William Seale

The Architecture of William Nichols: Building the Antebellum South in North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi is the first comprehensive biography and monograph of a significant yet overlooked architect in the American South. William Nichols designed three major university campuses--the University of North Carolina, the University of Alabama, and the University of Mississippi. He also designed the first state capitols of North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi. Nichols's architecture profoundly influenced the built landscape of the South but due to fire, neglect, and demolition, much of his work was lost and history has nearly forgotten his tremendous legacy. In his research onsite and through archives in North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, Paul Hardin Kapp has produced a narrative of the life and times of William Nichols that weaves together the elegant work of this architect with the aspirations and challenges of the Antebellum South. It is richly illustrated with over two hundred archival photographs and drawings from the Historic American Building Survey.

This story of the young city of Washington coming up in the international scene is populated with presidents, foreign diplomats, civil servants, architects, artists, and influential hosts and hostesses who were enamored of the idea of world power but had

Recovered in the mid-1990s from the attic of a Turnbull family descendant, Martha Turnbull's garden diary offers the most extensive surviving first-hand account of nineteenth-century plantation life and gardening in the Deep South. Landscape architecture professor and preservationist Suzanne Turner spent fifteen years transcribing and annotating the original manuscript, making it accessible to twenty-first-century gardening enthusiasts. The resulting dialogue between Turnbull's diary entries and Turner's illuminating notes demonstrates the pivotal role that kitchen and pleasure gardens held in the lives of planter families. In addition, the diary documents the relationship between the mistress and the enslaved whose labor made her vast gardens possible. Turner's exquisite interpretation reveals not only an energetic gardener but also a well-read one, eager to experiment with the newest gardening trends. Illustrated with engravings from period books, journals, and nursery catalogs, Turner's annotations provide the reader with a deeper understanding of American horticultural history. The diary, spanning the years 1836 through 1894, reveals the portrait of a courageous and resilient woman. After the tragic loss of her two sons and husband prior to the Civil War, Martha assumed full responsibility for her family and the plantation. She endured living under siege during the war and persevered during Reconstruction by growing and selling food as a truck farmer. By working daily in her ornamental garden and faithfully maintaining her diary for nearly sixty years, she found the solace and peace to look forward to the future.

A history of the building and restoration of one of the nation's most prominent capitols.

Although Sam Houston has been the subject 6f several biographies and· many historical articles, little attention has been paid to his third wife, whose enormous influence on the Liberator of Texas has never before been examined closely. In this first biography of Margaret Lea Houston, a remarkable woman is finally awakened from the historical sleep which has enveloped her for over a century. Alabama-born Margaret Lea was just a schoolgirl when she first saw Sam Houston arrive at New Orleans after the Battle of San Jacinto to have his wounds tended. ""She later described having a premonition that she would some day meet Sam Houston,"" says· William Seale. ""But she told that story many years later, after she had become his wife.""For marry Sam Houston she did-in the face of strong opposition of family and friends and of Houston's friends and advisers. Twenty-six years younger than her husband, this protected child of a Baptist minister set out to change the life of the frontier hero. Aware that alcoholism and the sorrows of personal misfortune weighed upon him, she battled the former and sought to alleviate the latter. Her abiding faith in him, coupled with his unceasing devotion to her and to their children, is a central theme of this book. The author explores the personality of Margaret, the idealist whose absorption in religion often led her to melancholia, the reader of romances who was never able to come to terms with the Texas wilderness, the wife who strummed her guitar and wrote love poems during her husband's absences on affairs of state. This account of Sam Houston's wife, which presents details of the general's life not hitherto explored, is in addition a colorful picture of the time in which she lived. It is a realistic appraisal of Sam and Margaret Houston, to which the author has brought a fresh and sympathetic understanding. In writing the richly human story, he has made extensive use of unpublished manuscripts and original documents in private hands and public archives.