Lessons from the Big House : One Family?s Passage Through the History of the South

Beginning in the South Carolina Low Country with his Huguenot ancestors who fled religious persecution in Europe, journalist-historian Frye Gaillard traces his family through the troubled, oppressive history of the South. Gaillard, who came of age during the civil rights years, shares the painful legacy of a family sometimes on the wrong side of that history. He writes of Capt. Peter Gaillard, who fought in the Revolutionary War (on both sides), and became a prosperous planter and slave-owner. The author follows the family story through the major events of Southern history―the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the civil rights revolution―to show how a family’s identity was forged by privilege, hardship, and loss, and also by a moral reckoning that emerged slowly, inevitably over time. A powerful memoir that is sure to speak to the heart of every Southerner. Researched with Dr. Nancy Gaillard, educator and wife of the author.

Frye Gaillard (Author)
FRYE GAILLARD is a former writer-in-residence in the English and history departments at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of thirty books, including With Music and Justice for All: Some Southerners and Their Passions; Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award; The Dream Long Deferred: The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina, winner of the Gustavus Myers Award; and A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s (Georgia), an NPR best book of 2018. He lives in Mobile, Alabama.

Nancy B. Gaillard (With)
Nancy Gaillard was a lifelong educator who worked as a public school teacher and principal in Charlotte, North Carolina. She earned her doctorate in education at the University of Alabama and served as an assistant professor in the College of Education at the University of South Alabama. She collaborated on two books with her husband, Frye Gaillard.