Description
Book SynopsisThe most thorough history of Alabama’s Madison County region, widely available for the first time. The 1956 dissertation by Frances Cabaniss Roberts is a classic text on Alabama history that continues to be cited by southern historians. Roberts was the first woman to earn a PhD from the University of Alabama’s history department.
Trade ReviewFew bicentennial-inspired books are more deserving of consideration by Alabama historians than one that was actually written over sixty years ago but finally made easily available to the public: the late Frances Cabaniss Roberts's
The Founding of Alabama: Background and Formative Period in the Great Bend and Madison County. . . . Readers of
The Founding of Alabama will be struck by the depth of familiarity with the subject displayed by the author. The book evidences a thorough canvassing of resources on the history of the Madison County area, bringing to light information on the contours of its early development which stand up to scrutiny and remain authoritative in their particulars despite the intervening six decades of scholarship which have added to the story Roberts tells." -
Alabama Review"Just as fine as I remembered, exceedingly well researched, clearly and persuasively argued, and important beyond the limits of its subject, early antebellum Madison County. . . . The passage of the years has not in the least diminished the significance of its findings.!" - J. Mills Thornton III, author of
Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma and
Archipelagoes of My South: Episodes in the Shaping of a Region, 1830–1965"
The Founding of Alabama is an exhaustive study of the Great Bend area of the Tennessee Valley and makes an original and significant contribution to the field." - Herbert James Lewis, author of
Alabama Founders: Fourteen Political and Military Leaders Who Shaped the State
