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In Thinking Outside the Book, Augusta Rohrbach works through the increasing convergences between digital humanities and literary studies to explore the meaning and primacy of the book as a literary, material, and cultural artifact. Rohrbach assembles a rather unlikely cohort of nineteenth-century women writers—Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, Augusta Evans, and Mary Chesnut—to consider the publishing culture of their period from the perspective of our current digital age, bringing together scholarly concepts from both print culture and new media studies. 

In nineteenth-century America, women from a variety of racial and class affiliations were bombarding the print market with their literary productions, taking advantage of burgeoning rates of literacy and advances in publishing technology. Their work challenged prevailing modes of authorship and continues to do so today. Each chapter of Thinking Outside the Book positions a focal figure as both paradigmatic and problematic within the context of key terms that define the study of the book. In lieu of terms such as literacy, authorship, publication, edition, and editor, Rohrbach develops an alternate typology that includes mediation, memory, history, testimony, and loss. Recognizing that the field spans radio, cinema, television, and the Internet, she draws comparisons to the present day, when Web 2.0 allows writers from varying backgrounds and positions to seek out readers without “gatekeepers” limiting their exposure. 

More than a literary history, this book takes up theories of recovery, literacy, authorship, narrative, the book, and new media in connection with race, gender, class, and region.

An intellectual journey through 250 million years of stone

In the San Rafael Swell, geologic forces have tilted and exposed the strata so that over 250 million years of geologic history can be observed simply by traveling across the rocky landscape, with its dramatic variety of colors and forms. Largely neglected by visitors to the state’s national parks and monuments and overlooked by many nature writers of the Colorado Plateau, the exceptional “Swell” offers a unique opportunity to think about people’s connections to the layers of earth beneath our feet. 

Thinking with Stone takes readers on an intellectual journey across the Swell, moving from the youngest rocks at its edges to the oldest near its center and guiding readers through the features and histories of each geological layer. Drawing on personal experience and scientific research, Brian Rajski explores how creatively engaging with geology by using rocks as the foundation for thinking can generate new ideas about art, ethics, and the environment. Ultimately, the book reimagines the relationships between history and deep time, humanity and geology, and the individual and the stories told by stone.

Discusses the challenges and pleasures of creating a new feminism.

Young feminists have grown up with a plethora of cultural choices and images-in the distance from Gloria Steinem to Courtney Love, a chasm has been traversed and an entire history made. In Third Wave Agenda, feminists born between the years 1964 and 1973 discuss the things that matter now, both in looking back at the accomplishments and failures of the past and in planning for the challenges of the future.

A deluxe, commemorative edition of famed southern author and folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham’s introduction to Mississippi’s thirteen most famous haunted houses and ghostly visitations.

For as long as Mississippi has existed (and then some), flocks of phantoms have haunted the mortal inhabitants of the Magnolia State. In Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey, best-selling folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham, along with her trusty spectral companion Jeffrey, introduces thirteen of the state’s most famous ghost stories.

Although stories about Mississippi’s spirits seemingly outnumber the ghosts themselves, Windham observes that “Southern ghost tales are disappearing because people no longer sit around on the porch on summer nights and tell stories. The old folks who grew up with these stories are dying now, and the stories are dying with them.”

Fortunately for us, Windham was a writer dedicated to preserving these tales in print. The veteran author spent many years tracking down these stories and chronicling the best ones. From the ghost of Mrs. McEwen still wearing her beloved cameo pin and keeping a watchful eye over Featherston Place, her home in Holly Springs, where, she swore, she would stay forever, to the ghostly visage fixed permanently on the bedroom window pane of Catherine McGehee, who searched the horizon ardently for her unrequited love to come to her as promised at Cold Spring Plantation in Pinckneyville, Windham’s stories cover the breadth and depth of Mississippi—at times more moonlight than magnolia.

An enduring classic, this commemorative edition restores Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey to the ghastly grandeur of its original 1974 edition.

The murder of thirteen women and girls in 1979 and the social movement they launched.

In four terrifying months in 1979, thirteen women and girls—twelve Black, one white—were murdered in Boston. All were found in or near Roxbury, a predominantly Black neighborhood in a city famously beset by racial strife and division. Fears of a serial killer spread within Black communities. But the authorities wouldn’t hear of it: these were just ordinary, everyday murders of unimportant people, killed by men they knew. The police said Black residents had nothing to fear—and the media implied that white people could safely ignore the carnage.

Yet Black feminists refused to accept the murders of Black women and girls. The real serial killers, they argued, were chronic racism, sexism, poverty, and domestic violence, including violence committed by Black men. Something had to be done.

Thirteen Sisters tells the gripping stories of the women who died—their lives, their brutal deaths, the attempts to solve them—and the renowned Combahee River Collective, whose activism in the wake of the murders brought national attention to the overlapping oppressions that made Black women and girls so vulnerable to violence. Historian Andrew S. Baer interviews family members and activists to introduce readers to the victims as complete people and investigate the events surrounding their deaths, unspooling a fast-paced and urgent narrative about crime, race, and marginalization. Baer also pays tribute to the Black feminists who saw the social roots of this violence and called for radical change, demands that remain all too relevant today.

Riveting, enraging, and humane, Thirteen Sisters is an indictment of the neglectful institutions that have failed Black women and a testament to the activists who transformed how we understand systemic oppression.

A deluxe, commemorative edition of famed southern author and folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham’s introduction to the Volunteer State’s most enduring ghost stories.

In Thirteen Tennessee Ghosts and Jeffrey, beloved and best-selling folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham presents a spine-tingling collection of Tennessee’s eeriest ghost tales. Accompanied by her faithful companion, Jeffrey, a friendly spirit who resided in her home, Windham traveled from the mysterious muds of Memphis to the haunted hollow’s of east Tennessee to collect the spookiest collection of Volunteer State revenants ever written.

In these perennial favorites, Windham captures the gentle folk humor of native Tennesseans as well as fascinating facts about the state’s rich history. In “The Dark Legend,” Windham recounts the story of explorer Merriwether Lewis, who met an untimely end on the Natchez Trace 1809 and whose spirit, it is said, still treads through Tennessee’s forests. Windham also visits central Tennessee’s Chapel Hill, where people who know the town say those who stand on the train tracks on dark, lonely nights can often see a disembodied light floating along the tracks. Neighbors say it’s the ghost of a headless flagman who returns to cavort with night-time guests.

High in Tennessee’s Appalachian mountains, Windham encounters Martin, the phantom fiddler of Johnson County. Legend has it that in life Martin’s musical skills so mesmerized the snakes of the Stone Mountains that they would slither from their dens to listen tamely to his fiddling. Intrepid visitors to the rocky tops of northeast Tennessee’s mountains say you can still hear Martin’s ghost fiddling in the hollows.

This handsome, new commemorative hardback edition returns Windham’s suspenseful classic to its original keepsake quality and includes a new afterword by the author’s children. 

Combining memoir with oral history, creates a vivid and searing portrait of the Freedom Summer of 1965.

This Bright Light of Ours offers a tightly focused insider’s view of the community-based activism that was the heart of the civil rights movement. A celebration of grassroots heroes, this book details through first-person accounts the contributions of ordinary people who formed  the nonviolent army that won the fight for voting rights.

Combining memoir and oral history, Maria Gitin fills a vital gap in civil rights history by focusing on the neglected Freedom Summer of 1965 when hundreds of college students joined forces with local black leaders to register thousands of new black voters in the rural South. Gitin was an idealistic nineteen-year-old college freshman from a small farming community north of San Francisco who felt called to action when she saw televised images of brutal attacks on peaceful demonstrators during Bloody Sunday, in Selma, Alabama.

Atypical among white civil rights volunteers, Gitin came from a rural low-income family. She raised funds to attend an intensive orientation in Atlanta featuring now-legendary civil rights leaders. Her detailed letters include the first narrative account of this orientation and the only in-depth field report from a teenage Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) project participant.

Gitin details the dangerous life of civil rights activists in Wilcox County, Alabama, where she was assigned. She tells of threats and arrests, but also of forming deep friendships and of falling in love. More than four decades later, Gitin returned to Wilcox County to revisit the people and places that she could never forget and to discover their views of the “outside agitators” who had come to their community. Through conversational interviews with more than fifty Wilcox County residents and former civil rights workers, she has created a channel for the voices of these unheralded heroes who formed the backbone of the civil rights movement.

One woman’s enlightening trek through the natural histories, cultural stories, and present perils of thirteen national monuments, from Maine to Hawaii—now available in paperback

This land is your land. When it comes to national monuments, the sentiment could hardly be more fraught. Gold Butte in Nevada, Organ Mountains–Desert Peaks in New Mexico, Katahdin Woods and Waters in Maine, Cascade–Siskiyou in Oregon and California: these are among the thirteen natural sites McKenzie Long visits in This Contested Land, an eye-opening exploration of the stories these national monuments tell, the passions they stir, and the controversies surrounding them today.

Starting amid the fragrant sagebrush and red dirt of Bears Ears National Monument on the eve of the Trump Administration’s decision to reduce the site by 85 percent, Long climbs sandstone cliffs, is awed by Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings and is intrigued by 4,000-year-old petroglyphs. She hikes through remote pink canyons recently removed from the boundary of Grand Staircase–Escalante, skis to a backcountry hut in Maine to view a truly dark night sky, snorkels in warm Hawaiian waters to plumb the meaning of marine preserves, volunteers near the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States, and witnesses firsthand the diverse forms of devotion evoked by the Rio Grande. In essays both contemplative and resonant, This Contested Land confronts an unjust past and imagines a collaborative future that bears witness to these regions’ enduring Indigenous connections. 

From hazardous climate change realities to volatile tensions between economic development and environmental conservation, practical and philosophical issues arise as Long seeks the complicated and often overlooked—or suppressed—stories of these incomparable places. Her journey, mindfully undertaken and movingly described, emphasizes in clear and urgent terms the unique significance of, and grave threats to, these contested lands.

An exciting and accurate portrayal of the military action in the southern colonies that led to a new American nation

Following up the success of his 1777: The Year of the Hangman about the northern theaters of the American Revolutionary War, historian John Pancake now cover the war in the South, from General Clinton's attack on Charleston in the spring of 1780 to Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown in October 1781.

Pancake expertly takes the reader back and forth between British and American headquarters to provide a brisk and sharp view from both sides of the conflict. His artful analysis also adds insights to the familiar narrative of the British losing because of their mistakes, American victory thanks to tenacity (particularly in the person of southern Continental forces commander Nathanael Greene), and British failure to overcome logistical problems of geography. Readers enjoy Pancake's wide-ranging knowledge of military history as applied to the Revolution as where, for example, he cites that tests conducted by the US Navy in World War II demonstrated that gun crews that were 100 percent efficient in training lost 35 percent of their efficiency in their first performance in combat.

Pancake has a writer's eye for telling details, and he creates characters sketches of the main players in the conflict that readers will always remember. This Destructive War includes a number of figures as well as detailed maps of the region where battle took place. General readers as well as scholars and students of the American Revolution will welcome anew this classic, definitive study of the campaign in the Carolinas.

This is the complex story of New Hampshire's White Mountains, from the range's days as the majestic homeland of the Abenaki, first seen by English colonists four centuries ago, to its unassailable standing today as one of America's most beloved national forests, comprising 112,000 acres of protected wilderness.

Christopher Johnson, an avid hiker intimately familiar with the White Mountains, achieves two important objectives in This Grand and Magnificent Place. He lovingly explores their rich ecological, political, economic, and cultural history and, more broadly, opens a panoramic window on the evolution of American attitudes and policies toward wilderness over time.

Two competing visions of wilderness historically have coexisted in America: the instrumental, in which the wilderness is seen as a conglomeration of resources to be exploited for the benefit of entrepreneurs and consumers, and the aesthetic, in which the wilderness is appreciated for its natural beauty, the personal growth that it stimulates, the national pride it engenders, and the spiritual truth it offers. Johnson never loses sight of this fundamental dichotomy as he shares marvelous true tales of the first intrepid European settlers who “tamed” the Whites. He discusses Ethan Allen Crawford, the area's first innkeeper, the emergence of tourism, and America's love affair with the “wilderness experience”; and he explores tales of Thomas Cole, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other renowned artists who immortalized these mountains in their works. He considers the coming of grand resort hotels—and the contemporaneous wilderness revival—in the late nineteenth century and the passing of the landmark 1911 Weeks Act, which was instrumental in preserving American wilderness in the face of development and threats of irreparable environmental damage. Johnson traces the perilous course of the twentieth-century movement toward wilderness preservation, which has successfully conserved the Whites, an extraordinary American treasure, for future generations. Finally, he poses thoughtful and essential questions regarding the destiny of this American wilderness, exploring the balance between maintaining its usefulness while conserving its glorious heritage. 

This skillful and accessible history will rivet general readers, students, and professionals interested in the history, culture, and politics of the White Mountains, as well as those fascinated by environmental history and wilderness protection everywhere.

A personal account by a war historian and adoptee who discovers his biological father was a famous Marine combat photographer in Vietnam. 
 
Robert K. Brigham has had a substantial career as a historian of the Vietnam War, with a hand in nine books, a documentary, public history projects, and more. While many a historian has felt compelled at some point to write about a subject close to them personally, Brigham did not think he was doing that. But, at age 58, Brigham, who had long known he was adopted, discovered that he’d improbably and unknowingly been studying and talking about his real father for decades. That man, Bruce Atwell, was a Marine Corps photographer who took some of that war’s most indelible and widely reproduced pictures. Brigham had used those images over and over again in decades’ worth of classes and public lectures, never knowing the truth.
 
Both Brigham and Atwell were products of the American foster care and adoption system, and both were defined professionally by Vietnam. In a story shot through with echoes and shadows, Brigham not only reveals his own history as an adoptee but opens a startlingly fresh vantage on the fragility of American families; the power of social norms and taboos to shape lives; and the forces that inequitably disrupt families, not least of them war. The result is an accessible and moving book that is at once both a powerful personal story and an illuminating social critique.