After a long absence from his native southern Appalachians, Thomas Rain Crowe returned to live alone deep in the North Carolina woods. This is Crowe’s chronicle of that time when, for four years, he s
The Diary of Dolly Lunt Burge is the compelling story of an ordinary woman rising to meet extraordinary challenges in nineteenth-century Georgia. Dolly Lunt Burge's full life was remarkable for the ra
A fourteen-year-old orphan who lives in his great-aunt's boarding house describes life in the heart of the rundown, mixed-race Quarrytown,Georgia, community during the mid-1950s, in an evocative comin
In the first English-language survey of Argentine-U.S. relations to appear in more than a decade, David M. K. Sheinin challenges the accepted view that confrontation has been the characteristic state
An astonishing variety of captivity narratives emerged in the fifty years following the American Revolution; however, discussions about them have usually focused on accounts of Native American captivi
Near the end of her classic wartime account, Susie King Taylor writes, "there are many people who do not know what some of the colored women did during the war." For her own part, Taylor spent four ye
In The Hammers of Creation, Eric J. Sundquist analyzes the powerful role played by folk culture in three major African-American novels of the early twentieth century: James Weldon Johnson's The Autobi
History remembers Edmund Ruffin, the Virginia native believed to have fired the first shot against Fort Sumter in 1861, as one of the South's most aggressive "fire-eaters." This volume of Ruffin's wor
Thoreau's Living Ethics is the first full, rigorous account of Henry Thoreau's ethical philosophy. Focused on Walden but ranging widely across his writings, the study situates Thoreau within a long
In 1916, on the immigrant blocks of the Southern port city of Mobile, Alabama, a Romanian Jewish shopkeeper, Morris Kleinman, is sweeping his walk in preparation for the Confederate veterans parade a
Is music property? Under what circumstances can music be stolen? Such questions lie at the heart of Joanna Demers’s timely look at how overzealous intellectual property (IP) litigation both stifles
The Gullah people are one of our most distinctive cultural groups. Isolated off the South Carolina-Georgia coast for nearly three centuries, the native black population of the Sea Islands has develope
“What desire doesn’t seem as of the distance across a sea?” asks the voice in Kerri Webster’s debut collection of poetry, even as the poems attempt the transformation of that
The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling was a watershed event in the fight against racial segregation in the United States. The recent fiftieth anniversary of Brown prompted a surge of tributes: b
Judith Ortiz Cofer’s third volume of poetry collects thirty-four poems written over the course of many years. In places as stark as a New Jersey barrio or fabled as the island home of Penelope
The first two decades of colonial Georgia's existence--known as its Trustee era--have come down through history as a well-intentioned but failed experiment. In one largely overlooked way, contends Jul
In Jennifer K. Dick's first book, Fluorescence, very real places--Paris, Massachusetts, Colorado, Iowa, Morocco--mix into the imagined, into Breughelian villages where there's "a persimmon in the corn
Until its use declined in the nineteenth century, Indians of the southeastern United States were devoted to a caffeinated beverage commonly known as black drink. Brewed from the parched leaves of the
Winter, when plants are dormant and their leaves may have fallen, is a challenging time to identify woody flora. Designed especially for winter use and featuring almost six hundred illustrations, thi
Kyle Dargan's debut collection of poetry, The Listening, searches through the cluttered surface of contemporary life to tune into the elemental sounds within the marrow of living/life. Throughout the
Before 1650, only a few hundred Scots had trickled into the American colonies, but by the early 1770s the number had risen to 10,000 per year. A conservative estimate of the total number of Scots who
Spanning the era from the American Revolution to the Civil War, these nine pathbreaking original essays explore the unexpected, competing, or contradictory ways in which southerners made sense of manh
Hearing History is a long-needed introduction to the basic tenets of what is variously termed historical acoustemology, auditory culture, or aural history. Gathering twenty-one of the field’s m
Welcome to Nathalie Dupree's South, a place of ladies' luncheons, bake sales, fresh fish dinners, and pit barbecue, where time seems to move a bit more slowly and where fresh, flavorful food is an ind
African American artists sustained an interest in social realism well into the Cold War era, significantly longer than many of their white counterparts. Morgan (American studies, U. of Alabama) presen
Focusing on Alabama's textile industry, this study looks at the complex motivations behind the "whites-only" route taken by the Progressive reform movement in the South. In the early 1900s, northern m
In the early sixties, Stuart Schlegel went into a remote rainforest on the Philippine island of Mindanao as an anthropologist in search of material. What he found was a group of people whose tolerant,
These previously unpublished private writings expand our understanding of Grace King (1852-1932) as a writer and as a nineteenth-century, middle-class, white southern woman. A prolific New Orleans aut
This study of the construction of race in American culture takes its title from a central story thread in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck, who resolves to "go to hell" rather than t
This collection of seventeen fascinating biographies, produced by the Mississippi Women's History Project, is an important step toward gaining the state's women their deserved place in its written rec
In this challenging look at some of the historical forces actively at work in today's South, David Goldfield draws pointed, provocative links between the "Lost Cause" mythology that emerged from the c
Charting DeLillo's emergence as a contemporary novelist of major stature, David Cowart discusses each of DeLillo's twelve novels, including his most recent work, The Body Artist (2001). Rejecting the
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), one of the leading poets of the twentieth century, continues to influence a wide range of poets writing today. However, an image persists of Stevens as an aesthete who was
During the first half of the twentieth century, the city of Charleston, South Carolina underwent a cultural revival known as the Charleston Renaissance. Directed at a general as well as a scholarly au
Disturbing, ironic, haunting, brutal. What inner struggles led Flannery O’Connor to create fiction that elicits such labels? Much of the tension that drives O’Connor’s writing, says Sarah Gordon, stem
The human impact on vast areas of the oceans remains relatively unregulated. Sometimes, in fact, the only controls over our exploitation of marine resources lie in our environmental consciousness. Wh
The absorbing vintage photographs brought together in Vanishing Georgia recall life in the state from halfway through the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Pictured here are both gre
From 1773 to 1777, naturalist William Bartram journeyed through the American South from the Carolinas to Florida to the Mississippi River. Bartram's classic account, Travels, documents what he saw: a
Mountains and freeways, oceans and apartment buildings, trees and automobiles: such things lend shape to mental activity, says Christopher J. Preston. Yet Western epistemology, since its origins, has
The Times Literary Supplement calls Louis A. Pérez Jr. "the foremost historian of Cuba writing in English." In this new edition of his acclaimed 1990 volume, he brings his expertise to bear on t
