The Annotated Pickett's History of Alabama
And Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi, from the Earliest Period
Albert James Pickett author James P Pate author James P Pate editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of Georgia Press
Published:1st Oct '18
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Albert James Pickett’s History of Alabama, and Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi, from the Earliest Period first appeared in Montgomery bookstores in September 1851. The buyers of his two-volume work paid $3 and the demand caused Charleston publisher Walker and James to issue a second and third edition before year’s end. William Gilmore Simms, the South’s most prolific writer, referred to the publication as “one of the prettiest specimens of book making ever done in America.” Newspapers in Alabama and literary journals in New York, Charleston, and New Orleans commended Pickett for his “absolutely enchanting” fresh writing style, for using “great care” throughout his book, and for “his important service to his state.” While some reviews questioned his narrative style, his sources, or his focus on facts, others credited Pickett for producing “a very valuable” chronicle for the people of Alabama and urged him to produce a third volume for “rising generations.”
Pickett opens volume one with Hernando de Soto’s explorations from Florida to Arkansas, encounters with native people, and discovery of the Mississippi River. He shifts from the early chiefdoms of the protohistoric period to the Natchez and smaller tribes in the coastal plain and then to the major Indian nations of the interior into the late eighteenth century. While the struggles of French Louisiana with the Natchez dominate the first volume, Pickett establishes the English presence with the founding of Oglethorpe’s Georgia colony and ends with the surrender of the French forts Tombecbé and Toulouse to the British. In volume two, Pickett traces the English push into present-day Alabama and Mississippi and the Revolutionary War era, the Spanish occupation of East and West Florida, the intrigues of Alexander McGillivray and William Bowles, and Georgia’s Yazoo land sales. He devotes several chapters to the Mississippi Territory, Aaron Burr, and the Indian unrest that led to the massacre at Fort Mims, the Creek War of 1813–14, and Andrew Jackson’s campaigns to destroy the Red Sticks and defeat the British in the Gulf South. Pickett concentrates his final chapters on the emergence of Alabama as a territory and state, including biographical sketches of early state leaders, the state constitutional convention, and Alabama’s first governor, William Wyatt Bibb, who died in 1820.
Despite Pickett’s failure...
In his History of Alabama, Albert James Pickett showed an unusual interest, for his time, in the intersections between colonists and the American Indians who inhabited what would become the state of Alabama. Pickett’s narrative is a crucial source for nineteenth-century interpretations and understandings of those relations, not only for Alabama, but for the South at large. Additionally, Pickett’s History includes some rare primary source material on Alabama’s Native people. We now, for the first time, have an annotated version of Pickett’s History. Historian James P. Pate offers not only a detailed introduction to the volume, but careful and much-needed annotations that clarify, correct, contextualize, and amplify Pickett’s text. This version will supplant all others.
* author of Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World *This new edition of Albert Pickett's History of Alabama is itself a historic event. Pickett's stories — many based on personal interviews — are now classic. They convey a sense of Alabama life before statehood no other book can match, rich with details. And Jim Pate’s excellent annotations help modern readers follow the narrative more easily. In nicely designed side notes, he identifies people and places that may no longer be familiar and also updates us on insights of historians today. We have needed an annotated History for a long time. This new edition fills that need beautifully.
* author of Alabama: The Making of An American State *With The Annotated Pickett's History of Alabama, Jim Pate invites modern readers to take a fresh look at a classic by Alabama's first historian, now illuminated by more than a century and a half of scholarship accomplished in Pickett's wake.
* author of A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813-1814 *James P. Pate has edited and annotated an important new edition of Albert James Pickett’s History of Alabama. This classic, nineteenth-century text receives thoughtful comments and annotations in his careful hands. Pate clearly introduces and contextualizes Pickett’s decades-long labor of love. Pickett used Spanish, French, and Native sources to tell the multilingual, diverse, and contested histories of the region. This new edition reminds readers of the long, deep, and fascinating history of the American South.
* author of Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South *The republication of Pickett's History in a new edition that is updated, annotated, and indexed for the first time is significant and will be a welcome addition to many bookshelves. Thanks to James Pate for reintroducing us to Pickett's sturdy narrative of all that transpired in the centuries before Alabama became a state.
* co-editor of Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast *Pickett’s History of Alabama, first published in 1851, has remained a primary source for understanding about the early history of Alabama. For decades, libraries shelved their copies in their rare books collections, behind locked doors. With its republication by NewSouth Books — in a handsome fully annotated, indexed, and illustrated edition made possible by Dr. James Pate — the book is given magnificent second life. Everyone should have a copy of this important work, and now can.
* co-author of Alabama: The History of a Deep South StaISBN: 9781588380326
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
736 pages