Overview

Best known for her award-winning book The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War, historian Victoria Bynum turns now to her own history in this multigenerational American saga spanning from 1840 to 1979. Through meticulous historical research, personal letters, diaries, and the unpublished memoir of Mary Daniel Huckenpoehler, the author’s maternal grandmother, Bynum examines five generations within the broader context of the nation’s history, navigating pivotal events such as First Wave immigration, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, two world wars, the Cold War, and beyond. Child of a mother from Waconia, Minnesota, and father from Jones County, Mississippi, Bynum blends a historian’s voice with personal experiences, intertwining her grandmother’s unpublished memoir and letters with her own role as a diarist and historian. She explores class, race, ethnicity, and gender dynamics. From the rise of Welsh immigrant ancestors in the Upper Midwest and the Gilded Age privileges of her grandmother’s upbringing to Bynum’s own tumultuous childhood in the 1950s and early 1960s as she is shuttled between Georgia, Mississippi, Minnesota, Florida, and California, Bynum grapples with numerous dangers of being raised in a volatile environment marked by alcohol-fueled violence, sexual degradation, and neglect. Against the backdrop of racial segregation, civil rights movements, and the Cold War, Deep Roots, Broken Branches traces the author’s coming-of-age journey, and the profound influence of her grandmother. Revealed through the lens and tensions of an Air Force family, Deep Roots, Broken Branches explores Bynum’s intellectual curiosity, voracious reading habits, and turbulent path through early motherhood, divorce, and higher education in California. Throughout, her grandmother remains a stabilizing force, offering inspiration and guidance. This book paints a vivid portrait of a southern identity’s growth amid personal challenges and broader societal shifts.

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9781496855619

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Reviews

Victoria Bynum's book courageously explores her personal family history informed by her extensive knowledge of the past. By combining history and memoir, Bynum invites the reader to join her journey of discovery, including family secrets. While sympathetic to family members' struggles, Bynum never romanticizes the circumstances in which they lived, loved, and raised children. With lavish detail and her usual excellent writing, Bynum makes readers feel the past in intimate terms.--Noralee Frankel, historian and author An authentic American voice of a type rarely heard, Victoria Bynum writes with great heart--and deep historical insight--about the rags to riches, and riches to rags, life of a midcentury American family, her own. In prose worthy of a novel, Deep Roots, Broken Branches poignantly reminds us that amid upturns and downturns, the choices we make are ultimately our own.--Elizabeth Cobbs, author of Fearless Women: Feminist Patriots from Abigail Adams to Beyoncé

Author Information

Victoria Bynum is distinguished professor emeritus of history at Texas State University, San Marcos. A scholar of class, gender, and race relations in the Civil War–era South, she is an award-winning author and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. Her book The Free State of Jones inspired the movie of the same title. Other publications include The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies and Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South. She is creator and administrator of the blog Renegade South.

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