A group of three friends who made music in a house in Lubbock, Texas, recorded an album that wasn’t released and went their separate ways into solo careers. That group became a legend and then—twenty years later—a band. The Flatlanders—Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock—are icons in American music, with songs blending country, folk, and rock that have influenced a long list of performers, including Robert Earl Keen, the Cowboy Junkies, Ryan Bingham, Terry Allen, John Hiatt, Hayes Carll, Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, and Lyle Lovett.

In The Flatlanders: Now It’s Now Again, Austin author and music journalist John T. Davis traces the band’s musical journey from the house on 14th Street in Lubbock to their 2013 sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall. He explores why music was, and is, so important in Lubbock and how earlier West Texas musicians such as Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison, as well as a touring Elvis Presley, inspired the young Ely, Gilmore, and Hancock. Davis vividly recreates the Lubbock countercultural scene that brought the Flatlanders together and recounts their first year (1972–1973) as a band, during which they recorded the songs that, decades later, were released as the albums More a Legend Than a Band and The Odessa Tapes. He follows the three musicians through their solo careers and into their first decade as a (re)united band, in which they cowrote songs for the first time on the albums Now Again and Hills and Valleys and recovered their extraordinary original demo tape, lost for forty years. Many roads later, the Flatlanders are finally both a legend and a band.

Departments and language programs often are asked to evaluate the efficacy of their own programs and make curricular decisions on the basis of evidence. This guide, designed to help language educators meet the needs of program evaluation and assessment often requested by their institutions, provides step-by-step advice to help language educators conduct evaluation and assessment and to show how it can lead to meaningful programmatic decisions and change. With discussions about evaluation planning, advice for selecting data-collection tools, explanations for data analysis, examples based on actual evaluations, and more, this book provides everything you need to complete a successful language program evaluation that will give educators useful data on which to base curricular decisions. This short book is practical and timely and will find an audience in instructors of all languages and all levels.  

Among the various human interventions in landscape, war has left one of the most lasting and eloquent records, literally inscribed on the face of the earth. Military landscapes can assume different forms and functions; yet, by controlling vision and movement, they impose shared strategies of seeing upon geography and the environment.

Built around such fundamental concepts as representation, scale, nature, gender, and memory, Military Landscapes seeks to reevaluate the role of militarization as a fundamental factor in human interaction with land. Moving beyond discussions of infrastructure, battlefields, and memorials, it foregrounds the representational role of military landscapes across different historical periods, geographical regions, and territorial scales, covering a wide range of subjects, including the home front and refugee camps. It contributes to scholarship by shifting the focus to often overlooked factors, such as local knowledge, traditional technology, and physical labor, highlighting the historical character of militarized environments as inherently gendered and racialized. By juxtaposing and synthesizing diverse disciplinary perspectives, this volume seeks to develop a more inclusive and nuanced definition of military landscapes under the framework of landscape theory, based on their understanding as a physical reality as well as a cultural construction.