Overview

The most thorough history of Alabama’s Madison County region, widely available for the first time The 1956 dissertation by Frances Cabaniss Roberts is a classic text on Alabama history that continues to be cited by southern historians. Roberts was the first woman to earn a PhD from the University of Alabama’s history department. In the 1950s, she was the only full-time faculty member at what is now the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she was appointed chair of the history department in 1966. Roberts’s dissertation, “Background and Formative Period in the Great Bend and Madison County,” remains the most thorough history of the region yet produced. While certainly a product of its era, Roberts work is visionary in its own way and offers a useful look at Alabama’s rise to statehood. Thomas Reidy, editor of this edition, has kept Roberts’s words intact except for correction of minor typographical errors and helpful additions to the notes and citations. His introduction describes both the value of Roberts’s decades of service to UAH and the importance of her dissertation over time. While highlighting the great intrinsic value of Roberts’s research and writing, Reidy also notes its significance in demonstrating how the practice of history—its methods, priorities, and values—has evolved over the intervening decades. In her examination of Madison County, Roberts spotlights exemplars of civic performance and good community behavior, giving readers one of the earliest accountings of the antebellum southern middle class. Unlike many historians of her time, Roberts displays an interest in both the “common folks” and leaders who built the region—rural and urban—and created the institutions that shaped Madison County. She examines the contributions of merchants, shopkeepers, lawyers, doctors, architects, craftsmen, planters, farmers, elected and appointed officials, board members, and entrepreneurs.

Full Product Details

9780817361204

Table of Contents

Reviews

The Founding of Alabama is an exhaustive study of the Great Bend area of the Tennessee Valley and makes an original and significant contribution to the field. --Herbert James Lewis, author of Alabama Founders: Fourteen Political and Military Leaders Who Shaped the State Few bicentennial-inspired books are more deserving of consideration by Alabama historians than one that was actually written over sixty years ago but finally made easily available to the public: the late Frances Cabaniss Roberts's The Founding of Alabama: Background and Formative Period in the Great Bend and Madison County. . . . Readers of The Founding of Alabama will be struck by the depth of familiarity with the subject displayed by the author. The book evidences a thorough canvassing of resources on the history of the Madison County area, bringing to light information on the contours of its early development which stand up to scrutiny and remain authoritative in their particulars despite the intervening six decades of scholarship which have added to the story Roberts tells. --Alabama Review Just as fine as I remembered, exceedingly well researched, clearly and persuasively argued, and important beyond the limits of its subject, early antebellum Madison County. . . . The passage of the years has not in the least diminished the significance of its findings. --J. Mills Thornton III, author of Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma and Archipelagoes of My South: Episodes in the Shaping of a Region, 1830-1965

Author Information

Frances Cabaniss Roberts (1916–2000) was instrumental in founding the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she was a professor of history for more than forty years. She is author or coauthor of several books about Alabama history, including Civics for Alabama Schools and Shadows on the Wall: The Life and Works of Howard Weeden. Thomas Reidy is former lecturer of history at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. His articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications. In 2013, he led a campaign to pardon and exonerate the defendants in the Scottsboro Boys case.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available