In Down on Mahans Creek, Benjamin Rader provides a fascinating look at a neighborhood in the Missouri Ozarks from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. He explores the many ways in which Mahans Creek, though remote, was never completely isolated or self-sufficient. The residents were deeply affected by the Civil War, and the arrival of the railroad and the timber boom in the 1890s propelled the community into modern times, creating a more fast-paced and consumer-oriented way of life and a new moral sensibility. During the Great Depression the creek’s residents returned to some of the older values for survival. After World War II, modern technology changed their lives again, causing a movement away from the countryside and to the nearby small towns.

Down on Mahans Creek tells the dynamic story of this distinctive neighborhood navigating the push and pull of the old and new ways of life.

Charles Rafferty works in masks, voices, and personae. Winner of the fifth annual Arkansas Poetry Award, The Man on the Tower consists of dramatic monologues and fables about “the man” the many incarnations of our lives that are not allowed, cannot be lived, or are kept darkly hidden. Made believable in the lines of Rafferty’s poems, his characters show us their desires, complaints, and obsessions, often revealing what they would want to keep concealed, the shameful and the wild.

The Ozark Mountains reach into Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, forming a region with great natural beauty and a distinctive cultural and historical landscape. This comprehensive volume, a fully updated edition of a beloved classic, reaches into history, anthropology, economics, and geography to explore the complex relationships between the Ozarks' people and land through times of profound change. Drawing on more than thirty years of research, field observations, and interviews, Rafferty examines this subject matter through a range of topics: the settlement patterns and material cultures of Native Americans, French, Scotch-Irish, Germans, Italians, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians in the region; population growth; the guerrilla warfare and battles of the Civil War; the cultural transformations wrought by railroads, roads, mass media, and modern communication systems; the discovery, development, and decline of the great mining districts; the various forms of agriculture and the felling of the region's vast forests; and the built landscape, from log cabins to Victorian mansions to strip malls. This new edition also explores the new and potent forces which have reshaped the region over the last twenty years: tourism and the growing service industry, suburbanization, rapid population growth and retirement living, and agribusiness. Lavishly illustrated with historic and contemporary photographs, maps, and charts.

When a significant number of Americans had to prepare meals in the out of doors—colonists, pioneers moving west, cowboys working the range, or sheep herders—they needed something portable to cook their food in. Iron casters filled that need by turning out various pots, pans, and ovens to be carried to cabins, campfires, wagon trains, and camping trails. One such vessel was the Dutch oven, which had been in use for generations.

Dutch Ovens Chronicled offers a history of the development, care, and use of these ovens, complete with photos and recipes. This authoritative, informative, and eminently readable guide will be appreciated by outdoor enthusiasts, antiquarians, and history buffs alike.

Vance Randolph was perfectly constituted for his role as the chronicler of Ozark folkways. As a self-described “hack writer,” he was as much a figure of the margins as his chosen subjects, even as his essentially romantic identification with the region he first visited as the vacationing child of mainstream parents was encouraged by editors and tempered by his scientific training. In The Ozarks, originally published in 1931, we have Randolph’s first book-length portrait of the people he would spend the next half-century studying. The full range of Randolph’s interests—in language, in hunting and fishing, in folksongs and play parties, in moonshining—is on view in this book that made his name; forever after he was “Mr. Ozark,” the region’s preeminent expert who would, in collection after collection, enlarge and deepen his debut effort. With a new introduction by Robert Cochran, The Ozarks is the second entry in the Chronicles of the Ozarks series, a reprint series that will make available some of the Depression Era’s Ozarks books. An image shaper in its day, a cultural artifact for decades to come, this wonderful book is as entertaining as ever.

Roll Me in Your Arms, Volume I includes 180 unexpurgated songs collected by Randolph, with tunes transcribed from the original singers.

Greg Rappleye’s Figured Dark is a collection of contemporary lyric and narrative poems, set in an American landscape, which takes as its implicit theme the journey of the soul from darkness into light.

The voices in the collection call across a vast landscape of myth, memory, and horrific wreckage. In the title poem, speaking of the phenomenon of fireflies rising at night from a southern field, he writes, “I could read this down to a million tiny bodies, / blazing the midnight trees,” but the reader is left to wonder whether any extravagant numbering can account for the massed starlings, dreamy raptors, dome-lighted Firebirds, flaming bodies, junk cars, and deadly archangels that come to ground in Rappleye’s world, where the spiritual exhaustion of Odysseus is visited upon Brian Wilson, and the young John Berryman seeks recompense from a wily family in northern Michigan.

These poems are by turns wise, elegiac, ironic, and wickedly funny. This is a poet who refuses easy categories. If these poems are anything, they are affidavits of a heart at work, building out of darkness a kind of wild redemption, hard-earned in the real world.

Figured Dark is part of the University of Arkansas’s Poetry Series, edited by Enid Shomer.

First published in 1851, this is the fictionalized account of Dr. Marcus Byrn's brief practice in eastern Arkansas and the earliest volume solely devoted to Arkansas humor.

The 431 examples of picture postcards offer a fascinating glimpse into the lives of Arkansans during the early part of the twentieth century.

Published just days before America’s entry into World War II, Ozark Country is Otto Ernest Rayburn’s love letter to his adopted region. One of several chronicles of the Ozarks that garnered national attention during the Depression and war years, when many Americans craved stories about people and places seemingly untouched by the difficulties of the times, Rayburn’s colorful tour takes readers from the fictional village of Woodville into the backcountry of a region teeming with storytellers, ballad singers, superstitions, and home remedies.

Rayburn’s tales—fantastical, fun, and unapologetically romantic—portray a world that had already nearly disappeared by the time they were written. Yet Rayburn’s depiction of the Ozarks resonates with notions of the region that have persisted in the American consciousness ever since.

This witty, wide-ranging memoir from Roy Reed--a native Arkansan who became a reporter for the New York Times--begins with tales of the writer's formative years growing up in Arkansas and the start of his career at the legendary Arkansas Gazette. Reed joined the New York Times in 1965 and was quickly thrust into the chaos of the Selma, Alabama, protest movement and the historical interracial march to Montgomery. His story then moves from days of racial violence to the political combat of Washington. Reed covered the Johnson White House and the early days of the Nixon administration as it wrestled with the competing demands of black voters and southern resistance to a new world. The memoir concludes with engaging postings from New Orleans and London and other travels of a reporter always on the lookout for new people, old ways, good company, and fresh outrages.

In this close, personal history, the result of eight years of intensive research, Reed finds Faubus to be an opaque man, “an insoluable mixture of cynicism and compassion, guile and grace, wickedness and goodness,” and, ultimately, “one of the last Americans to perceive politics as a grand game.”

New York Times Book Review Notable Book for 1997
1998 Certificate of Commendation, American Association for State and Local History

With a legendary beginning as a printing press floated up the Arkansas River in 1819, the Arkansas Gazette is inextricably linked with the state’s history, reporting on every major Arkansas event until the paper’s demise in 1991 after a long, bitter, and very public newspaper war. Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette, knowledgeably and intimately edited by longtime Gazette reporter Roy Reed, comprises interviews from over a hundred former Gazette staffers recalling the stories they reported on and the people they worked with from the late forties to the paper’s end. The result is a nostalgic and justifiably admiring look back at a publication known for its progressive stance in a conservative Southern state, a newspaper that, after winning two Pulitzers for its brave rule-of-law stance during the Little Rock Central High Crisis, was considered one of the country’s greatest. The interviews, collected from archives at the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas, provide fascinating details on renowned editors and reporters such as Harry Ashmore, Orville Henry, and Charles Portis, journalists who wrote daily on Arkansas’s always-colorful politicians, its tragic disasters and sensational crimes, its civil rights crises, Bill Clinton, the Razorbacks sports teams, and much more. Full of humor and little-known details, Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette is a fascinating remembrance of a great newspaper.

In that always compelling yet simple style that has made Roy Reed one of the country’s foremost journalists, he shows us—as we share with him delightful moments and rich insights on the way to Hogeye—Southerners still different for being Southerners, and country Southerners who are even more so, pained by bruises and comforted by salves that are peculiarly their own.

“I hope that my city friends will not be upset to learn that this book is a little more sympathetic to the Arkansas hill people than it is to New Yorkers,” he says. “I have grown attached to cities over the years, but I am still, somewhere near my heart, a hillbilly. I have gone to a lot of trouble to remember that.”

This book is a special admission into those hills, to Vacation Bible School, tent meetings, sale barns, back roads and pool halls, to dog days in Hogeye.

To read Looking for Hogeye is to sit with Roy Reed on his wide front porch as he tells by the life he lives why, after Washington, London, and New York, he made his home in the north Arkansas hills, where he felt—as he puts it—”like Brer Rabbit reentering the briar patch.”

It is a visit not to be missed, and not to be forgotten.

This new collection examines not only how athletes looked to the nation’s judicial system to solve conflicts but also how their cases trans¬formed the interpretation of laws. These essays examine a vast array of social and legal controversies including Heywood v. NBA (1971), which allowed any player to enter the draft; Flood v. Kuhn (1972), which considered baseball’s antitrust status; the Danny Gardella lower level 1948 case regarding free agency and baseball; Muhammad Ali’s celebrated stance against the U.S. draft; Renée Richards’s 1976 lawsuit against the U.S. Tennis Association and its due process ramifications; and human rights violations in international law with respect to the increased recruitment of underage Latin baseball players in the Caribbean region are a few examples of the vast array of stories included. Sport and the Law links these cases to other cases and topics, giving the reader the opportunity to see the threads weaving law and sport together in American society.

In a literature where recognition is hard earned, this anthology demonstrates what distinguishes contemporary Bolivian fiction and poetry from the rest of Latin American writing and shows clearly how Bolivian writers relate to that tradition.

Bolivia is a landlocked nation of mountains and high, arid plains, a place native writer Jesús Urzagasti calls the “Land of Silence.” This crucible of indigenous and European influences has contributed to the creation of a writing style that is always down-to-earth, often grittily realistic.

From this fundamental base, Bolivian writers express provincial customs and values, decry political oppression, and sound universal themes of isolation, even resignation; but, more often, they show the will to move forward as a people. This rich thematic mix encourages what critic Edgar Lora has called the “dynamic and vigorous social dis course” and the resulting “subversive, militant, and revolutionary” qualities of Bolivian literature.

Editor Sandra Reyes has gathered a panoramic sampling of twenty two poets and eighteen fiction writers. Focusing predominantly on living, practicing writers, this anthology defines the current literary voice of Bolivia and gives us a distillation of the contemporary Bolivian consciousness.

As recent stories in the news have shown, maintaining the integrity of the food supply is of critical importance to the consumer. Thousands of Americans die each year from food-borne illnesses, and millions more get sick. Tremendous strides have been made to reduce the incidence of food-borne diseases originating from animal-derived foods, but food safety and food-borne pathogens continue to remain problematic throughout the world. Food-safety scientists from around the nation continue to conduct groundbreaking research not only to understand causative factors in food-borne pathogen prevalence but to develop novel intervention strategies for limiting contamination in all phases of food animal production. The twenty-four essays in this book highlight research efforts of researchers from the tristate Food Safety Consortium established in 1988 by Congress as a research alliance of food-safety scientists at the University of Arkansas, Iowa State University, and Kansas State University. Members of the consortium conduct research through an annual grant approved by Congress and administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Its mission is to conduct extensive investigation into all areas of poultry, beef, and pork meat production, from the farm to the consumer’s table. In addition to the consortium researchers, collaborative university researchers, government officials, and industry personnel provide timely reviews of their latest findings with regard to five significant subject areas: preharvest food-borne pathogen ecology and intervention strategies, postharvest food-borne pathogen ecology, rapid methods and detection strategies for food-borne pathogens, antibiotics and antimicrobials in food safety, and emerging issues in food safety. Progress in these research areas provides opportunities to further enhance protection of animal-derived foods from farm to fork.

Winner, 2019 NASSH Book Award, Anthology.

The Cold War was fought in every corner of society, including in the sport and entertainment industries. Recognizing the importance of culture in the battle for hearts and minds, the United States, like the Soviet Union, attempted to win the favor of citizens in nonaligned states through the soft power of sport. Athletes became de facto ambassadors of US interests, their wins and losses serving as emblems of broader efforts to shield American culture—both at home and abroad—against communism.

In Defending the American Way of Life, leading sport historians present new perspectives on high-profile issues in this era of sport history alongside research drawn from previously untapped archival sources to highlight the ways that sports influenced and were influenced by Cold War politics. Surveying the significance of sports in Cold War America through lenses of race, gender, diplomacy, cultural infiltration, anti-communist hysteria, doping, state intervention, and more, this collection illustrates how this conflict remains relevant to US sporting institutions, organizations, and ideologies today.
 

Winner, 2017 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize

In the magic my body becomes, Jess Rizkallah seeks a vernacular for the inescapable middle ground of being Arab American—a space that she finds, at times, to be too Arab for America and too American for her Lebanese elders.

These poems freely assert gender, sexuality, and religious beliefs while at the same time respecting a generational divide: the younger’s privilege gained by the sacrifice of the older, the impossibility of separating what is wholly hers from what is hers secondhand.

In exploring family history, civil war, trauma, and Lebanon itself, Rizkallah draws from the spirits of canonical Arab and Middle Eastern poets. As a result of her conjuring, the reader feels these spirits begin to exorcise the grief of those who are still alive. Throughout, there is the body, a reclamation and pushback against cultures that simultaneously sexualize and shame women. And there is a softness as inherent as rage, a resisting of stereotypes that too often speak louder than the complexities of a resilient cultural identity.

The magic my body becomes is an exciting new book from an exciting young poet, a love letter to a people as well as a fist in the air.

In Praise Nothing, Joshua Robbins writes from a suburban landscape of strip mall bars and vacant lots in which addicts and itinerant preachers, hymns and the turnpike's whine are all made to confess, to testify to the hard truths of faith and doubt in middle-class America. In this arresting and finely crafted debut collection, readers travel a via negativa of sidewalk weeds and patched asphalt that meanders past cheap motels and laundromats, trailer parks, and corner churches to a place where a truant God aimlessly and endlessly drives the neighborhood, where birds sing their "fevered hymn / over the dusty tract house roofs" and even the "gravel-throated hallelujahs of dumpsters" profess that "no one is looking for the infinite." Populated with figures as diverse as Janis Joplin, Ronald Reagan, the Big Bopper, and Søren Kierkegaard, these poems are wrought by reverence and skepticism. Praise Nothing navigates the religious, the political, and the sublime. In the lyric tradition of Gerard Manley Hopkins's Terrible Sonnets and James Wright's odes to the Midwest, Robbins's compassionate poems sing of our broken connection to the transcendent. Robbins shows us that if there is anything left to praise, it is Nothing. Praise Nothing is part of the University of Arkansas Press Poetry series, edited by Enid Shomer.

The American newspaper industry is in the middle of the most momentous change in its entire three hundred-year history. A generation of relentless "corporatization" has resulted in a furious, unprecedented blitz of buying, selling, and consolidation of newspapers —affecting the mightiest dailies and the humblest weeklies. Accompanying this corporate jury has come dramatic—and drastic—change in reporting and coverage of all kinds. Concerned that this phenomenon was going largely unreported—and, therefore, unquestioned—Gene Roberts, legendary reporter and editor, decided to undertake a huge, extended reportorial study of his own industry. Gathering more than two dozen distinguished journalists and writers, Roberts produced a long series of reports in the American Journalism Review, published by the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism. This is the first of two books to be published exploring the current state of American newspaper and it asks the crucial question: Are American communities—in the very middle of the so-called Information Explosion—in danger of becoming less informed than ever?

In the tumultuous decades after the Civil War, as the southern white elite reclaimed power, “racial mixing” was the central concern of segregationists who strove to maintain “racial purity.” Segregation—and race itself—was based on the idea that interracial sex posed a biological threat to the white race. In this groundbreaking study, Charles Robinson examines how white southerners enforced anti-miscegenation laws. His findings challenge conventional wisdom, documenting a pattern of selective prosecution under which interracial domestic relationships were punished even more harshly than transient sexual encounters. Robinson shows that the real crime was to suggest that black and white individuals might be equals, a notion which undermined the legitimacy of the economic, political, and social structure of white male supremacy.

Robinson examines legal cases from across the South, considering both criminal prosecutions brought by states and civil disputes over marital and family assets. He also looks at U.S. Supreme Court decisions, debates in state legislatures, comments in the U.S. Congressional Record, and newspaper editorials. He not only shows the hardening of racial categories but assesses the attitudes of African Americans about anti-miscegenation laws and intermarriage. The epilogue concerns “The Demise of Anti-miscegenation Law” including the case of Richard and Mildred Loving.

Dangerous Liaisons vividly documents the regulation of intimacy and its fundamental role in the construction of race.

With the admittance in 1948 of Silas Hunt to the University of Arkansas Law School, the university became the first southern public institution of higher education to officially desegregate without being required to do so by court order. The process was difficult, but an important first step had been taken. Other students would follow in Silas Hunt's footsteps, and they along with the university would have to grapple with the situation. Remembrances in Black is an oral history that gathers the personal stories of African Americans who worked as faculty and staff and of students who studied at the state's flagship institution. These stories illustrate the anguish, struggle, and triumph of individuals who had their lives indelibly marked by their experiences at the school. Organized chronologically over sixty years, this book illustrates how people of color navigated both the evolving campus environment and that of the city of Fayetteville in their attempt to fulfill personal aspirations. Their stories demonstrate that the process of desegregation proved painfully slow to those who chose to challenge the forces of exclusion. Also, the remembrances question the extent to which desegregation has been fully realized.

Besides extensive illustrations and photographs of each species, Only in Arkansas provides pertinent literature references to the original distributions of each form within the state and reports known information of the general biology, evolutionary relationships, and habitat occupied by each endemic form.

The second edition of Fishes of Arkansas, in development for more than a decade, is an extensive revision and expansion of the first edition, including reclassifications, taxonomic changes, and descriptions of more than thirty new species.

An invaluable reference for anyone interested in the state’s fish population—from professional ichthyologists, fisheries biologists, and managers of aquatic resources, to amateur naturalists and anglers—this new edition provides updated taxonomic keys as well as detailed descriptions, photographs, and line drawings to aid identification of the state’s 243 fish species. There is also much information on the distribution and biology of each species, including descriptions of habitat, foods eaten, reproductive biology, and conservation status.

This project and the preparation of this publication was funded in part by a grant from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.

 

In her first book, Chord Box, Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers envisions a world where each place is best known by its sound. Weaving complex junctions between music, speech, the body, and sexuality, these poems trace the arc of adolescence and early adulthood, rooting themselves in gritty landscapes of the South and Appalachia, China and its borderlands. Part narrative and part lyric, Rogers's poems make use of the whole field of the page, assembling an innovative poetic vocabulary that includes word, character, and symbol. By calling on figures from the recent as well as the distant past, this coming-of-age collection asks us to consider history, both personal and political. Whether struggling to make vibrato on the guitar or stringing together her first sentences in Mandarin, the speaker of these poems assumes the role of the eager student, edging her way toward an understanding with both fierceness and a sense of humility. Chord Box is exquisitely crafted and rich with feeling, a dazzling debut collection. Chord Box is part of the University of Arkansas Press Poetry Series, edited by Enid Shomer.

The Country Music Message: Revisited is more than a history of commercial country music, a discussion of the performers, or a compilation of song lyrics. It is an examination of the way the “message” in country songs is relayed and received: why the songs move us as they do. As Jimmie Rogers saying in his preface, “A country song is a special form of communication——communication that more closely resembles interpersonal or face-to-face interaction between two people than do other types of mass appeal music. This close bond that exists between audience and performers, as well as the unique treatment of the song topics, helps to make the music, the performers, and the audience special. After the characteristics are reviewed, observations are made about the audience that accepts and approves these messages. The topics, and the approach to those topics by the songwriter and by the singers, tell us much about the audience that chose to listen to country music.”

If you are already a fan of country music, this book will provide insights into a process you’ve probably taken for granted. If you are a newcomer, you will better understand and appreciate the music that a “few folks are performing for a large number of people.”

Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object is a lively meditation on the profession of art modeling as it has been practiced in history and as it is practiced today. Kathleen Rooney draws on her own experiences working as an artist's model, as well as the famous, notorious, and mysterious artists and models through the ages. Through a combination of personal perspective, historical anecdote, and witty prose, Live Nude Girl reveals that both the appeal of posing nude for artists and the appeal of drawing the naked figure lie in our deeply human responses to beauty, sex, love, and death.

Adored by its fans, deplored by its critics, Oprah’s Book Club has been at the center of arguments about cultural authority and literary taste since it began in 1996. Reading with Oprah explores the club’s revolutionary fusion of books, television, and commerce and tells the engaging and in-depth story of the OBC phenomenon.

Kathleen Rooney combines extensive research with a dynamic voice to reveal the club’s far-reaching cultural impact and its role as crucible for the clash between “high” and “low” literary taste. Comprehensive and up-to-date, the book covers the club from its inception in 1996, through the Jonathan Franzen contretemps, the surprising suspension in 2002, and, after the club’s return in 2003, the progression from “great books” to memoir. New material includes an extensive look at the James Frey scandal and Oprah’s turn to contemporary fiction, including The Road and Middlesex.

Through close examination of Winfrey’s picks and personal interviews with book club authors and readers, Rooney demonstrates how the club that Barbara Kingsolver calls “one of the best possible uses of a television set” has, according to Wally Lamb, “gotten people of all ages to read, to read more, and to read widely.”

First edition published in 2005.

Mary Butts wrote and lived among notable modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Jean Cocteau, H.D., and Ezra Pound, and was on her way to becoming one of the most respected British female writers of the twentieth century. Yet, after her death in 1937 at the age of forty-six, her reputation suffered a decline. Butt's idiosyncratic spirituality did not lend itself to easy critical examination, modernism was generally considered a masculine endeavor, and her papers were not made public for over fifty years. The recent acquisition of those papers by the Beinecke Library at Yale University, however, has brought about a resurgence of interest in her unique writings. Mary Butts confronts and reinterprets reality in extraordinary ways, and her modernist vision recalls the natural origins and powers of the female divine. Her intense dedication to ancient rites and myth, and her dabbling in the occult, became embedded in her fiction and led to her own brand of mysticism. Indeed, the Butts heroine is at once, healer, sacred priestess, earth goddess, lover, and daimon/demon. In presenting her characters this way, Butts valorizes what she calls "the soul living at its fullest capacity." Roslyn Reso Foy gives us the first sustained critical study of Butts, exploring the signficance of feminism, mysticism, and magic in her life and writings. Foy's thoughtful analysis, combining scholarship with straightforward discussion, will serve as an introduction to, and foundation for, further critical studies of this remarkable female modernist whose work coincides with contemporary concerns and who can no longer be ignored.

The essays in United States District Courts and Judges of Arkansas, 1836–1960—one each for a judge and his decisions—come together to form a chronological history of the Arkansas judicial system as it grew from its beginnings in a frontier state to a modern institution.

The book begins with statehood and continues with Congress’s decision to expand jurisdiction of the original 1836 District Court of Arkansas to include the vast Indian Territory to the west. The territory’s formidable size and rampant lawlessness brought in an overwhelming number of cases. The situation was only somewhat mitigated in 1851, when Congress split the state into eastern and western districts, which were still served by just one judge who travelled between the two courts.

A new judgeship for the Western District was created in 1871, and new seats for that court were established, but it wasn’t until 1896 that Congress finally ended all jurisdiction of Arkansas’s Western District Court over the Indian Territory.

Contributors to this collection include judges, practicing attorneys, academics, and thoughtful and informed family members who reveal how the judges made decisions on issues involving election laws, taxes, civil rights, railroads, liquor and prohibition, quack medicine, gangsters, bankruptcy, personal injury, the draft and Selective Service, school desegregation, prisons, and more. United States District Courts and Judges of Arkansas, 1836–1960 will be of value to anyone interested in Arkansas history—particularly Arkansas legal and judicial history as it relates to the local and national issues that came before these judges.

This project was supported in part by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas and the United States District Court for the Western District of Arkansas.

Most Civil War historians now agree that the guerrilla conflict shaped the entire war in significant ways. Some of these “bushwhackers”—Nathan Bedford Forrest, William Clarke Quantrill, John Singleton Mosby—have become quite infamous. Illiterate Sam Hildebrand, one of Missouri’s most notorious guerrillas—often compared to “Rob Roy,” and the subject of dime novels—was one of the few to survive the war and have his story taken down and published. Shortly after this he was killed in a barroom brawl. “I make no apology to mankind for my acts of retaliation; I make no whining appeal to the world for sympathy. I sought revenge and I found it; the key of hell was not suffered to rust in the lock while I was on the war path.” —Sam Hildebrand Hildebrand’s reign of terror gave the Union army fits and kept much of the Trans-Mississippi, especially Missouri, roiling in the 1860s. Over seven years of fighting he and his men killed dozens of soldiers and civilians, whites and blacks; he claimed to have killed nearly one hundred himself. He was accused of many heinous acts. The historical significance of Hildebrand’s story is substantial, but his bloody tale is eminently readable and stands quite well on its own as a cold-blooded portrait of a violent time in American history. Like the nightmarish and depraved world of the Kid in Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, Hildebrand’s world is truly ruthless and his story is brutally descriptive in its coolly detached rendering of one man’s personal war. Published in 1870, Hildebrand’s autobiography has long been out of print and has been a rare and highly prized acquisition among Civil War

he story of what happened at Little Rock's Central High School in September of 1957 is one with which most Americans are familiar. Indeed, the image of Central High's massive double staircase—and of nine black teenagers climbing that staircase, clutching their schoolbooks, surrounded by National Guardsmen with fixed bayonets—has become wedded in the American consciousness to the history of the civil-rights struggle in this country. The world saw the drama at Central High as a cautionary tale about power and race. Drawing on oral histories, Beth Roy tells the story of Central High from a fresh angle. Her interviews with white alumni of Central High investigate the reasons behind their resistance to desegregation. The alumni, now near retirement age, discuss their lives since Central High and their present insecurities and resentments. The stories tell of the shaping of white identities in the latter half of the twentieth century, of dissatisfaction, even anger, that still lingers after forty years. Our country has not moved beyond matters of race: we have not left intolerance behind. To do so, Roy believes, we must stop demonizing people whose actions, historical or current, we do not fully understand. This elegantly written treatment of the Central High crisis is unique among studies done to date. It will help readers to better comprehend the complexity of racism, not only as it was evidenced at Central High in 1957, but as it continues to impact our lives today.