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In 1917, Henri Gaillard led a delegation of deaf French men to the United States for the centennial celebration of the American School for the Deaf (ASD). The oldest school for deaf students in America, ASD had been cofounded by renowned deaf French teacher Laurent Clerc, thus inspiring Gaillard’s invitation. Gaillard visited deaf people everywhere he went and recorded his impressions in a detailed journal. His essays present a sharply focused portrait of the many facets of Deaf America during a pivotal year in its history.

       Gaillard crossed the Atlantic only a few weeks after the United States entered World War I. In his writings, he reports the efforts of American deaf leaders to secure employment for deaf workers to support the war effort. He also witnesses spirited speeches at the National Association of the Deaf convention decrying the replacement of sign language by oral education. Gaillard also depicts the many local institutions established by deaf Americans, such as Philadelphia’s All Souls Church, founded in 1888 by the country’s first ordained deaf pastor, and the many deaf clubs established by the first wave of deaf college graduates in their communities. His journal stands as a unique chronicle of the American Deaf community during a remarkable era of transition.

This new biography reveals Marion Greenwood's central place in the pantheon of history’s remarkable women artists.

Marion Greenwood: Portrait and Self-Portrait—A Biography brings to life a woman who blazed through the twentieth-century art world. Born in Brooklyn in 1909, Greenwood thrived at storied institutions and arts centers such as the Art Students League, the studio of German modernist Winold Reiss, the Woodstock Colony, and Yaddo. In 1933, she catapulted to international fame as the first woman to paint a public mural in Mexico. Diego Rivera celebrated Greenwood as one of “the world’s greatest living women mural painters.” She traveled the globe to create award-winning portraits of people from diverse backgrounds, crossing racial, cultural, and class lines to reflect her vision for a more just world.

This biography, the first about Greenwood, is based on a decade of research and interviews. Author Joanne B. Mulcahy integrates the artist’s adventuresome personal life with her journey to artistic glory. Greenwood comes alive as a notable and spirited part of the heady art scenes of 1920s and 1930s Mexico, New York City, and Paris, and as one of two women artist-correspondents during World War II. After social realism and portraiture fell from favor, Greenwood doggedly stuck with what she called “the human thing” in art. Her freewheeling romantic life and independent spirit defied expectations for women, and she dismissed sexist critics who mixed acclaim for her work with commentary on her stunning beauty.

A feminist pioneer, Greenwood made a living as an artist in a time when few women could. In following Greenwood’s maverick path and artistic achievements, this book reveals her central place in the pantheon of history’s remarkable women artists.

One city. One war. A story of transformation at home and abroad.

Using newspaper accounts, interviews, letters, journals, and his own memory of the time, Wesley Newton reconstructs wartime-era Montgomery, Alabama--a sleepy southern capital that was transformed irreversibly during World War II.

The war affected every segment of Montgomery society: black and white, rich and poor, male and female, those who fought in Europe and the Pacific and those who stayed on the home front. Newton follows Montgomerians chronologically through the war from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima as they experience patriotism, draft and enlistment, rationing, scarcity drives, and the deaths of loved ones. His use of small vignettes based on personal recollections adds drama and poignancy to the story. 

Montgomery in the Good War is an important reminder that wars are waged at home as well as abroad and that their impact reverberates well beyond those who fight on the front lines. Those who came of age during the war will recognize themselves in this moving volume. It will also be enlightening to those who have lived in times of relative peace.

Floating on air currents over rural countryside and open city spaces, the Mississippi Kite presents a familiar sight to many people across the southern United States, although this graceful hawk is not well known by name. This engaging natural history, illustrated with superb color photographs, provides all a bird watcher needs to become acquainted with the kite, its life cycle, and its fascinating history with humans.

Under various folk names, including Blue Darter, Grasshopper Hawk, and Mosquito Hawk, the Mississippi Kite ranges throughout the southern United States from the coasts of the Carolinas to the plains of the Southwest. The authors describe all aspects of the kite's life cycle, from breeding and nesting, raising young, and hunting and feeding to the kite's annual winter migration to South America. They also trace its intriguing relationship with humans, from its discovery by Europeans in the nineteenth century to the present day.

For bird lovers and ornithologists alike, The Mississippi Kite will be an essential introduction to a bird well worth knowing. A special section on conservation and a selection of references for further reading complement the text.

Wrestling with God, scripture, and conscience in the nineteenth‑century South

First published in 1979, Wrestlin’ Jacob offers important insights into the intersection of black and white religious history in the South. Erskine Clarke provides two arenas—one urban and one rural—that show what happened when white ministers tried to bring black slaves into the fold of Christianity. Clarke illustrates how the good intentions—and vain illusions—of the white preachers, coupled with the degradation and cultural strength of the slaves, played a significant role in the development of black churches in the South.

From 1833 to 1847, Reverend Charles Colcock Jones served as an itinerant minister to slaves on the rice and cotton plantations in Liberty County, Georgia. The aim of Jones, and of the largely Puritan-descended slave owners, was to harvest not only good Christians but also obedient and hard-working slaves. At the same time, similar efforts were under way in cosmopolitan Charleston, South Carolina. Charleston permitted blacks to worship only under the supervision of whites, and partially as a result, whites and blacks worshiped together in ways that would be unheard of later in the segregated South.

Clarke examines not only the white ministers’ motivation in their missionary work but also the slaves’ reasons for becoming a part of the church. He addresses the important issue of the continuity of African traditions with the religious life of slaves and provides a significant introduction to the larger issues of slavery and religion in the South.