New York: The Literary Guild, 1934. Hardcover - A book which was both a best seller and a classic account of 1920s Alabama, part memoir, part history, and part cultural analysis. In 1921, Carmer accepted a position at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Carmer discovered that the people of Alabama offered many interesting stories, especially those from a Sumter County woman named Ruby Pickens Tartt, who related numerous tales she had heard from the rural African American tenant farmers in her home town of Livingston. His first section, Tuscaloosa Nights, describes his arrival in Tuscaloosa by train, his trip to his hotel, and a meeting with a fellow faculty member and an old friend from Harvard and several of his associates. Late that first night, another professor whom he immediately liked told him bluntly to get out of the state before it was too late. For six years, Carmer travelled to every corner of the state and kept copious notes, on Ku Klux Klan parades, foot-washings, and voodoo rituals.and later turned them into this book (the title refers to an 1833 meteor event that appeared as a shower of stars falling on the countryside.) Illustrated by Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge. Map frontispiece. Includes a section titled 'from the Author's Notebook" which lists dozens of Fiddlers' Tunes, Mattie Sue's quilt patterns, All-Day Singing, Mountain Superstitions, Big House, Negro Superstitions, The Sims War, and Brer Rabbit Multiplies. 294 pp. Illustrated endpapers.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, (1993) dj. Hardcover first edition - Although the American settlement house movement was influential in helping immigrants adjust to life in American cities, when African Americans began migrating from the rural South to cities in the North "most houses failed to redirect their efforts toward their new neighbors. Nationally, the movement did not take a concerted stand on the issue of race until after World War II. . . [Instead] Lasch-Quinn recasts the traditional definitions, periods, and regional divisions of settlement work and uncovers a vast settlement movement among African Americans. By placing community work conducted by the YWCA, black women's clubs, religious missions, southern industrial schools, and other organizations within the settlement tradition, she highlights their significance . . . Her analysis fundamentally revises our understanding of the role that race has played in American social reform." Illustrated with photographs. Includes extensive notes, bibliography and index. xii, 225 pp. ISBN: 0-807821144.