Reflections on a half century's worth of interaction with the people, places, wildlife, and folkways of Alabama In 1971 James Seay Brown Jr. moved to Birmingham with his young family to start his first full-time teaching job at Samford University specializing in modern European history. Within days he discovered the Cahaba River, and soon was regularly exploring many of Alabama's rivers and much of its countryside-from the Paint Rock River on the Tennessee line to Wolf Bay on the Intracoastal Waterway. He was enchanted both by the myriad animals and plants he discovered and by the surviving old-time settler and Native American folkways so closely tied to their seasonal migrations and development. About the same time, Brown became particularly interested in the folkways that arose from European cultural nationalism in the Romantic age. As he delved deeper into folklore studies for their insights into history, local examples presented themselves in abundance-Sacred Harp singers and African American railroad callers, the use of handmade snares and stationary fishtraps to catch river redhorse and freshwater drum during their spawning cycles, white oak basketmaking and herbal medicine traditions, the evolution of the single-pen log cabin into the impressive two-story I-house, and many more. Together with colleagues in Samford's biology and geography departments, Brown adapted a "geology to future planning" model for introducing students to land use patterns over time in various parts of the world. Although he took students to 22 countries on five continents, he kept returning to Alabama examples. When he integrated experiential education teaching techniques including crafts apprenticing, cultural journalism, and adventure-based education into his classes, many of them used Alabama examples and materials. Interspersed throughout with insights drawn from Brown's academic career and his work with a variety of Birmingham-area community organizations, Distracted by Alabama traces a very personal, historically informed, and idiosyncratic profile of a region in transition in the mid to late twentieth century, and is a testament to the ideals and value of liberal arts education in a society.

Update for readers of Fairy Tales This text argues that the big story of the last 500 years is that  a) with unprecedented new power, the West explored and then came to dominate the non-western world; and then  b) the rest of the world fought back to win its independence, though in part by borrowing some of that new western power.  These are the two halves of the text, which might also be used for a modern western civ class that wanted to tilt a bit in the direction of world history.  For the first half, what a casual observer sees first is technology, and the first chapter is indeed on the rise of European technology from 1300-1900.  But the deeper power came from the world of ideas that changed human motivation.  The next three chapters explore political nationalism as it emerged in the Enlightenment and French Revolution, cultural nationalism as it emerged from the Romantic Age in the Germanies, and socialism as it emerged from the Romantic Age in Russia.  These three chapters also give the main background of European history down to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.  Three smaller European national experiences then show how political and cultural nationalism and socialism worked out there (in the context of the force field of great power politics). The more innovative half of the book comes with the last seven chapters, one each on how western challenge and local response it played out on a key transportation corridor of each major region of the world (two for East Asia):              – Latin America’s Veracruz-to-Mexico City corridor of Mexico;              – The Mideast’s the Damascus-south-to-Aqaba and the Nile Delta corridor              – Africa’s Durban-to-Johannesburg and Pretoria corridor of South Africa              – South Asia’s Grand Trunk Road corridor of India and Pakistan              – Southeast Asia’s Java Roads corridor from Jakarta to Surabaya of Indonesia              – East Asia’s Yangtze River (Chang Jiang) corridor of China              – East Asia’s Nakasendo/Tokaido corridor from Tokyo to Kyoto of Japan It’s regional history in microcosm – sometimes more, sometimes less representative of the whole region, but in greater depth and keeping history more on a personal scale.  Every chapter begins with a nod to area language(s), and then spends somewhat more time exploring the topography and texture of the land (the stage set on which the history played out).  Pre- and early history are quickly surveyed, slowing down somewhat around 1500 and even more around 1800.  Every chapter has a matching Google Earth folder of literally hundreds of points, lines, areas and image overlays; footnotes in the text refer to matching layer numbers in the Google Earth folders.  So the text itself has not single picture, chart, map or scrap of color – but it is all done more engagingly in Google Earth, to which your students should take as ducks to water.  “Read, travel, read, travel, and repeat,� goes a famous formula for cultural education.  Though virtual travel will never replace the real thing, Google Earth’s embedded Panoramio and Cities 360 photos icons, plus the effortless 3-D-ness of its navigation, make much of that “read, travel� feedback possible.   It’s the first modern world history text that really integrates GIS.  Worth a shot?