The Annotated Pickett's History of Alabama: And Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi, from the Earliest Period - Hardcover

Albert James Pickett, Alabama’s first historian, was born on 13 August 1810 in Anson County, North Carolina, and settled with his parents – William Raiford and Frances Dickson Pickett – in Autauga County, Alabama Territory in 1818. His father started with a trading post and became a prominent landowner and successful planter, eventually serving in both houses of the Alabama legislature. As a youth, he encountered Creek Indians, Indian countrymen, slaves, Loyalists and patriot participants of the Revolutionary War. His father’s career in business, farming, and state politics exposed him to the unique social and cultural milieu of early Alabama. Pickett’s formal education included local field schools, two years at Virginia’s Harwood Academy, and tutelage in law for two years by his brother William Dickson Pickett, judge of the Sixth Judicial Circuit. However, he never practiced law and gravitated to journalism instead ― writing articles for the Alabama Journal and the Planter’s Gazette. Pickett’s History was his only book-length publication. With a completed book manuscript by Christmas 1850, Pickett traveled to New York City in February 1851 where an engraver completed the illustrations for his book and to Charleston in March where he worked with his publisher Walker and James through June 1851. Upon publication, his History of Alabama received high praise and only a modicum of criticism from the state’s newspapers and literary journals in New York, New Orleans, Charleston and elsewhere. Pickett aggressively promoted his book as a speaker and lecturer before a variety of audiences in subsequent years, focusing on the “hardest work of my life” and fulfilling his “duty” to his History. The work is Pickett's magnum opus and remains one of the most significant documenting the early settlment of the state of Alabama and the Deep South. Albert Pickett died in 1858.

James P. Pate is an independent scholar/writer and an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of West Alabama where he served as a department chair, dean, and vice president for academic affairs (1967-1995). He also served as Dean of Arts and Letters at Southeastern Oklahoma State University (1995-1998), vice president for academic affairs at Northeastern State University (1898-2005), and campus dean at the University of Mississippi (2005-2014). He is a graduate of Delta State University and earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Mississippi State University. He edited The Reminiscences of George Strother Gaines, “When this Evil War Is Over”: The Correspondence of the Francis Family, 1860-1865, and Cherokee Newspapers, 1828-1906: Tribal Voice of a People in Transition by Cullen Joe Holland. He has received grants for his research and historic preservation work, including archaeological investigations at the Fort Tombecbé/Fort Confederation site (1736-1797). He negotiated the transfer of this eighteenth century French-British-Spanish site to the University of West Alabama in 1986. Dr. Pate completed post-doctoral study in Harvard University’s Institute for Educational Management (1985) and in the Price-Babson College Fellowship Program for Entrepreneurship Educators (2001). He has received numerous honors and recognitions for his professional and civic activities. He and his wife Betty live in Vestavia Hills, Alabama. They have three children and eight grandchildren.

In his History of Alabama, Albert James Pickett showed an unusual interest, for his time, in the intersections between colonists and the American Indians who inhabited what would become the state of Alabama. Pickett’s narrative is a crucial source for nineteenth-century interpretations and understandings of those relations, not only for Alabama, but for the South at large. Additionally, Pickett’s History includes some rare primary source material on Alabama’s Native people. We now, for the first time, have an annotated version of Pickett’s History. Historian James P. Pate offers not only a detailed introduction to the volume, but careful and much-needed annotations that clarify, correct, contextualize, and amplify Pickett’s text. This version will supplant all others. ― Robbie Ethridge, Professor of Anthropology, University of Mississippi, author of Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World

The Annotated Pickett’s History of Alabama, and Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi, from the Earliest Period, is a history lover’s dream. What makes this new edition so valuable is that the editor, James Pate, pulled together other historical records and interviews in the annotated version of the book to dispute or explain portions of the history. The book's nearly 700 pages are jammed with historical references and footnotes in addition to the written history of stories and record. ― Opelika-Auburn News

James Pate has produced an extremely useful modern edition of Pickett's History of Alabama, ensuring that the work will continue to shape knowledge of the state and the antebellum context in which Pickett wrote. Pate employs annotations―a most impressive and helpful feature of the volume―to discuss Pickett's judgments and uses of source material as well as to identify modern scholarship on the Old Southwest that validates or challenges Pickett's claims. Pate's knowledge of both the primary and secondary source literature is extensive. He has made Pickett's grand narrative accessible to modern readers and useful for scholars of Alabama history and the history of the Old Southwest. ― Journal of Southern History

James P. Pate has edited and annotated an important new edition of Albert James Pickett’s History of Alabama. This classic, nineteenth-century text receives thoughtful comments and annotations in his careful hands. Pate clearly introduces and contextualizes Pickett’s decades-long labor of love. Pickett used Spanish, French, and Native sources to tell the multilingual, diverse, and contested histories of the region. This new edition reminds readers of the long, deep, and fascinating history of the American South. ― Alejandra Dubcovsky, author of Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South

The republication of Pickett's History in a new edition that is updated, annotated, and indexed for the first time is significant and will be a welcome addition to many bookshelves. Thanks to James Pate for reintroducing us to Pickett's sturdy narrative of all that transpired in the centuries before Alabama became a state. ― Peter H. Wood, Professor of history, Duke University, co-editor of Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast

This new edition of Albert Pickett's History of Alabama is itself a historic event. Pickett's stories ― many based on personal interviews ― are now classic. They convey a sense of Alabama life before statehood no other book can match, rich with details. And Jim Pate’s excellent annotations help modern readers follow the narrative more easily. In nicely designed side notes, he identifies people and places that may no longer be familiar and also updates us on insights of historians today. We have needed an annotated History for a long time. This new edition fills that need beautifully. ― Edwin Bridges, former director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, author of Alabama: The Making of An American State

The first history of the state has been out of print more than a century ― and is still worth reading, especially with the annotations James Pate gives us in the margins of Pickett’s original text. Pickett’s history is rich and exciting, if a bit romantic for modern tastes, but with Professor Pate’s annotations and a complete index it certainly rewards the 21st-century reader handsomely. Added to which, this book is physically beautiful in its design and layout. ― Lagniappe

With The Annotated Pickett's History of Alabama, Jim Pate invites modern readers to take a fresh look at a classic by Alabama's first historian, now illuminated by more than a century and a half of scholarship accomplished in Pickett's wake. ― Gregory A. Waselkov, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of South Alabama, author of A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813-1814

Already a grand tour of Alabama history, Pickett's History of Alabama is now a more accurate one and an impressive accounting of some of the best scholarship on the state's colonial, territorial, and early statehood years currently available. ― Mike Bunn, Alabama historian and co-editor of The Historian's Manifesto

Pickett’s History of Alabama, first published in 1851, has remained a primary source for understanding about the early history of Alabama. For decades, libraries shelved their copies in their rare books collections, behind locked doors. With its republication by NewSouth Books ― in a handsome fully annotated, indexed, and illustrated edition made possible by Dr. James Pate ― the book is given magnificent second life. Everyone should have a copy of this important work, and now can. ― Leah Rawls Atkins, historian, co-author of Alabama: The History of a Deep South State