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An agricultural community that was founded by German immigrants from Cincinnati, Ohio, brought about an agricultural revolution in the best traditions of innovation in New South. The city's expanding prosperity in mercantile and manufacturing that were in contrast to state and national economic downturns commemorates Cullman's German founders.

A Changing Wind: Commerce and Conflict in Civil War Atlanta. By Wendy Hamand Venet. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2014. Pp. 304. $27.95.)The great transportation and business center of [...]

Civil War Camp Sumter, the notorious Confederate prison popularly known as Andersonville, became the world's first great concentration camp. Almost one third of the some 40,000 federal prisoners who entered its gates remain there today in its cemetery. The National POW Museum, representing all of America's wars, is part of the modern national park and cemetery on the site. The volumes of material in print about this prison do not, until now, include an in depth discussion of the subject of escape. Contrary to popular myth only some two dozen men broke out of Andersonville and successfully reached Federal lines. And despite legends to the contrary, almost none of them escaped by tunnel. This article uses statistics and personal narratives to explore how isolation thwarted efforts to flee the high mortality rate of this prison. Although the article covers many factors unique to Andersonville, such as POWs helped by slaves, it also compares fleeing this prison to generalities about escapes from confinement in later wars.

Eugene Allen Smith's Alabama: How a Geologist Shaped a State. By Aileen Kilgore Henderson. Foreword by Lewis Dean. (Montgomery, Ala., and Louisville, Ky.: NewSouth Books, c. 2011. Pp. [xvi], 256. [...]

The article explores the cultural, ethnic and racial history of the Briar Creek community, along with the history of the Battle of Briar Creek in 1779. Topics covered include the public acts of political resistance in Georgia, the division of Georgia's state government into partisan factions and the decision by Lieutenat Colonel John Maitland to maintain a British presence in the Georgia backcountry. Also mentioned is the key to the success of the southern strategy.

The article explores the stories of non-enslaved African Americans in early Georgia that represent how an individual act of courage becomes so much more through unintended consequences. The start of the thirteenth colony as a humanitarian experiment to rehabilitate middle class white families in the New World with the founding of Savannah in 1733 is tackled. The move of the state to pass restrictions on manumitting slaves and all but outlawed non-slave African Americans is also explored.