Founded in 1841 in Marion, Alabama, Howard College provided a Christian liberal arts education for young men living along the old southwestern frontier. The founders named the school after eighteenth-century British reformer John Howard, whose words and deeds inspired the type of enlightened moral agent and virtuous Christian citizen the institution hoped to produce. In From Every Stormy Wind That Blows, S. Jonathan Bass provides a comprehensive history of Howard College, which in 1965 changed its name to Samford University. According to Bass, the “idea” of Howard College emanated from its founders’ firm commitment to orthodox Protestantism, the tenets of Scottish philosophy, the British Enlightenment’s emphasis on virtue, and the moral reforms of the age. From the Old South, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the New South, Howard College adapted to new conditions while continuing to teach the necessary ingredients to transform young southern men into useful and enlightened Christian citizens. Throughout its history, Howard College faced challenges both within and without. As with other institutions in the South, slavery played a central role in its founding, with most of the college’s principal benefactors, organizers, and board of trustees earning financial gains from enslaved labor. The Civil War swept away the college’s large endowment and growing student enrollment, and the school never regained a solid financial footing during the subsequent decades—barely surviving bankruptcy and public auction. In 1887, with the continued decline of southern agriculture, Howard College moved to a new campus on the outskirts of Birmingham, where its president, Rev. Benjamin Franklin Riley, a well-known New South economic booster, fought to restore the college’s financial health. Despite his best efforts, Howard struggled economically until local bankers offered enough assistance to allow the institution to enter the twentieth century with a measure of financial stability. The challenges and changes wrought by the years transformed Howard College irrevocably. While the original “idea” of the school endured through its classical curriculum, by the 1920s the school had all but lost its connections to John Howard and its founding principles. From Every Stormy Wind That Blows is a fascinating look into this storied institution’s history and Samford University’s origins.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is arguably the most important written document of the civil rights protest era and a widely read modern literary classic. Personally addressed to eight white Birmingham clergy who sought to avoid violence by publicly discouraging King’s civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, the nationally published “Letter” captured the essence of the struggle for racial equality and provided a blistering critique of the gradualist approach to racial justice. It soon became part of American folklore, and the image of King penning his epistle from a prison cell remains among the most moving of the era. Yet, as S. Jonathan Bass explains in the first comprehensive history of King’s “Letter,” this image and the piece’s literary appeal conceal a much more complex tale. This updated edition of Blessed Are the Peacemakers includes a new foreword by Paul Harvey, a new afterword by James C. Cobb, and a new epilogue by the author.
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post and Kirkus Reviews A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection A Southern Independent Booksellers Association “Spring Pick” This harrowing portrait of the Jim Crow South “proves how much we do not yet know about our history” (New York Times Book Review). Caliph Washington didn’t pull the trigger but, as Officer James "Cowboy" Clark lay dying, he had no choice but to turn on his heel and run. The year was 1957; Cowboy Clark was white, Caliph Washington was black, and this was the Jim Crow South. Widely lauded for its searing “insight into a history of America that can no longer be left unknown” (Washington Post), He Calls Me by Lightning is an “absorbing chronicle” (Ira Katznelson) of the forgotten life of Caliph Washington that becomes an historic portrait of racial injustice in the civil rights era. Washington, a black teenager from the vice-ridden city of Bessemer, Alabama, was wrongfully convicted of killing a white Alabama policeman in 1957 and sentenced to death. Through “meticulous research and vivid prose” (Patrick Phillips), S. Jonathan Bass reveals Washington’s Kafkaesque legal odyssey: he came within minutes of the electric chair nearly a dozen times and had his conviction overturned three times before finally being released in 1972. Devastating and essential, He Calls Me by Lightning demands that we take into account the thousands of lives cast away by the systemic racism of a “social order apparently unchanged even today” (David Levering Lewis).
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