A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Blues in the Blood is an ode to the spring of 1932 in the Mississippi delta, when stifling heat crushed the countryside and threatened the harvest, pervasive injustice ruled the day, and ghostly riders of the Ku Klux Klan spread terror. A panoramic historical and musical portrait, Blues in the Blood follows a poor young Black couple who believe their love for each other will save them from this devastation. Julien Delmaire introduces us to a gallery of figures: Blacks, Whites, Native Americans, mulattos, landowners, itinerant bluesmen, preachers, witches, corrupt politicians, prisoners, bootleggers, and Legba, the voodoo god, “master of crossroads,” who, like an otherworldly detective, watches over people’s destinies. As the story unfolds, a world is reborn: the delta, the birthplace of the blues, in which oppressed women and men rediscover the voices and rhythms of their humanity.
Based mostly on his own experiences, Theophile Maher’s local color novel Cannel Coal Oil Days challenges many popular ideas about antebellum Appalachia, bringing it more fully into the broader story of the United States. Written in 1887, discovered in 2018, and published here for the first time, it offers a narrative of life between 1859 and 1861 in what was then western Virginia as it became West Virginia.
Cannel coal (a soft form of coal whose oil, when distilled, was competitive in the lighting oil business after overfishing reduced the whale oil supply) was at the center of one of Appalachia’s first extractive industries. Using the development of coal oil manufacturing in the Kanawha valley as its launching point, Maher’s semiautobiographical novel tells of a series of interrelated changes, each reflecting larger transformations in the United States as a whole. It shows how coal oil manufacturing was transformed from an amateurish endeavor to a more professional industry, with implications for Appalachian environment and labor. Then, Maher foreshadows the coming Progressive Era by insisting on moral and environmental reforms based in democratic and Christian principles. Finally, he tells the story of the coming of the Civil War to the region, as the novel’s protagonist, a mining engineer, works closely with a Black family to organize the local abolitionist mountain folk into a Union militia to aid in the secession of West Virginia from Virginia.
Classic-Period Cultural Currents in Southern and Central Veracruz explores the diverse traditions and dynamic interactions along the Mexican Gulf lowlands at the height of their cultural florescence. Best known for their elaborate ballgame rituals and precocious inscriptions with long-count dates, these cultures served as a critical nexus between the civilizations of highland Mexico and the lowland Maya, influencing developments in both regions.
Eleven chapters penned by leading experts in archaeology, art history, and linguistics offer new insights into ancient iconography and writing, the construction of sociopolitical landscapes, and the historical interplay between local developments and external influences at Cerro de las Mesas, Tres Zapotes, Matacapan, and many lesser-known sites. The result is a new, vibrant perspective on ancient lifeways along the Mexican Gulf lowlands and an important updated source for future research in the region.
A dark, lyrical blend of historical fiction and magical realism, The Curators examines a critically underexplored event in American history through unlikely eyes. All of Atlanta is obsessed with the two-year-long trial and subsequent lynching of Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank in 1915. None more so than thirteen-year-old Ana Wulff and her friends, who take history into their own hands—quite literally—when they use dirt from Ana’s garden to build and animate a golem in Frank’s image. They’ll do anything to keep his story alive, but when their scheme gets out of hand, they must decide what responsibility requires of them. The Curators tells the story of five zealous girls and the cyclonic power of their friendship as they come of age in a country riven by white supremacy.
Edited by longtime Harington scholar Brian Walter, Double Toil and Trouble also includes an appendix featuring the author’s spirited correspondence with the editor who originally inspired the title novel, providing an insider’s look at the American literary scene and Harington’s own early assessment of his work. Spanning several decades of the author’s career, this volume gives readers a Harington who is at once familiar and fresh as he experiments with new formal possibilities, only to once again endear the vagaries of love, life, and folk language to us.
Set in the Appalachian backcountry in the midst of the Great Depression, Fools’ Parade traces the adventures of three ex-convicts who become involved in a wild and woolly chase along the Ohio River.
Convicted murderer Mattie Appleyard has just served forty-seven years in Glory Penitentiary. His release puts him in possession of a check for $25,452.32—the result of his having salted away his meager earnings in the Prisoner’s Work-and-Hope Savings Plan of the local bank. With his friends Johnny Jesus and Lee Cottrill, he plans to open a general store that will compete with the company store in Stonecoal, West Virginia.
Unfortunately, banker Homer Grindstaff, prison guard Uncle Doc Council, and Sheriff Duane Ewing have no intention of allowing Mattie to realize his ambitions. Mattie’s efforts to cash his check set a deadly pursuit in motion and introduce the reader to a host of colorful characters and a vividly recreated regional and historical background. Good and evil meet head-on in this novel that is, by turns, warm and humorous, rousing and tumultuous.
The Author: Davis Grubb (1919–1980) was the author of ten published novels, the most famous of which was Night of the Hunter. Both that book and Fools’ Parade, originally published in 1969, were made into motion pictures.
Knox’s shop makes the perfect front for a marijuana operation, but his supplier turns out to be violent and calculating, and Knox ends up under his thumb. It’s not long before more than just the pizza shop is at risk.
But to help her hometown’s haunted women, Emme must also face the things that haunt her, things she thought she had lost when she chose to move away: the majestic music of her family’s beloved hills and hollows, the mysterious old ways of her Appalachian kin, and the memory of her remarkable first love, Evan. Through it all, she must reckon with her magical “mountain gift”—is it real, or merely a unique synesthesia? And can she trust it to help heal her family and her town, a place still plagued by the social injustice that first drove her away? Can she trust it to help heal herself?
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.
Set during the 2009 recession, The Nature of Remains rests at the intersection of class, gender, education and place. Through extended geological metaphor, readers witness the orogeny, crystallization, and weathering of the human soul. Doreen’s journey reveals the ways even a woman’s most precious connections—her children, her grandchildren, her lover—operate within larger social structures capable of challenging her sovereignty.
"The Road is a strong novel by one of our most distinguished authors. Muscular, vivid, and pungent, it is broad in historical scope and profound in its human sympathies. We welcome its return with warm pleasure."—Fred Chappell
Originally published in 1967, The Road is epic historical fiction at its best. At the novel's center is Weatherby Wright, a railroad builder who launches an ambitious plan to link the highlands of western North Carolina with the East. As a native of the region, Wright knows what his railway will mean to the impoverished settlers. But to accomplish his grand undertaking he must conquer Sow Mountain, "a massive monolith of earth, rock, vegetation and water, an elaborate series of ridges which built on one another to the top."
Wright's struggle to construct the railroad—which requires tall trestles crossing deep ravines and seven tunnels blasted through shale and granite—proves to be much more than an engineering challenge. There is opposition from a child evangelist, who preaches that the railroad is the work of the devil, and there is a serious lack of funds, which forces Wright to use convict labor. How Wright confronts these challenges and how the mountain people respond to the changes the railroad brings to their lives make for powerfully compelling reading.
The Author: A native of Asheville, North Carolina, John Ehle has written seventeen novels and works of nonfiction. His books include The Land Breakers, The Journey of August King, The Winter People, and Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. Among the honors he has received are the Lillian Smith Prize and the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Award.
In her debut short-story collection A Small Apocalypse, Laura Chow Reeve examines cultural inheritance, hybridity, queerness, and the stickiness of home with an eye for both the uncanny and the realistic: human bodies become reptilian, queer ghosts haunt their friends, a young woman learns to pickle memories, and a theater floods during an apocalyptic movie marathon. The characters in A Small Apocalypse weave in and out of its fourteen stories, confronting their sense of otherness and struggling to find new ways of being and belonging. Heavily steeped in the swampy, feral heat of Florida, these stories venture beyond the problems of constructing an identity to the frontier of characters living their truth in a world that doesn’t yet have a place for them.
Covering 19 years of excavations, this volume provides an invaluable collection of Moore's pioneering archaeological investigations along Alabama's waterways.
In 1996, The University of Alabama Press published The Moundville Expeditions of Clarence Bloomfield Moore, which covered a large part of Moore's early archaeological expeditions to the state of Alabama. This volume collects the balance of Moore's Alabama expeditions, with the exception of those Moore made along the Tennessee River, which will be collected in another, forthcoming volume focusing on the Tennessee basin.
This volume includes:
Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Alabama River (1899);
Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Tombigbee River(1901);
a portion of Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Northwest Florida Coast (1901);
The So-Called "Hoe-Shaped Implement" (1903);
Aboriginal Urn-Burial in the United States (1904);
A Form of Urn-Burial on Mobile Bay (1905);
Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Lower Tombigbee River (1905);
Certain Aboriginal Remains on Mobile Bay and on Mississippi Sound (1905);
a portion of Mounds of the Lower Chattahoochee and Lower Flint Rivers (1907);
a portion of The Northwest Florida Coast Revisited(1918).
Craig Sheldon's comprehensive introduction focuses both on the Moore expeditions and on subsequent archaeological excavations at
sites investigated by Moore. Sheldon places Moore's archaeological work in the context of his times and against the backdrop of similar investigations in the Southeast. Sheldon discusses practical matters, such as the various assistants Moore employed and their roles in these historic expeditions. He provides brief vignettes of daily life on the Gopher and describes Moore's work habits, revealing professional and personal biographical details previously unknown about this enigmatic archaeologist.
2020 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award finalist
Darrick MacBrehon, a government auditor, wakes among the dead. Bloodied and disoriented from a gaping head wound, the man who staggers out of the mine crack in Redbird, West Virginia, is much more powerful—and dangerous—than the one thrown in. An orphan with an unknown past, he must now figure out how to have a future.
Hard-as-nails Lourana Taylor works as a sweepstakes operator and spends her time searching for any clues that might lead to Dreama, her missing daughter. Could this stranger’s tale of a pit of bones be connected? With help from disgraced deputy Marco DeLucca and Zadie Person, a local journalist investigating an acid mine spill, Darrick and Lourana push against everyone who tries to block the truth. Along the way, the bonds of love and friendship are tested, and bodies pile up on both sides.
In a town where the river flows orange and the founding—and controlling—family is rumored to “strip a man to the bones,” the conspiracy that bleeds Redbird runs as deep as the coal veins that feed it.
“It seems like everybody but people from here are sure about what we’re about, and they make money being wrong about it.” The residents of Labor County, a fictional small community in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky, may be short on cash, but they are rich in creativity and tirelessly inventive as they concoct new schemes to make ends meet, settle old scores, and work off their debts to society and, in a way, to themselves.
A zealous history professor is caught stealing from the local museum in protest of petty theft; an arsonist strikes it lucky—twice; a skilled leatherworker saddles a turkey and finds a rider; an angel aspires to be a punk rock Roller Derby princess; a grieving artist carves a miracle into a roadside rock face; and affable Uncle Archie produces a seemingly unending supply of new and bizarre items to display in his Odditorium.
More than a collection of tales, Working It Off in Labor County assembles memorable characters who recur across these seventeen linked stories, sharing in one another’s struggles and stumbling upon humor and mystery, the grotesque and the divine, each in many forms.
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