The best books about Alabama 📚

Sara Brooks was one of seventeen children raised by landowning African American farmers in Alabama. Hers is a lively and evocative account of growing up on the land in a loving family and a harsh coming of age at the hands of an abusive man. Like many southern black women of the era, Brooks is able to escape the bleak conditions of her life by moving first to Mobile and then to Cleveland where she worked as a domestic, eventually acquiring her own home and reuniting with the children she had been forced to leave behind. Hers is a hopeful… show more.

Pulitzer prize-winning and best-selling author Rick Bragg depicts hardscrabble, family life in rural Alabama, with a bad-tempered, hard-drinking father and a mother who won’t see her children go without. Bragg’s honest voice is immediate and compelling, and the visceral feel of the setting is the perfect backdrop for this rags to riches story of a man who triumphs over adversity to become a widely acclaimed writer. Bragg’s use of Southern vernacular is what makes this story. 

This book was originally published in 1895 and was a model of scholarship for its period, featuring a significant amount of research, familiarity with the locations where the war raged, and informed by interviews with actual participants. Certainly, contemporary treatments are more informed on many details. But because this book reigned for decades as the essential and virtually the only book-length treatment of the subject and influenced generations of historians of the war, it is an invaluable reference source for anyone interested in the history of the Creek War.