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In a volume that represents the culmination of his life’s work in considering the relationship between culture and landscape, eminent scholar Yi-Fu Tuan argues that “cosmos” and “hearth” are two scales that anchor what it means to be fully and happily human. Illustrating this contention with examples from both his native China and his home of the past forty years, the United States, Tuan proposes a revised conception of culture, one thoroughly grounded in one’s own society but also embracing curiosity about the world. Optimistic and deeply human, this important volume lays out a path to being “at home in the cosmos.”

The exploration of the North-South relationship and the growth of of antebellum Mobile.

Cotton City offers a compelling exploration of Mobile, Alabama’s transformation into a thriving urban center during the antebellum period. Historian Harriet E. Amos examines how economic ambition, civic planning, and the cotton trade shaped the city’s development between 1819 and 1861. Through detailed archival research, Amos reveals how Mobile’s leaders sought to modernize infrastructure, expand commerce, and assert the city’s regional importance—all while navigating the tensions of slavery, class, and Southern identity.

This richly contextualized study highlights the interplay between urban growth and the broader forces of the Southern economy, making Cotton City a vital contribution to the histories of the American South, urbanization, and antebellum society.

Step back into 1920s Alabama, where grit, laughter, and the red clay roads of the Black Belt shape one young woman’s unforgettable first year of teaching

Cotton-Patch Schoolhouse follows 18‑year‑old Susie Powers Tompkins as she takes on a one-room school with eight children, zero experience, and a Model T that’s always one mud puddle away from disaster. With warmth and wit, she discovers that the real curriculum is written not in textbooks—but in the faces, fears, and fierce hopes of her students.

In a world of cotton fields, nature walks, homemade art supplies, and potbellied stoves, Susie learns that teaching is as much about heart as it is about lessons. She navigates runaway love affairs, surprise pets (including an opinionated mouse), the hardships of rural poverty, and the extraordinary generosity of neighbors who have little but give much.

As contemporary readers grapple with educational inequities, rural depopulation, and renewed conversations about community, Cotton-Patch Schoolhouse feels strikingly fresh. It reminds us that creativity blooms under constraint, that relationships matter more than resources, and that small schools can make a big difference. Tompkins' memoir will delight lovers of Southern history, educators, memoir readers, rural studies enthusiasts, and anyone who enjoys heartfelt stories of resilience, community, and the transformative power of teaching

A nostalgic journey through the beliefs, customs, sayings, superstitions, and folk wisdom of a Southern childhood

Count Those Buzzards! Stamp Those Grey Mules! is a warm and engaging celebration of the folklore, superstitions, and everyday wisdom that once shaped life across the rural South. Drawing on her Alabama childhood, beloved storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham recounts the sayings, rituals, beliefs, and customs passed from generation to generation long before information was instantly available at the touch of a screen.

With humor, affection, and a keen eye for the memorable details of ordinary life, Windham introduces readers to a world where bottle trees repelled evil spirits, rabbit’s feet promised good fortune, and signs and omens guided daily decisions. Her stories capture not only the traditions themselves but also the families and communities that kept them alive.

Part memoir and part folklore treasury, this enduring classic preserves a rich cultural inheritance while offering a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Southern life. Featuring a new introduction by Dilcy Windham and a foreword by Emily Blejwas, this edition invites readers to rediscover a fascinating world of memory, myth, and tradition.

Investigates the interdisciplinary dimensions of countermemory through a rhetorical lens

Countermemory: A Rhetoric of Resistance by April L. O’Brien and James Chase Sanchez is a groundbreaking monograph that explores the concept of countermemory from an interdisciplinary and rhetorical perspective. The authors define “countermemory” as remembrance that resituates often overlooked or erased narratives of marginalized groups by positioning these memories as equally significant to dominant historical narratives. This work investigates how countermemories emerge in response to public memories, highlighting the tensions and resistance that arise when marginalized voices challenge mainstream historical accounts.

Through a mixed-methodological approach—incorporating site-based analysis, participant observation, textual analysis, and historiography—O’Brien and Sanchez examine countermemory in both physical and digital spaces. From memorial sites and museums to music videos, TV shows, and digital maps, they reveal the various ways countermemory operates and persists. The authors focus particularly on countermemory in the American South, centering on the experiences and histories of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities.

Countermemory is essential reading for scholars and students of rhetoric and public memory. The book also offers rich insights to readers who are passionate about addressing issues of racial inequality, people interested in examining their own experiences and the role they can play in promoting social change, and those interested in exploring the ways in which history is constructed and presented, and how marginalized perspectives are often excluded or distorted.

An essential look at how and why backlash movements are inherent to US policymaking.

The most successful policies not only solve problems. They also build supportive coalitions. Yet, sometimes, policies trigger backlash and mobilize opposition. Although backlash is not a new phenomenon, today’s political landscape is distinguished by the frequency and pervasiveness of backlash in nearly every area of US policymaking, from abortion rights to the Affordable Care Act.

Eric M. Patashnik develops a policy-centered theory of backlash that illuminates how policies stimulate backlashes by imposing losses, overreaching, or challenging existing arrangements to which people are strongly attached. Drawing on case studies of issues from immigration and trade to healthcare and gun control, Countermobilization shows that backlash politics is fueled by polarization, cultural shifts, and negative feedback from the activist government itself. It also offers crucial insights to help identify and navigate backlash risks.

The public library is in the perfect position as a community resource to help bridge the gap between preschool and kindergarten; however, starting from scratch can feel daunting. In this guide, Baker combines her background in early childhood education with her experience as a youth services programming specialist to present a school readiness program that can be tailored for any public library. Based on the successful framework of her tried and tested original program, this book offers everything that a public library needs in order to get started, including

• A six-week schedule of detailed lesson plans which combine the best practices of the Every Child Ready to Read® (ECRR) Second Edition (talking, singing, reading, writing, playing) with nationally identified school readiness skills
• A six-month family calendar with activities to help parents engage their children in activities that foster early literacy and school readiness skills at home
• Tips for maintaining a collaborative relationship with early childhood stakeholders and policymakers to help maintain a program that fits the school readiness needs of the local community
• Specific examples of successful school readiness programs and partnerships from public library systems across the country

Baker's guide will help public libraries ensure that young children are ready for school from day one.

Country music evokes a simple, agrarian past, with images of open land and pickup trucks. While some might think of the genre as a repository of nostalgia, popular because it preserves and reveres traditional values, Jeremy Hill argues that country music has found such expansive success because its songs and its people have forcefully addressed social and cultural issues as well as geographic change. Hill demonstrates how the genre and its fans developed a flexible idea of “country,” beyond their rural roots, and how this flexibility allowed fans and music to “come to town,” to move into and within urban spaces, while retaining a country “character.”

To understand how the genre has become the far-reaching commercial phenomenon that it is today, Hill explores how various players within the country music fold have grappled with the notion of place. He shows both how the industry has transformed the city of Nashville and how country music—through song lyrics, imagery associated with the music, and branding—has reshaped ideas about the American landscape and character. As the genre underwent significant change in the last decades of the twentieth century, those who sought to explain its new styles and new locations relied on a traditional theme: “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy.” Hill demonstrates how this idea—that you can still be “country” while no longer living in a rural place—has been used to expand country's commercial appeal and establish a permanent home in the urban space of Nashville.

A Supreme Court historian’s memoir places court events in the larger context of American history.

Legal scholar James F. Simon has written many acclaimed books on the history of the US Supreme Court, but in this memoir, he turns his attention to a more personal subject: himself. Simon, a native of Fort Worth, details what it was like growing up in segregated Texas. He left home for college and law school at Yale, interspersed with travels abroad to build a schoolhouse in Ghana, work at an Israeli kibbutz, and spend a year on a fellowship in India.

Simon worked as a legal journalist for Time magazine before embarking on a career as a Supreme Court historian. He later was appointed professor of constitutional law and served as dean of New York Law School. Meanwhile, he continued his work on what became his specialty, well-researched books on the history of the Supreme Court that place events at the court in the larger context of American history. Much of this research is included in his papers, which are now housed at the Briscoe Center for American History.

In this engaging memoir, Simon describes the challenges of interviewing Supreme Court justices and researching constitutional history for his books and juggling his law school and family responsibilities, all the while reflecting on changing American perspectives on civil rights and liberties.

A novel meditation on how courts and bureaucracies function today and how they can be made better.

We live in a highly bureaucratic society, so much so that we often don’t even see it. Although we think of bureaucracies and courtrooms as different kinds of institutions, as Robert P. Burns argues in Courts and Bureaucracies, their functions and everyday operations often blur together. Today, courts are being used to address numerous social problems that the government is unable or unwilling to tackle, and consequently, the courts frequently emphasize bureaucratic goals—such as efficiency and social control—over the adjudicatory functions that they are supposed to embody.

Drawing on social theory, philosophy, public administration, and law, Burns clarifies the role of courts in today’s bureaucratic society and considers the distinctive contributions that specifically legal procedures can bring. After exploring the competing first principles of adjudication, Burns then examines our current administrative, civil, and criminal processes and describes new and looming changes to rules and practices that should affect our thinking about the rule of law and the role of the courts.

A broad reassessment—both philosophical and practical—of how criminal, civil, and administrative practices differ from one another and what benefits each bestows, Courts and Bureaucracies offers concrete suggestions for how we can better achieve the ideals already implicit in our judicial traditions and practices.

Cow People records the fading memories of a bygone Texas, the reminiscences of the cow people themselves. These are the Texans of the don't-fence-me-in era, their faces pinched by years of squinting into the desert glare, tanned by the sun and coarsened by the dust of the Chisholm Trail. Their stories are often raucous but just as often quiet as hot plains under a pale Texan sky.

A native Texan, J. Frank Dobie had an inborn knowledge of the men and customs of the trail camps. Cattlemen were as various as the country was big. Ab Blocker was a tall, quiet man who belonged totally to the cattle and the silent plains. But big men often had big lungs. "Shanghai Pierce was the loudest man in the country. He would sit at one end of a day coach and in normal voice hold conversation with some man at the other end of the coach, who of course had to yell, while the train was clanking along. He knew everybody, yelled at everybody he saw."

Texas bred tall men and taller stories. There was Findlay Simpson, who played havoc with fact but whiled away the drivers' long, lonely evenings with his tales. Old Findlay told of a country so wet that it bogged down the shadow of a buzzard, and of cattle that went into hibernation during rugged winters; he once spun yarns for three days straight, outlasting his listeners in a marathon of endurance.

All real cow people—from the cattle drivers to the cattle owners—lived by a simple code based on the individual's integrity. Bothering anyone else's poke or business uninvited was strictly forbidden, and enforcement of this unwritten law was as easy as pulling a trigger. Honesty was taken for granted, and a cowman's name on a check made it negotiable currency.

Yet Texas had its "bad guys"—the crooks, the thieves, even the tightwads. "A world big enough to hold a rattlesnake and a purty woman is big enough for all kinds of people," wrote Dobie. This is the world whose vast and various population the reader will find in Cow People.

No president today is more controversial than Venezuela's Hugo Chávez Frías. Elected in a landslide in 1998, he promised a peaceful revolution. That peaceful dream became a nightmare when Chávez was overthrown in a coup d'état in 2002. Surprisingly, he was brought back to power by his supporters, mostly barrio dwellers, within forty-eight hours. Although Chávez continues to be dogged by controversy, he stays in power because of these supporters who see themselves as active participants in a democratic revolution.

As a former Catholic priest who has lived in Venezuela for the past twenty years and spent eight of those years in a cardboard-and-tin shack in one of Caracas' barrios, Charles Hardy is in a unique position to explain what is taking place. Cowboy in Caracas: A North American's Memoir of Venezuela's Democratic Revolution gives the reader insight into the Venezuelan reality, using an anecdotal presentation drawn from the writer's personal experiences.

Cracker Culture is a provocative study of social life in the Old South that probes the origin of cultural differences between the South and the North throughout American history. 

Among Scotch-Irish settlers the term “Cracker” initially designated a person who boasted, but in American usage the word has come to designate poor whites. McWhiney uses the term to define culture rather than to signify an economic condition. Although all poor whites were Crackers, not all Crackers were poor whites; both, however, were Southerners.

The author insists that Southerners and Northerners were never alike. American colonists who settled south and west of Pennsylvania during the 17th and 18th centuries were mainly from the “Celtic fringe” of the British Isles. The culture that these people retained in the New World accounts in considerable measure for the difference between them and the Yankees of New England, most of whom originated in the lowlands of the southeastern half of the island of Britain. From their solid base in the southern backcountry, Celts and their “Cracker” descendants swept westward throughout the antebellum period until they had established themselves and their practices across the Old South. Basic among those practices that determined their traditional folkways, values, norms, and attitudes was the herding of livestock on the open range, in contrast to the mixed agriculture that was the norm both in southeastern Britain and in New England. The Celts brought to the Old South leisurely ways that fostered idleness and gaiety. Like their Celtic ancestors, Southerners were characteristically violent; they scorned pacifism; they considered fights and duels honorable and consistently ignored laws designed to control their actions. In addition, family and kinship were much more important in Celtic Britain and the antebellum South than in England and the Northern United States. Fundamental differences between Southerners and Northerners shaped the course of antebellum American history; their conflict in the 1860s was not so much brother against brother as culture against culture.

The definitive biography of Sidney J. Catts—Florida’s fiery governor who fused pulpit rhetoric with populist politics in the early twentieth century. 

Cracker Messiah by Wayne Flynt is a riveting portrait of Sidney J. Catts, one of the most controversial figures in Southern political history. Catts rose from Baptist pulpits and Chautauqua stages to Florida’s governor’s mansion in 1916, riding a wave of rural populism, prohibition fervor, and anti-Catholic rhetoric. His fiery oratory and outsider persona electrified “Florida crackers” at a time when industrial and urban forces were reshaping the South. Yet Catts was more than a demagogue. His administration championed progressive reforms—good roads, penal improvements, vocational education, and even women’s political participation—while his career oscillated between idealism and opportunism. 

Wayne Flynt’s meticulously documented biography illuminates this complicated politician, tracing Catts’s battles with the Democratic establishment, his failed Senate bid, and his later flirtations with gambling and real estate during Florida’s boom years. Drawing on interviews, archival sources, and legislative records, Cracker Messiah illuminates the tensions between nativism and reform, faith and hypocrisy, populism and progressivism in the early twentieth-century South. This new edition will appeal to readers of Southern history, political biography, and Progressive Era studies, as well as anyone interested in the roots of American populism and the enduring complexities of cultural and political identity in the Deep South.