Dr. Isabela Morales began her career as a historian as an undergraduate in The University of Alabama’s History Department (BA, 2012). During a visit to Hoole Special Collections Library as part of her Capstone Undergraduate Research class, she encountered a set of attorney papers from the nineteenth century. Those papers revealed that prominent Huntsville enslaver and cotton planter Samuel Townsend died in 1856, leaving behind a vast estate worth around $200,000 (equivalent to nearly $7 million today). Townsend left most […]