Publications to Note

Arcadia Publishing published Historian Jeff Sellers’ Tennessee State Capitol. Sellers, the director of education and community engagement at the Tennessee State Museum assembled a collection of images from archives and private collections. Sellers reviews the construction design of the Tennessee State Capitol’s noted architect William Strickland’s fastidious Greek Revival design, one of the last great monuments to Greek Revival architecture in America, its “Civil War - era military occupation, the constant determination of preservation efforts, and the ever-changing neighborhood that surrounds the capitol.” He also introduces the readers to the individuals who breathed life into what became known as “the people’s house.” Among those who helped the capitol become the “People’s house” were fifteen enslaved men, loaned to the state government by A.G. Payne, a Nashville stone mason. For a year they carved out the Capitol’s cellar, their skilled labor worth twice as much as the unskilled labor of free men, broke through tons of limestone rock and carting it away after digging. Convict labor also contributed to the construction of the state’s Capitol building, which is one of the most historical and architectural buildings in the nation. Completed fourteen years later in 1859, the Tennessee State Capitol sits on what was originally known as Campbell’s Hill named for its owner, Judge George Washington Campbell. Since the laying of the cornerstone, it has been known as Capitol Hill. Illustrated with numerous images that take the reader through the state’s various historical stages, Sellers’ Tennessee State Capitol is a must have tome for Tennesseans. Paperback $24.99.

Louisiana State University Press published Keith M. Finley’s From Slavery to Segregation: Reckoning with White Supremacy in the American South. This tome explores the strategic features of shaping southern politics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as explicated in the region’s justification of its racial structures that treated enslavement and racial apartheid as part of the same systems rather than as separate institutions rooted in different periods. While emphasizing the all-encompassing overview of the South’s racial and political thinking, Finely, an associate professor of history and assistant director of the Center for Southeast Louisiana Studies at Southeastern Louisiana University, stresses the American struggle with racial injustice, while well-defined and executed in the South, plagued all of America. In this volume, the author reveals elements of continuity and change in the South’s identity. The Old South and the New South shared a comparable constellation of philosophies that imparted arguments spreading their corresponding race-based social orders that took the form of a unity of perspicacity regarding race, a perception of being assailed by outsiders, and a “succession of appeals to the highest secular authority in the pantheon of regional and American beliefs - the Constitution.” The author of Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight Against Civil Rights 1938-1965 illustrates how the twentieth century South narrative is linked to the nineteenth century. This work illustrates that “history, after all, is best understood as a continuum not a series of isolated events that fall neatly into a preordained timeframe.” Hardcover, $45.00

Louisiana State University Press also published Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution by Timothy Messer-Kruse. In this tome the author extracts a long-hidden factor that led to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Messer-Kruse argues that scholars have discounted Americans’ desire to compel Britain to return fugitives from enslavement as a driving force behind the convention. Enslaved individuals, when offered freedom, joined forces with the British during the Revolutionary War. After the defeat of the British at the Battle of Yorktown, which ended on October 19,1781, American diplomats demanded the return of the fugitive enslaved. The standoff over the those who escaped enslavement escalated following the Revolution as Britain failed to abandon the western forts it occupied and took steps to curtail American commerce. When the British refused, several states confiscated Loyalist estates and blocked payment of English creditors, hoping to apply pressure on the Crown to hand over those who escaped the institution of enslavement. The Treaty of Paris signed by U.S. and British Representatives on September 3, 1783, ended the War of the American Revolution. However, state laws conflicted with the 1783 treaty as it violated the Articles of Confederation - the first constitution of the American nation. However, Congress lacked an executive branch or a federal judiciary, consequently it had no way to compel states to comply. Messer-Kruse, a professor in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University, contends that the issue prompted the founders to consider scraping the Articles of Confederation and drafting a superseding document that would dramatically increase federal authority - the Constitution that was ratified on June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the thirteenth state to approve the Constitution that became the official framework of the United States government.  Hardcover, $45.00

Vanderbilt University Press published Nowville: The Untold History of Nashville’s Contemporary Art Scene by Joe Nolan. This title is an oral history of Nashville’s art scene that began in the 1990s. Nolan pursues Nashville art punks, art monks, radical art students, and visionary pioneers to disclose what made their moments in Nashville special. He alerts the reader that Nashville’s modern art legacy is rooted in three events in the city’s Edgehill and North Nashville neighborhoods, in the first half of the twentieth century; Aaron Douglas’s founding of the Art Department at Fisk University in the 1930s; William Edmondson becoming the first African American artist to mount a one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1937; and Georgia O’Keeffe’s gifting the Stieglitz Collection to Fisk University in 1949. Nolan, an intermedia artist based in Nashville whose practice includes photography, multimedia paintings, public radio poetry broadcasts, and public projects, spoke with numerous individuals who created Nashville’s contemporary art renaissance. Composed of thirteen chapters, Nowville provides the reader with the origin story of Nashville’s surging contemporary art scene told by the ones who were there. It is not an account about commercial spaces or official institutions - this is the story of moldy warehouse studios and improvised galleries, happy-kegger after-parties and front lawn art sales, exhibitions in apartment living rooms and secret art displays hidden in plain sight. Paperback, $24.95

Vanderbilt University Press additionally published The Kingdom of the Poor: My Journey Home by Charles Strobel. With the assistance of his niece, Katie Seigenthaler, his colleague, Amy Frogge, and edited by Ann Patchett, Charles Strobel sets about to explain why he was born. A native Nashvillian, Charles Frederick Strobel graduated from Father Ryan High School in 1961. After high school, Strobel studied for the priesthood. He attended St. Mary College in Lebanon, Kentucky, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Furthering his education, he earned a master’s degree in education from Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, and a master’s degree in theology from The Theological College of The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. While in D. C., he became active in the Modern Civil Rights Movement. On January 31, 1970, Bishop Joseph Durick ordained Strobel into the priesthood at the Cathedral. Known for his generosity toward the city’s less fortunate and unhoused, Strobel began the Room in the Inn, a program that provided shelter from the harsh cold nights. The Kingdom of the Poor reveals a people narrative and the occurrences that led Father Strobel to epitomize Matthew 22:39 “. . .Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Hardcover, $29.95

Yale University Press published Raymond Arsenault’s John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community. The John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History emeritus at the University of South Florida, Dr. Arsenault is the author of several award-winning books including Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice; The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America; and Arthur Ashe: A Life. His John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community is the first full-length biography of Georgia’s late Congressman John Robert Lewis that describes his search for a more perfect union. This tome reveals Lewis’s time as a planner and participant of protests that began in Nashville and continued throughout the South, his service in the United States House of Representatives from Georgia’s 5^th Congressional District from 1987 until his death in 2020, and his time as an American elder statesman. This work intersects with present day events and suggests the idea that history sets the context for the present or as William Shakespear noted in his play The Tempest, “what is past is prologue.” Arsenault traces Lewis’s upbringing in rural Alabama, his activism as a participant in the Nashville Sit-in Movement, Freedom Rider, and leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, his championing of voting rights and anti-poverty initiatives, and his decades of service as the “conscience of Congress.” Lewis’s activism led to repeated arrests and beatings, most notably when he suffered a skull fracture in Selma, Alabama, during the 1965 police attack later known as Bloody Sunday. He was instrumental in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and in Congress he advocated for racial and economic justice, immigration reform, LGBTQ rights, and national health care. Lewis never wavered in this pursuit of the “beloved community,” and though he is no longer among the living, in death his guidance prevails, motivating mobilization and resistance in the struggle for social justice. Hardcover $35.00