Distracted by Alabama
Regular price
€28.50
Regular price
€32.50
Sale
Sale price
€28.50
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
A01=James Seay Brown
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Alabama
Audubon Society
Author_James Seay Brown
automatic-update
basketry
Birmingham Alabama
Cahaba River
Cahaba River Society
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DNBT
Category=JBGB
Category=JFHF
Category=RN
Category=WN
COP=United States
crafts
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
environmental organizations
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=0
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
experiential education
fasola
fish snare
fishing
fishtraps
folklore
Foxfire
HABS
herbalist
herpetology
historic preservation
history
Homewood Alabama
landscape architecture
Language_English
Lookout Mountain
memoir
natural history
PA=Available
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
railroad hollers
redhorse
Sacred Harp
salamanders
Samford University
shape note singing
softlaunch
traditional art
Product details
- ISBN 9780817361655
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 178 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Mar 2024
- Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Reflections on fifty years of interaction with the people, places, wildlife, and folkways of Alabama
In 1971 James Seay Brown Jr. moved to Birmingham with his young family to start his first full-time teaching job at Samford University specializing in modern European history. Within days he discovered the Cahaba River, and soon was regularly exploring many of Alabama’s rivers and much of its countryside—from the Paint Rock River on the Tennessee line to Wolf Bay on the Intracoastal Waterway. He was enchanted both by the myriad animals and plants he discovered and by the surviving old-time settler and Native American folkways so closely tied to their seasonal migrations and development.
About the same time, Brown became particularly interested in the folkways that arose from European cultural nationalism in the Romantic age. As he delved deeper into folklore studies for their insights into history, local examples presented themselves in abundance—Sacred Harp singers and African American railroad callers, the use of handmade snares and stationary fishtraps to catch river redhorse and freshwater drum during their spawning cycles, white oak basketmaking and herbal medicine traditions, the evolution of the single-pen log cabin into the impressive two-story I-house, and many more.
Together with colleagues in Samford’s biology and geography departments, Brown adapted a “geology to future planning” model for introducing students to land use patterns over time in various parts of the world. Although he took students to 22 countries on five continents, he kept returning to Alabama examples. When he integrated experiential education teaching techniques including crafts apprenticing, cultural journalism, and adventure-based education into his classes, many of them used examples and materials from Alabama.
Interspersed throughout with insights drawn from Brown’s academic career and his work with a variety of Birmingham-area community organizations, Distracted by Alabama traces a very personal, historically informed, and idiosyncratic profile of a region in transition in the mid to late twentieth century, and is a testament to the ideals and value of liberal arts education in a society.
In 1971 James Seay Brown Jr. moved to Birmingham with his young family to start his first full-time teaching job at Samford University specializing in modern European history. Within days he discovered the Cahaba River, and soon was regularly exploring many of Alabama’s rivers and much of its countryside—from the Paint Rock River on the Tennessee line to Wolf Bay on the Intracoastal Waterway. He was enchanted both by the myriad animals and plants he discovered and by the surviving old-time settler and Native American folkways so closely tied to their seasonal migrations and development.
About the same time, Brown became particularly interested in the folkways that arose from European cultural nationalism in the Romantic age. As he delved deeper into folklore studies for their insights into history, local examples presented themselves in abundance—Sacred Harp singers and African American railroad callers, the use of handmade snares and stationary fishtraps to catch river redhorse and freshwater drum during their spawning cycles, white oak basketmaking and herbal medicine traditions, the evolution of the single-pen log cabin into the impressive two-story I-house, and many more.
Together with colleagues in Samford’s biology and geography departments, Brown adapted a “geology to future planning” model for introducing students to land use patterns over time in various parts of the world. Although he took students to 22 countries on five continents, he kept returning to Alabama examples. When he integrated experiential education teaching techniques including crafts apprenticing, cultural journalism, and adventure-based education into his classes, many of them used examples and materials from Alabama.
Interspersed throughout with insights drawn from Brown’s academic career and his work with a variety of Birmingham-area community organizations, Distracted by Alabama traces a very personal, historically informed, and idiosyncratic profile of a region in transition in the mid to late twentieth century, and is a testament to the ideals and value of liberal arts education in a society.
James Seay Brown Jr. is emeritus professor of history at Samford University. He is author of Fairy Tales, Patriotism and the Nation-State: The Rise of the Modern West and the Response of the World and editor of Up before Daylight: Life Histories from the Alabama Writers’ Project, 1938–1939. He has served as president of the Alabama Folklife Association and remains active in academic and community life.
