"The author discusses his family’s search for meaning in the American South and the struggles to find a path to prosperity as a black person born into poverty"--

It's the summer of 1955. For Ethan Harper, a biracial kid raised mostly by his white father, race has always been a distant conversation. When he's sent to spend the summer with his aunt and uncle in small-town Alabama, his blackness is suddenly front and center, and no one is shy about making it known he's not welcome there. Enter Juniper Jones. The town's resident oddball and free spirit, she's everything the townspeople aren't--open, kind, and...

Neal Wooten grew up in a tiny community atop Sand Mountain, Alabama, where everyone was white and everyone was poor. Prohibition was still embraced. If you wanted alcohol, you had to drive to Georgia or ask the bootlegger sitting next to you in church. Tent revivals, snake handlers, and sacred harp music were the norm, and everyone was welcome as long as you weren't Black, brown, gay, atheist, Muslim, a damn Yankee, or a Tennessee Vol fan. The Wootens...

"Jennifer Brooks's Resident Strangers recovers the lost history of non-native laborers in the New South, utilizing the state of Alabama from 1865 through 1914 as the primary focus. Several immigrant groups-Chinese, southern, central, northern, and eastern Europeans, British, and Africans-arrived in Alabama during those years, mainly due to various campaigns to recruit workers. Brooks examines each group, analyzing the experiences of Chinese laborers...