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Trevecca College

Alan Harding

in The Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion: A Sect in Action in Eighteenth-Century England

Trevecca College, founded by Lady Huntingdon in 1768, was one of the first institutions to be concerned exclusively with training for Christian ministry; it was significant both because of the ... More

Trevecca College, founded by Lady Huntingdon in 1768, was one of the first institutions to be concerned exclusively with training for Christian ministry; it was significant both because of the influence that its achievements (and shortcomings) had upon later forms of ministerial education, and for the impact on evangelical and other congregations of the more than two hundred students who attended Trevecca in the twenty-three years of its existence. The chapter discusses the origins of the college, the initial plans for its curriculum and staffing, and the backgrounds and recruitment of the students. It describes the often haphazard nature of the educational regime at Trevecca (including the conflicting demands of study and preaching); the college’s involvement in foreign missions; its theology; and the diverse sources of authority and influence to which the students were subject. The successor to Trevecca opened at Cheshunt in 1792; its ground rules (particularly clearly defined courses of study, and strict limits on outside preaching) showed that some of the lessons of Trevecca had been learned.Less

If Tombstones Could Talk: The Evolution of the Black Church in Savannah

Andrew Billingsley

in Mighty Like a River: The Black Church and Social Reform

A study of the historical evolution of the black church as agent of social reform could have no more authentic a setting than Savannah, Georgia. It is where the oldest continuous black congregation ... More

A study of the historical evolution of the black church as agent of social reform could have no more authentic a setting than Savannah, Georgia. It is where the oldest continuous black congregation in all of North America can be found. And throughout its 225-year history (since 1773), the First African Baptist Church repeatedly has been drawn into the community to deal with social issues of a nonreligious nature. The Laurel Grove South Cemetery, located at the end of Victory Drive on the western edge of the city, is discussed. The contributions of Rev. George Leile, Rev. Andrew Bryan, Rev. Henry C. Cunningham and Rev. Andrew Marshall to the evolution of the black church in Savannah are described in detail.Less

General Sherman and the Black Church

Andrew Billingsley

in Mighty Like a River: The Black Church and Social Reform

This chapter discusses the contribution of General William T. Sherman to the black church. Gen. Sherman's brilliant and bloody march through Georgia and the Carolinas during the fall and winter of ... More

This chapter discusses the contribution of General William T. Sherman to the black church. Gen. Sherman's brilliant and bloody march through Georgia and the Carolinas during the fall and winter of 1864–65 profoundly affected the black community and the black church. Just as profoundly did the black people and their church affect the success of Sherman's mission. After Sherman's conquest, the Zion Baptist Church would become separate and free, and Brother Ephraim would lead this independent church into the early years of freedom. The quest of Gen. Sherman from Atlanta to Savannah is described. Twenty black religious leaders were the special guests of the general. They were summoned to help the general and President Lincoln on how to implement the Emancipation Proclamation. After six weeks in Savannah, Sherman left the city for his campaign through the Carolinas.Less

The Crisis of Emancipation and Reconstruction in Savannah

Andrew Billingsley

in Mighty Like a River: The Black Church and Social Reform

The black churches in Savannah responded in two distinct ways to the collapse of the Confederacy and the crisis of emancipation. They expanded their churches, and established an institutional ... More

The black churches in Savannah responded in two distinct ways to the collapse of the Confederacy and the crisis of emancipation. They expanded their churches, and established an institutional hegemony in the black community that would last for more than a century and a half. These churches were functioning as social institutions as defined by Du Bois, Frazier, and C. Eric Lincoln. In addition, the church also moved resolutely into community action, thus executing the “communal” dimension of its mission as set forth by Lincoln and Mamiya. Education, business and economic development, and political action are among the areas of social reform in which churches were preeminent in the black community. After working hard and successfully to influence the state Legislature to establish the first college for blacks in Georgia, Emanuel King Love convinced the state authorities that Richard R. Wright Sr. should become this fledgling college's first president.Less

Rev. Ralph Mark Gilbert and the Civil Rights Movement in Savannah

Andrew Billingsley

in Mighty Like a River: The Black Church and Social Reform

The evolution of the black church in Savannah as agent of social reform reached its zenith during the civil rights era. Rev. Ralph Mark Gilbert, pastor of the First African Baptist Church from ... More

The evolution of the black church in Savannah as agent of social reform reached its zenith during the civil rights era. Rev. Ralph Mark Gilbert, pastor of the First African Baptist Church from 1939–1956, is generally considered the father of the civil rights movement in Savannah. Gilbert inherited a mantle of activist leadership. He was a leader in the political life of blacks in Georgia. He was also a great builder of the church as a community institution. Building on the groundwork laid under the leadership of the Rev. Gilbert, W. W. Law, the NAACP, and the churches, Savannah blacks were ready for action in 1960 when the student sit-in movement was launched by four black students in North Carolina who sat down at a Greensboro lunch counter. In addition, the Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum is described.Less

Workers, 1733–1736

Noeleen McIlvenna

in The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South

This chapter describes everyday life for the working class of England, then tells the story of the difficult first years of the settlement of Savannah and surrounding forts. The high rates of illness ... More

This chapter describes everyday life for the working class of England, then tells the story of the difficult first years of the settlement of Savannah and surrounding forts. The high rates of illness and mortality, combined with swampy land, led to low productivity and to disillusionment with the Trustees. Irish convict servants were blamed and punished severely. Gradually the workers realized they must fend for themselves and began both hunting for food and demanding better wages. This led to a group of Scottish gentlemen protesting the current conditions to the Trustees.Less

Molly and Matilda: Old Savannah Specters

Tiya Miles

in Tales From the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era

This chapter recounts the rise of Savannah, Georgia as a key tourist attraction for visitors interested in the paranormal. The chapter focuses on the Sorrel-Weed House, reportedly Savannah’s most ... More

This chapter recounts the rise of Savannah, Georgia as a key tourist attraction for visitors interested in the paranormal. The chapter focuses on the Sorrel-Weed House, reportedly Savannah’s most haunted abode, to examine how stories of race, gender, and sexual improprieties during slavery drive “dark tourism” ventures today. It connects this analysis to historical context about black slaves, free blacks, and Haitian immigrants in 1830s-1860s Savannah.Less

‘Like children in a toy factory’

Sean F. Johnston

in The Neutron's Children: Nuclear Engineers and the Shaping of Identity

During the war, theoretical ideas had been translated with dizzying rapidity into immense industrial enterprises. The concentration of wartime experience at a handful of centres was crucial in ... More

During the war, theoretical ideas had been translated with dizzying rapidity into immense industrial enterprises. The concentration of wartime experience at a handful of centres was crucial in nurturing the new specialists. But the drive for the new field was provided by glimmers of technological possibilities and the opportunities that they might provide to build a new discipline. The design of ‘atomic piles’, or nuclear chain-reactors, became the aspiration and focus of activity at a half-dozen national labs. In the USA, ‘nucleonics’ was promoted as a new field, while in the UK nuclear engineering received little support from administrators as a new discipline. In each country, empirical engineering science became the focus of attention, leading to hybrid scientist-engineers unlike their pre-war counterparts.Less

Marching on to Savannah, September–December 1864

Brian Holden Reid

in The Scourge of War: The Life of William Tecumseh Sherman

This chapter studies the taking of Savannah in 1864. William T. Sherman, the author of the most famous and reviled of American campaigns, here relied entirely on himself. The scheme had been his, he ... More

This chapter studies the taking of Savannah in 1864. William T. Sherman, the author of the most famous and reviled of American campaigns, here relied entirely on himself. The scheme had been his, he had persuaded his skeptical chiefs to allow him to carry it out, and in doing so, he had taken a strategic gamble in Tennessee. Yet he had brought it off with aplomb. Moral opprobrium was often lavished, especially on the March to the Sea. Much of it is rooted in “the lies” of Confederate propagandists in the very final struggle for the moral high ground in waging this war. Many southern voices can be found in the sources expressing surprise at how well they were treated. However, Sherman’s style of war was far from novel. If we accept the centrality of plunder as a motive for taking part in war, then it follows that the southern pleading concerning the unique horrors to which they were subjected should be rejected. The criticism directed at Sherman is too personalized, as if he bears personal responsibility for every burning and act of vandalism. He has assumed a wholly false diabolic presence in this self-indulgent and self-serving folklore of victimhood. Indeed, the behavior of Sherman’s soldiers differs little from that of Union and Confederate troops on other fronts.Less

Prologue

Michael A. Gomez

in African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa

This prologue provides an overview of the history of early and medieval West Africa. During this period, the rise of Islam, the relationship of women to political power, the growth and influence of ... More

This prologue provides an overview of the history of early and medieval West Africa. During this period, the rise of Islam, the relationship of women to political power, the growth and influence of the domestically enslaved, and the invention and evolution of empire were all unfolding. In contrast to notions of an early Africa timeless and unchanging in its social and cultural categories and conventions, here was a western Savannah and Sahel that from the third/ninth through the tenth/sixteenth centuries witnessed political innovation as well as the evolution of such mutually constitutive categories as race, slavery, ethnicity, caste, and gendered notions of power. By the period's end, these categories assume significations not unlike their more contemporary connotations. All of these transformations were engaged with the apparatus of the state and its progression from the city-state to the empire. The transition consistently featured minimalist notions of governance replicated by successive dynasties, providing a continuity of structure as a mechanism of legitimization. Replication had its limits, however, and would ultimately prove inadequate in addressing unforeseen challenges.Less

Early Gao

Michael A. Gomez

in African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa

This chapter examines Gao's early historical significance, which is often relegated in the scholarship on early West Africa. This tendency issues from a failure to more critically assess the region's ... More

This chapter examines Gao's early historical significance, which is often relegated in the scholarship on early West Africa. This tendency issues from a failure to more critically assess the region's two most important thirteenth/seventeenth-century chronicles; a far more plausible rendering of Gao's importance forms when considering those chronicles in conjunction with the external sources, the archaeological record, and the epigraphic evidence. Further contesting the secondary literature is the conclusion that these very different sources are far more harmonious than has been represented. But in closely examining the sources, the very concept of bilād as-sūdān, or “land of the blacks,” must be attenuated, as it does not conform to the demographic realities of North and West Africa. The chapter then explains that Gao represents a crossroads to and through which migrated whole communities across an often artificial divide between Sahara and Savannah.Less

The Hollywood Site (9RI1) and the Foundations of Mississippian in the Middle Savannah River Valley

Adam King, Christopher L. Thornock, and Keith Stephenson

in Mississippian Beginnings

In this chapter we explore the role of the Hollywood site in the development of a unique version of Mississippian political culture that emerged along the middle Savannah River Valley. We argue this ... More

In this chapter we explore the role of the Hollywood site in the development of a unique version of Mississippian political culture that emerged along the middle Savannah River Valley. We argue this variant of Mississippian was inspired by the coming together of material culture, belief traditions, and people from the Central Mississippi valley and the middle Savannah valley. Those divergent traditions and practices were entangled through a set of mortuary rituals emplaced within Hollywood’s Mound B. What resulted was a new settlement system, emphasis on monumentality, and ceremonialism that was a unique historical creation.Less

From Aliens to Confederates: Catholics in the South, 1845–1865

James M. Woods

in A History of the Catholic Church in the American South, 1513–1900

Two episodes in the career of Fr. Jeremiah O'Neill illustrate the progression of feelings regarding the Irish in Savannah and much of the South. At first regarded as dangerous aliens, welcomed only ... More

Two episodes in the career of Fr. Jeremiah O'Neill illustrate the progression of feelings regarding the Irish in Savannah and much of the South. At first regarded as dangerous aliens, welcomed only to perform hard manual labor too dangerous to be carried out by African slaves, on the eve of the Civil War these Irish were needed as future allies in the South's coming struggle for independence. Ireland's influx was so massive in the United States that, after 1840, these immigrants became the face of Catholicism to Americans, North and South. How the Irish were first viewed as aliens and then became Confederates in one of the truly amazing episodes in southern history. However, natives of the Emerald Isle had migrated to the South long before the 1840s.Less

Epilogue: The mystery of beta decay

Robert T. Hanlon

in Block by Block: The Historical and Theoretical Foundations of Thermodynamics

The mystery of beta decay temporarily challenged the conservation of energy. The discovery of the neutrino solved this mystery and preserved the conservation law.

The Bosomworth Ordeal

John T. Juricek

in Colonial Georgia and the Creeks: Anglo-Indian Diplomacy on the Southern Frontier, 17331763

This chapter discusses Georgia after the end of the war which ended in October 1748 with the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. In November 1748, the British government decided upon a drastic reduction of ... More

This chapter discusses Georgia after the end of the war which ended in October 1748 with the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. In November 1748, the British government decided upon a drastic reduction of the military establishment in Georgia and South Carolina and Oglethorpe's regiment along with the three independent companies. The action resulted in a general exodus from the southern part of the colony to safer places. Georgian President Stephens noted that Georgia was now suffering more from Indian attacks. The action also resulted in a change of focus from the Anglo-Indian contacts along the Savannah River, and the authority to deal with the Indians finally devolved to the provincial government in Savannah.Less

Town, Region, and Nation

Tyler Boulware

in Deconstructing the Cherokee Nation: Town, Region, and Nation among Eighteenth-Century Cherokees

This chapter concerns the mid-eighteenth century Cherokee settlements. By 1750, four regions—the Lower, Middle, Valley, and Overhill Settlements—had been consistently recognized by both Euroamericans ... More

This chapter concerns the mid-eighteenth century Cherokee settlements. By 1750, four regions—the Lower, Middle, Valley, and Overhill Settlements—had been consistently recognized by both Euroamericans and Cherokees, with the Out Towns perhaps best characterized as an ephemeral quasi-region. Their locations were well known. The Lower and Middle Towns were mostly situated on the upper reaches of the Savannah and Little Tennessee Rivers, respectively. The Valley Settlements lay directly to the west of the Middle Towns along the Valley and Hiwassee Rivers, and the Overhills were primarily along the lower reaches of the Little Tennessee and Tellico Rivers. The Out Towns, which achieved temporary prominence during the Seven Years' War, existed to the north and east of the Middle Towns along the Tuckasegee River. While these brief descriptions might seem as if Cherokee regions were in proximity to one another, in fact the opposite is true.Less

The Final Months

Barbara Brooks Tomblin

in Bluejackets and Contrabands: African Americans and the Union Navy

As December 1864 came to a close, General William T. Sherman's army approached its objective: Savannah, Georgia. Sherman's march across Georgia afforded many Union soldiers the opportunity to become ... More

As December 1864 came to a close, General William T. Sherman's army approached its objective: Savannah, Georgia. Sherman's march across Georgia afforded many Union soldiers the opportunity to become acquainted with and befriend black civilians. Young northern soldiers hired black men as servants, teaching them to read and offering them tips on how to survive in their new world of freedom. In letters home, soldiers wrote of their admiration for blacks who assisted escaping Union prisoners and guided Union soldiers on foraging parties in search of food. The advance of Sherman's army across Georgia to Savannah and then northward encouraged thousands of slaves to seek freedom and start new lives. For many more African Americans along the southern coast or in Union-occupied areas inland, the final months of the Civil War brought a measure of peace and stability. For other African Americans, especially those in the path of Sherman's advance, 1865 brought turmoil.Less