Ebb & Flow

Inheriting the historical gene from her professor father, Martha Keber studied history at the University of Redlands as an undergraduate and at Emory University where she received her Ph.D. A French historian by training, she spent most of her university career teaching at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville. A growing interest in the history of coastal Georgia led to the publication of Seas of Gold, Seas of Cotton (2002), a biography of Christophe Poulain DuBignon of Jekyll Island. Since her retirement in 2005, she participated in an initiative by the City of Savannah to preserve the precious but perishable history of Savannah neighborhoods . In 2008, she wrote a detailed history of three African American neighborhoods in western Savannah under the title of Low Land and the High Road , followed three years later by Ebb and Flow, focusing on the city’s eastside.
The stories of Native American villagers, rice planters and enslaved labor, African American cannery workers, and the women and men who built Liberty Ships in World War II can be found within the boundaries of five present-day eastern Savannah neighborhoods. Ebb and Flow traces the historical roots of the area and depicts the large and small events that shaped everyday life. As in the two previous volumes of the City of Savannah’s neighborhood history series, archival research was blended with oral histories from residents of the focus communities to create a narrative rich in anecdotes and detail. A photographic record of vintage and contemporary images vividly portrays people at work, at school, and at play. Full partners in this project, residents contributed their recollections, their images, and their time to make this portrait of eastside neighborhoods come to life.

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