to teach at the University of Virginia, where he found himself in the midst of the Civil Rights movement. He has spent a career examining how social change comes about, and how it is thwarted.

Darkroom: A Memoir in Black & White. By Lila Quintero Weaver. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2012. 254 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-5714-6.

This is not your typical University of Alabama Press memoir. Instead of pages of text illustrated with family photos, Darkroom is a graphic novel—a comic book, if you will, though not one filled with caped superheroes. Instead it is the illustrated story of a young Latina girl who moved from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Marion, Alabama, and grew up in the midst of the Civil Rights movement. Weaver offers a unique view, one neither white nor African American, of an era that shaped the state.

The Papers of Andrew Jackson: Volume VIII, 1830. Edited by Daniel Feller, Thomas Coens, and Laura-Eve Moss. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2010. xxxvii, 853 pp. $80.00. ISBN 1-57233-715-X.

This eighth volume of Andrew Jackson's papers presents more than five hundred documents from a core year in Jackson's presidency. They include Jackson's handwritten drafts of his presidential messages; private notes and memoranda; and correspondence with government officials, Army and Navy officers, friends and family, Indian leaders, foreign diplomats, and ordinary citizens throughout the country. Specific to Alabama, documents address the Creek Indians, state politics and elections, land claims and land frauds, and the appointment of public figures such as marshals and US attorneys.

The Plantation. By Edgar Tristram Thompson, edited by Sidney W. Mitz and George Baca. Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2010. xx, 150 pp. $29.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-1-57003-940-9. $14.95 (paper). ISBN 978-1-57003-941-6.

While Thompson's 1932 dissertation examining the southern plantation system is considered a classic, only its first chapter has ever been published. In The Plantation, Thompson presents a nuanced vision of the links between plantation culture, capitalism, and social science. Editors Minz and Baca provide a thorough introduction to the work explaining its guiding principles and grounding it in its historical context.

Speak Truth to Power: The Story of Charles Patrick, a Civil Rights Pioneer. By Mignette Y. Patrick Dorsey. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2010. xv, 130 pp. $16.00. ISBN 978-0-8173-5556-2.

In December 1954, Birmingham resident and World War II-veteran Charles Patrick was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for "sassing" the wife of a police officer. That officer and another subsequently beat him in his cell. Dorsey, Patrick's daughter, takes the reader through what happened next—his quest for justice in pre-Civil Rights Alabama and his unlikely success in having his assailants fired.

Taming Alabama: Lawyers and Reformers, 1804-1929. By Paul M. Pruitt Jr.Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2010. xiii, 186 pp. $26.95. ISBN: 978-0-8173-5601-9.

This book introduces readers to seven individuals who worked to reform the legal, political...