“This book is very important in the wider context of related scholarship in the modern-day civil rights movement because it will be the first on the youth perspective in the NAACP. . . . I believe that it will be widely used by scholars and the general public.”—Linda Reed, author of Simple Decency and Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938-1963
“A recent trend in the historiography of the civil rights movement is the increased understanding of the role that young people played in the right for equality. . . . Bynum has filled a gap in the civil rights literature in this short book.” —Choice
Historical studies of black youth activism have until now focused almost exclusively on the activities of the Congress Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). However, the NAACP youth councils and college chapters predate both of those organizations. Thomas Bynum carefully examines the activism of the NAACP youth and effectively refutes the perception of the NAACP as working strictly through the courts. His research illuminates the many direct-action activities undertaken by the young people of the NAACP—activities that helped precipitate the breakdown of racial discrimination and segregation in America. He also explores the evolution of the youth councils and college chapters, including their sometime rocky relationship with the national office, and captures the successes, failures, and challenges the NAACP youth groups experiences at the national, state, and local levels.
Thomas Bynum is an assistant professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University.
Evelyn Scott’s first novel, The Narrow House, depicts a family stricken by dysfunctional domesticity. Revolving around troubled members of the Farley family, Scott exposes notions of romantic love, longing, and the image of the Southern belle as damaging, unrealistic constructs, all against the backdrop of a seemingly normal middle-class existence that in previous decades had been idealized in Southern writing. Published to high praise when it appeared in 1921, The Narrow House vaulted Scott to literary celebrity in her day.
In this new critical edition, Mary E. Papke contextualizes Scott’s first and possibly best writing effort with an astute introduction that discusses Scott and her contemporaries, the work’s importance to the genre of the novel, and the small but ongoing reclamation of Scott’s place in literary history. Completely updated and formatted for a modern readership, this critical edition of The Narrow House is sure to find its way into classrooms and onto bookshelves.
World War II shaped the United States in profound ways, and this new book--the first in the Legacies of War series--explores one of the most significant changes it fostered: a dramatic increase in ethnic and religious tolerance. A Nation Forged in War is the first full-length study of how large-scale mobilization during the Second World War helped to dissolve long-standing differences among white soldiers of widely divergent backgrounds.
Never before or since have so many Americans served in the armed forces at one time: more than 15 million donned uniforms in the period from 1941 to 1945. Thomas Bruscino explores how these soldiers' shared experiences--enduring basic training, living far from home, engaging in combat--transformed their views of other ethnic groups and religious traditions. He further examines how specific military policies and practices worked to counteract old prejudices, and he makes a persuasive case that throwing together men of different regions, ethnicities, religions, and classes not only fostered a greater sense of tolerance but also forged a new American identity. When soldiers returned home after the war with these new attitudes, they helped reorder what it meant to be white in America.
Using the presidential campaigns of Al Smith in 1928 and John F. Kennedy in 1960 as bookend events, Bruscino notes a key change in religious bias. Smith's defeat came at the end of a campaign rife with anti-Catholic sentiment; Kennedy's victory some three decades later proved that such religious bigotry was no longer an insurmountable obstacle. Despite such advances, Bruscino notes that the growing broad-mindedness produced by the war had limits: it did not extend to African Americans, whose own struggle for equality would dramatically mark the postwar decades.
Extensively documented, A Nation Forged in War is one of the few books on the social and cultural impact of the World War II years. Scholars and students of military, ethnic, social, and religious history will be fascinated by this groundbreaking new volume.
Though scholarship on intoxicants in regions like Asia, Africa, Mesoamerica, and South America is plentiful, Native Intoxicants of North America represents the first foray into a study of prehistoric intoxicants throughout North America specifically. In this study, Sean Rafferty fills significant gaps in existing research with a focus on native cultures of North America and holistic coverage of intoxicants by type. Importantly, Rafferty anchors his investigation in an easily overlooked question: why did early humans use intoxicants in the first place?
Rafferty begins by discussing the origins of intoxicants and their role in rituals, medicine, and recreation. Subsequent chapters turn to specific intoxicants—hallucinogens, stimulants, alcohol, and tobacco—making ample use of illustrations across disciplines, weaving a tapestry of culture, ritual, medicine, botany, artifact, and history. All the while, Rafferty explores the societal significance of narcotics, stimulants, and hallucinogens on prehistoric North American cultures.
While Native Intoxicants of North America focuses specifically on Native cultures, the author’s analysis provides the foundation for a valuable broader discussion: that in a world where few human behaviors are universal, experiencing altered states of consciousness is one that transcends culture and time.
Widely regarded as the crown jewel of the Great Smoky Mountains, Mount Le Conte harbors the greatest concentration of notable geological features in all of the Smokies. This unique book tells the history of the mountain, offering visitors a greater appreciation of its scenic splendor.
Kenneth Wise and Ron Petersen combine their intimate knowledge of Le Conte with a wealth of scientific and historical information. Following introductory coverage of the mountain’s geologic history and human exploration, they follow the six main trails up the mountain—Alum Cave, Bullhead, Rainbow Falls, Trillium Gap, Brushy Mountain, and the Boulevard—and reveal each one to be not merely a path but also a rich source of historical and personal testimony. A final chapter covers the distinguishing features of the summit itself.
Along each route, the authors explain how the trail was developed and provide background for well-known landmarks, from Inspiration Point to Huggins Hell. They offer informative descriptions of the plants and wildlife indigenous to Mount Le Conte as well as observations on the effects of environmental changes on the landscape.
The book is illustrated with dozens of photographs, many of historic interest.
Kenneth Wise is an associate professor at the John C. Hodges Library and the author of Hiking Trails of the Great Smoky Mountains. Ron Petersen is a distinguished professor in the Department of Botany at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
Since at least the time of Plato, religious explanations of the metaphysical foundations of morality have typically fallen into one of two camps: natural law theory, according to which morality is fundamentally explained by facts about human nature—facts that God is responsible for—and divine command theory, which holds that moral obligations arise directly from God’s commands or some other prescriptive act of the divine will. J. Caleb Clanton and Kraig Martin offer an accessible analysis of these traditional views, reconstruct the various arguments for and against them, and offer an extended consideration of the historical emergence of the divide between these positions within the Christian tradition. Nature and Command goes on to develop and defend a theory that combines these two views—a metaethical approach that has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves.
Along the way, the authors make use of underexplored theological resources drawn from the Stone-Campbell movement, a nineteenth-century restoration movement that culminated in one of the largest Protestant groups in America by the dawn of the twentieth century. Nature and Command summons the resources of this particular Christian heritage—its first principles, call for unity, and ecumenism—to solve one of the great dilemmas of moral philosophy and theology dating back to Plato’s Euthyphro.
This historically aware, argumentatively rigorous, and highly readable volume will serve as a valuable resource for moral philosophy and ethics, as well as for mining the Stone-Campbell Restoration tradition for historical and theological insights.
Known for his sometimes-gritty naturalism and use of Appalachian dialect, Harry Harrison Kroll (1888–1967) was a remarkably prolific Tennessee novelist and short-story writer during the middle decades of the twentieth century. His career spanned two of the three major shifts in publishing during the twentieth century: the heyday and decline of the fiction magazine market during the late 1920s, and the rise of nonfiction and solidification of paperback marketing during the 1950s. Never Been Rich explores details of Kroll’s humble, rural youth, his long delayed education and the development of his craft, before discussing his lengthy career and how it reflected changes in both public taste and the American publishing industry.
Kroll focused on writing not as a high art, but instead on what was popular—what would earn him a living. He preferred to write voluminously rather than exquisitely, and growing up in the rural south provided him with a broad and fertile field of experience to plow for his crop of stories. As a writing instructor, he had a profound influence on his students, particularly the well-known Appalachian triumvirate of James Still, Jesse Stuart, and Don West.
While Kroll may lack grand literary significance, Richard Saunders maintains that we should explore not merely the linguistic and thematic aspects of a writer’s work but also its broad economic and social contexts, including the idea that literature is both an art form and a marketable product in an extensive industry. His study of Kroll delves deeply into those contexts and shows that, while Kroll did not strive for a place among writers of high literature, he exemplifies the far more widely read popular literature of his times.
The first African American to publish a book on any subject, poet Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784) has long been denigrated by literary critics who refused to believe that a black woman could produce such dense, intellectual work, let alone influence Romantic-period giants like Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson once declared that “the compositions published under her name are below dignity of criticism.” In recent decades, however, Wheatley’s work has come under new scrutiny as the literature of the eighteenth century and the impact of African American literature have been reconceived. In these never-before-published essays, fourteen prominent Wheatley scholars consider her work from a variety of angles, affirming her rise into the first rank of American writers.
The pieces in the first section show that perhaps the most substantial measure of Wheatley’s multilayered texts resides in her deft handling of classical materials. The contributors consider Wheatley’s references to Virgil’s Aeneid and Georgics and to the feminine figure Dido as well as her subversive critique of white readers attracted to her adaptation of familiar classics. They also discuss Wheatley’s use of the Homeric Trojan horse and eighteenth-century verse to mask her ambitions for freedom and her treatment of the classics as political tools.
Engaging Wheatley’s multilayered texts with innovative approaches, the essays in the second section recontextualize her rich manuscripts and demonstrate how her late-eighteenth-century works remain both current and timeless. They ponder Wheatley’s verse within the framework of queer theory, the concepts of political theorist Hannah Arendt, rhetoric, African studies, eighteenth-century “salon culture,” and the theoretics of imagination.
Together, these essays reveal the depth of Phillis Wheatley’s literary achievement and present concrete evidence that her extant oeuvre merits still further scrutiny.
John C. Shields is Distinguished Professor of English at Illinois State University. He is the editor of The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley and author of The American Aeneas: Classical Origins of the American Self, a Choice Outstanding Academic Book; Phillis Wheatley and the Romantics; and Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation; and awarded honorable mention in competition for the American Comparative Literature Association’s Harry Levin Prize. As well, Shields serves as director of the Center for Classicism and American Culture and General Editor for the series of monographs on Classicism in American Culture to be published by the University of Tennessee Press.
Eric D. Lamore is an assistant professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, and a contributor to The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry.
The Eastern Band’s economic decisions of the 1900s did not occur in a vacuum. In fact, these decisions reflected regional changes and the broader development of the post-Civil War American South. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians formally incorporated under North Carolina law in the 1880s, and their economic policies evolved as the country experienced Jim Crow segregation, the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement. During the twentieth century, members of the Eastern Band embraced an economic strategy partially based on tourism. In the late 1900s, they pursued policies that facilitated the rise of casino gaming.
Divided into five chapters, Christopher Arris Oakley’s New South Indians traces the economic development of the Eastern Band throughout the twentieth century to better contextualize the Cherokee Tribal Council’s 1990s decision to incorporate gaming into the nation’s economic strategy. In building his contextual framework, Oakley discusses the interdependent relationships forged by Cherokee Tribal Council members with various public and private entities in order to protect their land, manage their resources, and advance the well-being of their nation’s economy and community.
New South Indians also situates the story within the history of the American South. Thus, the saga of the Eastern Band’s struggle for economic autonomy and financial stability throughout the stormy twentieth century can be seen as an integral part of the historical account of western North Carolina.
A multifaceted glimpse into a vital aspect of contemporary southern history, New South Indians is sure to appeal to a wide variety of readers, from those captivated by Native American culture and the history of the modern South to those interested in economic history.
CHRISTOPHER ARRIS OAKLEY is an associate professor in the Department of History at East Carolina University. He is the author of Keeping the Circle: American Indian Identity in Eastern North Carolina, 1885–2004, and he is coauthor, with Theda Perdue, of Native Carolinians: The Indians of North Carolina.
From the early 1500s to the mid-1700s, the American Southeast was the scene of continuous
tumult as European powers vied for dominance in the region while waging war on Native American communities. Yet even before Hernando de Soto landed his expeditionary
force on the Gulf shores of Florida, Native Americans had created their own “cultures of violence”: sets of ideas about when it was appropriate to use violence and what sorts of violence were appropriate to a given situation.
In New Worlds of Violence, Matthew Jennings offers a persuasive new framework for understanding the European–Native American contact period and the conflicts among indigenous peoples that preceded it. This pioneering approach posits that every group present in the Southeast had its own ideas about the use of violence and that these ideas changed over time as they collided with one another. The book starts with the Mississippian era and continues through the successive Spanish and English invasions of the Native South. Jennings argues that the English conquered the Southeast because they were able to force everyone else to adapt to their culture of violence, which, of course, changed over time as well. By 1740, a peculiarly Anglo-American culture of violence was in place that would profoundly influence the expansion of England’s colonies and the eventual southern United States. While Native and African violence were present in this world, they moved in circles defined by the English.
New Worlds of Violence concludes by pointing out that long-lasting violence bears long-lasting consequences. An important contribution to the growing body of work on the early Southeast, this book will significantly broaden readers’ understanding of America’s violent past.
Matthew Jennings is an assistant professor of history at Macon State College in Macon, Georgia. He is the author of “Violence in a Shattered World” in Mapping the Shatter Zone: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, edited by Robbie Ethridge and Sheri Shuck-Hall. His work has also appeared in The Uniting States, The South Carolina Encyclopedia, A Multicultural History of the United States, and The Encyclopedia of Native American History.
Walter E. Klippel came to the University of Tennessee in 1977 as an assistant professor of anthropology. In the forty years that followed, he supervised and mentored countless students in archaeology and biological anthropology, published more than fifty journal articles and book chapters, and assembled a zooarchaeological comparative collection of national significance. During his tenure, Klippel’s important contributions to the field of zooarchaeology would impact not only his students and colleagues but the development of zooarchaeological research as a whole. Even after his retirement in 2017, Klippel’s influence is readily apparent in the studies of his contemporaries. North American Zooarchaeology: Reflections on History and Continuity is their tribute to his work.
Developed by friends, students, and colleagues of Walter Klippel, North American Zooarchaeology presents a wide-ranging collection of essays through the lens of his remarkable career. Each chapter of the volume represents a prevailing theme notable in Klippel’s research, including geological and landscape contexts, taphonomy, and the incorporation of actualistic methodologies and new technologies into zooarchaeological analyses. The diversity of topics represented across the ten chapters showcase just how extensive Klippel’s research interests are and suggest how much contemporary zooarchaeology owes to his vision. The authors take up this broad palette to explore the various ways in which the framework of zooarchaeology can be used and applied in nontraditional settings.
With a foreword by Bonnie Styles and Bruce McMillan, longtime friends and colleagues of Walter Klippel, this volume reflects on the history and continuity of zooarchaeology in North America and honors one of its most notable contemporary contributors. With its multifaceted approach, this volume is sure to appeal to a broad array of practitioners in the field of zooarchaeology.
In December 1846, John Jacob Oswandel—or Jake as he was often called—enlisted in the Monroe Guards, which later became Company C of the First Pennsylvania Volunteer Regiment. Thus began a twenty-month journey that led Oswandel from rural Pennsylvania through the American South, onward to the siege of Veracruz, and finally deep into the heart of Mexico. Waging war with Mexico ultimately realized President James K. Polk’s long-term goal of westward expansion all the way to the Pacific Ocean. For General Winfield Scott, the victorious Mexico City campaign would prove his crowning achievement in a fifty-three-year military career, but for Oswandel the “grand adventure of our lives” was about patriotism and honor in a war that turned this twenty-something bowsman into a soldier.
Notes of the Mexican War, 1846–1848, is the quintessential primary source on the Mexican War. From Oswandel’s time of enlistment in Pennsylvania to his discharge in July of 1848, he kept a daily record of events, often with the perception and intuition worthy of a highly ranked officer. In addition to Oswandel’s engaging narrative, Timothy D. Johnson and Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Jr. provide an introduction that places Oswandel’s memoir within present-day scholarship. They illuminate the mindset of Oswandel and his comrades, who viewed the war with Mexico in terms of Manifest Destiny and they give insight into Oswandel’s historically common belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority—views that would bring about far worse consequences at the outbreak of the American Civil War a dozen years later.
As historians continue to highlight the controversial actions of the Polk administration and the expansionist impulse that led to the conflict, Notes of the Mexican War, 1846–1848, opens a window into the past when typical young men rallied to a cause they believed was just and ordained. Oswandel provides an eyewitness account of an important chapter in America’s history.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press