The Potomac Canal: George Washington and the Waterway West is a history of a new nation’s first effort to link the rich western agricultural lands with the coastal port cities of the east. The Potomac Canal Company was founded in 1785, and was active until it was overtaken by the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company in 1828. During its operation, the canal system was used to ship flour from mills in the foothills of Appalachia to the tidewater of the Chesapeake, where the flour was shipped to the Caribbean as trade for sugar and other goods. This trade soon became the basis of agricultural wealth in West Virginia’s eastern panhandle and throughout the Appalachian Piedmont. Coal was also shipped via the canal system from the upper reaches of the Potomac River to workshops at Harpers Ferry and beyond. This industrial trade route laid the foundation for what would eventually become the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

Theorizing Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture significantly advances the complex study of Anglo-Saxon carved monuments, such as the Ruthwell Cross, by adopting more explicit theoretical approaches to the subject. Scholars included here are explicit in describing how their approaches complement (or, more often, contradict) the work of others. This book comes as a shot across the bow of these vessels. Contributors include the best scholars on this subject matter in England, Ireland, and America.

Cross and Cruciform in the Anglo-Saxon World: Studies to Honor the Memory of Timothy Reuter is edited by Sarah Larratt Keefer, Karen Louise Jolly, and Catherine E. Karkov and is the third and final volume of an ambitious research initiative begun in 1999 concerned with the image of the cross, showing how its very material form cuts across both the culture of a society and the boundaries of academic disciplines—history, archaeology, art history, literature, philosophy, and religion—providing vital insights into how symbols function within society. The flexibility, portability, and adaptability of the Anglo-Saxon understanding of the cross suggest that, in pre-Conquest England, at least, the linking of word, image, and performance joined the physical and spiritual, the temporal and eternal, and the earthly and heavenly in the Anglo-Saxon imaginative landscape.

This volume is divided into three sections. The first section of the collection focuses on representations of “The Cross: Image and Emblem,” with contributions by Michelle P. Brown, David A. E. Pelteret, and Catherine E. Karkov. The second section, “The Cross: Meaning and Word,” deals in semantics and semeology with essays by Éamonn Ó Carragáin, Helen Damico, Rolf Bremmer, and Ursula Lenker. The third section of the book, “The Cross: Gesture and Structure,” employs methodologies drawn from archaeology, new media, and theories of rulership to develop new insights into subjects as varied as cereal production, the little-known Nunburnholme Cross, and early medieval concepts of political power.

Cross and Cruciform in the Anglo-Saxon World: Studies to Honor the Memory of Timothy Reuter is a major collection of new research, completing the publication series of the Sancta Crux/Halig Rod project. Cross and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies in Honor of George Hardin Brown, Volume 2 in this series, remains available from West Virginia University Press.

American Bridge Patents: The First Century (1790-1890), thoroughly illustrated with dozens of photographs and reproductions, presents the findings of a two-decade long study of several thousand pages of patent documents collected from the U.S. Patent Office. The essays in this volume offer readers tremendous insight into the creativity that characterized the evolution of bridge patents during this important and formative period of American engineering history. Of particular interest to the authors is the great variety of innovative and unusual designs that were accommodated by the then ambiguous patent law. Alongside these case studies, authors also address the Patent Office itself, whose processes regarding permissions were reformed in 1836, linking the evolution of patent law to the technology it managed.

In 1849, the new Wheeling Suspension Bridge was a triumph of engineering, the world's longest clear span bridge. The Wheeling bridge was also a landmark in the development of the American frontier, spanning the Ohio River to speed settlement and commerce in the Midwest and beyond. In 1999, historians, engineers, and industrial archaeologists from around the world met in Wheeling to celebrate the still-busy bridge's 150th anniversary. This book presents highlights of the conference, and points out the far-reaching effects of bridge-building.

Emory Kemp is the founder and director of the Institute for the History of Technology and Industrial Archaeology at West Virginia University, where he also served as a chair and professor of civil engineering and a professor of history. This collection of essays encompasses over fifty years of his research in the field of the history of technology.

Within these twelve essays, Kemp describes and analyzes nineteenth century improvements in building materials such as iron, steel, and cement; roads and bridges, especially the evolution of the suspension bridge; canals and navigable rivers, including the Ohio River and its tributaries; and water supply systems. As one of the few practicing American engineers who also researches and writes as an academic, Kemp adds an important historical context to his work by focusing not only on the construction of a structure but also on the analytical science that heralds a structure’s design and development.

West Virginia University English Professor Timothy Sweet edited the second volume in our West Virginia and Appalachia series. The Blackwater Chronicle by Philip Pendleton Kennedy was originally published in 1853, but this wilderness travelogue about the exploration of Canaan Valley has appeal far beyond that time and region. In fact, it was originally published in New York and London, and even in a German edition. This often humorous and always fascinating story, told by Kennedy about the journey he and his colleagues took into yet unexplored territory, will make the reader long for days when there was still wilderness on this continent. It will also be of interest to the outdoorsman and should be viewed as an environmental cautionary tale.

Teaching about race and racism can be a difficult business. Students and instructors alike often struggle with strong emotions, and many people have robust preexisting beliefs about race. At the same time, this is a moment that demands a clear understanding of racism. It is important for students to learn how we got here and how racism is more than just individual acts of meanness. Students also need to understand that colorblindness is not an effective anti-racism strategy.

In this book, Cyndi Kernahan argues that you can be honest and unflinching in your teaching about racism while also providing a compassionate learning environment that allows for mistakes and avoids shaming students. She provides evidence for how learning works with respect to race and racism along with practical teaching strategies rooted in that evidence to help instructors feel more confident. She also differentiates between how white students and students of color are likely to experience the classroom, helping instructors provide a more effective learning experience for all students.

This gonzo-style metamemoir follows Chuck Kinder on a wild tour of the back roads of his home state of West Virginia, where he encounters Mountain State legends like Sid Hatfield, Dagmar, Robert C. Byrd, the Mothman, Chuck Yeager, Soupy Sales, Don Knotts, and Jesco White, the “Dancing Outlaw.”

First published in 1973, this debut novel is the deeply moving coming-of-age story of Speer Whitfield, whose recollection of his upbringing and his large, remarkable, and often peculiar family evokes the forces that set the path for a boy’s growth into manhood in 1940s Appalachia.

Cassandra Kircher was in her twenties when she was hired by the National Park Service, landing a life that allowed her to reinvent herself. For four years she collected entrance fees and worked in the dispatch office before being assigned as the first woman to patrol an isolated backcountry district of Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. There, Kircher encountered wonder and beauty, accidents and death. Although she always suspected the mountains might captivate her, she didn’t realize that her adopted landscape would give her strength to confront where she was from—both the Midwest that Willa Cather fans will recognize, and a childhood filled with problems and secrets.

Divided and defined by geographic and psychological space, Far Flung begins in the Rockies but broadens its focus as Kircher negotiates places as distant as Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, Russia’s Siberian valleys, and Wisconsin’s lake country, always with Colorado as a heartfelt pivot. These thirteen essays depict a woman coming to terms with her adoration for the wilds of the West and will resonate with all of us longing to better understand ourselves and our relationships to the places and people we love most.