The Early Community at Bedford Park: Corporate Happiness in the First Garden Suburb

Bolsterli, Margaret Jones

Routledge & Keegan Paul

The early community at Bedford Park: "corporate happiness" in the first garden suburb

Ohio University Press

In this gracefully written memoir, Margaret Jones Bolsterli recounts her experiences as a lively, observant girl coming of age on an Arkansas cotton farm during the 1930s and 1940s. The Mississippi River's broad, flat floodplain provides the setting for her vivid strokes of memory and history each portraying key elements of the "southern sensibility." Bolsterli's themes include the southerner's strong sense of place, the penchant for stories rather than true dialog, a caste system based on formality and race, the underlying current of violence, and the repressive function of evangelical religion. She also examines manners, the patriarchal family structure, the "southern belle" concept, and the persistence of the memory of the Civil War. A fascinating chapter on food indicates how African and European customs are melded in southern cuisine to include chicken, pork, "cracklin' bread," gravy and biscuits, field peas, turnip greens, butter beans, devil's food cake, and dill pickles. Comparable to Shirley Abbott's Womenfolks, Born in the Delta is a valuable resource for those interested in southern history and culture, as well as readers who just enjoy a good story, well-told.

Born in the Delta: Reflections on the Making of a Southern White Sensibility

History

Americas

Univ of Tennessee Pr

From June 11,1890, to April 15, 1891, Nannie Stillwell Jackson wrote with pencils in a small ledger the best and meanest moments of her life on a small farm in southeast Arkansas. The combination of dreariness and charm that informs the diary is found on every page in the accounts of social gatherings, floods, poultry trades, dress-hemmings, and deaths. The experience is rich and awful, as is also what we may learn from it about the human spirit on the edge of civilization.

Vinegar Pie and Chicken Bread: A Woman's Diary of Life in the Rural South, 1890-1891 (President's Series in Arkansas & Regional Studies)

Biographies & Memoirs

Jackson, Nannie Stillwell

Regional U.S.

University of Arkansas Press

In her perceptive chronicle of everyday life on an Arkansas plantation, Harriet Bailey Bullock Daniel sheds light on the plantation economy, medical practices, religion, slavery, and sex roles in the period from 1849 until Daniel's marriage in 1872. The work is a rich mixture of mundane details surrounded by momentous events, and Daniel's sure grasp of both provides enjoyment and enlightenment for any reader.

A Remembrance of Eden: Harriet Bailey Bullock Daniel's Memories of a Frontier Plantation in Arkansas, 1849–1872

Literature & Fiction

In 2005 Margaret Jones Bolsterli learned that her great-great-grandfather was a free mulatto named Jordan Chavis, who owned an antebellum plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi. The news was a shock; Bolsterli had heard about the plantation in family stories told during her Arkansas Delta childhood, but Chavis’s name and race had never been mentioned. With further exploration Bolsterli found that when Chavis’s children crossed the Mississippi River between 1859 and 1875 for exile in Arkansas, they passed into the white world, leaving the family’s racial history completely behind. Kaleidoscope is the story of this discovery, and it is the story, too, of the rise and fall of the Chavis fortunes in Mississippi, from the family’s first appearance on a frontier farm in 1829 to ownership of over a thousand acres and the slaves to work them by 1860. Bolsterli learns that in the 1850s, when all free colored people were ordered to leave Mississippi or be enslaved, Jordan Chavis’s white neighbors successfully petitioned the legislature to allow him to remain, unmolested, even as three of his sons and a daughter moved to Arkansas and Illinois. She learns about the agility with which the old man balanced on a tightrope over chaos to survive the war and then take advantage of the opportunities of newly awarded citizenship during Reconstruction. The story ends with the family’s loss of everything in the 1870s, after one of the exiled sons returns to Mississippi to serve in the Reconstruction legislature and a grandson attempts unsuccessfully to retain possession of the land. In Kaleidoscope, long-silenced truths are revealed, inviting questions about how attitudes toward race might have been different in the family and in America if the truth about this situation and thousands of others like it could have been told before.

Kaleidoscope: Redrawing an American Family Tree

Community & Culture

Things You Need to Hear gathers memories of Arkansans from all over the state with widely different backgrounds. In their own words, these people tell of the things they did growing up in the early twentieth century to get an education, what they ate, how they managed to get by during difficult times, how they amused themselves and earned a living, and much more. Some of Margaret Bolsterli's "informants," as she calls them, are famous (Johnny Cash, Maya Angelou, Levon Helm, Joycelyn Elders), but many more are not. Their vivid personal stories have been taken from published works and from original interviews conducted by Bolsterli. All together, these tales preserve memories of ways of life that are compelling, entertaining, and certainly well worth remembering.

Things You Need to Hear: Collected Memories of Growing Up in Arkansas, 1890–1980

Things You Need to Hear gathers memories of Arkansans from all over the state with widely different backgrounds. In their own words, these people tell of the things they did growing up in the early twentieth century to get an education, what they ate, how they managed to get by during difficult times, how they amused themselves and earned a living, and much more.    Some of Margaret Bolsterli's "informants," as she calls them, are famous (Johnny Cash, Maya Angelou, Levon Helm, Joycelyn Elders), but many more are not. Their vivid personal stories have been taken from published works and from original interviews conducted by Bolsterli. All together, these tales preserve memories of ways of life that are compelling, entertaining, and certainly well worth remembering.

Historical

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bolsterli, Margaret Jones. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bolsterli, Margaret Jones

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bolsterli, Margaret Jones. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Early Community at Bedford Park: Corporate Happiness in the First Garden Suburb

The early community at Bedford Park: "corporate happiness" in the first garden suburb

Born in the Delta: Reflections on the Making of a Southern White Sensibility

Vinegar Pie and Chicken Bread: A Woman's Diary of Life in the Rural South, 1890-1891 (President's Series in Arkansas & Regional Studies)

A Remembrance of Eden: Harriet Bailey Bullock Daniel's Memories of a Frontier Plantation in Arkansas, 1849–1872

Kaleidoscope: Redrawing an American Family Tree

Things You Need to Hear: Collected Memories of Growing Up in Arkansas, 1890–1980

Things You Need to Hear: Collected Memories of Growing Up in Arkansas, 1890–1980