San Antonio College Library

"This revised award-winning Yale dissertation brings to life the distinct but intersecting worlds of black and white Americans during the Depression. A collapsing cotton economy, alternating floods and droughts, and racial stratification meant that hard times came early and stayed late in Memphis and the Delta. By 1929, the region teetered on the brink of crisis and churches could no longer carry the burden. Change came quickly and relentlessly during...

The last Jewish tenant on North Main Street in Memphis, Lenny Sklarew, makes the startling discovery that he's a character in a book about his neighborhood, and the stories he finds within the book transform both himself and the fate of the Pinch.

The districts in which southern blacks lived from the pre-World War II era to the mid-1960s differed markedly from those of their northern counterparts. The African-American community in the South was (and to some extent still is) a physically expansive, distinct, and socially heterogeneous zone within the larger metropolis. It found itself functioning both politically and economically as a "separate city"--A city set apart from its predominantly...

"I wondered for many years," reveals the Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles, "why I was there at that crucial moment." Rev. Kyles stood only a few feet away from Dr. Martin Luther King when the eminent civil rights leader was assassinated. This Academy Award-nominated documentary features Rev. Kyles' reflections on the tragedy-and on the events leading up to it, most notably the sanitation workers' strike that Dr. King had come to Memphis to support. A view...

"In the sound of the 1960s and 1970s, nothing symbolized the rift between black and white America better than the seemingly divided genres of country and soul. Yet the music emerged from the same songwriters, musicians, and producers in the recording studios of Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama -- what Charles L. Hughes calls the country-soul triangle. In legendary studios like Stax and FAME, integrated groups of musicians...

This book is a descriptive catalogue of the Dixon Gallery in Memphis' remarkable holdings - donated by Warda Stevens Stout and considered to be among the most important in the world. But the book is also one of the first in English to describe in captivating detail the artisans, aesthetics, social and political intrigue, financial arrangements, and courtly ambitions that resided in porcelain factories at Ansbach, Frankenthal, Fürstenberg, Höchst,...

"In the summer of 1995, ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father's violence to the only place they have left: her mother's ancestral home in Memphis. Half a century ago, Joan's grandfather built this majestic house for her grandmother--only to be lynched, days after becoming the first Black detective in Memphis, by his all-white police squad. This wasn't the first time violence altered the course of Joan's family's trajectory,...

The adventures of a Mississippi innocent who, with two older friends, "borrows" his grandfather's automobile one day in 1905 and heads for Memphis.

"Punkzilla" is on a mission to see his older brother "P", before "P" dies of cancer. Still buzzing from his last hit of meth, he embarks on a days-long trip from Portland, Ore. to Memphis, Tenn., writing letters to his family and friends. Along the way, he sees a sketchier side of America and worries if he will make it to see his brother in time.