Reply #18: Sat thru 3 years of southern history and historiography seminars at U. of Alabama.

[nealmhughes]

I've also read all the WPA ex-slave narratives and most of the memoirs. The ex-slave narratives need to be read aloud for the forced dialectial spelling the editors used, and the fact that most of those interviewed were mere children in slave times.
Fenton's book is really good, she states how raw the southern frontier was in the 1840s in NE Ga. after the gold rush and the removal of the Cherokees.
My favorite though is a Tuscaloosa lady in the 40s who stated after Dorothea Dix travelled thru to lobby for a state "insane asylum" as Tuscaloosa was then the capitol that "she had the most charming voice and often sang for the lunatics, who found it quite calming."
You ought to be able to interlibrary loan it from any library in the US as it is in a tremendous amount of academic libraries with a southern history program.