What's COOL@HOOLE: Highlighting the collections, events, items, happenings, ideas, new acquisitions, discoveries, initiatives, and everything else that's Cool @ the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library at The University of Alabama.
Showing posts with label Summersell Center for the Study of the South. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Summersell Center for the Study of the South. Show all posts
To support the study of southern history and promote the use of the collections housed at the University of Alabama, the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South will offer four fellowships in the amount of $500 each for researchers whose projects entail work to be conducted in southern history or southern studies at the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library (http://www.lib.ua.edu/libraries/hoole/), the A.S. Williams III Americana Collection (http://www.lib.ua.edu/williamscollection), or in other University of Alabama collections.
Applicants should send two copies of
A current CV
One letter of recommendation (which may be sent under separate cover)
A description of the research project, no longer than two double-spaced pages, which includes a description of the particular resources to be used during the term of the fellowship
The deadline for applications to be received by the Summersell Center is March 16, 2012. Decisions regarding awards will be made by May 1, 2012, and research may be conducted anytime between June 1, 2012 and May 31, 2013. Both academic and non-academic researchers at any stage of their careers are encouraged to apply. Because fellowships are designed primarily to help defray travel and lodging expenses, however, eligibility is restricted to researchers living outside the Tuscaloosa area.
Send all application materials to: Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South Department of History University of Alabama Box 870212, 202 ten Hoor Hall Tuscaloosa, AL 35487
Any questions about the fellowships may be directed to Joshua Rothman, Director of the Summersell Center, at jrothman@bama.ua.edu or 205.348.3818.
Few Alabama authors have written more, and have produced so much variety as Wayne Greenhaw. He has written novels, plays, works of non-fiction, and several hundred articles in regional, national, and international publications.
Wayne will be at the Hoole Library on Wednesday, February 2, 2011 at 5 pm (talk to begin at 5:30 pm) to discuss his new book, Fighting the Devil in Dixie: How Civil Rights Activists took on the KuKlux Klan in Alabama (Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press, 2011)
Greenhaw is the 2006 recipient of the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer, given annually by the Alabama Writers’ Forum and Alabama Southern Community College at Monroeville’s Alabama Writers’ Symposium. In 2005, Greenhaw was recipient of the ninth Clarence Cason Award for Nonfiction, given annually by the University of Alabama’s College of Communication, joining such distinguished writers asGay Talese, Rick Bragg, Diane McWhorter, andHowell Raines.Greenhaw's short story, "The Old Guy," won first place in the Hackney Literary Awards at Birmingham Southern College's 2007 Writing Today conference.
After graduating from high school in 1958, Greenhaw traveled to Mexico from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, by four different trains. In the central Mexican mountain Spanish colonial town of San Miguel de Allende he attended Instituto Allende. He returned for the next three summers, studying at the writing center under Ashmead Scott.
At The University of Alabama he studied under the legendary Hudson Strode. In 1967, after working as a reporter for the Alabama Journal, Montgomery's afternoon newspaper, his first novel, the Golfer, was published by J.B. Lippincott Company.
After his first nonfiction book, The Making of a Hero: Lt. William L. Calley and the My Lai Massacre, was published in 1971, he was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard.
Throughout his years as a journalist in Alabama, where he was a stringer for the New York Times, Time magazine, and others, Greenhaw met and nourished friendships and relationships with Dr. Martin Luther King, Governor George C. Wallace, numerous political personalities and Southern cultural icons. Greenhaw was a protegé and mentee of fellow Alabama author and University of Alabama graduate, William Bradford Huie. As part of the 100th anniversary celebration of the birth of William Bradford Huie, Greenhaw, along with Huie's widow Martha, spoke at the opening of the exhibition on November 10, 2010.
Wayne Greenhaw's talk on his new book, Fighting the Devil in Dixie will begin at 5:30 pm, but doors will open at 5 pm. Books will be on sale for the event, and a reception will follow. This event is free and open to the public. The event is co-sponsored by University Libraries, the Alabama Center for the Book, the Summersell Center for the Study of the South, and the WBH@100 Collaborative Group. As part of the event, Wayne Greenhaw will present the Hoole Library with some personal copies of his works to be included in the Alabama Collection. In addition, we have a very special guest to introduce Mr. Greenhaw!
About Fighting the Devil in Dixie:
" Shortly after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Ku Klux Klan—determined to keep segregation as the way of life in Alabama—staged a resurgence, and the strong-armed leadership of Governor George C. Wallace, who defied the new civil rights laws, empowered the Klan’s most violent members.
As Wallace’s power grew, however, blacks began fighting back in the courthouses and schoolhouses, as did young Southern lawyers like Charles “Chuck” Morgan, who became the ACLU’s Southern director; Morris Dees, who cofounded the Southern Poverty Law Center; and Bill Baxley, Alabama attorney general, who successfully prosecuted the bomber of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and legally halted some of Wallace’s agencies designed to slow down integration. Fighting the Devil in Dixie is the first book to tell this story in full, from the Klan’s kidnappings, bombings, and murders of the 1950s to Wallace’s run for a fourth term as governor in the early 1980s, asking forgiveness and winning with the black vote."
A new offsite exhibit, Dwelling in the House of the Lord: Spirituality and Space in Tuscaloosa County was developed by Sarah Murchison Campbell, a graduate student in the Department of History. The exhibit project is a joint project of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South and the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library. Working with professors Kari Frederickson and Jessica Lacher-Feldman, Sarah Murchison Campbell's exhibit explores some of the most prevalent architectural styles in the Tuscaloosa area. This exhibit will be on display during the Race & Place conference to be held on April 11-12 in the AIME Building on The University of Alabama campus. The exhibit will be displayed in Gorgas Library following the conference. The Hoole Library holds a great deal of material relating to local and regional church history including published congregational histories, archival collections from local churches and church groups, and photographs and other materials from local churches and other religious organizations.
Sarah's introductory exhibit label explains her research goal for this exhibit:
"Architectural structures stand as valuable historical sources. The architectural language of those structures illuminates the nature, values, and personalities of a region as profoundly as any statistic or human voice. Whether expressed in courthouses, schools, houses of worship, city halls, libraries, or houses, the architectural language of buildings both shapes and reflects the organization, character and caliber of the communities in which they come to life. In a region historically distinguished by the persistence of a deep strain of Christian evangelical Protestantism, church buildings in particular have made a significant contribution to the South’s architectural identity.
The exhibit documents and interprets four major architectural styles embodied in Tuscaloosa County churches. The goal of the exhibit is to illuminate the important role church architecture plays in our community’s built environment. Though the architectural subjects chosen for this analysis represent a diverse body of denominational and congregational cultures and create a colorful portfolio of architectural styles, the project seeks to determine through visual and historical analysis whether there is a common language regarding “what is church?” By examining the ways in which each religious structure depicted uses, manipulates, or avoids altogether the traditional architectural concepts of place, form, light, space, movement, materials, scale, and beauty, this analysis seeks to reach a more nuanced understanding of how and why church buildings speak in the language that they do. What makes a church a church in the eyes of the building’s architect, its congregation, and sightseers and church shoppers passing by? How do church buildings define the space around it? Is structural functionality more important than aesthetic delight? Is the architectural composition and design of a church a reflection of the body of believers worshipping inside its walls? How do churches affect what our community looks like and how it operates?"
In 2006, the University of Alabama and Tuskegee University were awarded a grant, Bringing Alabama's African-American History to Light: A Model Partnership, from the NHPRC (National Historical Publications and Records Commission). The primary goals of this collaborative effort are to process, preserve, and make available to researchers selected collections from both The W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library and the Tuskegee University Archives. Both universities hired project archivists, Dana Chandler at Tuskegee and Merrily Harris at UA, who are responsible for the processing of collections that are important for further exploring and understanding the African-American experience in Alabama.
