KATHRYN TUCKER WINDHAM EXHIBIT

    A special exhibit of the books and papers of the late Kathryn Tucker
Windham is on display through fall semester in the Special Collections
and Archives Department of Auburn University's Ralph Brown Draughon
Library.

    The Selma native, who died June 12 at the age of 93, was the author
of a variety of books on southern folklore and folk life, including a
popular series of ghost stories. She was also well known as a
storyteller, practicing her craft on National Public Radio and at a
variety of festivals around the United States.

    "Ms. Windham has been very generous to Auburn University over the
years with her personal papers," said Dwayne Cox, head of Auburn
University Libraries' Special Collections and Archives Department. "Now
we want to honor her life by sharing with our patrons the things she
shared with us.

    The exhibit includes items that chronicle Windham's life, including
a handwritten manuscript for one of her books; fan letters from school
children; a 1991 resolution of the Alabama legislature honoring Windham;
and a variety of photographs of Windham and certificates she had been
awarded.

    The exhibit is open during all regular Special Collections and
Archives hours. For exact hours, go to
http://www.lib.auburn.edu/hoursdev/spec

    Auburn University Libraries serves the more than 24,000 students and
faculty of Auburn with a collection of more than 3.2 million volumes.
The Special Collections and Archives Department collects, preserves and
houses rare and unique items relating to the histories of Auburn
University, the state of Alabama, the southeastern region, the Civil
War, Native Americans and aviation. The Auburn University Digital
Library develops accessible digital collections of materials that
support the teaching and research of Auburn faculty and students and
further the mission of the university. These collections are made
available to educators and students worldwide.

(Contributed by Jayson Hill.)


  PLEASE NOTE:  due to vacation plans, the next What's New library
update will not appear until the week of July 18-22.

Tim Dodge
What's New Web Manager and Whatsnew-L Listserv Moderator



Tim Dodge
Reference Dept.
Ralph Brown Draughon Library
231 Mell St.
Auburn University, AL  36849-5606

Tel.  (334) 844-1729
Fax:  (334) 844-7751
E-mail:  dodgeti@...

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2011 08:57:59 -0500
From: Brian Nichols <bnichols@...>
Subject: Re: [ALMADISO] (no subject)
To: almadiso@...
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	 <CA+k7XrN7-pu1NphYN1kg7MdRKXiQevw93O3oXHYpBp7HOLcP_A@...>
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There is a Alabama Genealogy Network on Facebook at

http://www.facebook.com/groups/8210363481
--
Brian Nichols
http://www.n2genealogy.com

***************************************

Andrew Zimmerman.  Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the
German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South.  Princeton
Princeton University Press, 2010.  xii + 397 pp.  $35.00 (cloth),
ISBN 978-0-691-12362-2.

Reviewed by Daniel Speich Chassé
Published on H-TGS (July, 2011)
Commissioned by Corinna R. Unger

At the heart of Andrew Zimmerman's study lies a seemingly ordinary
colonial adventure set in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Commissioned by imperial authorities, several Western agricultural
experts went to Togo to transform the African colony into a cotton
economy. What makes Zimmerman's story extraordinarily interesting is
the fact that these experts from the United States belonged to an
emerging African American elite that formed around Booker T.
Washington's Tuskegee Institute, and that they cooperated with German
imperialism. In a brilliant yet complex account, Zimmerman connects
African, German, and American regional histories as elements of a
truly transnational history. Its core topics are disputes over free
labor, global agriculture, and structures of colonial rule and
exploitation. The book studies the emergence of a complex of
oppression and exploitation undergirded by race and sexuality in the
transnational world of imperialism. It is a model study for
transnational inquiries and probably one of the more important books
in the emerging body of global historical literature. Such a judgment
seems appropriate because Zimmerman not only tracks down the
interconnectedness of historical experiences in three continents, but
in the final two chapters, he also sketches the institutionalization
of transnational connections by virtue of international political
bodies, namely, the League of Nations and universalized bodies of
social scientific knowledge--in this case, agricultural sociology in
a Weberian tradition.

The account starts with the appointment of Baron Beno von Herman auf
Wein in 1895 as agricultural attaché to the German embassy in
Washington DC. Baron von Herman established contacts to Washington at
the Tuskegee Institute because he believed that the training programs
of this institution could be applied to the German colony of Togo. He
persuaded Washington to recruit "'two negro-cottonplanters and one
negro-mechanic ... who would be willing to come over to ... the
colony of Togo in West-Africa to teach the negroes there how to plant
and harvest cotton in a rational and scientific way'" (p. 5). In 1901
James N. Calloway, Allen Lynn Burks, Shepherd Lincoln Harris, and
John Winfrey Robinson arrived in Lomé. They established an
experimental farm in Tove including a group of six villages where
they bred a strain of cotton resembling the American Upland variety
and produced seeds for the entire German colony. Harris also built up
his own cotton farm, which was to set an example of cotton growing
and domestic economy for the African farmers. In 1902, five more
African American farming experts traveled to Togo; two of them
drowned upon landing. Harris died of a fever. Calloway returned in
1903 to Tuskegee and so did the rest of the staff in 1904. Only
Robinson, who learned to speak Ewe and married two Togolese women,
stayed on. He died in 1908 but the cotton projects proved rather
successful. The cotton variety the Americans introduced became a
standard seed in Togo because it produced a quality staple fit for
industrial processing on the European market. The agricultural
institutions the Americans had established remained in operation,
run, after 1914, by the French authorities and, after 1960, by
independent Togo's government.

Zimmerman's main ambition is to reconstruct all possible ambivalences
entailed in this small story and to place it in a large, global
historical background. Zimmerman identifies the central conflict of
the story in the strange alliance between African American
emancipation and German imperialism. The material on which his book
is based relates to the political economy of cotton production that
emerged in the New American South after emancipation. Once labor was
freed, Zimmerman argues, industrial capitalism needed institutions of
oppression and exploitation. A specific constellation of labor
ethics, labor organization, plant breeding, and social order emerged
from this challenge. For African American elites it entailed a
promise of economic emancipation; for German imperialists it entailed
the idea that it was possible to extract a larger amount of natural
resources from the colony through the use of coerced African labor.
One of the key witnesses of this tension between emancipation and
exploitation was W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois had studied sociology with
Max Weber and economics with Gustav Schmoller in Germany, thereby
becoming acquainted with ideas and theories designed in response to
Eastern Prussia's problems of agricultural organization, which were
structurally similar to those diagnosed by German imperial
administrators in Togo.

In five steps, Zimmerman unfolds a plethora of transnational and
transcontinental connections. The first chapter recalls the necessity
of qualitatively graded cotton for industrial processing. The slave
labor economy of the American South produced such a quality. The
disciplining of labor was a necessary corollary of industrialization.
Upon emancipation it was connected to a specific construction of
African American racial identity and to the political economy of the
New American South. In this situation, African American educational
perspectives as expressed in the work and mission of Washington
proved important. The contradictions between hierarchical social
organization, prevailing practices of racial segregation, and the
promises of rational farming laid the basis for the decidedly
political academic work of George Washington Carver and Du Bois. It
also informed Marcus Garvey's conviction that African Americans
needed to envision a future as settlers on the African continent.

In chapter 2, the reader is confronted with a completely different
historical setting, namely, the establishment of the modern welfare
state in Prussia. Zimmerman draws a line from the social reforms
initiated by Prussian reformers Karl Freiherr vom und zum Stein and
Karl August Freiherr von Hardenberg at the beginning of the
nineteenth century to the founding of the German "Verein für
Socialpolitik" in 1873. The debates of its members were linked to the
German project of "internal settlement" in East Prussia; to the rise
of Marxism as a leading ideology in the German Social Democratic
Party; and to the phenomenon of Polish labor migration, which
encompassed specific constructions of sexuality and racial identity.
It was this combination of contemporary problems against which Du
Bois defended his PhD thesis, "Der landwirtschaftliche Gross- und
Kleinbetrieb in den Vereinigten Staaten" (Large and Small
Agricultural Enterprises in the United States), in 1893 in Berlin.
Zimmerman carefully reconstructs those elements of Germany's
historical experience that were crucial for Du Bois. They included
the technical aspects of producing the one important staple crop
other than cotton, the sugar beet, a crop around which social
problems of agricultural organization emerged in Prussia in the
second half of the nineteenth century, a situation that to Du Bois
seemed comparable to the political economy of cotton production in
the American South.

Chapter 3 reconstructs the Togo experience of the African American
experts. The chapter discusses Togo's position in the Atlantic slave
trade and Germany's early imperial agenda. African forms of political
resistance and African emancipatory prospects became confronted with
African American ideas of modernization, rationalization, and racial
identity, producing a pan-African clash of concepts of civilization.
To those Zimmerman easily adds the German Social Democrats' notion of
modernization and race as expressed in the heated debate on an
assumed "Negerfrage" (Negro question). Most striking were the
unexpected synergies that resulted from the American system of
sharecropping in the cotton sector and German domestic experiences of
internal colonization and the cultivation of the sugar beet.
Zimmerman shows how this conjuncture resulted in the establishment of
new exploitative economic structures in Togo prior to 1914.

Chapter 4 takes up the new bodies of international and transnational
intellectual exchange that emerged after World War One. Zimmerman
connects the tradition of pan-African conferences to Woodrow Wilson's
imagination of a peaceful world order as embodied in the League of
Nations. As African Americans in favor of economic modernization
strongly criticized Belgian colonial practices in Congo, they laid
the ground for the construction of international alliances against
European imperialism. A non-paternalistic mode of developmental
intervention into the African continent became an obvious necessity
for European Social Democrats and African American intellectuals
alike, the realization of which albeit remained problematic
throughout the twentieth century.[1]

In chapter 5, Zimmerman shows how closely the design of a social
scientific perspective on a generalized historical process of
"modernization" was linked to European colonial experiences, African
American emancipatory perspectives, and African positions. His book
offers a very insightful reading of the history of sociology by
localizing Weber in an early global discourse that encompassed places
like Lomé, Atlanta, and Berlin. It found its first expression in the
Chicago School of Sociology founded by Robert E. Park, who not only
investigated labor and migration problems in the American Midwest but
also traveled extensively through Africa, basing his analytical tools
on the German academic tradition.

Zimmerman's account is excessively rich in detail. It exemplifies a
new mode of historical scholarship that boldly leaves behind
nationally and regionally consigned inquiries in favor of a
historical narrative of transnational connections across seemingly
firm boundaries of race and geography. Some general remarks seem thus
appropriate. Zimmerman's main thesis is that constellations which
emerged in the American South after emancipation were globalized in
the first decades of the twentieth century. According to his
interpretation, specific visions of the American South became a
template of the global South and thus magnified social scientific
perspectives from a domestic American context to the world at large,
thanks to German sociology. Such an account is fully convincing, even
more so as it clearly shows the limits of a historical approach that
aims to explain the postcolonial development endeavor as a result of
an assumed American exceptionalism.[2] Rather, Zimmerman rightly
informs us that global historical scholarship has to broaden its
perspective and to take into account European and African experiences
in order to fully understand the globalization of the modernization
concept, which structured global history in the twentieth century.
_Alabama in Africa_ shows that such an endeavor can offer new tools
to fully assess what Charles S. Maier has called a core conflict in
consigning the twentieth century to history, namely, the scandal of a
global economic divide between the North and the South, i.e., between
Europe and America on the one hand and Asia, Africa, and Latin
America on the other.[3] It is hard to imagine a more appropriate
mode of inquiry than set affront by Zimmerman in this highly
innovative book.

Still some reservations must be made. By relocating Alabama to Africa
Zimmerman opens up an enormously wide spun net of relations, which
cannot easily be accommodated in a historical narrative. To put it
more simply: this book is hard to read. The consequent transnational
approach produces a picture in which the length of cotton fibers is
positioned directly next to lynching mobs, and in which African
agricultural practices are linked to highly abstract notions in
academic Berlin. This structure produces a story that is not always
easy to follow. In terms of content, Zimmerman has a clear message.
In terms of form, however, his account sometimes runs astray in
details, which are important for understanding the different local
trajectories he wishes to combine but which in their sum obfuscate
the central argument.[4] It remains unclear what really stands at the
heart of the book. Is it the person of Calloway, the leader of the
Togo mission? Is it Washington, as the title suggests? Or is it
rather Du Bois, the discussion of whom actually fills the pages of
the book? Is it an American upland variety of cotton, or the Prussian
sugar beet featured on the cover jacket illustration? In its
intricate details, this book does not convince because it fails to
sum them up in one clear narrative. In its total, however, Zimmerman
has achieved what very few historians have achieved so
far--accounting for global connections. We must assume that the
misfit between content and form is a structural characteristic of
that global historiography, for which current trends in the
discipline call for. Zimmerman's account is tough reading and hard
stuff for reviewers, but excellent scholarship, and it sketches a
trajectory for future global historical research.

Notes

[1]. The moral ambivalence of the well-meant global development
endeavor in the post-1945 era has been highlighted, among others, by
Arturo Escobar, _Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of
the Third World_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

[2]. This is what David Ekbladh suggests in his _The Great American
Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World
Order_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

[3]. Charles S. Maier, "Consigning the Twentieth Century to History:
Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era," _American Historical
Review_ 105, no. 3 (2000): 807-831. On global inequality, see also
Alexander Nützenadel and Daniel Speich, "Editorial: Global
Inequality and Development after 1945," _Journal of Global History_
6, no. 1 (2011): 1-5.

[4]. Hayden White, _The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and
Historical Representation_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987).

Citation: Daniel Speich Chassé. Review of Zimmerman, Andrew,
_Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the
Globalization of the New South_. H-TGS, H-Net Reviews. July, 2011.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32394

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.

________________________________________
From: U.S. Southern Literature [H-SOUTHERN-LIT@...] On Behalf Of
Daniel Turner [danielcrossturner@...]
Sent: Friday, July 29, 2011 2:41 PM
To: H-SOUTHERN-LIT@...
Subject: CFP: Society for the Study of Southern Literature (Nashville, TN; March
29-April 1, 2012)

*Call for Papers: "Anniversaries"*

***Society for the Study of Southern Literature*

*Biannual Conference*

*Nashville, TN*

*March 29 � April 1, 2012*



Keynote Address by Barbara Ladd (Emory University)

Fiction Reading by Percival Everett (University of Southern California)



Coming amid the organized commotion surrounding the sesquicentennial of the
Civil War, the theme for the 2012 conference is �Anniversaries.�



The SSSL Programming Committee seeks abstracts for individual papers,
proposals for sessions, and themes for roundtables that encompass related
works from the most private form of "anniversaries" (marriages, births,
deaths, divorces etc.) to the most public (commemorations, celebrations,
festivals, and so on in southern writing, film, etc.).  The movement for a
New Southern Studies celebrated ten years at an MLA session in January,
2011, suggesting that critical and theoretical movements have reasons to
think of anniversaries too. We might, then, have sessions of self-analysis �
but a little shy of out and out narcissism on the one hand and hair-shirt
penance on the other. Those whose focus is the global South might explore
African, Caribbean, French, Spanish, and other non-U.S. legacies in southern
forms of commemorations such as funerals and Mardi Gras.



2012 is at or near the publication anniversaries of some pivotal southern
texts: Walker Percy�s *The Moviegoer*, C. Vann Woodward�s *The Burden of
Southern History*, Warren�s *The Legacy of the Civil War. *Patsy Cline was
Queen in the early 1960s: �Crazy,� �She�s Got You,� and �I Fall to Pieces�
were all released in 1961 and 1962. Harlan Howard, who wrote many of Patsy�s
songs, is buried in Nashville City Cemetery not too far from one of Lee�s
generals, Richard Ewell. The film adaptation of *To Kill a Mockingbird *was
released in 1962, as was *Intruder *(not *in the Dust*) directed by Roger
Corman and starring William Shatner.*  *2012 is also 200th anniversary of
the War of 1812. Possibilities range widely, crossing disciplines and media.



The conference will be held at the Scarritt-Bennett Center (see
www.scarrittbennett.org) on Thursday and Friday, and at Vanderbilt
University on Saturday. Keynote and Plenary sessions will be held on the
Vanderbilt campus. I chose Scarritt-Bennett because of cost and convenience;
as a converted college, it offers very reasonably-priced, renovated dorm
rooms. Visit their website and take the virtual tour. We�ve set aside a
block of fifty of these rooms, but more are available if demand is high and
if you make reservations early (i.e. before the end of February, 2012).
Fifty rooms are also blocked at the Embassy Suites Hotel at $139 per night,
with a deadline of March 5, 2012, for reservations. SSSL needs to book at
least these fifty rooms or we�ll pay a penalty. So, if you can afford it
plan to stay there.  The Embassy Suites--Vanderbilt (1811 Broadway,
Nashville, TN � don�t confuse this hotel with the one at the Nashville
airport) is a full-service hotel within walking distance of Vanderbilt
University and Scarritt-Bennett. The route leads through Vanderbilt�s
�college town� of caf�s and restaurants. A few blocks farther west, past the
Vanderbilt Medical Center, is Hillsboro Village, a local student hangout
with bars, coffee shops, banks, restaurants, a used bookstore, an indie
cinema (www.belcourt.org) -- just about all you could hope for when you need
relief from the conference. Nashville is, of course, Music City. We�ll have
a guide to performance venues when you check in. The Country Music Hall of
Fame and Museum is downtown, as is the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. *THE
*Parthenon is a longer walk, across the campus and West End Avenue in
Centennial Park, but worth the trek.



Until we get a program committee organized, you can send abstracts (500
words) to: michael.p.kreyling@....



Michael Kreyling

President, SSSL

Vanderbilt University