Born into a relatively privileged family, Geraldyne Pierce Zimmerman earned a reputation as a maverick in her lifelong home of Orangeburg, South Carolina, a semirural community where race and class were very much governed by the Jim Crow laws. Educated at Nashville’s Fisk University, Zimmerman returned to Orangeburg to teach school, serve her community, and champion equal rights for African Americans and women.
Kibibi V. Mack-Shelton offers a vivid portrayal of the kind of black family seldom recognized for its role in the development of the African American community after the Civil War. At a time when “separate but equal” usually meant suffering and injustice for the black community, South Carolina families such as the Tatnalls, Pierces, and Zimmermans achieved a level of financial and social success rivaling that of many white families.
Drawing heavily on the oral accounts of Geraldyne Pierce Zimmerman, Mack-Shelton draws the reader into the lives of the African American elite of the early twentieth century. Her captivating narrative style brings to life many complicated topics: how skin color affected interracial interactions and class distinctions within the black community itself, the role of education for women and for African Americans in general, and the ways in which cultural ideas about family and community are simultaneously preserved and transformed over the span of
generations.
Refreshing and engaging, Ahead of Her Time in Yesteryear is a fascinating biography for any reader interested in a new perspective on small-town black culture in the Jim Crow South.
The mistress of a slave-holding estate, Ida Powell Dulany took over control of the extensive family lands once her husband left to fight for the Confederacy. She struggled to manage slaves, maintain contact with her neighbors, and keep up her morale after her region was abandoned by the Confederate government soon after the beginning of hostilities.
More than just an elegantly written account of her own day-to-day experiences in the Civil War, Ida’s journal opens a window into the Southern culture of the time.
Stevan F. Meserve has written extensively for several Civil War publications and is the author of The Civil War in Loudoun County, Virginia: A History of Hard Times.
Anne Mackall Sasscer grew up on Selby, a family farm near The Plains, Virginia, the home of Ida Powell Dulany’s youngest daughter.
Mary LeJeune Mackall spent her early years at Blenheim, a pre-Revolutionary farm near Charlottesville, which inspired her lifelong interest in Virginia history.
In the fall of 1862, after a leadership shake-up initiated by Lincoln, Gen. Ambrose Burnside assumed command of the Army of the Potomac and developed an aggressive plan to attack the Confederate capital of Richmond. However, in order to reach Richmond, Burnside had to march through Fredericksburg, where Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was well entrenched. After crossing the Rappahannock River under enemy fire, Burnside and his troops engaged Lee’s army within the city, then launched a futile frontal assault against a heavily fortified ridge west of Fredericksburg. The end result was a decisive victory for the Confederacy, as the Union army suffered more than double the number of casualties as its foes. Burnside would resign a month later but would resurface as war in the Western Theater grew heated.
Decisions at Fredericksburg explores the critical decisions made by Confederate and Union commanders during the battle and how these decisions shaped its outcome. Rather than offering a history of the battle, Chris Mackowski hones in on a sequence of critical decisions made by commanders on both sides of the contest to provide a blueprint of the Battle of Fredericksburg at its tactical core. Identifying and exploring the critical decisions in this way allows students of the battle to progress from knowledge of what happened to a mature grasp of why events happened.
Complete with maps and a driving tour, Decisions at Fredericksburg is an indispensable primer, and readers looking for a concise introduction to the battle can tour this sacred ground—or read about it at their leisure—with key insights into the campaign and a deeper understanding of the Civil War itself.
Decisions at Fredericksburg is the eleventh in a series of books that will explore the critical decisions of major campaigns and battles of the Civil War.
“Abducted by Circumstance is a thrilling crime story, a dark and complex psychological study, a rich contemplation on contemporary life. It is also a masterful moral drama about the centuries-old conflicts that arise from the juxtaposition of the flesh and spirit.”
—Allen Wier, author of Tehano
“David Madden continues to push the envelope of literary fiction in subtle and profoundly sophisticated ways. Abducted by Circumstance is a quirky, utterly compelling novel in pieces that in its very structure speaks to the work’s twenty-first-century theme: how do we find connection in a fragmented world? In this new book Madden is at the height of his considerable power.”
—Robert Olen Butler
In Abducted by Circumstance, David Madden offers his readers a unique experience simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating.
Carol Seaborg makes a risky visit in zero weather to a lighthouse near her house in The Thousand Islands of New York on the Canadian border. A self-confident, attractive woman of about 55 suddenly appears on the observation deck looking out over frozen Lake Ontario. Carol admires the woman as her ideal.
Suddenly, the woman disappears, apparently abducted by a serial rapist and killer, stimulating in Carol an immediate empathy that, enhanced by the power of her imagination, is so great as to make her unique. Carol projects her own emotions, imagination, and intellect into Glenda’s experience.
To render that empathy and imagination, Madden channels everything that the people around her say and do through Carol’s perceptions so intimately that he shifts frequently and without transition into her thoughts, which focus mostly on the abducted woman, whose name newscasters reveal is Glenda Hamilton.
As Carol imagines Glenda gradually coping with her abductor, she speaks directly, sometimes out loud, to her, encouraging her, advising her, expressing fear for her.
If Carol’s external experiences are passive almost to paralysis, her memories reveal that her life has been full of more venturesome relationships and events (she once rode across Greece alone on a bicycle) than most wives and mothers in their late thirties have. Carol’s emotions and imagination are highly charged and exquisitely presented.
The circumstances and relationships of her past and present predispose Carol to empathize with Glenda. Carol’s own life among a crude, remote second husband, a somewhat estranged adolescent son, a bright five-year-old daughter, a father who is a rather cold philosophy teacher, and the strong spiritual presence of her mother who committed suicide, is simple and routine. The events involving Glenda’s disappearance take place during the week before Carol’s second surgery for breast cancer.
Gradually, as she takes late night drives with her little girl, visits her ex-boyfriend’s father in a nursing home, drives by her ex-lover’s house and business, and visits the campus where her father is a prominent teacher, the reader realizes, some pages before Carol herself does, that she has been abducted by the circumstances of her life.
Although it is grounded in the realistic detail of everyday life, Abducted by Circumstance is unique in conception, style, and characterization. Madden immerses the reader in an extraordinarily rich and unforgettable psychological experience.
Thoroughly absorbing from start to finish, Abducted by Circumstance explores Carol’s troubled psyche with the rare precision and insight that have long distinguished David Madden’s fiction.
Since 1961, each of David Madden’s highly praised novels and two books of short stories has had some quality of uniqueness, among them Cassandra Singing, Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War, Bijou, and The Suicide’s Wife. Twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, David Madden received the Robert Penn Warren Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
The Hero and the Witness is a harrowing and comic story of nineteen-year-old Lucius’s ordeal as a merchant seaman caught in the crossfire between an enigmatic scapegoat and a violent crew en route to Chile. In To Play the Con, Lucius, now a teacher and a first-time novelist, cons his little brother’s six small-town victims into accepting restitution for passing bad checks, a scam their older brother taught him and that may send him to the chain gang. Lucius works another con in Nothing Dies, but Something Mourns by persuading an ancient lady in a mountain town to tell him the romantic story of her brief love affair with Jesse James. In the innovative novella Marble Goddesses and Mortal Flesh, Lucius, now middle-aged and a successful novelist, buys the derelict Bijou Theater where he was a very young usher and becomes immersed to the brink of psychosis in memories of the immortal movie goddesses of the 40s and the mortal girls of his youth.
The novella is the perfect medium for this wide-ranging author to explore the power of the imagination and of oral storytelling in the lives of his characters. Madden’s unmatched scope in this collection could draw comparisons to Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Thomas Wolfe, and James M. Cain equally well.
Like Lucius, a native of Knoxville, DAVID MADDEN was an adolescent usher in the
1940s, a Merchant Mariner in the 1950s, and his two brothers were con men in their youth. He became a teacher in 1957, retiring in 2008 as LSU’s Robert Penn Warren Professor of Creative Writing, emeritus. Living now in Black Mountain, North Carolina, he has nearly finished a memoir recounting his youthful experiences in the U.S. Army.
A gripping and thought-provoking work that is unlike any Civil War novel previously written, Sharpshooter takes us into the mind of one of the war’s veterans as he attempts, years after the conflict, to reconstruct his experiences and to find some measure of meaning in them.
A child of the divided East Tennessee mountain region, Willis Carr left home at age thirteen to follow his father and brothers on a bridge-burning mission for the Union cause. Imprisoned at Knoxville, he agreed to join the Confederate army to avoid being hanged and became a sharpshooter serving under General Longstreet. He survived several major battles, including Gettysburg, and eventually found himself guarding prisoners at the infamous Andersonville stockade, where a former slave taught him to read.
After the war, haunted by his memories, Carr writes down his story, revisits the battlefields, studies photographs and drawings, listens to other veterans as they tell their stories, and pores over memoirs and other books. Above all, he embues whatever he hears, sees, and reads with his emotions, his imagination, and his intellect. Yet, even as an old man nearing death, he still feels that he has somehow missed the war, that something essential about it has eluded him. Finally, in a searing moment of personal revelation, a particular memory, long suppressed, rises to the surface of Carr’s consciousness and draws his long quest to a poignant close.
A compelling work of fiction from a writer who is both a gifted novelist and a distinguished student of the Civil War, David Madden’s Sharpshooter invites us to see this signal episode in American history in a new way—to grasp its facts, to imagine what facts cannot convey, and to make the war our own.
At least since the rise of the “Nashville sound” in the 1950s, Tennessee’s capital city has attracted numerous books and articles offering insight into the celebrity machine known as Music City. But behind the artist in the limelight are a host of support personnel and contributors who shape the artist’s music. Of these myriad occupations within the music industry, only two have received significant attention: executives at the major labels and elite songwriters who have forged a path to the top of the charts. In Making Music in Music City, sociologist John Markert compiles and assesses more than one hundred interviews with industry professionals whose roles have been less often examined: producers, publishers, songwriters, management, studio musicians, and more.
The book naturally pivots around the country music industry but also discusses Nashville’s role in other forms of modern music, such as rock, Christian, and rap. Markert’s in-depth interviews with key music professionals provide a fresh perspective on the roles of critical players in Nashville’s music industry. This book sheds light not only on the complexities of the industry and the occupational changes taking place but on the critical role of those who work behind the scenes to shape the music that ultimately reaches the public.
Through firsthand accounts, Making Music in Music City analyzes just what it takes to create, produce, and disseminate the Nashville sound.
In 1882, William Simpson Pearson, writing under the pseudonym Brinsley Matthews, published Well-Nigh Reconstructed, a thinly disguised
autobiographical novel excoriating the enormous societal changes that had beset the former Confederacy during Reconstruction. Pearson’s work was especially notable in that the author was a onetime Radical Republican and supporter of Ulysses S. Grant’s bid for the presidency. A product of Pearson’s perception that northern Reconstruction policies had devastated his native North Carolina, the book set in motion a genre of politically motivated novels that would culminate near the turn of the twentieth century with Thomas Nelson Page’s Red Rock and later Thomas Dixon Jr.’s infamous The Clansman.
Though set in Virginia and Alabama, it is clear that Well-Nigh Reconstructed drew heavily on Pearson’s own experiences and that it was conceived as a direct response to A Fool’s Errand, a pro-Reconstruction novel by fellow North Carolinian Albion Tourgée. Echoing Pearson’s own disillusionment with the Radical Republicans, the novel’s protagonist, Archie Moran, comes to see Radical Reconstruction as an attempt to turn the South into a carbon copy of the North, and through a series of encounters involving corrupt carpetbaggers, greedy politicians, and the Klan trials of the late 1870s, Moran grows weary of politics altogether and resigns his Republican Party affiliation. For Pearson and
his doppelganger, Moran, Reconstruction became a vast breeding ground for corruption.
Featuring an extensive introduction by historian Paul D. Yandle, who sets the political and regional scene of Reconstruction North Carolina, this
reissue of Well-Nigh Reconstructed will shed new light on the ways in which sectionalism, regionalism, and the embrace of white supremacy tended to undermine the recently reconstituted Union among Appalachian residents.
Richard Halliburton (1900–1939), considered the world’s first celebrity travel writer, swam the length of the Panama Canal, recreated Ulysses’ voyages in the Mediterranean, crossed the Alps on an elephant, flew around the world in a biplane, and descended into the Mayan Well of Death, all the while chronicling his own adventures. Several books treat his life and travels, yet no book has addressed in detail Halliburton’s most ambitious expedition: an attempt to sail across the Pacific Ocean in a Chinese junk.
Set against the backdrop of a China devastated by invading Japanese armies and the storm clouds of world war gathering in Europe, Halliburton and a crew of fourteen set out to build and sail the Sea Dragon—a junk or ancient sailing ship—from Hong Kong to San Francisco for the Golden Gate International Exposition. After battling through crew conflicts and frequent delays, the Sea Dragon set sail on March 4, 1939. Three weeks after embarking, the ship encountered a typhoon and disappeared without a trace.
Richly enhanced with historic photographs, Richard Halliburton and the Voyage of the Sea Dragon follows the dramatic arc of this ill-fated expedition in fine detail. Gerry Max artfully unpacks the tensions between Halliburton and his captain, John Wenlock Welch (owing much to Welch’s homophobia and Halliburton’s unconcealed homosexuality). And while Max naturally explores the trials and tribulations of preparing, constructing, and finally launching the Sea Dragon, he also punctuates the story with the invasion of China by the Japanese, as Halliburton and his letters home reveal an excellent wartime reporter. Max mines these documents, many of which have only recently come to light, as well as additional letters from Halliburton and his crew to family and friends, photographs, films, and tape recordings, to paint an intricate portrait of Halliburton’s final expedition from inception to tragic end.
Cedrick May’s The Collected Works of Jupiter Hammon offers a complete look at the literary achievements of one of the founders of African American literature. Born into slavery on the Lloyd plantation in 1711, Jupiter Hammon became the first African American writer to be published in the present-day United States at the age of forty-nine. It has been decades since a collection of Hammon’s work has appeared, and May’s intensive research has yielded two additional poems, adding new layers to his works and life that, until now, have gone unexplored.
The most comprehensive volume on Hammon’s works to date, The Collected Works of Jupiter Hammon carefully reconstructs the historical, political, social, and religious contexts that shaped his essays and poems throughout the late eighteenth century. This attentive reconstruction, which takes full account of Hammon’s prose works as well as his more well-known poetry, gives readers a radical re-reading of Hammon as a much more complex and intellectually curious commentator on his historical and political period, while providing ample evidence of his literary importance and artistic integrity. Cedrick May’s fresh presentation and insightful reevaluation of Hammon’s life and writings will change the way Hammon is studied and appreciated among literary scholars and readers alike. This edition will become the definitive one for many years to come.
Cedrick May’s The Collected Works of Jupiter Hammon offers a complete look at the literary achievements of one of the founders of African American literature. Born into slavery on the Lloyd plantation in 1711, Jupiter Hammon became the first African American writer to be published in the present-day United States at the age of forty-nine. It has been decades since a collection of Hammon’s work has appeared, and May’s intensive research has yielded two additional poems, adding new layers to his works and life that, until now, have gone unexplored.
The most comprehensive volume on Hammon’s works to date, The Collected Works of Jupiter Hammon carefully reconstructs the historical, political, social, and religious contexts that shaped his essays and poems throughout the late eighteenth century. This attentive reconstruction, which takes full account of Hammon’s prose works as well as his more well-known poetry, gives readers a radical re-reading of Hammon as a much more complex and intellectually curious commentator on his historical and political period, while providing ample evidence of his literary importance and artistic integrity. Cedrick May’s fresh presentation and insightful reevaluation of Hammon’s life and writings will change the way Hammon is studied and appreciated among literary scholars and readers alike. This edition will become the definitive one for many years to come.
Until its reissue in 1988 with the help of renowned southern culture scholar John Egerton, Dishes and Beverages of the Old South lingered as a rare text on southern foodways. Now, in its third edition, and with a new foreword by Sheri Castle, this pathfinding cookbook—one of the first to be written in a narrative style—is available to a new generation of southern foodies and amateur chefs. McCulloch-Williams not only provides recipes for the modern cook, but she expounds upon the importance of quality ingredients, muses on memories brought back by a good meal, and deftly recognizes that comfort goes hand in hand with southern eats. Castle navigates the third edition of Dishes and Beverages of the Old South with a clear vision of McCulloch-Williams and her southern opus, and readers and cooks alike will be invigorated by the republication of this classic work.
SHERI CASTLE is a food writer and author of three cookbooks on southern food, including The Southern Living Community Cookbook, which was a finalist for the IACP Cookbook Award.
Colorful, dramatic, blundering, and tragic – these are some of the adjectives that have been applied to the two-day engagement at Shiloh. This battle, which bears the biblical name meaning “place of peace,” was one of the bloodiest encounters of the Civil War. The Union colonel, whose words give the present book its title, foretold the losses when he told his men: “Fill your canteens Boys! Some of you will be in hell before night….”
Fought in the early spring of 1862 on the west bank of the Mississippi state line, Shiloh was, up to that time, the biggest battle of American history. One hundred thousand men were involved, and major Civil War commanders such as Grant, Sherman, Johnston, Beauregard, Bragg, and Forrest participated. The battle took the life of Johnston and it left a lasting impact on the reputation of other commanders. More-over, it played a significant role in the campaign for control of the Mississippi Valley.
Although hundreds of books have been written about the Civil War and its battle, questions about the disorganized struggle at Shiloh have continued to perplex historians. Why was Grant absent when his army was attacked? Why did Grant and Sherman apparently ignore evidence of a Confederate advance? What happened to Lew Wallace that he never got his division into the fight on the first day of battle? Why did it take the Rebels so long to make their way from Corinth to the battlefield? Did the Rebels really have a distinct opportunity to win the battle, as it seems in retrospect, or were they doomed from the start? Were Johnston and Beauregard working at cross-purposes? Shiloh-In Hell Before Night provides answers or clues to answers of clues to answers for these and other questions arising from this controversial engagement.
The author tells his story by placing Shiloh in the larger context of the war and by exploring the very personal side of the conflict through the words of the Union and Confederate participants, officers and common soldiers alike. Touches of humor and even or romance are revealed in the midst of the carnage, but the overriding element is the specter of death. Among those who survived, the soldiers who had been eager to “see the elephant,” as they commonly referred to combat, could never again feel so eager for a fight.
Student teaching can be an endeavor fraught with anxiety. Those entering the classroom for the first time face the daunting challenge of translating coursework on the theory of teaching into real-world experience. Common questions for anxious student teachers include: Will I be a good teacher? Will I ever get control of my classroom? How can I do all of this grading and plan for next week at the same time? This helpful guide by teacher educator Rosalyn McKeown offers practical suggestions for student teachers, interns, and teacher candidates just starting out in a secondary school classroom. This easy-to-read text enables new educators to rapidly advance their teaching skills early in their pre-service experiences.
After exploring the pitfalls of inexperience and providing helpful guidance on maintaining order in the classroom, McKeown focuses on teaching skills. She advises readers on writing objectives and lesson plans, creating interesting ways to start and end class, introducing variety into the classroom, lecturing, asking meaningful questions, and using visual aids. Among the other topics discussed are setting up a classroom, recognizing differences in learning styles, and developing an individual teaching style. Sidebars scattered throughout the text offer useful advice on everything from how to deal with stage fright and distracting noises from outside, to planning for block scheduling and avoiding the attributes of a boring teacher.
With McKeown’s own list of expectations for her classes, templates for hall passes and lesson plans, and scores of tips garnered from years of experience, Into the Classroom provides information a first-time teacher needs to enter the secondary classroom with confidence.
“Previous biographers have poorly understood Hood within the culture of his times, but Miller’s study is a refreshing look at this important theme. Relying on the perspective of memory studies and the experience of amputees, he adds new dimensions to our understanding of Hood and the Civil War.”
—Earl J. Hess, author of In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat
“Miller is particularly strong on the cultivation of Hood’s legend as part of the Lost Cause narrative. . . . He has done nice work in areas previously neglected, offering the first new research on Hood to emerge in years.”
—David Coffey, author of John Bell Hood and the Struggle for Atlanta
Some Southern generals, like Lee and Jackson, have stood the test of time, celebrated in their place in history. And then there are generals like John Bell Hood, reviled and ridiculed by generations of Civil War historians as one of the inglorious architects of the Confederate disgrace in the Western Theater. The time has come to rethink this long-held notion, argues Brian Miller, in his comprehensive new biography, John Bell Hood and the Fight for Civil War Memory, and to reassess John Bell Hood as a man, a myth, and a memory.
In this first biography of the general in more than twenty years, Miller offers a new, original perspective, directly challenging those historians who have pointed to Hood’s perceived personality flaws, his alleged abuse of painkillers, and other unsubstantiated claims as proof of his incompetence as a military leader. This book takes into account Hood’s entire life—as a student at West Point, his meteoric rise and fall as a soldier and Civil War commander, and his career as a successful postwar businessman. In many ways, Hood represents a typical southern man, consumed by personal and societal definitions of manhood that were threatened by amputation and preserved and reconstructed by Civil War memory. Miller consults an extensive variety of sources, explaining not only what Hood did but also the environment in which he lived and how it affected him.
What emerges is a more nuanced, balanced portrait, unfettered by the one-sided perceptions of previous historical narratives. It gives Hood the fair treatment he has been denied for far too long. By looking at Hood’s formative years, his wartime experiences, and his postwar struggles to preserve his good name, this book opens up a provocative new perspective on the life of this controversial figure.
Brian Craig Miller is an assistant professor of history at Emporia State University. He is the author of The American Memory: Americans and Their History in 1877.
“Turn on, tune in, drop out,” Timothy Leary advised young people in the 1960s. And many did, creating a counterculture built on drugs, rock music, sexual liberation, and communal living. The hippies preached free love, promoted flower power, and cautioned against trusting anyone over thirty. Eschewing money, materialism, and politics, they repudiated the mainstream values of the times. Along the way, these counterculturists created a lasting legacy and inspired long-lasting social changes.
The Hippies and American Values uses an innovative approach to exploring the tenets of the counterculture movement. Rather than relying on interviews conducted years after the fact, Timothy Miller uses “underground” newspapers published at the time to provide a full and in-depth exploration. This reliance on primary sources brings an immediacy and vibrancy rarely seen in other studies of the period.
Miller focuses primarily on the cultural revolutionaries rather than on the political radicals of the New Left. It examines the hippies’ ethics of dope, sex, rock, community, and cultural opposition and surveys their effects on current American values. Filled with illustrations from alternative publications, along with posters, cartoons, and photographs, The Hippies and American Values provides a graphic look at America in the 1960s.
This second edition features a new introduction and a thoroughly updated, well-documented text. Highly readable and engaging, this volume brings deep insight to the counterculture movement and the ways it changed America. The first edition became a widely used course-adoption favorite, and scholars and students of the 1960s will welcome the second edition of this thought-provoking book.
Toward the end of his career, Robert Penn Warren wrote, “It may be said that our lives are our own supreme fiction.” Although lauded for his writing in multiple genres, Warren never wrote an autobiography. Instead, he created his own “shadowy autobiography” in his poetry and prose, as well as his fiction and nonfiction. As one of the most thoughtful scholars on Robert Penn Warren and the literature of the South, Joseph Millichap builds on the accepted idea that Warren’s poetry and fiction became more autobiographical in his later years by demonstrating that that same progression is replicated in Warren’s literary criticism. This meticulously researched study reexamines in particular Warren’s later nonfiction in which autobiographical concerns come into play—that is, in those fraught with psychological crisis such as Democracy and Poetry.
Millichap reveals the interrelated literary genres of autobiography, criticism, and poetry as psychological modes encompassing the interplay of Warren’s life and work in his later nonfiction. He also shows how Warren’s critical engagement with major American authors often centered on the ways their creative work intersected with their lives, thus generating both autobiographical criticism and the working out of Warren’s own autobiography under these influences. Millichap’s latest book focuses on Warren’s critical responses to William Faulkner, John Crowe Ransom, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Theodore Dreiser. In addition, the author carefully considers the black and female writers Warren assessed more briefly in American Literature: The Makers and the Making.
Robert Penn Warren, Shadowy Autobiography, and Other Makers of American Literature presents the breadth of Millichap’s scholarship, the depth of his insight, and the maturity of his judgment, by giving us to understand that in his writing, Robert Penn Warren came to know his own vocation as a poet and critic—and as an American.
The persecution of Old World German Protestants and Anabaptists in the seventeenth century-following debilitating wars, the Reformation, and the Inquisition-brought about significant immigration to America. Many of the immigrants, and their progeny, settled in the Appalachian frontier. Here they established a particularly old set of religious beliefs and traditions based on a strong sense of folk spirituality. They practiced astrology, numerology, and other aspects of esoteric thinking and left a legacy that may still be found in Appalachian folklore today.
Based in part on the author's extensive collection of oral histories from the remote highlands of West Virginia, Signs, Cures, and Witchery: German Appalachian Folklore
describes these various occult practices, symbols, and beliefs; how they evolved within New World religious contexts; how they arrived on the Appalachian frontier; and the prospects of those beliefs continuing in the contemporary world.
By concentrating on these inheritances, Gerald C. Milnes draws a larger picture of the German influence on Appalachia. Much has been written about the Anglo-Celtic, Scots-Irish, and English folkways of the Appalachian people, but few studies have addressed their German cultural attributes and sensibilities. Signs, Cures, and Witchery sheds startling light on folk influences from Germany, making it a volume of tremendous value to Appalachian scholars, folklorists, and readers with an interest in Appalachian folklife and German American studies.
Throughout the nineteenth-century, itinerant painters traveled the length and breadth of Europe and American in search of patronage. In the company of the his crupulous wife, Emma S. Cameron (1825–1907), the Scots-born James Cameron (1816–1882) sought to fulfill his ambitious dream of becoming an artist.
Working primarily as a landscapist and portraitist—he was also an inventor, a missionary, an ordained minister, a land agent, farmer, clothing merchant, and Sunday school teacher—Cameron produced a small collection of paintings during the ten-year period the couple resided in East Tennessee and the American South. Driven by the wife’s lively journals, correspondence, and Civil War diary, Moffatt’s narrative details the couple’s marriage, their extended honeymoon in revolutionary Italy and, following a brief excursion in the Adirondacks, their subsequent residencies in Knoxville, Chattanooga, Memphis, Nashville, Augusta, central Mississippi, and New Orleans, between 1856 and 1868. While in Chattanooga, they settled near Col. James A. Whiteside’s fashionable summer resort, Lookout Mountain Hotel, where James reigned as resident artist and Emma, reluctantly, served as the house nurse and social entertainer. In the late 1860s they lived in Maine and, after 1874, in California, where they founded separate Presbyterian churches.
The book emphasizes Cameron’s painting career, the patrons who supported it, and discusses his best-known works, all of which are reproduced here. The study demonstrated how persisted while working under a cultural cloud that often devalued artistic achievement Emma’s journals reveal her to be a perceptive observer of Protestant middle class “life-on-the-run” and yields insight into historic events in the making, including the Italian Risorgimento, the American Civil War, and the settlement of America’s Western frontier. Moffatt’s detailed joint biography provides a valuable contribution to women’s studies, art history, nineteenth-century frontier expansionism, and social history.
“The reason I travel and explore the outdoors is simple,” writes Johnny Molloy, “the world is a beautiful place!” And Molloy would know: he has backpacked more than 2,500 nights in forty states. It is this experience—much of it garnered in his home state of Tennessee—combined with his extensive production of guidebooks spanning activities from hiking and camping to paddling and bicycling, that enabled him to produce Backpacking Tennessee: Overnight Trail Adventures from the Mississippi River to the Appalachian Mountains.
Complete with directions, distances, descriptions, and maps, Backpacking Tennessee is divided into four sections that together outline forty overnight hikes across West Tennessee, Middle Tennessee, the Cumberland Plateau, and East Tennessee and the Appalachian Mountains. The trails Molloy has chosen to highlight are a mix of well-known hikes and lesser-known areas, ranging in distance and difficulty for both novice hikers and experienced backpackers. Woven throughout the trail descriptions are comments on scenery, notes about safety, and historical information that help readers get a true feel for each hike. To round out his comprehensive guide, Molloy also includes ratings, 1–5, on the family- and dog-friendliness of each trail—an especially helpful feature for readers bringing loved ones along.
From the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Cherokee National Forest to Big South Fork and Land Between the Lakes, Tennessee offers thousands of miles of trails for adventurers looking to explore. For budding outdoor enthusiasts and experienced backpackers alike, Backpacking Tennessee answers the timeless question: where do we go next?
The Fiction of Gloria Naylor is one of the very first critical studies of this acclaimed writer. Including an insightful interview with Naylor
and focusing on her first four novels, the book situates various acts of insurgency throughout her work within a larger framework of African American opposition to hegemonic authority. But what truly distinguishes this volume is its engagement with African American vernacular forms and twentieth-century political movements.
In her provocative analysis, Maxine Lavon Montgomery argues that Naylor constantly attempts to reconfigure the home and homespace to be more conducive to black self-actualization, thus providing a stark contrast to a dominant white patriarchy evident in a broader public sphere. Employing a postcolonial and feminist theoretical framework to analyze Naylor’s evolving body of work, Montgomery pays particular attention to black slave historiography, tales of conjure, trickster lore, and oral devices involving masking, word play, and code-switching—the vernacular strategies that have catapulted Naylor to the vanguard of contemporary African American letters.
Montgomery argues for the existence of home as a place that is not exclusively architectural or geographic in nature. She posits that in Naylor’s writings, home exists as an intermediate space embedded in cultural memory and encoded in the vernacular. Home closely resembles a highly symbolic, signifying system bound with vexed issues of racial sovereignty as well as literary authority. Through a reinscription of the subversive, frequently clandestine acts of resistance on the part of the border subject—those outside the dominant
culture—Naylor recasts space in such a way as to undermine reader expectation and destabilize established models of dominance, influence, and control.
Thoroughly researched and sophisticated in its approach, The Fiction of Gloria Naylor will be essential reading for scholars and students of African American, American, and Africana Literary and Cultural studies.
At once accessible and sophisticated, this primer introduces a set of specific principles and procedures designed to promote a deeper understanding of the nuances of human experience and reflection.
The empirical, qualitative approach outlined in this book, which has been refined over the past thirty years at the University of Tennessee, uses disciplined forms of dialogue as the primary means of gathering and assessing information about human experience. Properly known as existential-hermeneutic-phenomenology (or simply phenomenology in everyday usage), this style of scholarly investigation has been applied to illuminate a wide range of research questions in fields such as psychology, child and family studies, marketing, nursing, communications, political science, and more. This book seeks to make this transdisciplinary tradition of research more accessible to a wider audience.
Investigating Our Experience in the World begins with an overview of basic concepts. April L. Morgan provides clear definitions of key terms and succinctly describes how phenomenological research procedures evolved from philosophical explorations of consciousness. Although phenomenological methods are rife with philosophical underpinnings, the author remains focused on describing specific research applications. Each subsequent chapter describes a major stage of a research study. For example, Morgan leads readers through framing the project and undertaking the initial bracketing interview to conducting phenomenological interviews with participants, interpreting texts, thematizing, and developing thematic structure.
Rounding out discussion of the research procedures is a full chapter devoted to writing the research report. The book concludes with a section answering common questions about this style of phenomenological research. Appendices provide a glossary, sample forms, and references for further study.
Aspects of real-world research projects are continually highlighted, illuminating key methodological points. Morgan recognizes the primary investigators and research teams behind such studies for contributing significantly to the development of contemporary phenomenological research methods.
While a member of the political science faculty at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville,
April L. Morgan participated in phenomenology labs housed in the university’s Department of Psychology and in the College of Nursing. Morgan coedited The Art of College Teaching: Twenty-eight Takes, with Marilyn Kallet, and Ethics and Global Politics: The Active Learning Sourcebook, with Lucinda Joy Peach and Colette Mazzucelli.
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