In late August 1998, Kim Trevathan and his dog, Jasper, set out by canoe on a long, slow trip down the 652 miles of the Tennessee River, the largest tributary of the Ohio. Trevathan wanted to experience the river in its entirety, from Knoxville’s narrow, winding channel, which flows past rocky bluffs, to the wide-open waters of Kentucky Lake at its lower end.

Over the course of the five-week voyage, Trevathan rediscovered the people and places that made history on the Tennessee’s banks. He crossed the path of the explorer Meriwether Lewis along the Natchez Trace, noted the sites of Ulysses S. Grant’s Civil War battles, and passed Hiwassee Island, the spot where a teenaged runaway named Sam Houston lived with Cherokee Chief Jolly.

Trevathan also came to know the modern river’s dwellers, including a towboat pilot, two couples who traded in their landlocked homes for life on the river, a campground owner, and a meteorologist for NASA. He placed his life in the hands of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers lock operators as he and Jasper navigated the river’s nine dams.

Paddling the Tennessee River is a powerful travel narrative that captures the river’s wild, turbulent, and defiant past and confronts what it has become—an overused and overdeveloped series of lakes. But first and foremost, the book is the story of a man and his dog, riding low enough to smell the water and to discover the promise of a slow river running through the southern heartland.

The Author: Kim Trevathan, who earned his M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Alabama, works as a new media writer and producer and writes a column for the Maryville Daily Times. His essays and short stories have been published in The Distillery, New Millennium Writings, The Texas Review, New Delta Review, and Under the Sun. He lives in Rockford, Tennessee.

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 Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor in the Case of Black Washington, D.C. considers the function of oral history in shaping community dynamics among African American residents of the nation’s capitol. The only attempt to document rumor and legends relating to complexion in black communities,The Paper Bag Principle looks at the divide that has existed between the black elite and the black “folk.” While a few studies have dealt with complexion consciousness in black communities, there has, to date, been no study that has catalogued how the belief systems of members of a black community have influenced the shaping of its institutions, organizations, and neighborhoods. Audrey Kerr examines how these folk beliefs—exemplified by the infamous “paper bag tests”—inform color discrimination intraracially. Kerr argues that proximity to whiteness (in hue) and wealth have helped create two black Washingtons and that the black community, at various times in history, replicated “Jim Crowism” internally to create some standard of exceptionalism in education and social organization. Kerr further contends that within the nomenclature of African Americans, folklore represents a complex negotiation of racism written in ritual, legend, myth, folk poetry, and folk song that captures “boundary building” within African American communities. The Paper Bag Principle focuses on three objectives: to record lore related to the “paper bag principle” (the set of attitudes that granted blacks with light skin higher status in black communities); to investigate the impact that this “principle” has had on the development of black community consciousness; and to link this material to power that results from proximity to whiteness. The Paper Bag Principle is sure to appeal to scholars and historians interested in African American studies, cultural studies, oral history, folklore, and ethnic and urban studies.

“Parlor Ladies and Ebony Drudges does not simply fill in another piece of the mosaic that women’s historians have been assembling. Raising new questions, it offers a fresh perspective on the history of African American women and invites us to follow new paths of inquiry.”—from the Foreword by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

Focusing on the community of Orangeburg, South Carolina, from 1880 to 1940, Parlor Ladies and Ebony Drudges explores the often sharp class divisions that developed among African African women in that small, semirural area.
Kibibi Voloria Mack’s research challenges the conventional thesis that all African American women toiled—and toiled hard—throughout their lives. She shows that this was only true if they belonged to certain socioeconomic classes. Mack  finds that, in Orangeburg, a significant minority did not have to work outside the home (unless they chose to do so) and that some even had staffs of domestics to do their housework—a situation paralleling that of the town’s genteel white women. While the factors of gender and race did restrict the lives of all African American women in Jim Crow Orangeburg, Mack argues, there was no real solidarity across class lines. In fact, as she points out, tensions often arose between women of the upper classes and those of the middle and working classes.

Mack offers a rich picture of the work patterns, social lives, home lives, attitudes, and self-images of the women of each class, carefully distinguishing their differences and noting the historical changes and continuities that affected them. The book is not only an important contribution to the study of African American women in the South but also to the research on women’s work more generally: it is a vital corrective to the past emphasis on white women living in northeastern urban areas.

The Author: Kibibi Voloria C. Mack is an assistant professor in the Africana Studies Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is a native of Orangeburg, South Carolina, and received her doctorate in history at the State University of New York, Binghamton. The mother of four daughters, she has also written several books for young people on African and African American history.

Often thought of as impoverished, backward, and victimized, the people of the southern mountains have long been prime candidates for development projects conceptualized and controlled from outside the region. This book, breaking with old stereotypes and the strategies they spawned, proposes an alternative paradigm for development projects in Appalachian communities-one that is far more inclusive and democratic than previous models.

Emerging from a critical analysis of the modern development process, the participatory development approach advocated in this book assumes that local culture has value, that local communities have assets, and that local people have the capacity to envision and provide leadership for their own social change. It thus promotes better decision making in Appalachian communities through public participation and civic engagement.

Filling a void in current research by detailing useful, hands-on tools and methods employed in a variety of contexts and settings, the book combines relevant case studies of successful participatory projects with practical recommendations from seasoned professionals. Editor Susan E. Keefe has included the perspectives of anthropologists, sociologists, and others who have been engaged, sometimes for decades, in Appalachian communities. These contributors offer hopeful new strategies for dealing with Appalachia's most enduring problems-strategies that will also aid activists and researchers working in other distressed or underserved communities.

Susan E. Keefe is professor of anthropology at Appalachian State University. She is the editor of Appalachian Mental Health and Appalachian Cultural Competency: A Guide for Medical, Mental Health, and Social Service Professionals.

In this thought-provoking study, Jonathan M. Atkins provides a fresh look at the partisan ideological battles that marked the political culture of antebellum Tennessee. He argues that the legacy of party politics was a key factor in shaping Tennessee's hesitant course during the crisis of Union in 1860–61.

Between the Jacksonian era and the outbreak of the Civil War, Atkins demonstrates, the competition between Democrats and Whigs in Tennessee was as heated as any in the country. The conflict centered largely on differing conceptions of republican liberty and each party's contention that the other posed a serious threat to that liberty. As the slavery question pushed to the forefront of national politics, Tennessee's parties absorbed the issue into the partisan tumult that already existed. Both parties pledged to defend southern interests while preserving the integrity of the Union. Appeals for the defense of liberty and Union interests proved effective with voters and profoundly influenced the state's actions during the secession crisis. The belief that a new national Union party could preserve the Union while checking the Lincoln administration encouraged voters initially to reject secession. With the outbreak of war, however, West and Middle Tennesseans chose to accept disunion to avoid what they saw as coercion and military despotism by the North. East Tennesseans, meanwhile, preferred loyalty to the Union over membership in a Southern confederacy dominated by a slaveholding aristocracy.

No previous book has so clearly detailed the role of party politics and ideology in Tennessee's early history. As Atkins shows, the ideological debate helps to explain not only the character and survival of Tennessee's party system but also the peristent strength of unionism in a state that ultimately joined the Southern cause.

The Author: Jonathan M. Atkins is assistant professor of history at Berry College in Mt. Berry, Georgia.
 

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the booming textile industry turned many New England towns and villages into industrialized urban centers. This rapid urbanization transformed the built environment of communities such as New Bedford, Massachusetts, as new housing styles emerged to accommodate the largely immigrant workforce of the mills. In particular, the wood-frame “three-decker” became the region’s multifamily housing design of choice in urban areas and is widely acknowledged as a unique architectural form that is characteristic of New England. In The Patina of Place, Kingston Heath offers the first book-length analysis of the three-decker and its cultural significance, revealing New Bedford’s evolving regional identity within New England.
The Patina of Place offers a multidisciplinary analysis of workers’ housing as an index to social change and cultural identity in New Bedford from 1848 to 1925. Heath discusses both the city’s company-owned mill housing and the subsequent transition to a speculative building market that established the three-decker rental flat as the city’s most common housing form for industrial workers.

Using the concept of “cultural weathering” to explore the cultural imprints left by inhabitants on their built environment, Heath considers whether the three-decker is a generic “type” that could be transferred elsewhere. He concludes that the ethnic, economic, and geographic conditions of a locale serve as filters that reshape the meaning, utility, and character of a building form, thereby making it an integral part of its particular community. Specifically, he shows how the three-decker was lived in, and used by, its original inhabitants and illustrates its transformation by later generations of residents following the collapse of the textile industry in the mid-1920s.

The Patina of Place focuses on the three-decker in New Bedford, but its overarching theme concerns the cultural, economic, and social complexities of place-making and the creation of regional identity. Heath offers a broad investigation of the forces that drive the production and consumption of architecture, at the same time providing an economic and cultural context for the emergence of a particular architectural form.

The Author: Kingston Heath is associate professor in the college of architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His articles have appeared in The Encyclopedia of Architecture and Old-Time New England, among other publications.

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins was perhaps the most prolific black female writer of her time. Between 1900 and 1904, writing mainly for Colored American Magazine, she published four novels, at least seven short stories, and numerous articles that often addressed the injustices and challenges facing African Americans in post–Civil War America. In Pauline Hopkins and the American Dream, Alisha Knight provides the first full-length critical analysis of Hopkins’s work.
    Scholars have frequently situated Hopkins within the domestic, sentimental tradition of nineteenth-century women's writing, with some critics observing that aspects of her writing, particularly its emphasis on the self-made man, seem out of place within the domestic tradition. Knight argues that Hopkins used this often-dismissed theme to critique American society's ingrained racism and sexism. In her “Famous Men” and “Famous Women” series for Colored American Magazine, she constructed her own version of the success narrative by offering models of African American self-made men and women. Meanwhile, in her fiction, she depicted heroes who fail to achieve success or must leave the United States to do so.
    Hopkins risked and eventually lost her position at Colored American Magazine by challenging black male leaders, liberal white philanthropists, and white racists—and by conceiving a revolutionary treatment of the American Dream that placed her far ahead of her time. Hopkins is finally getting her due, and this clear-eyed analysis of her work will be a revelation to literary scholars, historians of African American history, and students of women’s studies.

Alisha Knight is an associate professor of English and American Studies at Washington College. Her published articles include “Furnace Blasts for the Tuskegee Wizard: Revisiting Pauline E. Hopkins, Booker T. Washington, and the Colored American Magazine,” which appeared in American Periodicals.

Since 1972 the Rainbow Family of Living Light, a loosely organized and anarchistic nomadic community, has been holding large gatherings in remote forests to pray for world peace and create a model of a functioning utopian society. Michael I. Niman’s People of the Rainbow, originally published in 1997, was the first comprehensive study of this countercultural group and its eclectic philosophy of environmentalism, feminism, peace activism, group sharing, libertarianism, and consensus government. It is a book yet to be superseded.

This second edition of Niman’s compelling and insightful work brings the Rainbow story up to date with a new introduction and two extensive new epilogues. While the big annual Rainbow “Gatherings” have drawn fewer numbers in recent years, Niman notes, the Rainbow ethos has in many ways migrated to the mainstream, as Rainbow notions about alternative medicine and environmental sustainability, for example, have gathered wider acceptance and influenced the national dialogue. Meanwhile, Rainbow movements in other regions, from Eastern Europe and the Middle East to Asia and Australia, are thriving.

In addition to addressing changes within the Rainbow Family and its complex relationship
to “Babylon” (what Rainbows call mainstream culture), the book’s new material explores the growing harassment Rainbows now face from U.S. law enforcement agencies—
especially those associated with the National Forest Service. As Niman contends, this particular saga of a U.S. bureaucracy at war with its own citizens is a subplot in the larger—and disturbing—story of how the relationship between Americans and their government has changed during the first decade of the twenty-first century.

In its nuanced portrait of an intriguing subculture, its successes, and its limitations, People of the Rainbow remains a significant contribution to the study of utopian communities in the United States and their ongoing legacy.

Michael I. Niman is a professor of journalism and media studies in the Communication Department at Buffalo State College in New York.

For additional resources related to this new edition, see http://buffalostate.edu/peopleoftherainbow.

Unified by geography and themes of tradition and progress, the essays in this anthology present a complex view of the Upper Cumberland area of Tennessee and Kentucky—a remote and, in some ways, mysterious region—and its people. The distinguished contributors cover everything from early folk medicine practices (Opless Walker), to the changing roles of women in the Upper Cumberland (Ann Toplovich), to rarely discussed African American lifeways in the area (Wali R. Kharif). The result is an astonishingly fresh contribution to studies of the Upper Cumberland area.

Randall D. Williams’s essay on the relatively unknown history of American Indians in the region opens the collection, followed by Michael Allen’s history of boating and river professions on the Cumberland River. Al Cross and David Cross illuminate the Republican politics of the Kentucky section of the Upper Cumberland, while Mark Dudney provides a first-of-its-kind look at the early careers of distinguished Tennesseans Cordell Hull and John Gore. Equally fresh is Mary A. Evins’s examination of the career of Congressman Joe L. Evins, and coeditor Michael E. Birdwell and John B. Nisbet III contribute an in-depth piece on John Catron, the Upper Cumberland’s first Supreme Court justice. Troy D. Smith’s essay on Champ Ferguson sheds new light on the Confederate guerilla. Birdwell’s second contribution, an exploration of the history of moonshine, provides insight into a venerable Cumberland tradition. Pairing well with Walker’s essay, Janey Dudney and coeditor W. Calvin Dickinson discuss the superstitions faced by early Upper Cumberland medical professionals. Closing out the grouping of medical articles is Dickinson’s second chapter, which tells the story of Dr. May Cravath Wharton and her contribution to the region’s health care. Laura Clemons explores the relationship between composer Charles Faulkner Bryan and his gifted African American pupil J. Robert Bradley during the Jim Crow era. Birdwell’s third chapter and the collection’s final essay examines race relations in the Upper Cumberland.

Offering a broad look at one of the most understudied regions of the Volunteer State, this significant addition to Tennessee history will prove insightful for students and academics with interdisciplinary and cross-historical interests.

Phillis Wheatley was the first African American to publish a book. Born in Gambia in 1753, she came to America aboard a slave ship, the Phillis. From an early age, Wheatley exhibited a profound gift for verse, publishing her first poem in 1767. Her tribute to a famed pastor, “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield,” followed in 1770, catapulting her into the international spotlight, and publication of her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral in London created her an international star.

Despite the attention she received at the time, history has not been kind to Wheatley. Her work has long been neglected or denigrated by literary critics and historians. John C. Shields, a scholar of early American literature, has tried to help change this perception, and Wheatley has begun to take her place among the elite of American writers.

In Phillis Wheatley and the Romantic Age, Shields contends that Wheatley was not only a brilliant writer but one whose work made a significant impression on renowned Europeans of the Romantic age, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who borrowed liberally from her works, particularly in his famous distinction between fancy and imagination. Shields shows how certain Wheatley texts, particularly her “Long Poem,” consisting of “On Recollection,” “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” and “On Imagination,” helped shape the face of Romanticism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Phillis Wheatley and the Romantic Age helps demolish the long-held notion that literary culture flowed in only one direction: from Europe to the Americas. Thanks to Wheatley’s influence, Shields argues, the New World was influencing European literary masters far sooner than has been generally understood.

     Well known for the important role he played in the American Restoration Movement, Alexander Campbell was one of the most respected and influential religious figures of 19th-century America. Although Campbell’s legacy as a religious leader and theologian has been widely acknowledged and documented, his contributions as a philosopher of religion have been  largely neglected.
     The Philosophy of Religion of Alexander Campbell reintroduces readers to Campbell as a philosopher of religion and explores the philosophical basis for the views underlying his religious movement. It begins with a highly readable discussion of Campbell’s role in antebellum American religion and proceeds to an exploration of his philosophical influences. J. Caleb Clanton then reconstructs, explains, and evaluates Campbell’s philosophy of religion. He critically examines Campbell’s unique, revealed-idea argument for the existence of God—that is, if God did not exist, we could not form the distinct idea of God. Clanton goes on to explore Campbell’s defense of miracles, including the resurrection of Christ, and his responses to the problem of evil and the problem of divine hiddenness. The final and most speculative chapter collects and synthesizes from scattered writings Campbell’s view on morality and religion— namely that there is no morality without God—which has proven difficult to defend on philosophical grounds.
     With this book, the author makes a unique and important contribution to the literature of the Stone-Campbell movement. Clanton presents Campbell’s views strictly in philosophical terms and evaluates them from a philosophical perspective without regard to religious apologetics. In doing so, he illuminates previously unexplored dimensions of Campbell and his work, both historically and theologically, and clearly validates Campbell’s inclusion in contemporary discussions of the philosophy of religion.

The journals of David Golightly Harris are a unique daily record of a fifteen-year span in the life of a Piedmont South Carolina farm family that owned ten slaves and cultivated one hundred acres.  Documents from small slaveholders are few, making these journals an invaluable source of information about the agricultural routines of a small antebellum farm as well as a revealing commentary on regional and national affairs, slavery, education, religion, family relationships, and community life.  
An especially compelling feature of this book is its inclusion of writings by Harris's wife, Emily, who took over the journal when he went to war for the Confederacy in 1862. Recounting the trials of managing the farm and raising seven children in her husband's absence, Emily's words offer poignant insights into the daily struggles of those who tended the home front during the Civil War.
"Piedmont Farmer is one of those rare books that deserves a place alongside The Cotton Kingdom, My Bondage and My Freedom, The Children of Pride, Mary Chesnut's Civil War, and the recent Freedom volumes as an indispensable source for historians of the nineteenth-century South."—David C. Rankin, The Journal of Southern History
"Harris's journals are important because they span the years before, during, and after the Civil War. . . . Philip N. Racine's annotations are extensive and extraordinarily rich in detail and insight. Enhanced with photographs, maps, and a comprehensive index, the Harris journals are not only a major contribution to southern history, but also they are a poignant view of agriculture and an explicit confirmation of slavery's burden."—David E. Schob, Illinois Historical Journal

The Editor: Philip N. Racine is Kenan Professor of History at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He edited "Unspoiled Heart": The Journal of Charles Mattocks of the 17th Maine in the Voices of the Civil War series published by the University of Tennessee Press.

Whether loved or reviled, the New York Yankees have had an impact on American culture that extends well beyond baseball. Since the early twentieth century, movies, novels, memoirs, pop songs, and even TV sitcoms have either dealt directly with the Bronx club and its star players or incorporated key elements of Yankee iconography. In Pinstripe Nation, Will Bishop explores the myriad ways in which the Yankees and their successes (and spectacular failures) became interwoven with the nation’s larger cultural narrative. 

In 1920, with their acquisition of Babe Ruth, the Yankees rose to prominence. With his power-hitting style attracting legions of new fans, the “Great Bambino” became a national hero of the Roaring Twenties. In contrast to Ruth’s flamboyance, his less flashy successors Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio captured the spirit of striving and courage that carried America through the Depression and WWII years. The Pride of the Yankees, a popular movie celebrating Gehrig’s career, and the Hemingway novella The Old Man and the Sea, whose protagonist reveres DiMaggio, typified the trend. 

Mirroring the nation’s postwar swagger and confidence, the club of the Mickey Mantle–era remained hugely popular, but “Yankee hating” set in as well. Novels like Mark Harris’s The Southpaw and Douglass Wallop’s The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant signified a widespread resentment of the team’s outsized dominance. Amid the national turmoil of the 1960s, the Yankees also went into decline. In the following decades, as player salaries soared and team infighting grabbed headlines, the once-glowing portrayals of the team gave way to tell-all books like Ball Four and The Bronx Zoo. Yet, as this informative and entertaining book amply shows, the Yankees have, through all their ups and downs, retained a hold on the American imagination unmatched by any other sports franchise. 
 

 

The Fellowship Independent Baptist Church near Stanley, Virginia, was a group of fundamental Christian believers broadly representative of southern Appalachian belief and practice. Jeff Todd Titon worked with this Baptist community for more than ten years in his attempt to determine the nature of language in the practice of their religion. He traces specialized vocabulary and its applications through the acts of being saved, praying, preaching, teaching, and in particular singing. Titon argues that religious language is performed and the context of its occurrence is crucial to our understanding and to a holistic view of not only religious practice but of folklife and ethnomusicology. Titon’s monumental study of The Fellowship Independent Baptist Church produced not only the first edition book but also an album and documentary film.
            In this second edition of Powerhouse for God, Titon revisits The Fellowship Independent Baptist Church nearly four decades later. Brother John Sherfey, the charismatic preacher steeped in Appalachian tradition has passed away and left his congregation to his son, Donnie, to lead. While Appalachian Virginia has changed markedly over the decades, the town of Stanley and the Fellowship Church have not. Titon relates this rarity in his new Afterword: a church founded on Biblical literalism and untouched by modern progressivism in an area of Appalachia that has seen an evolution in population, industry, and immigration.
            Titon’s unforgettable study of folklife, musicology, and Appalachian religion is available for a new generation of scholars to build upon.
 

This volume is the first comprehensive overview of North Carolina Presbyterians to appear in more than a hundred years. Drawing on congregational and administrative histories, personal memoirs, and recent scholarship—while paying close attention to the relevant social, political, and religious contexts of the state and region—Walter Conser and Robert Cain go beyond older approaches to denominational history by focusing on the identity and meaning of the Presbyterian experience in the Old North State from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries.
    Conser and Cain explore issues as diverse as institutional development and worship experience; the patterns and influence of race, ethnicity, and gender; and involvement in education and social justice campaigns. In part 1 of the book, “Beginnings,” they trace the entrance of Presbyterians—who were legally considered dissenters throughout the colonial period—into the eastern, central, and western sections of the state. The authors show how the Piedmont became the nexus of Presbyterian organizational development and examine the ways in which political movements, including campaigns for American independence, deeply engaged Presbyterians, as did the incandescence of revivalism and agitation for reform, which extended into the antebellum period.
    The book’s second section, “Conflict, Renewal, and Reunion,” investigates the denominational tensions provoked by the slavery debate and the havoc of the Civil War, the soul searching that accompanied Confederate defeat, and the rebuilding efforts that came during the New South era. Such important factors as the changing roles of women in the church and the decline of Jim Crow helped pave the way for the eventual reunion of the northern and southern branches of mainline Presbyterianism. By the arrival of the new millennium, Presbyterians in North Carolina were prepared to meet future challenges with renewed confidence.
    A model for modern denominational history, this book is an astute and sensitive portrayal of a prominent Protestant denomination in a southern context.

Walter H. Conser Jr. is professor of religion and professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. His books include A Coat of Many Colors: Religion and Society along the Cape Fear River of North Carolina and God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in the Natural World.

Before his retirement after thirty-two years of service, Robert J. Cain was head of the Colonial Records Branch at the North Carolina State Archives. He is the editor of The Colonial Records of North Carolina, second series.

     Press, Platform, Pulpit examines how early black feminism goes public by sheding new light on some of the major figures of early black feminism as well as bringing forward some lesser-known individuals who helped shape various  reform movements. With a perspective unlike many other studies of black feminism, Teresa Zackodnik considers these activists as central, rather than marginal, to the politics of their day, and argues that black feminism reached critical mass well before the club movement’s national federation at the turn into the twentieth century . Throughout, she shifts the way in which  major figures of early black feminism have been understood.   

      The first three chapters trace the varied speaking styles and appeals of black women in the church, abolition, and women’s rights, highlighting audience and location as mediating factors in the public address and politics of figures such as Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Amanda Berry Smith, Ellen Craft, Sarah Parker Remond and Sojourner Truth. The next chapter focuses on Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching tours as working within “New Abolition” and influenced by black feminists before her. The final chapter examines feminist black nationalism as it developed in the periodical press by considering Maria Stewart’s social and feminist gospel; Mary Shadd Cary’s linking of abolition, emigration, and woman suffrage; and late-nineteenth-century black feminist journalism addressing black women’s migration and labor.  Early black feminists working in reforms such as abolition and women’s rights opened new public arenas, such as the press, to the voices of black women. The book concludes by focusing on the 1891 National Council of Women, Frances Harper, and Anna Julia Cooper, which together mark a generational shift in black feminism, and by exploring the possibilities of taking black feminism public through forging coalitions among women of color.
    Press, Platform, Pulpit goes far in deepening our understanding of early black feminism, its position in reform, and the varied publics it created for its politics. It not only moves historically from black feminist work in the church early in the nineteenth century to black feminism in the press at its close, but also explores the connections between black feminist politics across the century and specific reforms.

"In this highly readable book, Kathleen Casey makes an important intervention into the study of early-twentieth-century American vaudeville and some of its most infamous stars. She pinpoints the blind spot in current scholarship by demonstrating how race as much as gender charges the meanings in vaudeville performance.”
—Linda Mizejewski, author of Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics and Ziegfeld Girl


From the 1890s through the 1920s, vaudeville reigned as one of the most popular entertainment forms in urban America. Through drama, humor, and satire, it invited its socially, economically, and ethnically diverse audiences to turn a self-conscious eye upon themselves and their culture, which was being rapidly transformed by such forces as immigration, racial discord, and new conceptions of gender roles. It was no coincidence that acts featuring cross-dressing performers and racial impersonators were among vaudeville’s biggest attractions.

In this lively and enlightening study, Kathleen B. Casey explores the ways in which the gender- and race-bending spectacles of vaudeville dramatized the economic, technological, social, and cultural upheaval that gripped the United States in the early twentieth century. She focuses on four key performers. Eva Tanguay, known as “The I Don’t Care Girl,” was loved for her defiance of Victorian decorum, linking white womanliness to animalistic savagery at a time when racial and gender ideologies were undergoing significant reconstruction. In contrast, Julian Eltinge, the era’s foremost female impersonator, used race to exaggerate notions of manliness
and femininity in a way that reinforced traditional norms more than it undermined them. Lillyn Brown, a biracial woman who portrayed a cosmopolitan black male dandy while singing about an antebellum southern past, offered her audiences, black and white, starkly different visual and aural messages about race and gender. Finally, Sophie Tucker, who often performed in blackface during the early years of her long and heralded career, strategically played with prevailing
ideologies by alternately portraying herself as white, Jewish, black, manly, and womanly, while managing, remarkably, to convince audiences that these identities could coexist within one body.

Analyzing a wide assortment of primary materials—advertisements, recordings, lyrics, sheet music, costumes, photographs, reviews, and press accounts from the era—Casey looks not only at gender and racial impersonation but also at how spectators reacted to these performances.

Kathleen B. Casey is an assistant professor of history at Virginia Wesleyan College.

“A haunting, evocative novel. In Prodigals, Mark Powell depicts a lost American landscape—the small towns and logging camps of the South during World War II, with their subculture of fugitives and transients. I can't get the desperate hero out of my mind.” —Cary Holladay, author of Mercury

In the late summer of 1944, fifteen-year-old Ernest Cobb flees into the dense forests of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Behind him, in his South Carolina hometown, the girl he thought he had impregnated is being buried. Her shooting death was not Ernest’s doing, but Ernest fears that he will be implicated in it anyway. With little sense of where he is going or how he might survive, the boy makes his way northward.

Ernest’s journey brings him into the company of outsiders and drifters—an often violent subculture at the tattered fringes of wartime America. An aging mountain hermit, who was once a glassblower, rescues Ernest from the wilderness and nurtures him for a while. Eventually, Ernest finds himself in Asheville, North Carolina, where he goes to work as a dishwasher and rents a dingy room that he soon shares with a new girlfriend. When that relationship falters, Ernest accompanies an amiable but reckless friend, a boy called June Bug, to work at a logging camp. There they meet Jimmy Morgan, a wounded war veteran with his own dark secret. The convergence of these lost souls and their chance discovery of an injured child lead to further tragedy. By the end, the once-naive Ernest has begun to comprehend the gaping loneliness that defines much of human existence, but he has also come to sense the possibility of transcendence in the fleeting connections born of love.
With Prodigals, Mark Powell makes an impressive fiction debut. The author’s keen ear for dialogue, his understanding of character and motive, and his lean, taut language will make this novel linger long in the minds of readers.

The Author: Mark Powell lives in Mountain Rest, South Carolina. He studied creative writing at the University of South Carolina.

The Victorian era provided few opportunities for women in the professional world.  The American Arts and Crafts movement, which began in the late nineteenth century to promote handcraftsmanship over mass production, was a major factor in changing the status of women as professional workers.  In <i>Professional Pursuits</i>, Catherine Zipf examines the participation of women in this significant design movement and the role they played in revolutionizing the position of women in the professional world.  She also shows how, in turn, the Arts and Crafts movement set the stage for social and political change in future years.

Zipf focuses on five gifted women in various parts of the country. In San Diego, Hazel Wood Waterman parlayed her Arts and Crafts training into a career in architecture. Cincinnati's Mary Louise McLaughlin expanded on her interest in Arts and Crafts pottery by inventing new ceramic technology.

New York's Candace Wheeler established four businesses that used Arts and Crafts production to help other women earn a living.  In Syracuse, both Adelaide Alsop Robineau and Irene Sargent were responsible for disseminating Arts and Crafts-related information through the movement's publications. Each woman's story is different, but each played an important part in the creation of professional opportunities for women in a male-dominated society.

<i>Professional Pursuits</i> will be of interest to scholars and students of material culture and of the Arts and Crafts movement. More importantly, it chronicles a very significant, little-understood aspect of the development of Victorian capitalism: the integration of women into the professional workforce.

Catherine Zipf is an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural and Historic Preservation at Salve Regina University.  She has published articles in <i>Women's Art News</i> and the <i>Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians</i>.

“The land, the heat, the South's societal complexities (and perplexities) are all here.  Utterly involving, wise and perceptive, this is a novel to remember.  If you liked To Kill a Mockingbird, you will love The Prudent Mariner.”
-Kelly Cherry, judge of the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel

In 1913, a young white girl in coastal Georgia fabricates a romance between her elder sister and an African American laborer, inadvertently leading to the man's lynching. A crowd gathers and a photographer records the event on picture postcards.  In one of these, the young girl stands smiling beside the hung man.

More than fifty years later, nine-year-old Riddley Cross discovers these postcards amid her late grandfather's belongings.  As she tries to make sense of why the postcards are in her family's possession, and why the photographed girl seems so familiar, Riddley becomes haunted by apparitions and dreams of lynchings.  The postcards force her to question what she has been taught about the world, the South, and her family-and what she has not.

The mysteries of the lynching postcards start to unravel after her widowed grandmother, Adele, moves in with the family.  Afflicted with Alzheimer's disease, Adele speaks only to murmur the occasional insult or curse.  Nonetheless, she and Riddley become companions of a sort, based largely on their common affinity for silence, wandering, and the nearby river. When Riddley develops a friendship with her neighbor Carver, an artist and iconoclast, the connections between the postcards and Riddley's family gradually come to light, and a series of tragic events begins to unfold.  In The Prudent Mariner, Williams offers a searing exploration of the legacies of complicity and violence, silence and regret, and the unforeseeable ways the past shapes and impinges upon the present.  

Leslie Walker Williams was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia, and currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her short stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Madison Review, Harvard Review, and American Fiction.  The Prudent Mariner, her first novel, was awarded the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, and the Morris Hackney Literary Award for the Novel.