Cities of Silence is a richly illustrated, evocative study of five of Mobile's historic burial grounds: Magnolia Cemetery. Church Street Graveyard, Old Catholic, Sha'arai Shomayim, and Ahavas Chesed cemeteries. Through the use of historic photographs and maps as well as more than 70 contemporary black-and-white images by photographer Sheila Hagler, John Sledge thoroughly examines the development of these solemn spaces. Briskly paced and absorbing, Cities of Silence moves the reader through a world of mourning and ritual scarcely imaginable today. Sledge probes the meanings and practices of Victorian burials and jazz funerals and explains national trends in cemetery landscaping and funerary sculpture. Hagler's breathtaking photographs document the wealth of sophisticated cast iron and beautiful gravestone art characteristic of these cemeteries. Together they unearth a rich stock of legend and folklore associated with Mobile's hallowed grounds, including the stories of the Boyington Oak, grown from the grave of a falsely accused man, and the enigmatic Goddess of Magnolia, said to summon storms when attempts are made to move her. Mobile's cemeteries have been shaped by pestilence, war, and deep-seated religious beliefs. From the devastation of the 1819 yellow fever epidemic to the persistent sectional loyalty demonstrated by the annual decoration of Confederate Rest, from descriptions of arcane Mardi Gras practices to the variety of foreign inscriptions indicating Mobile's cosmopolitan population, this book serves as an important cultural analysis of the Port City and its peoples. Even more than this, Cities of Silence is a celebration of the human spirit in the face of life's greatest test - death itself.

Cities of Silence: A Guide to Mobile's Historic Cemeteries

Arts & Photography

Sledge, John S.

Hagler, Sheila

Photography & Video

University Alabama Press

An accessibly written and dramatic account of Alabama’s role in the Civil War. The Civil War has left indelible marks on Alabama’s land, culture, economy, and people. Despite its lasting influence, this wrenching story has been too long neglected by historians preoccupied by events elsewhere. In These Rugged Days: Alabama in the Civil War, John S. Sledge provides a long overdue and riveting narrative of Alabama’s wartime saga. Focused on the conflict’s turning points within the state’s borders, this book charts residents’ experiences from secession’s heady early days to its tumultuous end, when 75,000 blue-coated soldiers were on the move statewide. Sledge details this eventful history using an impressive array of primary and secondary materials, including official records, diaries, newspapers, memoirs, correspondence, sketches, and photographs. He also highlights such colorful personalities as Nathan Bedford Forrest, the “Wizard of the Saddle”; John Pelham, the youthful Jacksonville artillerist who was shipped home in an iron casket with a glass faceplate; Gus Askew, a nine-year-old Barbour County slave who vividly recalled the day the Yankees marched in; and Augusta Jane Evans, the young novelist who was given a gold pen by a daring blockade runner. Sledge offers a refreshing take on Alabama’s contributions to the Civil War that will intrigue anyone who is interested in learning more about the state’s war efforts. His narrative is a dramatic account that will be enjoyed by lay readers as well as students and scholars of Alabama and the Civil War. These Rugged Days is an enthralling tale of action, courage, pride, and tragedy, making clear the relevance of many of the Civil War’s decisive moments for the way Alabamians live today.

These Rugged Days: Alabama in the Civil War

History

Americas

The "iron lace" that graces the businesses, homes, squares, and cemeteries of Mobile, Alabama, is as vital a part of that southern port city as it is of New Orleans, Charleston, and Savannah. Until now, its story has never been fully told. In this attractive volume, John S. Sledge's rich narrative, combined with evocative historic images and Sheila Hagler's stunning contemporary photographs, eloquently conveys as never before how ornamental cast iron defines Mobile's heart and soul. Cast iron was the wonder of the Victorian age, according to Sledge. In Mobile, the material's diverse applications were on display in hulking locomotives and boilers, flamboyant fountains, imposing fences, and endless other forms and structures. The city's ornate iron balconies, dozens of which still remain, elicited the greatest wonder, then as now. Local publications have long extolled Mobile's enchanting ironwork. Only now, however, has the subject been situated within national trends in design, industry, and consumer tastes. It is a colorful saga featuring rawboned iron founders, artisan slaves, hustling salesmen, conniving architects, willful plunderers, romantic artists, and dedicated preservationists. Drawing on rare surviving business records and other archival sources, Sledge skillfully reconstructs how the local iron industry developed and then fiercely competed with big northern foundries. As a working preservationist, Sledge pays particular attention to how many of Mobile's most splendid ornamental iron pieces have weathered hard times, natural disasters, and misguided development to remain a delight for tourists and residents alike. Hagler's beautiful photographs provide a powerful and sometimes moody visual accompaniment to this fascinating tale.

An Ornament to the City: Old Mobile Ironwork

Architecture

University of Georgia Press

In The Pillared City, John S. Sledge presents a richly illustrated overview of the Greek Revival period in Mobile, Alabama (1825–70), when high style and vernacular columned buildings were erected on the city’s streets.
Using a wealth of resources such as deeds and diaries, Sledge reveals the architectural accomplishments that helped Mobile emerge from its position as a rustic backwater to become a prominent international seaport. Sledge explains how these buildings reflect coastal and national trends and details the surprisingly advanced construction techniques required of the architects and builders.
Sledge offers more than an architectural history, incorporating stories such as how the triple blows of bankruptcy, yellow fever, and fire nearly obliterated Mobile in 1839. The eventful histories behind prominent landmarks such as Barton Academy, Government Street Presbyterian Church, Christ Episcopal Church, Oakleigh, Stewartfield, Georgia Cottage, and the Bragg-Mitchell Mansion are detailed, as are the lives of historical figures like Henry Hitchcock, James and Charles Dakin, James Gallier, Signor Vito Viti, John Trenier Sr., and Augusta Jane Evans.
Featuring more than fifty-five contemporary black-and-white photographs by Sheila Hagler and a rich array of historical images, The Pillared City captures the grace and allure of Mobile’s antebellum style.

The Pillared City: Greek Revival Mobile

Southern Bound represents a running conversation on books, writers, and literary travel written for the Mobile Press-Register Books page from 1995 to 2011 by John S. Sledge. The collection includes more than one hundred of the best pieces culled from Sledge's total output of approximately seven hundred columns. Numerous classic authors are celebrated in these pages, including Homer, Plato, Gibbon, Melville, Proust, Conrad, Cather, and Steinbeck as well as modern writers such as Walter Edgar, Tom Franklin, and Eugene Walter. While some of the essays are relatively straightforward book reviews, others present meditative and deeply personal perspectives on the author's literary experiences such as serving on the jury in the play version To Kill a Mockingbird; spending the night alone in a Jesuit college library's venerable stacks; rambling through funky New Orleans bookshops; talking to Square Books owner Richard Howorth while overlooking the Oxford, Mississippi courthouse; rereading Treasure Island on the shores of Mobile Bay; and remembering a beloved father's favorite books. Engaging and spirited, Southern Bound represents the critical art at its most accessible and will prove entertaining fare for anyone who loves the written word.

Southern Bound: A Gulf Coast Journalist on Books, Writers, and Literary Pilgrimages of the Heart

Literature & Fiction

United States

University of South Carolina Press

The Mobile River presents the first-ever narrative history of this important American watercourse. Inspired by the venerable Rivers of America series, John S. Sledge weaves chronological and thematic elements with personal experiences and more than sixty color and black-and-white images for a rich and rewarding read. The Mobile River appears on the map full and wide at Nannahubba, fifty miles from the coast, where the Alabama and the Tombigbee rivers meet, but because it empties their waters into Mobile Bay and subsequently the Gulf of Mexico, it usurps them and their multitudinous tributaries. If all of the rivers, creeks, streams, bayous, bogues, branches, swamps, sloughs, rivulets, and trickles that ultimately pour into Mobile Bay are factored into the equation, the Mobile assumes awesome importance and becomes the outlet for the sixth largest river basin in the United States and the largest emptying into the Gulf east of the Mississippi River. Previous historians have paid copious attention to the other rivers that make up the Mobile�s basin, but the namesake stream along with its majestic delta and beautiful bay have been strangely neglected. In an attempt to redress the imbalance, Sledge launches this book with a first-person river tour by �haul-ass boat.� Along the way he highlights the four diverse personalities of this short stream�upland hardwood forest, upper swamp, lower swamp, and harbor. In the historical saga that follows, readers learn about colonial forts, international treaties, bloody massacres, and thundering naval battles, as well as what the Mobile River�s inhabitants ate and how they dressed through time. A barge load of colorful characters is introduced, including Indian warriors, French diplomats, British cartographers, Spanish tavern keepers, Creole women, steamboat captains, African slaves, Civil War generals and admirals, Apache prisoners, hydraulic engineers, stevedores, banana importers, Rosie Riveters, and even a few river rats subsisting off the grid�all of them actors in a uniquely American pageant of conflict, struggle, and endless opportunity along a river that gave a city its name. Also available in a Deluxe Edition with Maps and Slipcase, limited to 150 copies, $100.00, ISBN 9781611174878.

The Mobile River

The Mobile River presents the first-ever narrative history of this important American watercourse. Inspired by the venerable Rivers of America series, John S. Sledge weaves chronological and thematic elements with personal experiences and more than sixty color and black-and-white images for a rich and rewarding read.The Mobile River appears on the map full and wide at Nannahubba, fifty miles from the coast, where the Alabama and the Tombigbee rivers meet, but because it empties their waters into Mobile Bay and subsequently the Gulf of Mexico, it usurps them and their multitudinous tributaries. If all of the rivers, creeks, streams, bayous, bogues, branches, swamps, sloughs, rivulets, and trickles that ultimately pour into Mobile Bay are factored into the equation, the Mobile assumes awesome importance and becomes the outlet for the sixth largest river basin in the United States and the largest emptying into the Gulf east of the Mississippi River.Previous historians have paid copious attention to the other rivers that make up the Mobile's basin, but the namesake stream along with its majestic delta and beautiful bay have been strangely neglected. In an attempt to redress the imbalance, Sledge launches this book with a first-person river tour by "haul-ass boat." Along the way he highlights the four diverse personalities of this short stream--upland hardwood forest, upper swamp, lower swamp, and harbor.In the historical saga that follows, readers learn about colonial forts, international treaties, bloody massacres, and thundering naval battles, as well as what the Mobile River's inhabitants ate and how they dressed through time. A barge load of colorful characters is introduced, including Indian warriors, French diplomats, British cartographers, Spanish tavern keepers, Creole women, steamboat captains, African slaves, Civil War generals and admirals, Apache prisoners, hydraulic engineers, stevedores, banana importers, Rosie  Riveters, and even a few river rats subsisting off the grid--all of  them actors in a uniquely American pageant of conflict, struggle, and endless opportunity along a river that gave a city its name.

Univ of South Carolina Pr

The Gulf of Mexico presents a compelling, salt-streaked narrative of the earth's tenth largest body of water. In this beautifully written and illustrated volume, John S. Sledge explores the people, ships, and cities that have made the Gulf's human history and culture so rich. Many famous figures who sailed the Gulf's viridian waters are highlighted, including Ponce de Leon, Robert Cavelier de La Salle, Francis Drake, Elizabeth Agassiz, Ernest Hemingway, and Charles Dwight Sigsbee at the helm of the doomed Maine. Sledge also introduces a fascinating array of people connected to maritime life in the Gulf, among them Maya priests, French pirates, African American stevedores, and Greek sponge divers. Gulf events of global historical importance are detailed, such as the only defeat of armed and armored steamships by wooden sailing vessels, the first accurate deep-sea survey and bathymetric map of any ocean basin, the development of shipping containers by a former truck driver frustrated with antiquated loading practices, and the worst environmental disaster in American annals. 
Occasionally shifting focus ashore, Sledge explains how people representing a gumbo of ethnicities built some of the world's most exotic cities--Havana, way station for conquistadores and treasure-filled galleons; New Orleans, the Big Easy, famous for its beautiful French Quarter, Mardi Gras, and relaxed morals; and oft-besieged Veracruz, Mexico's oldest city, founded in 1519 by Hernan Cortes. Throughout history the residents of these cities and their neighbors along the littoral have struggled with challenges both natural and human-induced--devastating hurricanes, frightening epidemics, catastrophic oil spills, and conflicts ranging from dockside brawls to pirate raids, foreign invasion, civil war, and revolution. In the modern era the Gulf has become critical to energy production, fisheries, tourism, and international trade, even as it is threatened by pollution and climate change. The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History is a work of verve and sweep that illuminates both the risks of life on the water and the riches that come from its bounty.

The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History

Winner of the Clinton Jackson Coley Book Award from the Alabama Historical Association In the first-ever narrative history of this important American watercourse, John S. Sledge weaves chronological and thematic elements together with personal experiences for a rich and rewarding read. Illustrated with more than sixty color and black-and-white images, The Mobile River beautifully communicates a strong sense of place. Beginning at Nannahubba, where the Alabama and Tombigbee Rivers meet, the Mobile River serves as the outlet for the sixth largest river basin in the United States and the largest one emptying into the Gulf of Mexico east of the Mississippi. Sledge takes readers on a journey through history framed and sometimes directed by this expansive watershed. A tale spanning colonial forts, international treaties, and thundering naval battles, and populated by characters, including Indian warriors, European diplomats, cartographers, enslaved Africans, Civil War generals, hydraulic engineers, and "Rosie the Riveter" women workers, The Mobile River presents a pageant of conflict, struggle, and endless opportunity. In a new preface, Sledge addresses the 2018 discovery of the wreck of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to arrive in America.

The Mobile River: With a New Preface

Mobile and Havana: Sisters across the Gulf

Cooper, Chip

Larramendi Joa, Julio Ángel

García-Santana, Alicia E.

History & Criticism

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sledge, John S.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Sledge, John S.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sledge, John S.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Cities of Silence: A Guide to Mobile's Historic Cemeteries

These Rugged Days: Alabama in the Civil War

An Ornament to the City: Old Mobile Ironwork

The Pillared City: Greek Revival Mobile

Southern Bound: A Gulf Coast Journalist on Books, Writers, and Literary Pilgrimages of the Heart

The Mobile River

The Mobile River

The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History

The Mobile River: With a New Preface

Mobile and Havana: Sisters across the Gulf