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categories: Memoir & Biography, paperback, ebook, hardcover, Books, South Carolina History & Culture,
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Pages: 272
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custom_subtitle:A Memoir of the South Carolina Coast
custom_byline1: Genevieve C. Peterkin
custom_byline2: foreword by Lee G. Brockington
afterword by William P. Baldwin
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custom_author_blurb:Local historian and environmentalist Genevieve C. Peterkin (1928–2011) lived in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, for most of her life.

William P. Baldwin, a lifelong resident of the South Carolina lowcountry, is the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels The Hard to Catch Mercy and Charles Town.

Lee G. Brockington is a senior interpreter for the Belle W. Baruch Foundation at Hobcaw Barony in Georgetown County and the author of Plantation between the Waters: A Brief History of Hobcaw Barony.
custom_reviews:"Titled after the popular spiritual, this book candidly depicts the life and times of many residents of the lowcountry through stories that sing of the joys and sorrows of everyday life."—Library Journal

"Peterkin's book is a treasure. Not quite an autobiography, not exactly a history, it is a very personal account of a special time and place and the people who made it so."—State (Columbia, S.C.)

"Heaven Is a Beautiful Place is simultaneously local and universal, intimate and expansive, funny and sad. . . . The hopeful quality of Heaven comes through distinctly, especially in Peterkin's wisdom about embracing the moment."—Charleston (S.C.) Post & Courier

"Peterkin's voice and Baldwin's editing . . . give glimpses and insights into an evolving seacoast community."—Coastal Observer

"If you read one book about South Carolina this year, make it Heaven Is a Beautiful Place."—Lexington County Chronicle
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content: Born in 1928 in the small coastal town of Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, Genevieve "Sister" Peterkin grew up with World War II bombing practice in her front yard, deep-sea fishing expeditions, and youthful rambles through the lowcountry. She shared her bedroom with a famous ghost and an impatient older sister. But most of all she listened. She absorbed the tales of her talented mother and her beloved friend, listened to the stories of the region's older residents, some of them former slaves, who were her friends, neighbors, and teachers.

In this new edition she once again shares with readers her insider's knowledge of the lowcountry plantations, gardens, and beaches that today draw so many visitors. Beneath the humor, hauntings, and treasures of local history, she tells another, deeper story—one that deals with the struggle for racial equality in the South, with the sometimes painful adventures of marriage and parenthood, and with inner struggles for faith and acceptance. This edition includes a new foreword by coastal writer and researcher Lee G. Brockington and a new afterword by coauthor and lowcountry novelist William P. Baldwin.

categories: Maritime History, U.S. History, Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World, ebook, hardcover, Forthcoming, Books,
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Pages: 232
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custom_subtitle:Sea-Facing Histories of the US South
custom_byline1: edited by Jacob Steere-Williams and Blake C. Scott
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custom_author_blurb:Jacob Steere-Williams holds a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and is associate professor of history at the College of Charleston.

Blake C. Scott holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas-Austin and is associate professor of international studies at College of Charleston.
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content: Traces the maritime routes and the historical networks that link port cities around the Atlantic world

Port Cities of the Atlantic World brings together a collection of essays that examine the centuries-long trans-Altlantic transportation of people, goods, and ideas with a focus on the impact of that trade on what would become the American South. Employing a wide temporal range and broad geographic scope, the scholars contributing to this volume call for a sea-facing history of the South, one that connects that terrestrial region to this expansive maritime history. By bringing the study up to the 20th century in the collection's final section, the editors, Jacob Steere-Williams and Blake C. Scott, make the case for the lasting influence of these port cities—and Atlantic world history—on the economy, society, and culture of the contemporary South.

categories: Literary Studies, Understanding Contemporary American Literature, paperback, Forthcoming, Books, New in Paperback,
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Pages: 152
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custom_subtitle:With a New Preface
custom_byline1: Jennifer Ann Ho
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custom_author_blurb:Jennifer Ann Ho, an associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, teaches courses in Asian American literature, multiethnic American literature, and contemporary American literature. She is the author of Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels and Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture and has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies, Journal for Asian American Studies, and Amerasia Journal, among others.
custom_reviews:"Jennifer Ann Ho in Understanding Gish Jen praises her progression from conventional first-person narrators in her early novels to The Love Wife's 'multiple homodiegetic first-person character narrators' who exploit the dynamism of voice and perspective. Ho is especially astute when noticing the little wrinkles of personal experience that tend to shape the author's career."—American Literary Scholarship

"Engagingly and even delightfully written, Understanding Gish Jen provides a much-needed resource for students, teachers, fans, and scholars alike. Ho's survey provides crucial insights about the context, content, and form of Jen's oeuvre. Understanding Gish Jen constitutes a major critical contribution to our understanding of this important American author; no reader of Gish Jen's work should be without this book."—Sue J. Kim, professor of English and co-director of the Center for Asian American Studies, University of Massachusetts Lowell

"Capacious in its analysis and well-researched in its approach, Jennifer Ho's treatment of Gish Jen's oeuvre — inclusive of fiction and creative non-fiction — is impressive, eloquent, and unmatched. A very welcome and smart analysis of a significant American author."—Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, University of Connecticut

"In Understanding Gish Jen, Jennifer Ann Ho offers a walk through the works of one of our most important American writers. Jen is, as Ho describes her, 'a writer with an exceptional eye and ear for the comically absurd parts of contemporary life,' an American writer with her finger on the pulse of what divides us and what brings us together. Ho leaves us with the desire to read and re-read the works of this great contemporary writer, to delight in her humor, to ruminate on her wisdom."—Jeffrey F. L. Partridge, author of Beyond Literary Chinatown, winner of an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation
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content: Traces the evolution of Jen's career, her themes, and the development of her narrative voice.

Jennifer Ann Ho introduces readers to a "typical American" writer, Gish Jen, the author of four novels, Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, The Love Wife, and World and Town; a collection of short stories, Who's Irish?; and a collection of lectures, Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. Jen writes with an engaging, sardonic, and imaginative voice illuminating themes common to the American experience: immigration, assimilation, individualism, the freedom to choose one's path in life, and the complicated relationships that we have with our families and our communities. A second-generation Chinese American, Jen is widely recognized as an important American literary voice, at once accessible, philosophical, and thought-provoking. In addition to her novels, she has published widely in periodicals such as the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Yale Review.

Ho traces the evolution of Jen's career, her themes, and the development of her narrative voice. In the process she shows why Jen's observations about life in the United States, though revealed through the perspectives of her Asian American and Asian immigrant characters, resonate with a variety of audiences who find themselves reflected in Jen's accounts of love, grief, desire, disappointment, and the general domestic experiences that shape all our lives.

Following a brief biographical sketch, Ho examines each of Jen's major works, showing how she traces the transformation of immigrant dreams into mundane life, explores the limits of self-identification, and characterizes problems of cross-national communication alongside the universal problems of aging and generational conflict. Looking beyond Jen's fiction work, a final chapter examines her essays and her concerns and stature as a public intellectual, and detailed primary and secondary bibliographies provide a valuable point of departure for both teaching and future scholarship.

categories: Memoir & Biography, African American Studies, ebook, hardcover, Forthcoming, Books, South Carolina History & Culture,
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Pages: 304
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custom_subtitle:A Black South Carolina Family from Slavery to the Dawn of Integration
custom_byline1: David Nicholson
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custom_author_blurb:David Nicholson is a former editor and book reviewer for the Washington Post Book World and author of Flying Home: Seven Stories of the Secret City. Nicholson has worked as a reporter in San Francisco; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Dayton, Ohio. He lives in Vienna, Virginia, with his wife and son.
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content: A writer in search of his roots discovers stories of African American struggle, sacrifice, and achievement.

In The Garretts of Columbia, author David Nicholson tells a multigenerational story of Black hope and resilience. Carefully researched and beautifully written, The Garretts of Columbia engages readers with stories of a family whose members believed in the possibility of America. Nicholson relates the sacrifices, defeats, and affirming victories of a cohort of stalwart men and women who embraced education, fought for their country, and asserted their dignity in the face of a society that denied their humanity and discounted their abilities.

The letters of Anna Maria "Mama" Threewitts Garrett, along with other archival sources and family stories passed down through generations, provided the framework that allowed Nicholson to trace his family's deep history, and with it a story about Black life in segregated Columbia, SC, from the years after the Civil War to World War II.

categories: Literary Studies, Understanding Contemporary American Literature, paperback, Books, New in Paperback,
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Pages: 160
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custom_subtitle:With a New Preface
custom_byline1: Brenda Murphy
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custom_author_blurb:Brenda Murphy is the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University and has published fifteen books, including The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity, Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in Theatre, and Twentieth-Century American Drama: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies.
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content: A new preface covers Mamet's most recent plays and nonfiction writing

Understanding David Mamet analyzes the broad range of his plays and places them in the context of his career as a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction prose, as well as drama. In addition to playwriting and directing for the theater, Mamet also writes, directs, and produces for film and television, and he writes essays, fiction, poetry, and even children's books. Author Brenda Murphy centers her discussion around Mamet's most significant plays—Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleanna, American Buffalo, Speed-the-Plow, The Cryptogram, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Edmond, The Woods, Lakeboat, Boston Marriage, and The Duck Variations—as well as his three novels—The Village, The Old Religion, and Wilson. Murphy also notes how Mamet's one-act and less known plays provide important context for the major plays and help to give a fuller sense of the scope of his art. In her new preface, Murphy provides an overview of Mamet's plays, fiction, and essays in the 2010s and the continued move to the right in his political and cultural thinking.

categories: Literary Studies, Understanding Contemporary American Literature, paperback, Books, New in Paperback,
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Pages: 152
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custom_subtitle:With a New Preface
custom_byline1: James A. Crank
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custom_author_blurb:James A. Crank is associate professor of American literature at the University of Alabama, a former National Humanities Center Summer Fellow, and co-host of the podcast "The Sound and the Furious." His other books include Understanding Randall Kenan, New Approaches to Gone with the Wind, and Race and New Modernisms.
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content: An ideal introduction into the complex and compelling dramas of the acclaimed playwright

Now available in a paperback edition and featuring a new preface, Understanding Sam Shepard investigates the notoriously complex dramatic world of one of America's most prolific, thoughtful, and challenging contemporary playwrights. During his nearly fifty-year career as a writer, actor, director, and producer, Shepard (1943-2017) consistently focused his work on the ever-changing American cultural landscape. James A. Crank's thorough study offers scholars and students of the dramatist a means of understanding Shephard's frequent experimentation with language, setting, character, and theme. The new preface examines Shepard's legacy and his final work of fiction, Spy of the First Person.

categories: Southern History, Business & Economics, ebook, hardcover, Forthcoming, Books, South Carolina History & Culture, Jewish Studies,
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Pages: 256
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custom_subtitle:How Jewish Entrepreneurs Built Economy and Community in Upcountry South Carolina
custom_byline1: Diane Catherine Vecchio
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custom_author_blurb:Diane Catherine Vecchio is author of Merchants, Midwives, and Laboring Women: Italian Migrants in Urban America. She is also a contributor to Recovering the Piedmont Past, Vols. 1 and 2; Doing Business in America, A Jewish History; Textile Town: An Encyclopedia of Spartanburg County Cotton Mill Culture; and the author of many articles on Italian and Jewish immigrants. Vecchio is professor emerita of history, Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina.
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content: Provides a corrective to a neglected aspect of Jewish history in the South

Diane Catherine Vecchio examines the diverse economic experiences of Jews who settled in what we today call Upstate South Carolina. Like other parts of the so-called New South, Upcountry South Carolina was a center of textile manufacturing and new business opportunities that drew entrepreneurial energy to the region. Previous histories of economic development in the South Carolina Piedmont have tended to overlook the significance of Jewish involvement and instead focused on northern investment and low labor costs. Working with a rich set of oral histories, memoirs, and traditional historical documents, Vecchio provides an important corrective to the history of manufacturing in South Carolina, and that revision is part of a large retelling of southern Jewish history, one that adds social and cultural dimensions to the traditional economic story.

Vecchio explores Jewish community development, how Jewish business leaders also became civic leaders and affected social, political, and cultural life in what we now call the mountainous Upcountry. Their impact in all facets of life across the Upstate is important to understanding the growth of today's Spartanburg-Greenville corridor.

categories: Civil War, U.S. History, paperback, ebook, hardcover, Books,
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Pages: 278
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custom_subtitle:From Shared Vision to Irreconcilable Conflict
custom_byline1: William F. Hartford
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custom_author_blurb:William F. Hartford is an independent scholar whose earlier works include Money, Morals, and Politics: Massachusetts in the Age of the Boston Associates and Where Is Our Responsibility: Unions and Economic Change in the New England Textile Industry, 1870-1960.
custom_reviews:"Adams and Calhoun tells an impressive story, one that has never been told before in this manner, with remarkable clarity, vigor, and fairness. William F. Hartford has produced a fast-paced, engaging narrative about two famous men that proves not only fair to both and engaging for readers but also one not sparing concern for the flaws both men manifested."—Lacy Ford, emeritus, department of history, University of South Carolina

"William F. Hartford's decision to structure his study of Calhoun and Adams as a dual biography is superb. The two men were so similar in some ways, and so dissimilar in others, that they make a perfect pairing to show how the issue of slavery became the rock on which the entire country had nearly shattered by the end of their lives."—Robert Elder, associate professor of history, Baylor University

"A notable book – Based on thorough research in primary and secondary sources, William Hartford's insightful treatment of both Adams and Calhoun illustrates the powerful personal and political motives that led two extraordinarily able and ambitious American leaders from alliance to opposition, a course that exemplified the nation's. I heartily recommend Professor Hartford's achievement."—William J. Cooper, Boyd Professor Emeritus, LSU
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content: Examines the evolving lives of two men who were crucial political figures in the consequential decades prior to the Civil War

Although neither of them lived to see the Civil War, John Quincy Adams and John C. Calhoun did as much any two political figures of the era to shape the intersectional tensions that produced the conflict. William F. Hartford examines the lives of Adams and Calhoun as a prism through which to view the developing sectional conflict. While both men came of age as strong nationalists, their views, like those of the nation, diverged by the 1830s, largely over the issue of slavery. Hartford examines the two men's responses to issues of nationalism and empire, sectionalism and nullification, slavery and antislavery, party and politics, and also the expansion of slavery. He offers fresh insights into the sectional conflict that also accounts for the role of personal idiosyncrasy and interpersonal relationships in the coming of the Civil War.

categories: Cultural Studies & Sociology, U.S. History, paperback, ebook, Books, Women's & Gender Studies, Native American Studies,
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Pages: 216
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custom_byline1: edited by Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough
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custom_author_blurb:Sandra Slater is an associate professor of history and director of the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program at the College of Charleston.

Fay A. Yarbrough is professor of history at Rice University and the author of Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century.
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content: Groundbreaking historical scholarship on the complex attitudes toward gender and sexual roles in Native American culture, with a new preface and supplemental bibliography

Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the New World, Native Americans across the continent had developed richly complex attitudes and forms of expression concerning gender and sexual roles. The role of the "berdache," a man living as a woman or a woman living as a man in native societies, has received recent scholarly attention but represents just one of many such occurrences of alternative gender identification in these cultures. Editors Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough have brought together scholars who explore the historical implications of these variations in the meanings of gender, sexuality, and marriage among indigenous communities in North America. Essays that span from the colonial period through the nineteenth century illustrate how these aspects of Native American life were altered through interactions with Europeans.

Organized chronologically, Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400-1850 probes gender identification, labor roles, and political authority within Native American societies. The essays are linked by overarching examinations of how Europeans manipulated native ideas about gender for their own ends and how indigenous people responded to European attempts to impose gendered cultural practices at odds with established traditions. Many of the essays also address how indigenous people made meaning of gender and how these meanings developed over time within their own communities. Several contributors also consider sexual practice as a mode of cultural articulation, as well as a vehicle for the expression of gender roles.

Representing groundbreaking scholarship in the field of Native American studies, these insightful discussions of gender, sexuality, and identity advance our understanding of cultural traditions and clashes that continue to resonate in native communities today as well as in the larger societies those communities exist within.

categories: African American Studies, paperback, ebook, Books, South Carolina History & Culture,
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Pages: 572
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custom_byline1: W. J. Megginson
custom_byline2: foreword by Orville Vernon Burton
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custom_author_blurb:W. J. Megginson (1943–2020) was a native of Upstate South Carolina. He received his PhD from George Washington University and taught at Arkansas State University, Hendrix College in Arkansas, Drexel University, and La Salle University.
custom_reviews:"By focusing on three counties in the northwest corner of South Carolina, W. J. Megginson illuminates how African Americans interacted with whites and at the same time struggled to sustain their own community. Relying on a broad range of contemporary and statistical evidence, the author offers a new perspective concerning the complex nature of race relations over more than a century in an area where the Black population remained in a minority."—Loren Schweninger, Elizabeth Rosenthal Excellence Professor emeritus, University of North Carolina Greensboro

"This remarkable and totally engrossing piece of scholarship—among the very best works ever published about African American life in the South—stands as a model of local history and research writing. Every page casts new and revealing light on such subjects as race relations and Black religion, education, and social life in the South during the period."—Allen B. Ballard, professor of history and Africana studies emeritus, State University of New York-Albany
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content: A rich portrait of Black life in South Carolina's Upstate

Encyclopedic in scope, yet intimate in detail, African American Life in South Carolina's Upper Piedmont, 1780-1900, delves into the richness of community life in a setting where Black residents were relatively few, notably disadvantaged, but remarkably cohesive. W. J. Megginson shifts the conventional study of African Americans in South Carolina from the much-examined Lowcountry to a part of the state that offered a quite different existence for people of color. In Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens counties—occupying the state's northwest corner—he finds an independent, brave, and stable subculture that persevered for more than a century in the face of political and economic inequities. Drawing on little-used state and county denominational records, privately held research materials, and sources available only in local repositories, Megginson brings to life African American society before, during, and after the Civil War. Orville Vernon Burton, Judge Matthew J. Perry Jr. Distinguished Professor of History at Clemson University and University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar Emeritus at the University of Illinois, provides a new foreword.

categories: Outdoors & Nature, Memoir & Biography, paperback, ebook, New & Noteworthy, Books, Travelogue & Essays,
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Pages: 192
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custom_subtitle:And Other Stories Afield with Fine Friends, Fair Dogs, a Shotgun, and a Fly Rod
custom_byline1: Jim Mize
custom_byline2: foreword by Jim Casada
drawings by Bob White
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custom_author_blurb:Jim Mize writes from his cabin in the South Carolina mountains while his Lab, Moose, keeps the bears at bay. His previous books include The Winter of our Discount Tent, A Creek Trickles Through It, Hunting with Beanpole, and Fishing with Beanpole. His articles have appeared in Gray's Sporting Journal, Field & Stream, South Carolina Wildlife, In-Fisherman, Great Days Outdoors, and other magazines.
custom_reviews:"In his ability to capture the elusive essence of sport, [Mize] serves as a voice for all of us. That's a rare gift and is precisely what makes The Jon Boat Years a treasure that should be read and enjoyed not just now but for generations to come."—Jim Casada, from the foreword

"Jim Mize knows the outdoors, from jon boats and fly rods to dove fields and pointing dogs—that is why his stories ring true. The tales recounted in The Jon Boat Years transcend time and ensure Jim a spot in the revered history of outdoor literature."—Joey Frazier, editor, South Carolina Wildlife

"Jim Mize has made his mark as a humor writer, but this book shows him to be one of our finest outdoor writers of any kind. He combines spot-on descriptions with searing insights into the human heart, and he is as adept at recalling a month of youthful freedom out West, as he is showing us how to pass along love and advice to a grandchild....This is a book I'll treasure and revisit often."—Rob Simbeck, author of The Southern Wildlife Watcher

"The Jon Boat Years possesses a healthy measure of Mize's usual wit, but the unforgettable stories in this collection will tug at your heartstrings as much as they tickle your funny bone. Tag along with Mize as he ventures through fields, forests, and streams, hunting and fishing with family and friends, and you're sure to agree he deserves recognition as one of our truly great outdoor writers."—Keith "Catfish" Sutton, writer, CatfishNow
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content: Delightful tales of hunting and fishing, family, friends, dogs, and precious time well spent.

Nationally recognized and award-winning writer Jim Mize captures the true essence of sport and living life to the fullest in this collection of stories about his outdoor escapades. In tales spanning more than five decades, Mize invites readers into carefree days hiking through the Colorado Rockies with a fly rod and leisurely casting poppers to bluegill on small southern ponds. Mize's humorous stories entertain and return readers to their own turkey hunting or creek-fishing excursions. Black-and-white drawings from artist Bob White illustrate stories filled with laughter, quiet contemplation, and wonder.

categories: Literary Studies, paperback, ebook, hardcover, Books,
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Pages: 336
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custom_subtitle:Cormac McCarthy's Writing Life, 1959-1974
custom_byline1: Dianne C. Luce
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custom_author_blurb:Dianne C. Luce is the author of Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee Period (University of South Carolina Press) and coeditor of Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy and A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy. She is cofounder and past president of the Cormac McCarthy Society.
custom_reviews:"In Embracing Vocation, Dianne C. Luce offers a vivid account of McCarthy's early writing life, one that is rich in archival detail and incomparable in its depth and scope. The volume constitutes the essential basis for any future biography, and it will form an interpretive foundation for a generation of McCarthy scholars and beyond."—Steven Frye, professor of English at California State University, Bakersfield, and author of Understanding Cormac McCarthy and Unguessed Kingships

"Dianne Luce is the rare literary scholar whose scrupulous research would pass courtroom standards of evidence. Through forensic analysis of drafts and correspondence, the meticulous assemblage of widely dispersed interview clues and financial records, and the invaluable archival record of her own making, Luce has achieved what lesser minds and scholars once deemed impossible: a credible and creditable account of the reputationally elusive writer's first phase of literary life. Her ability to elicit order from the record, one carefully sourced fact at a time, is astonishing. If McCarthy is a writer for the ages, then Luce's book will stand as a foundational gift to literary historians and devotees alike."—Bryan Giemza, author of Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy's Expanding World

"Dianne Luce continues to demonstrate her preeminence among Cormac McCarthy scholars. Rigorously excavating correspondence, drafts, notes and other documents from the Wittliff Collection and other archives, she provides a thorough, illuminating, and indispensable examination of the genesis of McCarthy's first three novels and the origins of his career."—Dr. Scott D Yarbrough, co-editor of Carrying the Fire: Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the Apocalyptic Tradition and host of the podcast Reading McCarthy

"In this intricately researched story of Cormac McCarthy's early novels and his work as a writer, Dianne Luce paints a fascinating portrait of the author, his creative process, and the sometimes surprising ways that his life and art come together. Luce's scholarship is, as always, unparalleled."—Stacey Peebles, editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal
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content: Revelations on craft from a foundational scholar of Cormac McCarthy

Devotees of Cormac McCarthy's novels are legion, and deservedly so. Embracing Vocation, which tells the tale of his journey to become one of America's greatest living writers, will be invaluable to scholars and literary critics—and to the many fans—interested in his work.

Dianne C. Luce, a foundational scholar of McCarthy's writing, through extensive archival research, examines the first fifteen years of his career and his earliest novels. Novel by novel, Luce traces each book's evolution. In the process she unveils McCarthy's working processes as well as his personal, literary, and professional influences, highlighting his ferocious devotion to both his craft and burgeoning art. Luce invites us to see the fascinating evolution of an American author with a unique vision all his own. Until there is a full-on biography, this study, along with Luce's previous, Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee Period, is the finest available portrait of an American genius unfolding.

categories: Southern History, Political Science, Cultural Studies & Sociology, Memoir & Biography, ebook, hardcover, New & Noteworthy, Books,
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Pages: 296
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custom_subtitle:Ralph Northam, Black Resolve, and a Racial Reckoning in Virginia
custom_byline1: Margaret Edds
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custom_author_blurb:Margaret Edds is a former reporter and editorial writer for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. She is the author of several books, including We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team That Dismantled Jim Crow; Finding Sara: A Daughter's Journey; and An Expendable Man: The Near-Execution of Earl Washington Jr.
custom_reviews:"[The] book . . . offers new details about the 2019 scandal and the former governor's remarkable political survival."—The Associated Press

"Margaret Edds delivers a deeply reported, inside look at how Gov. Ralph Northam weathered a potentially crippling scandal and ultimately helped establish Virginia as a vanguard of social and racial equity policy. She contextualizes it with a compelling examination of Virginia's racial history and the impact on its politics. Having extensively covered Northam's journey, I consider it a rare story of resolve, resilience, and redemption. Edds brilliantly captures it all."—Geoff Bennett, Chief Washington Correspondent for PBS NewsHour

"Margaret Edds, a longtime journalist and talented author, addresses the volatile mix of race and politics that boiled over in Virginia when the sitting governor was revealed to have used blackface decades earlier. Edds movingly chronicles the swift fall and then the remarkable redemption of this embattled governor, whose scandal unexpectedly became the start of historic progress in race relations."—Larry Sabato, director, UVA Center for Politics, and editor, Sabato's Crystal Ball

"Margaret Edds has pulled back the curtain to allow entry into the public and private moments endured by a politician grappling with race as he undergoes and creates transformative change. On February 1, 2019, a repulsive photo featured on Gov. Ralph Northam's medical school yearbook page became widely known and circulated. By June 4, 2020, Northam had come to understand why they announced that the Robert E. Lee statue must and would be removed from the storied Monument Avenue. The space in between is carefully chronicled by Edds, who brings the reader into the drama; introduces us to staff, friends, and family; and encourages us to feel the swirl of emotions and actions. Her engaging writing style and dedication to details makes this a book to sink into and challenges us to think about our own and our society's blind spots around race."—Lauranett L. Lee, public historian and visiting lecturer, Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond

"This book is no ordinary biography of Ralph Northam—it illustrates a man and a commonwealth, facing down history. The story transcends the now-infamous blackface controversy. Edds masterfully describes how the events of 2019 relate to America's tortured racial history, the politicization of that history, and one man's attempt to redeem himself—and his state—from the perils the past."—Julian Hayter, author of The Dream Is Lost: Voting Rights and the Politics of Race in Richmond, Virginia, and associate professor of leadership studies, University of Richmond

"What The Eyes Can't See by Margaret Edds, a veteran Virginia journalist, would make a good book club book. The impetus for Edds' book was Northam's infamous blackface scandal that nearly drove him from office, then led him to reconfigure his term around racial equity issues. Her book is fascinating for the behind-the-scenes account of how the scandal unfolded and then what happened for the rest of Northam's term. Even if you disagree with everything Northam did, those are still useful insights for how politics and government really work (spoiler alert: not often well). The real value of the book is in the last five words of the subtitle: "a racial reckoning in Virginia." . . . What you'll find is not on the preachy side, but the policy side – a look at some of the difficulties that Black Virginians face that many white Virginians simply don't think about because they don't have to. Edds' book offers up a lot to talk about, no matter how you feel about Northam personally."—Dwayne Yancey, Cardinal News
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content: The transformation of Governor Ralph Northam

Virginia Governor Ralph Northam's "blackface scandal" could have destroyed any politician. The photo of Governor Northam purportedly in blackface created a firestorm not only locally but also in every political sphere. What the Eyes Can't See details why Northam's career did not end with the scandal, and how it made him a better governor—and a better citizen.

In this book Margaret Edds draws on unprecedented access to the governor, his aides, and members of the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, whose initial anger evolved into determination to mine good from an ugly episode. Both scolding and encouraging, they led Northam to a deeper understanding of the racism and pain the photograph symbolized. To Northam's credit, he listened, and more importantly learned the lessons of endemic, systemic racism and applied those lessons to his legislative agenda. Edds provides a revealing examination of race in the nation, how racism might be addressed and reckoned with, and how we all may find a measure of redemption in listening to one another.

categories: Political Science, Rhetoric & Communication, Studies in Rhetoric & Communication, paperback, ebook, Books,
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custom_subtitle:The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres
custom_byline1: Gerard A. Hauser
custom_byline2: new foreword by Phaedra C. Pezzullo
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custom_author_blurb:Gerard A. Hauser is professor emeritus of communication and Arts & Sciences Professor Emeritus of Distinction in Rhetoric at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author of Introduction to Rhetorical Theory and editor of Philosophy and Rhetoric in Dialogue: Redrawing Their Intellectual Landscape. He also edits the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric.
custom_reviews:"This diverting, timely study of what it means to have a voice in civil society and how it is achieved offers new conceptions of complex public spheres. . . This title would be apt to use as a textbook, given its wisdom, orderly and clear presentation, and interdisciplinary approach."—Choice Reviews

"And insisting upon seeing vernacular exchanges as important forms of political discourse is part and parcel of Hauser's very useful project of shifting attention away from a non-existent public sphere to the real publics in which people spend much of their lives. That project is useful for a variety of reasons, but one of the most striking is that it provides a much more hopeful view of political discourse in democracy."—Rhetoric Society Quarterly

"Gerard Hauser's Vernacular Voices is an ambitious, wide-ranging, and thought-provoking theoretical discussion of public opinion and the public sphere. Hauser rightly disputes the 'authority' we grant to opinion polls, and he aspires to develop a 'rhetorical' alternative for discovering and communicating public opinion."—Argumentation and Advocacy
custom_awards:Winner of the 1999 Marie Hochmuth Nichols Prize, Public Address Division of the National Communication Association
content: An award-winning study of how formal and informal public discourse shapes opinions

A foundational text of twenty-first-century rhetorical studies, Vernacular Voices addresses the role of citizen voices in steering a democracy through an examination of the rhetoric of publics. Gerard A. Hauser maintains that the interaction between everyday and official discourse discloses how active members of a complex society discover and clarify their shared interests and engage in exchanges that shape their opinions on issues of common interest.

In the two decades since Vernacular Voices was first published, much has changed: in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, US presidents have increasingly taken unilateral power to act; the internet and new media have blossomed; and globalization has raised challenges to the autonomy of nation states. In a new preface, Hauser shows how, in an era of shared, global crises, we understand publics, how public spheres form and function, and the possibilities for vernacular expressions of public opinion lie at the core of lived democracy.

A foreword is provided by Phaedra C. Pezzullo, associate professor of communication at the University of Colorado Boulder.

categories: Cooking & Culinary History, Memoir & Biography, Gift Ideas, ebook, hardcover, New & Noteworthy, Books, South Carolina History & Culture,
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custom_title:
custom_subtitle:A Cook's Journal
custom_byline1: John Martin Taylor
custom_byline2: foreword by Jessica B. Harris
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custom_author_blurb:John Martin Taylor is a culinary historian and cookbook author. His first book, Hoppin' John's Lowcountry Cooking, has been continuously in print for thirty years, and his writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Gastronomica.
custom_reviews:"After flipping through a few pages, you will see why John Martin Taylor is one of my biggest heroes. His contribution to Southern food is unmatched. Keep flipping through these pages and you'll see why."—Sean Brock, author of cookbooks Heritage and SOUTH, and featured chef on the Netflix Chef's Table series

"John Martin Taylor embodies himself in landscapes and absorbs water, air, earth and spirit. This project, bridging his journeys southeast of America and Asia, with stops in Italy, Romania, China, and the Caribbean in between exposes a culinary dialogue of an artist with his art we are privileged to be a part of. This collection is magical."—Michael W. Twitty, author of The Cooking Gene and Koshersoul

"I had the good fortune to meet the inimitable John Martin Taylor at his Charleston bookshop years ago while I was a young newspaper food writer full of questions and his grand epicurean journey had already begun. This Lowcountry man who was born in Louisiana has been on the move all his life, and now, finally, we can find out where he's been. And meet his grandmother who showed him how to dry green summer apples on a window screen and learn the secret to his mother-in-law's chocolate chip cookies. And see how to make pesto like they do in Genoa and understand why he doesn't want to make wedding cake anymore, no matter how good of friends you are. (It has something to do with summer heat, a broken air conditioner, and vodka.) This bright, witty, globe-trotting epicure has just shared it all, and we better pull up a chair and listen."—Anne Byrn, author of American Cake, The Cake Mix Doctor, and Between the Layers newsletter on Substack

"John Taylor is what I would call a natural cook. We go back almost 50 years, and I've never known him to cook without dancing at the same time! Our band—The B52s—used to go over to his little house in Athens, Ga. On a hot summer afternoon where he could always be found playing music and making cornbread, we'd all dance around the table and wait for the gold to come out of the oven! [Charleston to Phnom]—rich in recipes, culinary history, travel, and general joie de vivre—will have you dancing around the kitchen table hungry for more!"—Kate Pierson, longtime friend of "JT," founding member of The B-52s

"John Martin Taylor, or "Hoppin' John," has done it again. His laser-like vision brings to life decades of insightful and scholarly work encompassing his vast knowledge of culinary history and classic European cooking. His Southern voice enchants us with vivid memories from long ago — dancing the Shag; preparing minestrone outside Genoa; and to-the-minute details of Lowcountry shrimp and grits. In Charleston to Phnom Penh: A Cook's Journal, he shares the lifetime of a man who has enjoyed life to the fullest. His brilliance edits out the mediocre, focusing instead on the beauty of a dish like Peaches Aswim in Rose Petals, 2008, a recipe from the sister-in-law of my mentor Richard Olney. John, like Richard, is an artist who, in lieu of painting, makes his mark with some of the greatest food writing and editing from the 20th century."—Frank Stitt, chef and owner of Highlands Bar and Grill, Bottega, and Chez Fonfon

"How lucky we are to have John Martin Taylor's collected works! These essays are filled with exuberance, wit, and erudition, at turns poignant and funny. Charleston to Phnom Penh captures a life rich in food, friendship, and art. Equal parts scholarship, memoir, travelogue, culinary companion, and language lesson, this is truly a book to savor."—Darra Goldstein, food historian and founding editor of Gastronomica

"A legendary writer and cook, John M. Taylor is one of the finest culinary and historical treasures of his generation. Two of my first cookbooks, The New Southern Cook and Hoppin' John's Lowcountry Cooking, are still some of my favorites and quite worn with use. Anyone can cook Southern if they follow along with this master of the craft!"—Tank Jackson, hog farmer and owner of Holy City Hogs

"I have known John Taylor since we met in Paris 40 years ago. His friendship was the key to an amazingly rich new world. Not only is he a wonderful cook, someone who cooks with his soul, with all his life history, but he's a passionate scholar of everything we ingest. This truly marvelous book encapsulates all this and more. It's a declaration of love to life."—Jean-Sébastien Stehli, associate managing editor of Madame Figaro

"What a pleasure, what a treasure—John Taylor's culinary musings all pulled together in one fascinating volume. I especially loved the beginning chapters with such hauntingly delicious memories of his early years, in the South and many other parts of the world. In a word: Delightful!"—Nancy Jenkins, food historian and journalist, author of Virgin Territory

"You are about to make a friend. Meet John Martin Taylor, also known as Hoppin' John, also known as Bubba to a very select few among whom I number myself. In these pages he invites you to sit with him for a while. If you do, I can guarantee that he will dazzle you with his erudition, astonish you with knowledge garnered in his travels, and delight you with his sense of humor that will have you at times laughing out loud. . . . The tales that are told are an exuberant love letter to a life well lived: a life that is savored daily—one seasoned with thought, simmered with humor, and served up with JOY."—From the foreword by Jessica B. Harris, PhD, culinary historian, and author of High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America
custom_awards:Winner of the 2023 Gourmand World Cookbook Award, Food Writing, Cambodia/USA
content: A journey through the lands of boiled peanuts, pesto, and pickled peppercorns—with thirty recipes

Foodies, travel enthusiasts, culinary historians, fans of fine writing, and cookbook collectors will feast on John Martin Taylor's Charleston to Phnom Penh. A unique vision of a joyous and peripatetic life, these essays take readers on a journey across three continents, from the South Carolina Lowcountry of Taylor's upbringing to the Caribbean, Italy, France, Eastern Europe, and Asia.

Taylor recalls his mother's before-her-time culinary experiments; probes historical archives to research the origins of classic dishes; and remembers adventures sailing, dancing, and fishing, as well as cooking. His gaze is social, etymological, personal, comic, and historical, and all foods are considered fair game for scrutiny. Taylor tells us how to bake with olive oil, why he doesn't make wedding cakes, what to do in Transylvania, and how he came to be a voice of the Lowcountry. Make a margarita and delve into his deconstruction of hoppin' john, his erstwhile namesake; the history of cheese straws; and how to make callaloo and fish amok.

categories: Rhetoric & Communication, paperback, ebook, hardcover, Books,
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Pages: 220
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custom_title:
custom_subtitle:Why Social Media Is Making Us Angry
custom_byline1: Jeff Rice
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custom_author_blurb:Jeff Rice is professor and Martha B. Reynolds Chair in Writing, Rhetoric & Digital Studies at University of Kentucky.
custom_reviews:"Shakespeare may have acknowledged the 'winter of our discontent,' yet Jeff Rice writes about an ongoing era of discontent that permeates our global psyche, building a case for outrage as the predominant digital response that is both medium and technology. The extent to which Rice succeeds in exhaustively documenting how pervasively anger circulates affectively, algorithmically, and rhetorically may itself enrage, but will never disappoint, given Rice's continued stature and skill as digital rhetoric's foremost social theorist."—Kristine L. Blair, dean, McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts, Duquesne University
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content: An accessible and important look at what is truly behind our digital outrage

On any given day, at any given hour, across the various platforms constituting what we call social media, someone is angry. Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. Reddit. 4Chan. In The Rhetoric of Outrage: Why Social Media is Making Us Angry Jeff Rice addresses the critical question of why anger has become the dominant digital response on social media. He examines the theoretical and rhetorical explanations for the intense rage that prevails across social media platforms, and sheds new light on how our anger isn't merely a reaction against singular events, but generated out of aggregated beliefs and ideas. Captivating, accessible, and exceedingly important, The Rhetoric of Outrage encourages readers to have the difficult conversations about what is truly behind their anger.

categories: Southern History, paperback, ebook, hardcover, Books, South Carolina History & Culture, Native American Studies,
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Pages: 196
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custom_title:
custom_subtitle:Stuarts Town and the Struggle for Survival in Early South Carolina
custom_byline1: Peter N. Moore
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custom_author_blurb:Peter N. Moore is professor of history, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, and the author of World of Toil and Strife: Community Change in Backcountry South Carolina, 1750–1805 and Archibald Simpson's Unpeaceable Kingdom: The Ordeal of Evangelicalism in the Colonial South.
custom_reviews:"An engagingly written book on a neglected subject: the nearly simultaneous settlement of the Port Royal region by first the Yamasees and then Scots. The author makes a big argument: that it was the partnering of the Yamasees and Scots in the 1685 assault on the Timucua town of Afuica that reignited the commercial enslavement of Indians out of South Carolina . . . Although other scholars discuss these events, [Moore's] book is the first to focus squarely on this subject."—Denise I. Bossy, associate professor, University of North Florida
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content: An examination of the dual Scottish-Yamasee colonization of Port Royal

Those interested in the early colonial history of South Carolina and the southeastern borderlands will find much to discover in Carolina's Lost Colony in which historian Peter N. Moore examines the dual colonization of Port Royal at the end of the seventeenth century. From the east came Scottish Covenanters, who established the small outpost of Stuarts Town. Meanwhile, the Yamasee arrived from the south and west. These European and Indigenous colonizers made common cause as they sought to rival the English settlement of Charles Town to the north and the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine to the south. Also present were smaller Indigenous communities that had long populated the Atlantic sea islands. It is a global story whose particulars played out along a small piece of the Carolina coast.

Religious idealism and commercial realities came to a head as the Scottish settlers made informal alliances with the Yamasee and helped to reinvigorate the Indian slave trade—setting in motion a series of events that transformed the region into a powder keg of colonial ambitions, unleashing a chain of hostilities, realignments, displacement, and destruction that forever altered the region.

categories: Literary Studies, Understanding Contemporary American Literature, African American Studies, paperback, ebook, hardcover, Books,
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Pages: 170
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custom_byline1: Michael Antonucci
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custom_author_blurb:Michael Antonucci is professor emeritus at Keene State College where he taught courses on Black literature and culture in the American Studies program and English department. His scholarship has appeared in African American Review, Callaloo, and Obsidian, as well as other journals and publications.
custom_reviews:"Michael Antonucci's sustained engagement with Michael Harper's extensive oeuvre has paid off in this richly textured and highly illuminating study of one of the major American poets of the late twentieth century. Antonucci deftly navigates Harper's vast canon and epigrammatic approach to poetic language with dexterity and aplomb. In coining the terms 'generative kinship' and 'convergent history,' he expertly traverses the multiple landscapes and diverse populations in Harper's aesthetic universe, and he skillfully deploys them as an analytic to unfold and explicate Harper's superb mastery of American and African American formal poetics and oral traditions while showcasing Harper's love of the sounds and rhythms of African American music and musical vocality. A gift for readers at all levels, Antonucci's compelling reading of Harper provides the necessary resources for accessing the complexity and for understanding the magnitude of Harper's poetic vision and cultural underpinnings."—Thadious M. Davis, author of Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Religion, and Literature

"Michael Antonucci truly 'Understands' how Michael S. Harper sings a self intensely replete with 'poetic multivocality.' This excellent discussion draws on other scholars' work while building its own arresting, informative contribution. These close readings of Harper present how he imagined and sought 'A Love Supreme.' Antonucci indeed 'Understands' Michael S. Harper!"—Robert B. Stepto, Professor Emeritus, Yale University, and coeditor of Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, with Michael S. Harper
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content: A fresh examination of Harper's body of work as an archive of Black life, thought, and culture

The first book devoted to the groundbreaking poet's work, Understanding Michael S. Harper locates Harper's poetic project within Black expressive tradition. The study examines poems drawn from the eleven volumes of verse that Harper (1938-2016) produced between 1970 and 2010, bringing attention to his poetry's sustained engagement with music, literature, and the visual arts. Author Michael Antonucci offers readers an account of the poet's career while assessing his verse and providing a sense of its perspective on Black America and the American experience.

Throughout his examination of Harper's verse, Antonucci builds on the critical attention the poet received at the outset of his career—he was twice nominated for the National Book Award. Exploring the poet's celebrated examinations of history, kinship, and Black music, Understanding Michael S. Harper develops and expands critical dialogues about the poet and his body of work, which, Antonucci argues, presents a counternarrative about the composition and origins of the United States, reshaping prevailing discourse about race, nation, and identity.

categories: ebook, hardcover, Forthcoming, Books, South Carolina History & Culture, Education Policy & History,
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Pages: 344
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custom_subtitle:University of South Carolina Sports in the Independent Era
custom_byline1: Alan Piercy
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custom_author_blurb:Alan Piercy is a freelance writer who currently resides in Raleigh, North Carolina. Piercy is a Columbia, South Carolina, native; a 1995 graduate of the University of South Carolina; and lifelong Gamecock fan. He hosts a collection of his general interest writings online at Yellow Dog Journal, and his South by Southeast: A Gamecock History online newsletter features stories spanning decades of Gamecock athletics.
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content: Meet the coaches, athletes, and other larger-than-life characters that laid the foundation for today's Gamecock Nation

In A Gamecock Odyssey: University of South Carolina Sports in the Independent Era, author Alan Piercy chronicles the significant events and describes the larger-than-life characters of the years following the university's departure from the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC). The University of South Carolina experienced some of the highest highs and lowest lows in its athletics history. With colorful storytelling and Gamecock pride, Piercy gives curious college sports fans and diehard Gamecocks a behind-the-scenes tour of these raucous decades. Tales of interpersonal clashes between football head coach Paul Dietzel and men's basketball head coach Frank McGuire, the Icarian rise and fall of women's basketball coach Pam Parsons, George Rogers and his magical Heisman Trophy-winning season, the birth of USC's beloved mascot, Cocky, and other USC sports stories converge, stirring feelings of amusement, nostalgia, and pride. A Gamecock Odyssey captures the spirit of the time and shows the reader how those years influenced today's Gamecock athletics culture.

categories: Cooking & Culinary History, African American Studies, paperback, ebook, Books,
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Pages: 328
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custom_title:
custom_subtitle:The African Connection
custom_byline1: Karen Hess
custom_byline2: foreword by John Martin Taylor
compiled by Mrs. Samuel Gaillard Stoney
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custom_author_blurb:Karen Hess (1918–2007) was an accomplished culinary historian and author and editor of numerous books. She was once called "the best American cook in Paris" by Newsweek.
custom_reviews:"The author calls this work a hymn of praise for the Africans enslaved and brought to South Carolina to clear the cypress swamps and plant and tend rice crops. But she's too modest. It's more of a symphony than a hymn."—Baltimore Sun

"Hess once again has reached into the shuttered recesses of the Lowcountry plantation culture to find the path rice took to get here [. . .] and, most of all, the women who found miraculous ways to transform this hard cereal grain into Hoppin' John and a plenitude of pilaus and scores of other culinary wonders."—John Egerton, South Carolina Historical Magazine
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content: A pioneering history of the Carolina rice kitchen and its African influences

Where did rice originate? How did the name Hoppin' John evolve? Why was the famous rice called "Carolina Gold"?

The rice kitchen of early Carolina was the result of a myriad of influences—Persian, Arab, French, English, African—but it was primarily the creation of enslaved African American cooks. And it evolved around the use of Carolina Gold. Although rice had not previously been a staple of the European plantation owners, it began to appear on the table every day. Rice became revered and was eaten at virtually every meal and in dishes that were part of every course: soups, entrées, side dishes, dessert, and breads. The ancient way of cooking rice, developed in India and Africa, became the Carolina way. Carolina Gold rice was so esteemed that its very name became a generic term in much of the world for the finest long-grain rice available.

This engaging book is packed with fascinating historical details, including more than three hundred recipes and a facsimile of the Carolina Rice Cook Book from 1901. A new foreword by John Martin Taylor underscores Hess's legacy as a culinary historian and the successful revival of Carolina Gold rice.

categories: Memoir & Biography, African American Studies, paperback, ebook, hardcover, Forthcoming, Books, South Carolina History & Culture, Education Policy & History,
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Pages: 176
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custom_subtitle:Benner C. Turner, A Black College President in the Jim Crow South
custom_byline1: Travis D. Boyce
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custom_author_blurb:Travis D. Boyce is associate professor and chair of the department of African American Studies at San Jose State University. He is the coeditor of Historicizing Fear: Ignorance, Vilification, and Othering.
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content: Reassesses the career of Benner C. Turner, the polarizing African American president at South Carolina State College during the civil rights era

Travis D. Boyce considers the full sweep of Benner C. Turner's life and career in the context of the contrary pressures of white and Black authority. Borrowing an expression from Michelle Obama's remarks to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Boyce casts Turner, long-serving president of South Carolina State University, as a steady and measured leader who preserved the limited resources his historically Black institution possessed in the face of often hostile social, political, and economic power structures.

Previous accounts of Turner and his SC State presidency portray him as unwilling to criticize the state's white power structure and unable to contend with their open resistance to civil rights. Boyce argues that the modern view of Turner flattens a complex terrain, often relying selectively on hostile sources, underplaying the political constraints on presidents of publicly funded HBCUs in the South. Considering Turner in a richer context, with a deep awareness of Turner's early life formative influences, Boyce provides a more complete critical examination of his leadership in trying times.

categories: Literary Studies, Cultural Studies & Sociology, Music & Theater, paperback, ebook, hardcover, Books,
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Pages: 184
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custom_subtitle:Race and Nation in American Popular Culture
custom_byline1: Geoffrey Galt Harpham
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custom_author_blurb:Geoffrey Galt Harpham is the author of numerous books, including What Do You Think, Mr. Ramirez? The American Revolution in Education and Scholarship and Freedom. He was president and director of the National Humanities Center from 2003–2015.
custom_reviews:"Beneath the evasions, cliches, and biases of popular entertainment, there is often a deeper truth. Geoffrey Harpham teaches us that this is so even when the subject is race in America. In this bold but patient, considered, and non-confrontational book, he gives us a better way to talk about works that were once celebrated but that can seem radioactive today."—Louis Menand, author of The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War

"Separate but equal? Nations are not born but made, and artistic action plays its part. Geoffrey Harpham's penetrating analysis of three icons of the silver screen and musical stage shows their grappling with race and identity to define an American future still being shaped by pernicious cultural memory."—Tim Carter, David G. Frey Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Music, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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content: A radical reinterpretation of three controversial works that illuminate racism and national identity in the United States

Citizenship on Catfish Row focuses on three seminal works in the history of American culture: the first full-length narrative film, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation; the first integrated musical, Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern's Showboat; and the first great American opera, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Each of these works sought to make a statement about American identity in the form of a narrative, and each included in that narrative a prominent role for Black people.

Each work included jarring or discordant elements that pointed to a deeper tension between the kind of stories Americans wish to tell about themselves and the historical and social reality of race. Although all three have been widely criticized, their efforts to connect the concepts of nation and race are not only instructive about the history of the American imagination but also provide unexpected resources for contemporary reflection.

categories: Political Science, paperback, Books, Women's & Gender Studies,
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custom_subtitle:Readings on the First Ladies
custom_byline1: edited by Robert P. Watson and Anthony J. Eksterowicz
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custom_author_blurb:Robert P. Watson has written or edited seven previous books, including The Presidents' Wives: Reassessing the Office of First Lady and the encyclopedia American First Ladies. He is an associate professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University and a former editor of the journal White House Studies.

Anthony J. Eksterowicz is a professor of political science at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and an editor of White House Studies. He is the coauthor of American Democracy: Representation, Participation, and the Future of the Republic and coeditor of The Post–Cold War Presidency and The President and Foreign Policy: Chief Architect or General Contractor.
custom_reviews:"The Presidential Companion . . . centers on the expansion of traditional duties and expectations over the course of the past two centuries. Much significance is also attached to the level of personal and political intimacy shared between both effective and controversial first ladies and their husbands."—

"The chapters in The Presidential Companion cover either singly or as a group the development of the position [of First Lady], its social influence, its political and policy influence, and the modern first ladies of the past two decades."—

"The Presidential Companion is a scholarly and very highly recommended contribution to American political science and women's studies reading lists."—
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content: A comprehensive look at the expanding roles of presidential wives from Martha Washington to Laura Bush

Bringing together the work of notable historians, political scientists, and sociologists, The Presidential Companion: Readings on the First Ladies offers a collection of essays that demonstrate the political relevance of first ladies throughout U.S. history and the dramatic expansion of their power during the twentieth century. With a foreword by Hillary Clinton's former chief of staff, Melanne Verveer, this anthology fills a gap in scholarship about the position of first lady and reveals the political acumen and activism of a number of the holders of this unofficial executive office.

The contributors reveal how the office has grown in political influence, from Martha Washington's selection of furnishings for the presidential mansion to Hillary Rodham Clinton's leadership of the President's Task Force on National Health Care Reform. They underscore the notion that an understanding of presidential spouses is central to the study of the American presidency. At the same time the volume dispels the myth that Eleanor Roosevelt and her successors have been the only presidential spouses to make significant public and political contributions to the nation.

Bringing this second edition up to date are two new chapters on the first ladyship of Laura Bush and on analyzing public perceptions of Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush.

categories: Political Science, Rhetoric & Communication, Business & Economics, paperback, ebook, hardcover, Movement Rhetoric Rhetoric's Movements, Books,
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custom_subtitle:Authenticity and Instrumentalism in US Movement Rhetoric after Occupy
custom_byline1: A. Freya Thimsen
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custom_author_blurb:A. Freya Thimsen is an assistant professor in the English Department at Indiana University. Her work has been published in journals including Philosophy & Rhetoric, Quarterly Journal of Speech, and Review of Communication.
custom_reviews:"The Democratic Ethos is a must-read for anyone interested in democracy. If a democrat is someone who is motivated by freedom, equality, social justice, and political practices that allow for all people to share power meaningfully, then democracy is not only a way of life but also a way of thinking and communicating. A. Freya Thimsen's analysis of Occupy Wall Street's democratic ethos advances our understanding of how democratic thinking and democratic communication work together to create democratic possibilities."—Jennifer Mercieca, author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump

"The Democratic Ethos gives lie to the facile conclusion that Occupy led nowhere and insightfully untangles the dialectic of authenticity and instrumental effort that lies at the heart of politics and ethos alike."—Peter Simonson, University of Colorado Boulder

"In clear and accessible readings of current practices of rhetorical citizenship, A. Freya Thimsen masterfully connects ancient rhetorical concepts with contemporary political theory and media criticism in a theoretical account of lived movement activism. This book epitomizes rhetorical scholarship at its best: a critical yet constructively oriented analysis of ways to engage contemporary societal problems."—Lisa S. Villadsen, University of Copenhagen

"A. Freya Thimsen offers an exquisite analysis of how the performance of an authentic democratic ethos does more than prefigure the democratic processes internal to movements. After Occupy, she argues, the display of an authentic democratic ethos has become a means of public persuasion to garner support for instrumental changes against undemocratic state practices. A must-read for social movement scholars."—Ronald Walter Greene, University of Minnesota
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content: A multidisciplinary analysis of the lasting effects of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement

What did Occupy Wall Street accomplish? While it began as a startling disruption in politics as usual, in The Democratic Ethos Freya Thimsen argues that the movement's long-term importance rests in how its commitment to radical democratic self-organization has been adopted within more conventional forms of politics. Occupy changed what counts as credible democratic coordination and how democracy is performed, as demonstrated in opposition to corporate political influence, rural antifracking activism, and political campaigns.

By comparing instances of progressive politics that demonstrate the democratic ethos developed and promoted by Occupy and those that do not, Thimsen illustrates how radical and conventional rhetorical strategies can be brought together to seek democratic change. Combining insights from rhetorical studies, performance studies, political theory, and sociology, The Democratic Ethos offers a set of conceptual tools for analyzing anticorporate democracy-movement politics in the twenty-first century.

categories: U.S. History, Memoir & Biography, paperback, ebook, Books, South Carolina History & Culture, Jewish Studies,
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custom_subtitle:A History of Immigration, Assimilation, and Loneliness
custom_byline1: Daniel Wolff
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custom_author_blurb:Daniel Wolff is an award-winning author of numerous books, including Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913 and The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back.
custom_reviews:"A powerful, mesmerizing story of what it means to uproot your whole life and become a citizen in an energetic, often unwelcoming new country. Using family letters, photographs, and a light green diary, author Daniel Wolff brings to life the absorbing saga of an unnamed Jewish family as they face tumultuous events in a raw, young nation. Moving from Bohemia to the American South, the family's definition of citizenship is continually redefined, impacted by Civil War, Reconstruction, the Great Depression, a pandemic, and World Wars. Along the way, the immigrants ask what it means to be an American (and when, exactly, will you become one). They grapple with racism, reversals of fortune, a relocation to the Midwest, a family betrayal, and the undertow of loneliness. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, Wolff has written an American masterpiece."—Michael Lee West, author of Mad Girls in Love, Crazy Ladies, American Pie, She Flew the Coop, and Consuming Passions

"Authenticity and lyricism draw the reader on the journey that becomes a tale of Everyman, or Everywoman, striving to become American and overcome the existential loneliness that motivates the narrator. Compelling events, astutely observed and presented with literary flair, drive Daniel Wolff's writing from start to finish."—Dale Rosengarten, founding curator of the Jewish Heritage Collection at the College of Charleston

"Would that we had more such diaries, found treasures, which expand what we know and how we understand the vast human drama of immigration. Beyond the well known personal narratives and troves of statistics, How to Become an American takes us, scholars and general readers as well, on an intimate journey into the experiences of a single individual who never expected that the story would be available to so many strangers, long decades after she lived and endured."—Hasia Diner, Director, Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History, New York University

"In this inspired work, Daniel Wolff uses the diary of an unnamed woman to chart the long history of immigration and acculturation in America. He turns what might be viewed as a familiar story into a lyrical meditation on location and dislocation, love and loss, and what it means to be an American. This is a book about history and memory, a loving work of recovery that achieves what all great books strive for: it allows us to see ourselves in this remarkable woman's story."—Louis Masur, Board of Governors Professor of American Studies and History, Rutgers University
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content: An odyssey from pre-Civil War Charleston to post-World War II Minneapolis through Jewish immigrants' eyes

The histories of US immigrants do not always begin and end in Ellis Island and northeastern cities. Many arrived earlier and some migrated south and west, fanning out into their vast new country. They sought a renewed life, fresh prospects, and a safe harbor, despite a nation that was not always welcoming and not always tolerant.

How to Become an American begins with an abandoned diary—and from there author Daniel Wolff examines the sweeping history of immigration into the United States through the experiences of one unnamed, seemingly unremarkable Jewish family, and, in the process, makes their lives remarkable. It is a deeply human odyssey that journeys from pre-Civil War Charleston, South Carolina, to post-World War II Minneapolis, Minnesota. In some ways, the family's journey parallels that of the nation, as it struggled to define itself through the Industrial Age. A persistent strain of loneliness permeates this story, and Wolff holds up this theme for contemplation. In a country that prides itself on being "a nation of immigrants," where "all men are created equal," why do we end up feeling alone in the land we love?

categories: Literary Studies, Understanding Contemporary British Literature, World Literature, paperback, ebook, hardcover, Forthcoming, Books,
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custom_byline1: Tison Pugh
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custom_author_blurb:Tison Pugh is author or editor of over twenty-five books, including The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom and Harry Potter and Beyond: On J. K. Rowling's Fantasies and Other Fictions. He is Pegasus Professor in the Department of English, University of Central Florida.
custom_reviews:"An excellent introduction to the world of Agatha Christie. Pugh offers an engaging, thoughtful, and well-researched discussion of the Queen of Crime, which will delight both scholars and fans."—Mark Aldridge, author of Agatha Christie's Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World

"A thoroughly entertaining study of the world's most popular writer. Pugh discusses Christie's personal life—her political views, theater, and incredible body of literature spanning most of the twentieth century. Like one of her own mysteries, Understanding Agatha Christie is a swiftly moving account of the author, written by someone who clearly knows her subject."—Blake Allmendinger, University of California, Los Angeles

"Tison Pugh offers readers an accessible way into the mysteries of Agatha Christie and the paradoxes and conversations around her remarkable body of work. Understanding Agatha Christie shows us why it's important not to underestimate popular writers and gives every reader a foothold to enjoy and discuss the world's best-selling novelist."—J.C. Bernthal, University of Suffolk, author of Queering Agatha Christie

"Do we really need help in understanding Agatha Christie? Tison Pugh begs to suggest that we do. Proposing a seven-paradox series that shapes Christie's deceptively accessible detective fiction, from her constant challenging of the rules associated with the Golden Age models she established to her frequent introduction of serious violence into the pastoral world she created to the successful promotion of her work by screen adaptations she disdained, Pugh makes a convincing case that there's a lot more to Christie than all those unguessable endings."—Thomas Leitch, Kirkpatrick Chair of Writing, University of Delaware
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content: Explores seven startling paradoxes behind the bestselling novelist's lasting popularity

Agatha Christie stands as the bestselling novelist of all time and, in terms of total sales in all genres, places only behind the Christian Bible and Shakespeare. Since the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, Christie's fiction has withstood the envy of her peers and the snipes of critics, while garnering the admiration of countless readers.

From her puzzling persona (notably in her eleven-day disappearance in 1926) and status as "Queen of the Cozies" to her tragicomic themes and critiques of Englishness, Christie built a lasting literary legacy that perplexes and pleases her hordes of readers. In Understanding Agatha Christie, Tison Pugh takes a fresh look at the contemporary world's most popular author, investigating seven notable paradoxes behind her lasting success, thereby illuminating the literary innovations that have contributed to her uncannily timeless appeal.

categories: Literary Studies, East-West Encounters in Literature and Cultural Studies, World Literature, ebook, hardcover, Books,
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custom_title:
custom_subtitle:The Intricate Journey of a Monistic Idea
custom_byline1: Yu Liu
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custom_author_blurb:Dr. Yu Liu is a professor of English at Niagara County Community College in New York State. In addition to over thirty-five essays in peer-reviewed journals of literature, history, and philosophy, he is the author of Poetics and Politics: The Revolutions of Wordsworth (1999), Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New English Aesthetic Ideal (2008), and Harmonious Disagreement: Matteo Ricci and His Closest Chinese Friends (2015). For his research, he has received the support of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship (2006-2007), a Fulbright fellowship at City University of Hong Kong (2012-2013), a Karlgren-Eisenstadt Residential Fellowship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (spring of 2018), and numerous short-term library research fellowships in the United States and Great Britain.
custom_reviews:"Yu Liu offers a groundbreaking analysis of cross-cultural exchange by exploring the influence of Chinese philosophical traditions on English art, gardening, and literature up to the Romantic period. This is a must-read for scholars interested in Anglo-Chinese relations between 1600 and 1830."—Robert Markley, W. D. and Sara E. Trowbridge Professor of English, University of Illinois

"In this deeply learned study, Yu Liu traces a 'relay of ideas' that made their way from Chinese philosophy to Western Romanticism, transformed along the way in Spinoza's thought and in theories of English landscape gardening. A tour de force of intellectual history, his book shapes a persuasive story out of disparate strands whose significance deepens when seen in a unifying perspective."—Leo Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Research Professor of Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University

"A thoughtful and imaginative attempt to trace the migration of the ancient Chinese cosmological unity of heaven and humanity to seventeenth-and-eighteenth-century Europe via the China Jesuits, Spinoza, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, leading to the redesign of English gardens and Romantic poetry."—D. E. Mungello, professor of history emeritus, Baylor University

"In his powerfully original monograph, From Chinese Cosmology to English Romanticism, Yu Liu upends the all-too-familiar asymmetry of theorizing Chinese culture through a Western conceptual structure. He mounts a carefully documented and compelling argument that the 'idea' of the persistent Chinese organismic worldview captured in the language of 'humanity's unity with nature' set its roots in the antinomian European Enlightenment thinkers as early as the complex Rites Controversy, and then spreads out as a root system through the heretical philosopher Spinoza to shape British Romanticism in all of its parts."—Roger T. Ames, Peking University
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content: A culturally sensitive and rewarding new understanding of the cross-cultural interaction between China and Europe

In this important new work author Yu Liu argues that, confined by a narrow English and European conceptual framework, scholars have so far obscured the radical innovation and revolutionary implication of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth's monistic philosophy. Liu's innovative intellectual history traces the organic westward movement of the Chinese concept of tianren heyi, or humanity's unity with heaven. This monistic idea enters the European imaginary through Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci's understanding of Chinese culture, travels through Spinoza's identification of God with nature, becomes ingrained in eighteenth-century English thought via the langscaping theory and practice of William Kent and Horace Walpole, and emerges in the poetry and thought of Coleridge and Wordsworth. In addition to presenting a significantly different reading of the two English poets, Liu contributes to scholarship about English literary history, history of European philosophy and religion, English garden history, and cross-cultural interactions between China and Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

categories: Cooking & Culinary History, Southern History, ebook, hardcover, Forthcoming, Books,
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custom_subtitle:The Untold History of an American Tradition
custom_byline1: Joseph R. Haynes
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custom_author_blurb:Joseph R. Haynes is an award-winning barbecue cook, a Kansas City Barbeque Society Master Certified Barbecue Judge, and the author of Virginia Barbecue: A History and Brunswick Stew: A Virginia Tradition. He lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
custom_reviews:"In From Barbycu to Barbecue, Joseph R. Haynes's exhaustive research gives some much-needed fresh air to barbecue's early, and hazy, history. This is a welcome addition to a growing barbecue canon."—Adrian Miller, James Beard Award-winning author and certified barbecue judge

"From Barbycu to Barbecue is the major missing link to understanding true barbecue in the United States. Haynes' years of research and analysis in evaluating the invention of Barbecue is clearly exhibited. This book is necessary for people that want to get the most accurate understanding of barbecue history available."—Howard J. Conyers, Ph.D., barbecue expert

"In a field which is still colored by invented traditions, rumors masquerading as facts, Haynes's work stands out as a properly historical act. He has done a fantastic job in finding new material to illuminate more precisely the African, indigenous, and European influences in American barbecue traditions. This is a work that pushes beyond the speculations of the past to establish the parameters of 'the barbecue archive' far more firmly than before."—Andrew Warnes, author of Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America's First Food

"Haynes' books, most notably Virginia Barbecue: A History and now From Barbycu to Barbecue, completely refute the currently accepted mainstream viewpoint on the origins of barbecue as we know it today, specifically the false premise that southern barbecue began in the Caribbean. At first glance, his assertions may strike some as absurd, but once you read his work and consider his meticulous research, it becomes clear that it's not Haynes that's off the wall but rather the current understanding of the mainstream concerning southern barbecue's birthplace. Alongside the likes of barbecue scholars Adrian Miller, Daniel Vaughn and Andrew Warnes, Haynes deserves a much-earned place at the pit where the in-depth conversations of barbecue's history are being had. His commonsense conclusions backed up by his commitment to research result in writing that is essential to better understanding the origins of southern barbecue."—Joshua Fitzwater, editor and publisher, Southern Grit
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content: An award-winning barbecue cook boldly asserts that southern barbecuing is a unique American tradition that was not imported.

The origin story of barbecue is a popular topic with a ravenous audience, but commonly held understandings of barbecue are often plagued by half-truths and misconceptions. From Barbycu to Barbecue offers a fresh new look at the story of southern barbecuing. Award winning barbecue cook Joseph R. Haynes sets out to correct one of the most common barbecue myths, the "Caribbean Origins Theory," which holds that the original southern barbecuing technique was imported from the Caribbean to what is today the American South. Rather, Haynes argues, the southern whole carcass barbecuing technique that came to define the American tradition developed via direct and indirect collaboration between Native Americans, Europeans, and free and enslaved people of African descent during the seventeenth century. Haynes's barbycu-to-barbecue history analyzes historical sources throughout the Americas that show that the southern barbecuing technique is as unique to the United States as jerked hog is to Jamaica and barbacoa is to Mexico. A recipe in each chapter provides a contemporary interpretation of a historical technique.

categories: Art & Photography, Civil Rights, African American Studies, ebook, hardcover, Forthcoming, Books, South Carolina History & Culture,
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custom_subtitle:The Civil Rights Photography of Cecil Williams
custom_byline1: Cecil Williams and Claudia Smith Brinson
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custom_author_blurb:Cecil Williams was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in 1937. At nine years old he became fascinated with photography after his older brother passed down a Baby Brownie Special. Williams dedicated himself to photographing civil rights activism, which he called a "journey toward freedom, justice, and equality" for Black publications such as Jet, Ebony, and the Crisis, and for white-owned newspapers through the Associated Press. In 2019 he founded the Cecil Williams South Carolina Civil Rights Museum, which preserves and exhibits photographs, documents, and artifacts from the state's civil rights activists. It is the state's first and only civil rights museum. Williams lives in Orangeburg, SC.

Claudia Smith Brinson is an award-winning ournalist with more than thirty years of experience at newspapers in Greece, Florida, and South Carolina. Brinson spent most of her journalism career with Knight Ridder at The State newspaper in Columbia, SC, while also freelancing for national publications. She is the author of Stories of Struggle: The Clash over Civil Rights in South Carolina (University of South Carolina Press). Brinson lives in Columbia, SC.
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content: The powerful life story and photography of an esteemed Black photojournalist from Orangeburg, South Carolina

Cecil Williams is one of the few Southern Black photojournalists of the civil rights movement. Born and raised in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Williams worked at the center of emerging twentieth-century civil rights activism in the state, and his assignments often exposed him to violence perpetrated by White law officials and ordinary citizens. Williams's story is the story of the civil rights era.

Williams and award-winning journalist Claudia Smith Brinson combine forces in Injustice in Focus: The Civil Rights Photography of Cecil Williams. Together they document civil rights activism in the 1940s through the 1960s in South Carolina. Williams was there, in South Carolina, to witness and document pivotal movements such as then-NAACP legal counsel Thurgood Marshall's arrival in Charleston to argue the landmark case Briggs v. Elliott and the aftermath of the infamous Orangeburg Massacre.

Featuring eighty stunning photographs accompanied by Brinson's rich research, interviews, and prose, Injustice in Focus offers a firsthand account of South Carolina's fight for civil rights and describes Williams's life behind the camera as a documentarian of the civil rights movement.

categories: Southern History, Civil War, Reconstruction Era, paperback, ebook, hardcover, Books, South Carolina History & Culture,
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custom_subtitle:James Chesnut, Honor, and Emotion in the American South
custom_byline1: Anna Koivusalo
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custom_author_blurb:Anna Koivusalo is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki and a former visiting Fulbright scholar both at the University of South Carolina and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
custom_reviews:"It is simultaneously a fine narrative of Chesnut's political journey from unionist to secessionist; a nuanced look at the cultural expectations Southern honor played in mapping that journey; and a deeply intimate study of the ways Chesnut tailored his emotions to navigate between 'raw' and 'honorable' expressions of Southern manhood. A fresh perspective long overdue."—John Mayfield, author of Counterfeit Gentlemen: Manhood and Honor in the Old South

"In this compelling study, Anna Koivusalo takes James Chesnut—South Carolina politician, secessionist, and Confederate officer—as a subject in his own right. No longer a lurker in the diary made famous by his wife Mary, James emerges as an actor whose efforts to manage his emotions by appealing to honor's dictates tells us a great deal about how mid-nineteenth century Americans experienced and understood their feelings. In so doing, The Man Who Started the Civil War offers new ways of thinking about questions that have long animated the field"—Sarah Gardner, Distinguished University Professor of History, Mercer University

"Anna Koivusalo has made a wholly original contribution to South Carolina history with the first full-length biography of James Chesnut, one of the state's most surprisingly neglected nineteenth-century luminaries. Moreover, by braiding the analysis of honor and emotion she has reinvigorated the study of southern honor and demonstrated the enduring value of emotions as a lens for historical analysis."—Michael E. Woods, Author of Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy

"Anna Koivusalo's book fairly bristles with exciting ideas about the intersection of honor and emotion across multiple planes in the Old South. Impressive research and innovative analysis yield a close understanding of the vexing, important South Carolina politician James Chesnut Jr. and the world that shaped him. This is a valuable, judicious biography and much more. The Man Who Started the Civil War advances the scholarly conversation on important problems with clarity and insight."—Lawrence McDonnell, Author of Performing Disunion: The Coming of the Civil War in Charleston, South Carolina

""Koivusalo brings Chesnut's lost world to life. Her work is academic in the best sense of the word: analytic, revelatory, and innovative. . . The Man Who Started the Civil War is, like its subject, a complex work that demands serious attention. Readers picking up the book with this frame of mind will be well rewarded.""—–Civil War Book Review
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content: A fresh biography of a neglected figure in Southern history who played a pivotal role in the Civil War.

In the predawn hours of April 12, 1861, James Chesnut Jr. piloted a small skiff across the Charleston Harbor and delivered the fateful order to open fire on Fort Sumter—the first shots of the Civil War. In The Man Who Started the Civil War, Anna Koivusalo offers the first comprehensive biography of Chesnut and through him a history of honor and emotion in elite white southern culture. Koivusalo reveals the dynamic, and at times fragile, nature of these concepts as they were tested and transformed from the era of slavery through Reconstruction.

Best remembered as the husband of Mary Boykin Chesnut, author of A Diary from Dixie, James Chesnut served in the South Carolina legislature and as a US senator before becoming a leading figure in the South's secession from the Union. Koivusalo recounts how honor and emotion shaped Chesnut's life events and the decisions that culminated in the cataclysm of civil war. Challenging the traditional view of honor as a code, Koivusalo illuminates honor's vital but fickle role as a source for summoning, channeling, and expressing emotion in the nineteenth-century South.

categories: Art & Photography, African American Studies, paperback, ebook, Forthcoming, Books, South Carolina History & Culture,
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custom_subtitle:Revisiting "I Made This Jar" and the Legacy of Edgefield Pottery
custom_byline1: edited by Jill Beute Koverman and Jane Przybysz
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custom_author_blurb:Jane Przybysz has served as executive director of McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina since 2011. She lives in Columbia, South Carolina.

Jill Beute Koverman was chief curator of collections at the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina when she died in 2013.
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content: A celebration of the remarkable poem vessels of Dave the Potter

David Drake, also known as Dave the Potter, was born enslaved in Edgefield in the backcountry of South Carolina near the Savannah River. Despite laws prohibiting enslaved people from learning to read or write, David was literate and signed some of his pots. His practice was not only to add his name and a date but also to embellish his work with verse—a powerful statement of resistance.

The Words and Wares of David Drake collects multifaceted scholarship about David and his craft. Building on the 1998 national traveling exhibit catalog, I Made This Jar: The Life and Works of Enslaved African-American Potter, Dave, and featuring more than one hundred beautiful images and six new essays, this authoritative volume presents the diverse perspectives of scholars, artists, and collectors.

The Words and Wares of David Drake adds important depth and context to our understanding of both Edgefield pottery and the life of Dave.

David's work is now so highly prized it is the cornerstone of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's traveling exhibit of nineteenth-century ceramic art from Edgefield.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (September 8, 2022-February 5, 2023)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (March 6, 2023-July 9, 2023)
University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor (August 26, 2023-January 7, 2024)
High Museum of Art, Atlanta (February 16, 2024-May 12, 2024)

categories: paperback, ebook, hardcover, Books, South Carolina History & Culture, Education Policy & History,
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custom_subtitle:University 101 at the University of South Carolina
custom_byline1: edited by Daniel B. Friedman, Tracy L. Skipper, and Catherine S. Greene
custom_byline2: foreword by John N. Gardner
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custom_author_blurb:Daniel B. Friedman is executive director of University 101 Programs and affiliate faculty in the Higher Education and Student Affairs program at the University of South Carolina.

Tracy L. Skipper is an editor, writer, and student success scholar.

Catherine S. Greene is responsible for the University 101 Program's campus partnerships.
custom_reviews:"An inspiring history of how a campus envisioned and executed a truly student-centered course that galvanized the whole campus community to provide students with a holistic, inclusive, and personally validating first-year experience. The practices and principles underlying UNIV 101's well-documented impact should be intentionally incorporated into all first-year seminar models."—Joe Cuseo, Professor Emeritus, Psychology, Marymount California University

"From Educational Experiment to Standard Bearer [addresses] not only the history of the University 101 course at the University of South Carolina but also the ingredients that made this remarkable experiment such a success. Anyone associated with first-year seminars will find rich resources within these pages for creating an effective and enduring program based on the principles that the authors have so carefully researched and documented."—Laurie A. Schreiner, Professor of Higher Education, Azusa Pacific University

"[Reading From Educational Experiment to Standard Bearer] takes me back to my days as a first-generation student trying tonavigate a foreign land to hopefully a successful destination. It also takes me back to my early days as a professor . . . when I promised myself and my students I would help them to not have such a new immigrant experience. Friedman and his co-contributors do a wonderful job of not only telling the University of South Carolina's ground-breaking history of organizing a holistic course and designing a foundational experience for new students, they also lay out how visionary leaders thought about transforming student learning. . . . We know the role UofSC has played in the first-year movement. [This book] provides a roadmap for those that have not yet joined the movement.""—Aaron Thompson, President of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education

"As a key social movement in higher education, University 101 changed the way colleges and universities welcome new students, resulting in greater academic achievement and higher first-to-second-year persistence rates. From Educational Experiment to Standard Bearer commemorates fifty years of the transformative first-year seminar model by recounting its rich history and revealing its masterplan, while looking to the future by encouraging innovation about what is still needed to help new students transition into and through their undergraduate education"—Jillian Kinzie, Interim Co-Director, National Survey of Student Engagement, Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research
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content: An exploration of the University of South Carolina's trailblazing approach to the first-year experience

As an innovative educational experiment, University 101 was designed to support students' transition to and success in college. Now, fifty years after its inception, the program continues to bring national recognition to the University of South Carolina. From Educational Experiment to Standard Bearer celebrates this milestone by exploring the course's origins; its evolution and success at the university; its impact on first-year students, upper-level students serving as peer leaders, faculty and staff instructors, and the university community and culture; and its role in launching the international first-year experience movement.

By highlighting the most significant takeaways, lessons learned, and insights to practitioners on other campuses, this book will serve as an inspiration and road map for other institutions to invest in this proven concept and focus on the ingredients that lead to a successful program. John N. Gardner, founding director and architect of University 101, provides a foreword.

categories: Southern History, Business & Economics, paperback, ebook, Books, South Carolina History & Culture,
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custom_subtitle:How Electric Cooperatives Transformed Rural South Carolina
custom_byline1: Lacy K. Ford and Jared Bailey
custom_byline2: foreword by James E. Clyburn
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custom_author_blurb:Lacy K. Ford, professor of history at the University of South Carolina, is the author of several books, including Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South.
custom_reviews:"Electric cooperatives have had an enduring role in improving the quality of life of South Carolinians for nearly a century. From delivering electricity for the first time to rural homes in the 1930s and 1940s to their modern efforts to ensure availability of high-speed internet to underserved communities, the co-ops have adapted to the changing needs of the people they serve, and our state is better for it."—Henry McMaster, governor, South Carolina

"The authors have chronicled the history of South Carolina and trends across the South. Few of those stories are as important as the emergence of electric cooperatives in South Carolina and other states that brought prosperity to rural areas. This compelling account of the state's electric co-ops reveals the importance of these member-owned entities to the communities they serve, extending beyond energy delivery to economic prosperity and, more recently, closing the digital divide."—Jim Matheson, CEO, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association

"As a cooperative with a demonstrated track record of being totally committed to the seventh Cooperative Principle, we have sought guidance and affirmation from our South Carolina colleagues who hold a lead position in delivering industry recruitment, community development, and energy efficiency programs and services. Leveraging ideas and sharing lessons learned, as we have done, are major contributors to rural electric cooperatives' eighty-plus years of success in serving rural America."—Curtis Wynn, president and CEO, Roanoke Electric Cooperative in North Carolina, and immediate past president, board of directors, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association

"South Carolina's electric cooperatives have skillfully navigated the state's complicated and often treacherous political waters for more than half a century, helping South Carolina avoid the shoals of catastrophe with disastrous commitments to dirty, expensive, outmoded energy production—most notably stopping construction of the infamous 'last coal plant in America' on the banks of the Pee Dee River. Meanwhile, the leadership has steered these consumer-owned companies toward important investments in conservation and renewable energy. Today as we embark on a critical period in energy service, we need the co-ops' innovation and responsiveness more than ever."—Dana Beach, founder and executive director emeritus, South Carolina Coastal Conservation League

"Implementing the 'Help My House' program demonstrates the deep caring and commitment the South Carolina electric co-op leadership has for the well-being of their members, many of whom are struggling to meet basic daily needs. It has been a joy for me to work with the co-ops on HMH from the start!"—Carol Werner, director emerita and senior fellow, Environmental and Energy Study Institute

"In the 1930s many questioned whether the fledgling Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina had the expertise to serve their members. That question was answered long ago. Yet, even today they act like they have something to prove."—Ted Case, executive director, Oregon Rural Electric Cooperative Association
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content: Early in the twentieth century, for-profit companies such as Duke Power and South Carolina Electric and Gas brought electricity to populous cities and towns across South Carolina, while rural areas remained in the dark. It was not until the advent of publicly owned electric cooperatives in the 1930s that the South Carolina countryside was gradually introduced to the conveniences of life with electricity. Today, electric cooperatives serve more than a quarter of South Carolina's citizens and more than seventy percent of the state's land area, bringing not only power but also high-speed broadband to rural communities.

The rise of "public" power—electricity serviced by member-owned cooperatives and sanctioned by federal and state legislation—is a complicated saga encompassing politics, law, finance, and rural economic development. Empowering Communities examines how the cooperatives helped bring fundamental and transformational change to the lives of rural people in South Carolina, from light to broadband.

James E. Clyburn, the majority whip of the U.S. House of Representatives from South Carolina, provides a foreword.

categories: Cultural Studies & Sociology, Memoir & Biography, paperback, ebook, New & Noteworthy, Books, South Carolina History & Culture, Jewish Studies,
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custom_subtitle:A Memoir
custom_byline1: Judy Goldman
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custom_author_blurb:Judy Goldman is the award-winning author of seven books including Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap, named one of the best books of 2019 by Real Simple. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.
custom_reviews:"Child is brave and lyrically told, a hymn of praise to a woman Goldman adored."—Charlotte Observer

"[Goldman] looks back on her life with a discerning eye that is able to appraise the dichotomy of her Southern upbringing. This act of remembering and then re-seeing brings a whiplash of honest realizations to the memoir's pages. ... Child shows that truth—at least truth of a sort—can be found."—SouthPark

"A gently told memoir of a cherished woman."—Kirkus

"A rich memoir that is long overdue, Child examines a Jewish child's loving relationship with a Black woman in the segregated South."—Foreword Reviews

"[A] fascinating memoir..."—The Charlotte Jewish News

"This moving memoir of a Black woman's importance in a white family reminds me that behind, under, and above the racial divide in the South, there ran strong currents of abiding love and mutual protection. These currents Judy Goldman excels at exploring without illusion and with full humanity. What a brave and timely book."—Frances Mayes, New York Times bestselling author of Under Magnolia and Under the Tuscan Sun

"Steeped in vivid, evocative memories of her southern childhood, Goldman's moving memoir "re-inhabits" and "interprets" the past: a white child growing up in a Black woman's care. It's a brave undertaking to explore the complexities of that time and place, but Goldman's wise, clear-eyed recognition of truth moves the memories into a new place."—Jill McCorkle, New York Times bestselling author of Hieroglyphics

"With mesmerizing detail and remarkable acuity, with a storyteller's ear and a poet's precision, Judy Goldman conveys, in Child, the profound goodness that shaped her, the antinomies that haunt her, and the mysteries that exert themselves even within the gilded frame of love."—Beth Kephart, National Book Award finalist and author of Wife Daughter Self: A Memoir in Essays and We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class

"Child is as profound a memoir as I've ever read. In one gorgeously rendered scene after another, Goldman illuminates the paradoxes of a loving childhood built on "unconscionable scaffolding." To read this riveting book is to learn how to hold the finest detail up to the light, how to examine all memory."—Abigail DeWitt, author of News of Our Loved Ones

"Judy Goldman cuts through the mist of memory to find a deeper truth in her relationship with her family's longtime housekeeper, Mattie. It's a story about love, family, privilege and prejudice, seen through the eyes of innocence and the eyes of experience. What a stunning feat."—Tommy Tomlinson, author of The Elephant in the Room

"South-turned-North Carolinian Judy Goldman has essentially mastered the art of the memoir. This book unpacks a common Southern experience (that I won't give away here) with such poise and grace. It's also up for the Southern book award for nonfiction! Just read it and, if you like to, check out her other books."—Zoe Yarborough, StyleBlueprint

"[An] honest look at a complicated and important relationship. . . . That sense of investigation between writer and reader makes Child a remarkable achievement."—North Carolina Literary Review
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content: 2023 Southern Book Prize Nonfiction Finalist • A 2022 Katie Couric Media Must-Read New Book • A personal meditation on love in the shadow of white privilege and racism

Child is the story of Judy Goldman's relationship with Mattie Culp, the Black woman who worked for her family as a live-in maid and helped raise her—the unconscionable scaffolding on which the relationship was built and the deep love. It is also the story of Mattie's child, who was left behind to be raised by someone else. Judy, now eighty, cross-examines what it was to be a privileged white child in the Jim Crow South, how a bond can evolve in and out of step with a changing world, and whether we can ever tell the whole truth, even to ourselves. It is an incandescent book of small moments, heart-warming, heartbreaking, and, ultimately, inspiring.

categories: Literary Studies, Understanding Contemporary American Literature, Cultural Studies & Sociology, paperback, ebook, hardcover, Books, Jewish Studies,
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custom_byline1: Matthew A. Shipe
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custom_author_blurb:Matthew A. Shipe is a senior lecturer and director of advanced writing in the English Department at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the editor, with Scott Dill, of Updike and Politics: New Considerations, and his work has appeared in Philip Roth Studies, The John Updike Review, and numerous edited collections. He is president of the Philip Roth Society and serves on the executive board of the John Updike Society.
custom_reviews:"Never has there been a greater need for a brisk, open-minded exploration as to why Philip Roth matters. A first-rate survey of contemporary American literature's most astute and provocative novelist"—Steven J. Zipperstein, Stanford University

"Matthew Shipe's Understanding Philip Roth pushes our understanding of Roth further, incorporating Roth's personal history with American life and trauma through original and stylized fictions matched by formal inventiveness. With concision, example and detail, Shipe shows how and why it matters."—Ira Nadel, author of Philip Roth: A Counterlife

"Matthew Shipe has done something extraordinary, rendering the breadth of Philip Roth's oeuvre in a mere 120 pages. Even more astonishing, his critical study is both accessible and sophisticated; bright undergraduates, along with seasoned Roth scholars, will be engaged. This is an important and deft introduction to one of the major writers and voices of our time."—James Schiff, University of Cincinnati

"Matthew Shipe's Understanding Philip Roth engages the key word—'understanding'—in two distinctive ways: by helping readers understand the author and by revealing Roth's own understanding of such important contemporary issues as the role of the writer, the vagaries of history, the origins of the American project, and the pleasure and pain at the heart of the human condition."—Aimee Pozorski, Central Connecticut State University, co-executive editor of Philip Roth Studies
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content: A panoramic and accessible guide to one of the most celebrated—and controversial—authors of the twentieth century

Philip Roth was one of the most prominent, controversial, and prolific American writers of his generation. By the time of his death in 2018, he had won the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, and three PEN/Faulkner Awards. In Understanding Philip Roth, Matthew A. Shipe provides a brief biographical sketch followed by an illuminating and accessible reading of Roth's novels, illustrating how the writer constructed one of the richest bodies of work in American letters, capturing the absurdities, contradictions, and turmoil that shaped the United States in the six decades following the Second World War.

Questions of Jewish American identity, the irrationality of male sexual desire, the nature of the American experiment—these are a few of the central concerns that run throughout Roth's oeuvre, and across which his early and late novels speak to one another. Moreover, Shipe considers how Roth's fiction engaged with its historical moment, providing a broader context for understanding how his novels address the changes that transformed American culture during his lifetime.

categories: Southern History, paperback, Books,
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custom_title:
custom_subtitle:The WPA Guide to Its Towns and Countryside
custom_byline1: introduction by Phinizy Spalding
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custom_author_blurb:Phinizy Spalding, a native Georgian, is a trained American Colonial Historian whose scholarly work on James Oglethorpe has attracted widespread attention in the field. Spalding has taught history at the University of Georgia since 1966 and has published widely in the general field of Georgia history. He edited the state's historical journal, the Georgia Historical Quarterly, from 1973–80 as the successor of E. Merton Coulter, and has held important positions in the state's premiere historic preservation organization as well. In the final analysis, Spalding is probably as well qualified as any, bearing in mind his long experience and demonstrated affection for the state, to introduce this American Guide Series volume reprint.
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content: Originally published almost fifty years ago as part of the Federal Writers' Program, a division of the Works Progress Administration, this book is a reprint of the original WPA guide for Georgia. Divided into four sections, the general background, cities, tours, and appendices, the book features 17 essays on a variety of topics from Georgia's natural setting and resources to its architecture and sporta and recreation. Detailed descriptions of the state's six major cities—Athens, Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, Macon and Savannah—are also included, and there are 17 remarkably detailed guided tours to all sections of the state as well. In addition to the original chapters, Phinizy Spalding has written a new introduction and a new appendix.

categories: Southern History, Reconstruction Era, Memoir & Biography, African American Studies, paperback, ebook, hardcover, New & Noteworthy, Books,
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Pages: 204
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custom_subtitle:One Family's Journey from Slavery to Freedom
custom_byline1: Elizabeth J. West
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custom_author_blurb:Elizabeth J. West is the John B. and Elena Diaz-Verson Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters and the Co-Director of Academics of the Center for Studies on Africa and Its Diaspora at Georgia State University. She is the author of African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction and coeditor of Literary Expressions of African Spirituality.
custom_reviews:"West deftly mines the archives of our lives in this moving tribute to her mother's paternal lineage six generations removed. In discovering Frances Sistrunk, West not only recovers the remnants of a resilient and familial legacy, she unearths the inextricable linkages between a living and buried past that refuses to stay silent. In this sojourn, West poetically discovers herself, and reveals to us all the ways oral histories, archives, legal and journalistic documents become a beautiful and painful tapestry of self-discovery, and a cultural map to a fuller view of American, African American, and human history that one must "find" and honor."—Dr. Carol E. Henderson, Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion, Emory University

"Finding Francis is an interdisciplinary, multimedia study that demonstrates the innovation of the African Diaspora to preserve and verify its histories. It adds to the growing body of scholarship that recenters the interiority of Black lives from enslavement to freedom. . .This book bears witness to a movement among black scholars to hold space for the voices who could not tell their own stories and those that the written word has neglected. A valuable contribution to Africana Studies, undoubtedly."—Kameela Martin, Dean, Graduate School of the University of Charleston, director of African American Studies and professor of African American Studies and English, College of Charleston
custom_awards:Winner of the 2023 College Language Association Book Award
content: Winner of the 2023 College Language Association Book Award

Finding Francis, finding family, freeing history

Francis is found. Beyond Francis, a family is found—in archival material that barely deigned to notice their existence. This is the story of Francis Sistrunk and her children, from enslavement into forced migration across South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. It spans decades before the Civil War and continues into post-emancipation America. A family story full of twists and turns, Finding Francis reclaims and honors those women who played an essential role in the historical survival and triumph of Black people during and after American slavery.

Elizabeth West has created a remarkable "biohistoriography" of everyday Black resistance, grounded in a determination to maintain enduring connections of family, kinship, and community despite the inhumanity and rapacity of slavery. There is inevitable heartbreak in these histories, but there is also an empowering strength and inspiration—the truth of these lives will indeed set us all free.

categories: Southern History, U.S. History, American Revolution, paperback, ebook, hardcover, Books, South Carolina History & Culture,
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Pages: 172
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custom_byline1: edited by Walter Edgar
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custom_author_blurb:Walter Edgar is the Neuffer Professor of Southern Studies Emeritus and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina.
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content: Paul Revere's midnight ride; the Battles at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill; and the people and places associated with the early days of the American Revolution hold a special place in America's collective memory. Often lost in this narrative is the pivotal role that South Carolina played in the Revolutionary conflict, especially when the war moved south after 1780. Drawing upon the entries in the award-winning South Carolina Encyclopedia, this volume shines a light on the central role South Carolina played in the story of American independence.

During the war, more than 200 battles and skirmishes were fought in South Carolina, more than any other state. The battles of Ninety Six, Cowpens, Charleston Harbor, among others, helped to shape the course of the war and are detailed here. It also includes well-known leaders and lesser-known figures who contributed to the course of American history. As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of its independence, this volume serves as a reminder of the trials and sacrifice that were required to make a new nation.

categories: Art & Photography, Gift Ideas, hardcover, Books, South Carolina History & Culture, Travelogue & Essays, Education Policy & History,
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Pages: 116
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custom_byline1: Chris Horn
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custom_author_blurb:Chris Horn is the director of editorial projects in the University of South Carolina's Communications and Public Affairs Division and host/producer of Remembering the Days, a podcast about the university's history.
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content: A vivid portrait of one of the South's most beautiful college campuses

Chartered in 1801 and built upon a twenty-four-acre parcel of undeveloped land east of what is today the South Carolina State House, in Columbia, the University of South Carolina has expanded beyond the boundaries of its original campus, the historic Horseshoe, to become a vibrant and multifaceted urban research university. Throughout its history, South Carolina's flagship university has created opportunity and knowledge, educated hundreds of thousands of students, and enriched the cultural and social lives of countless community members and supporters throughout the state.

University of South Carolina in Focus celebrates the beauty of its campus architecture and the university's commitment to academic and research excellence, unparalleled student experience, and the thrilling Gamecock sports that fans cheer throughout the year. Enjoy this colorful "walk" across campus and experience one of America's most beautiful universities. Whether you are a current student, an alumnus, or a faithful Gamecock fan, this stunning keepsake will bring your treasured memories of Carolina into focus.

categories: Southern History, Cultural Studies & Sociology, paperback, ebook, Books,
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Pages: 140
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custom_subtitle:Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820-1860
custom_byline1: Eugene D. Genovese
custom_byline2: foreword by Douglas Ambrose
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custom_author_blurb:Eugene D. Genovese (1930–2012) was Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the University Center in Atlanta, Georgia. He was awarded the Bancroft Prize in 1975 for Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made.
custom_reviews:"Genovese subjects the contradictions of conservative proslavery thought to a respectful if withering critique."—American Historical Review

"This study, based on unparalleled familiarity with the writings of antebellum southern thinkers, has much to tell us about topics that have long interested historians: the slaveholders' world view, its relationship to that of Americans (and Westerners) in general, and the persistent question of southern distinctiveness."—The Journal of American History

"Genovese lays bare the contradictions of the proslavery argument. Contrary to southern claims, free labor produced greater material progress. Slaveholders inconsistently pictured the North as powerful and aggressive, and in the next breath, maintained that the social system of the North was collapsing. By taking seriously the work of southern political theorists, economists, and theologians, Genovese offers penetrating insights into the world view of slaveholders. His study deserves a wide audience."—The Journal of the Early Republic

"With The Slaveholders' Dilemma, Eugene Genovese reminds us once again why he is both the most influential and the most controversial southern historian of his generation. No modern scholar has succeeded in writing with empathy about both slaves and slaveholders as well as Genovese, and this slender volume offers a cogent and forceful statement of Genovese's most recent thinking on what he considers the distinctive conservatism of the Old South."—Reviews in American History
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content: In The Slaveholders' Dilemma, Eugene D. Genovese explores the efforts of American slaveholders to reconcile the intellectual dilemma in which they found themselves as supporters of freedom but defenders of slavery. In the American South slaveholders perceived themselves as thoroughly modern, moral men who protected human progress against the perversions of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Surprisingly, they also accepted the widespread idea that freedom generated the economic, social, and moral progress they embraced as their own cause. Nonetheless, they continued to defend slavery. In this compact but densely argued volume, Genovese rehearses the central arguments that would define the latter portion of his career, thus offering a window not only into the mind of the master class but also the mind of one of the most important scholars of the American South.

A new foreword is provided by Douglas Ambrose, professor of history at Hamilton College and author of Henry Hughes and Proslavery Thought in the Old South.

categories: Memoir & Biography, African American Studies, ebook, hardcover, Books, South Carolina History & Culture,
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Pages: 148
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custom_subtitle:Coming of Age in the Jim Crow South
custom_byline1: Ruth R. Martin
custom_byline2: with Vivian B. Martin
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custom_author_blurb:Ruth R. Martin is professor emerita and former associate dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Connecticut.

Vivian B. Martin is professor and chair of the Journalism Department at Central Connecticut State University.
custom_reviews:"Too often our stories about Black America, and the Black South in particular, focus on slavery, segregation, and post–civil rights politics. In Beatrice's Ledger, Ruth R. Martin chronicles the beautiful, complex, and steadfast Black living that has happened between and beyond those moments in our history. Her portrait of Smoaks, South Carolina, recalls Zora Neale Hurston's Eatonville in Their Eyes Were Watching God for its description of memorable characters and cultural rituals, of enduring communal connection to the land and spirit. And like Hurston's classic, Beatrice's Ledger gives us a heroine whose journey from the South Carolina Lowcountry to points all around the world inspires our own quests for self-discovery and a sense of home."—Angela Ards, author of Words of Witness: Black Women's Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era

"The spunky daughter of a hard-working family, Martin offers a lyrical accounting of everyday life in the rural South of the mid-twentieth century, including the fraught intimacies and etiquette of racial interaction. Her memoir is a valuable addition to the first-person record of Black resilience and achievement during the Jim Crow years."—Jennifer Ritterhouse, author of Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race

"Beatrice's Ledger is a gift to historians and general readers who yearn for a firsthand account of the Lowcountry during a time that is now remote and yet exists within the framework of the lived experience of someone still with us. It is a pleasure to read and the place—and its citizens—truly come alive in Martin's careful reconstruction."—Rachel Devlin, author of A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America's Schools
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content: A vivid and moving story about family, courage, and the power of education

Ruth remembers the day the sheriff pulled up in front of her family's home with a white neighbor who claimed Ruth's father owed her recently deceased husband money. It was the early 1940s in Jim Crow South Carolina, and even at the age of eleven, Ruth knew a Black person's word wasn't trusted. But her father remained calm as he waited on her mother's return from the house. Ruth's mother had retrieved a gray book, which she opened and handed to the sheriff. Satisfied by what he saw, the sheriff and the woman left. Ruth didn't know what was in that book, but she knew it was important.

In Beatrice's Ledger, Ruth R. Martin brings to life the stories behind her mother's entries in that well-worn ledger, from financial transactions to important details about her family's daily struggle to survive in Smoaks, South Carolina, a small town sixty miles outside of Charleston. Once the land of plantations, slavery, and cotton, by the time Ruth was born in 1930 many of the plantations were gone but the cotton remained. Ruth's family made a living working the land, and her father owned a local grist and sawmill used by Black and white residents in the area. The family worked hard, but life was often difficult, and Ruth offers rich descriptions of the sometimes-perilous existence of a Black family living in rural South Carolina at mid-century.

But there was joy as well as hardship, and readers will be drawn into the story of life in Smoaks. Enriched with public records research and interviews with friends and family still living in Smoaks, Martin weaves history, humor, and family lore into a compelling narrative about coming of age as a Black woman in the Jim Crow South. Martin recounts her journey from Smoaks to Tuskegee Institute and beyond. It is a story about the power of family; about the importance of the people we meet along the way; and about the place we call home.

categories: Civil War, paperback, ebook, Books, South Carolina History & Culture,
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custom_byline1: Marion B. Lucas
custom_byline2: foreword by Anne Sarah Rubin
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custom_author_blurb:Marion B. Lucas is University Distinguished Professor of history at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green.
custom_reviews:"This splendid little volume should put to rest forever the question of who burned the capital city of South Carolina."—Civil War History

"Well worthy of examination by all interested in the nature of war and the social, political, and economic ramifications of total warfare. Professor Lucas is to be commended for a very worthy research achievement."—Journal of Southern History

"For a few South Carolinians, this little book will generate more heat than anything Mother Nature can do this summer. . . It is doubtful Lucas' book will ever shut down the debate over the burning of Columbia. History spawns passionate debate around here, as we've heard all year. But at least those who read it carefully should benefit from a little more balanced historical background."—The State

"deals with one of the most difficult, most delicate issues of the Civil War and deals with it in an honest, unbiased manner."—Midlands Weekend

"The results of his efforts are eminently satisfying. He brings order out of contradiction and confusion by carefully weighing the evidence and presenting the results of his study in a simple, straightforward, and interesting manner."—McCormick Messenger
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content: An investigation into who burned South Carolina's capital in 1865

Who burned South Carolina's capital city on February 17, 1865? Even before the embers had finished smoldering, Confederates and Federals accused each other of starting the blaze, igniting a controversy that has raged for more than a century. Marion B. Lucas sifts through official reports, newspapers, and eyewitness accounts, and the evidence he amasses debunks many of the myths surrounding the tragedy.

Rather than writing a melodrama with clear heroes and villains, Lucas tells a more complex and more human story that details the fear, confusion, and disorder that accompanied the end of a brutal war. Lucas traces the damage not to a single blaze but to a series of fires—preceded by an equally unfortunate series of military and civilian blunders—that included the burning of cotton bales by fleeing Confederate soldiers.

This edition includes a new foreword by Anne Sarah Rubin, professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman's March and America.

categories: Outdoors & Nature, Art & Photography, Gift Ideas, hardcover, Books, South Carolina History & Culture,
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custom_title:
custom_subtitle:Ever Changing. Simply Amazing.
custom_byline1: Brookgreen Gardens
custom_byline2: introduction by Page Hayhurst Kiniry
foreword by Dick Rosen
with contributions by Robin R. Salmon
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custom_reviews:"Brookgreen Gardens is an enticing introduction for those who haven't visited yet and an immersive rediscovery for those who have. The book illustrates beautifully how sculpture, horticulture, and wildlife enhance each other—Brookgreen draws its unique spirit from all three—and how the Huntingtons thoughtfully foresaw this synergy long before other benefactors did."—Peter Trippi, editor-in-chief, Fine Art Connoisseur

"The photographs in Brookgreen Gardens sparkle and show the beauty of the art and the unique landscape, but more than that, they illuminate all the facets of Brookgreen, bringing you close so that they caress the sculpture and reveal the elegance of the trees and plantings."—Larry Lederman, author of Garden Portraits: Experiences of Natural Beauty

"Peaceful, thoughtful and beautiful, Brookgreen Gardens – simultaneously art museum, botanical garden and wildlife sanctuary – has something for everyone. Its thought-provoking, tranquil and playful elements help preserve and interpret aspects of the history and environment of the South Carolina Lowcountry and that of the Gullah Geechee people."—Amy Dempsey, author of Destination Art

"This book is a joy to read, and celebrates one of our nation's garden gems. A combination of public garden, wildlife sanctuary and art museum, Brookgreen Gardens is an extraordinary institution, a credit to the vision of its founders as well as the staff who continue to curate it with such great care. Among American cultural institutions, I would think that the word unique is an apt descriptor."—Michael J. Balick, vice president and director, Institute of Economic Botany, The New York Botanical Garden

"Brookgreen Gardens is one of the hidden jewels of America, a sanctuary that celebrates the full wonder of South Carolina, its history and culture, flora and fauna, spirit and imagination. Nature and the arts inspire us, bringing peace, joy, and solace, and the Huntington family's gift provides both a window into the past and a vista into the promise of a future informed by the beauty, tranquility, and glory of the natural world."—Wade Davis, University of British Columbia

"As a horticulturist and environmentalist, I've rejoiced in the Garden's removal of invasive species, the addition of more native plants and pollinator-friendly gardens, and the protection of timberlands. Brookgreen Gardens creatively highlights the conservation of art, the importance of historical accuracy, and the preservation of natural resources."—Amanda McNulty, host of Making it Grow
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content: An oasis of art and nature, Brookgreen Gardens is America's first public sculpture garden and largest collection of American figurative sculpture. Founded in 1931 by Archer Milton Huntington and Anna Hyatt Huntington, its lush South Carolina coastal location, between Myrtle Beach to the north and Charleston to the south, is an exquisite setting for the more than two thousand works by four hundred twenty-five artists—including more than one hundred sculptures and other works by Anna Huntington, many placed in the gardens she designed. In 1984, Brookgreen was designated as a National Historic Landmark, highlighting the number of women sculptors whose work is presented in the collection, as well as the significance of the work of Anna Huntington. Today, Brookgreen has become a cultural institution unlike any other, blending sculpture, historic sites, botanical gardens, and the Lowcountry Zoo.

As Brookgreen begins its ninetieth year, this volume celebrates the art, nature, and history ensconced in its 9,127 acres. More than one hundred color photographs; an introduction by president and CEO, Page Kiniry; and a foreword by its chairman of the board, Dick Rosen, bring Brookgreen Gardens to life on the page.

categories: Literary Studies, African American Studies, paperback, ebook, hardcover, Cultures of Resistance, Books, Women's & Gender Studies,
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custom_subtitle:Stories of Black Girlhood and Liberation
custom_byline1: Janaka Bowman Lewis
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custom_author_blurb:Janaka Bowman Lewis is associate professor of English and director of the Center for the Study of the New South at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is author of Freedom Narratives of African American Women and three children's books [Brown All Over, Bold Nia Marie Passes the Test, and coauthor of Dr. King Is Tired, Too!! (A Family's Walk)]. She is founder of the Vanilla Bowman Foundation for Educational Impact based in Georgia and the Carolinas to provide collaborative educational support for families with a focus on women and youth.
custom_reviews:"Arresting and characteristically brilliant, Light and Legacies is a gem. With an impressive wide-ranging scope and exquisite approach—weaving personal storytelling and poetics with rigorous analysis of texts, cultural production, aesthetics, and movements, this is a supremely breathtaking contribution to Black Girlhood Studies and tribute to Black girls and women."—Trimiko Melancon, professor of African American and African studies, Michigan State University, and author of Unbought and Unbiased: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation

"Light and Legacies exemplifies what it means to hold Black girls and Black girlhood warmly and with incisive intentionality. Janaka Bowman Lewis masterfully explores contours of Black girls' lives, resistance, and possibilities and brilliantly excavates Black girl mattering. With beautiful prose and impeccable attention to the archive of representation, Lewis gifts us one of the most engaging and rigorous texts in the growing field of Black girlhood studies."—Treva B. Lindsey, professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, The Ohio State Univeristy, and author of America Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice and Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, DC

"Dr. Janaka Bowman Lewis's thoughtful consideration of narratives of Black girlhood is as thoroughly researched as it is elegantly crafted. With a deep and wide-ranging archive of material—from early African American writing through the 21st century and examining fiction, poetry, and visual texts—this study offers clarifying insights to the ways that representations of Black girlhood operate not only as freedom narratives but also as depictions of self-recognition, self-construction, and cultural and political development. Framed through an intimate writing style that blends personal narrative with critical analysis, Dr. Bowman Lewis's study is a must-read for scholars and students of Black literature, Black history, and anyone seeking a deeper understanding of not only the answers but also the deep abiding questions that are revealed when we attend to the ways that Black girls 'Live, Shine, and Play.'"—McKinley Melton, associate professor of English, Gettysburg College
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content: An engaging examination of Black Girl Magic and its significance in American literature

In Light and Legacies, author Janaka Bowman Lewis examines Black girlhood in American literature from the mid-twentieth century to the present. The representation of Black girlhood in contemporary literature has long remained underexplored. Through this literary history of "Black Girl Magic," Lewis offers one of the first studies in this rapidly growing field of study. Light and Legacies poignantly showcases the activist dimensions of creative literature through work by women writers such as Toni Morrison and Toni Cade. As vectors of protest, these stories reflect historical events while also creating an enduring space of liberation and expression. The book provides didactic and reflective portrayals of the Black experience—an experience that has long been misunderstood. In a work both enlightening and personal, Lewis brilliantly weaves accounts of her own journey together with the liberating stories that shaped her and so many others.

categories: World History, Southern History, African American Studies, Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World, ebook, hardcover, Books,
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custom_subtitle:Commemorating the Denmark Vesey Affair and Black Radical Antislavery in the Atlantic World
custom_byline1: edited by James O'Neil Spady
custom_byline2: foreword by Manisha Sinha
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custom_author_blurb:James O'Neil Spady, associate professor of American history at Soka University of America, is the author of Education and the Racial Dynamics of Settler Colonialism in Early America: Georgia and South Carolina, 1700–1820.
custom_reviews:"Fugitive Movements is a thoughtful and wide-ranging volume exploring not just the 1822 Vesey conspiracy, but black antislavery and resistance across both time and place. The collection draws on new ways of framing Vesey and evidence from around the Atlantic World to inspire a broader understanding of the world of Vesey and his co-conspirators."—John Garrison Marks, author of Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery: Race, Status, and Identity in the Urban Americas

"White Southerners who took up arms to assert their freedom in 1776 are revered, but mainstream thought traditionally ignored or reviled Black Southerners who aspired to do the same. Patient and varied recent scholarship has pushed Americans to confront that contradiction. This welcome collection reflects, and advances, the discussion admirably."—Peter H. Wood, author of Black Majority and Strange New Land

"[This] collection does much to reframe the 1822 uprising as one episode akin to others in a dynamic Black Atlantic, African diaspora, and Age of Revolutions framework. [The] volume is as dedicated to restoring the circumatlantic dimensions of the uprising as it is to reinstating Vesey himself within radical history."—Journal of Southern History
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content: In 1822, White authorities in Charleston, South Carolina, learned of plans among the city's enslaved and free Black population to lead an armed antislavery rebellion. Among the leaders was a free Black carpenter named Denmark Vesey. After a brief investigation and what some have considered a dubious trial, Vesey and thirty-five others were convicted of attempted insurrection and hanged.

Although the rebellion never came to fruition, it nonetheless fueled Black antislavery movements in the United States and elsewhere. To this day, activists, politicians, writers, and scholars debate the significance of the conspiracy, how to commemorate it, and the integrity of the archival records it left behind. Fugitive Movements memorializes this attempted liberation movement with new interpretations of the event as well as comparisons to other Black resistance throughout the Atlantic World—including Africa, the Caribbean, and the Northern United States.

This volume situates Denmark Vesey and antislavery rebellion within the current scholarship on abolition that places Black activists at the center of the story. It shows that Black antislavery rebellion in general, and the 1822 uprising by Black Charlestonians in particular, significantly influenced the history of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. The essays collected in this volume explore not only that history, but also the ongoing struggle over the memory of slavery and resistance in the Atlantic World.

Manisha Sinha, James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition, provides the foreword.

categories: Rhetoric & Communication, Civil Rights, paperback, ebook, hardcover, Movement Rhetoric Rhetoric's Movements, Books,
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Pages: 204
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custom_subtitle:Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting
custom_byline1: Elizabeth Ellis Miller
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custom_author_blurb:Elizabeth Miller is assistant professor of English at Mississippi State University. Her work appears in College English, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, and Rhetoric & Public Affairs.
custom_reviews:"Liturgy of Change shows how civil rights mass meetings imbued traditional religious genres (liturgy, sacred song, prayer, testimony) from the Black church with new meanings that emboldened and unified groups into courageous collectives. Going beyond well-known civil rights individuals and places, Miller's careful analysis provides valuable insight into the actions and reactions of little-known mass-meeting participants across the South."—Lisa J. Shaver, Baylor University

"Like its subject—the mass meetings that were so important to the civil rights movement during the 1960s—Liturgy of Change is transformational: read it, and you'll never think of mass meetings in the same way ever again."—John L. Selzer, Paterno Family Liberal Arts Professor Emeritus, Penn State
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content: Original archival research invites new ways of understanding the rhetorics of the civil rights movement

In Liturgy of Change, Elizabeth Ellis Miller examines civil rights mass meetings as a transformative rhetorical, and religious, experience. Scholars of rhetoric have analyzed components of the civil rights movement, including sit ins, marches, and voter registration campaigns, as well as meeting speeches delivered by well-known figures. The mass meeting itself still is also a significant site in rhetorical studies. Miller's "liturgy of change" framework brings attention to the pattern of religious genres—song, prayer, and testimony—that structured the events, and the ways these genres created rhetorical opportunities for ordinary people to speak up and develop their activism. To recover and reconstruct these patterns, Miller analyzes archival audio recordings of mass meetings held in Greenville and Hattisburg, Mississippi; Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham, Alabama; Savannah, Sumter, and Albany, Georgia; St. Augustine, Florida; and Danville, Virginia.

categories: Cooking & Culinary History, ebook, hardcover, Books, South Carolina History & Culture,
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custom_byline1: Recipes Gathered by Blanche S. Rhett
custom_byline2: Edited by Lettie Gay
Introduction and Explanatory Matter by Helen Woodward
Foreword to the 1976 Edition by Elizabeth Hamilton
Foreword to the New Edition by Rebecca Sharpless
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custom_author_blurb:Blanche S. Rhett (1876–1942) was the wife of R. Goodwyn Rhett, the fiftieth mayor of Charleston, South Carolina. They lived in the historic John Rutledge House until his death in 1939.
custom_reviews:"Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking should appeal to people who enjoy cooking and to lovers of the old city. . . . Not only does the cookbook give a richness of recipes but it also gives colorful and descriptive views of the atmosphere of Charleston in days past."—The State (Columbia, SC)

"The reader is transported into a long-gone leisurely era. . . . Yet one thing remains unchanged: the appreciation of good food gracefully served."—News and Courier (Charleston, SC)

"Here is a book that makes you hungry, not only for shrimp pilau and hoe cake, but for adventure and out-of-the-way places. After eating you want to stroll along the old streets of Charleston, study the iron-grilled porches and smell the flower gardens. For there is atmosphere in this volume, as well as information and glamour."—New York Telegram

"Like many other good cooks, Charleston cooks know no rules nor measures but cook by instinct and a real knowledge of cookery. So this collection of authentic receipts was no easy task to collect."—Augusta Chronicle (Ga.)
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content: A 1930s collection of more than 300 recipes from South Carolina housewives and the African American cooks they employed

First published in 1930 as 200 Years of Charleston Cooking, this collection of more than three hundred recipes was gathered by Blanche S. Rhett from housewives and their African American cooks in Charleston, South Carolina. From enduring favorites like she-crab soup and Hopping John to forgotten delicacies like cooter (turtle) stew, the recipes Rhett collected were full of family secrets but often lacked precise measurements. With an eye to precision that characterized home economics in the 1930s, Rhett engaged Lettie Gay, director of the Home Institute at the New York Herald Tribune, to interpret, test, and organize the recipes in this book.

Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking is replete with southern charm and detailed instructions on preparing the likes of shrimp with hominy, cheese straws, and sweet potato pie not to mention more than one hundred pages of delightful cakes and candies.

In a new foreword, Rebecca Sharpless, professor of history and author of Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960, provides historical and social context for understanding this groundbreaking book in the 21st century.

categories: paperback, ebook, Forthcoming, Books, South Carolina History & Culture, Historic Preservation,
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custom_subtitle:Equine Culture in the Palmetto City
custom_byline1: Christina Rae Butler
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custom_author_blurb:Christina Rae Butler is professor of Historic Preservation at the American College of Building Arts in Charleston, South Carolina, as well as an adjunct faculty member at the College of Charleston in the Historic Preservation and Community Planning Program. She is the owner/operator of Butler Preservation LLC, a private preservation firm engaged in cultural resource management in Charleston. Butler also works as a barn shift manager for Palmetto Carriage Works in Charleston where she cares for horses and mules, drives carriages, and trains new staff. She lives in Charleston.
custom_reviews:"Christina Rae Butler has perfectly melded historical facts with her knowledge and love of horses. Covering all forms of horse power, Charleston Horse Power is a must read for anyone interested in learning how equines, along with their human counterparts, were, and in many ways still are, an integral part of the city of Charleston."—Jennifer McCormick, chief of collections and archivist, Charleston Museum

"Christina Rae Butler has, once again, taken an otherwise unrecognized and certainly underappreciated element of Charleston's history and made it fascinating. Charleston Horse Power is an impeccably researched and terrifically informed work that exemplifies how central—and critical—equine activity really was within Charleston's urban economy."—J. Grahame Long, director of museums, Historic Charleston Foundation

"Christina Rae Butler has written a wonderful book on a subject that is so unique yet common in our history. Her scholarship includes facts and statistics that are amazing in their scope. Butler includes rich stories of human and equine relationships that are very much a part of our modern life. As the City of Charleston moves to even more heightened levels of progress, carriage companies with their equine staff will adapt and continue to offer something incredibly special to the fabric of the city."—Tony Youmans, director of the Old Exchange Building

"Christina Rae Butler's detailed study of horse culture and horse power in Charleston is a valuable addition to the growing literature on the changing role of horses in the city. It is especially significant because of Charleston's character as a southern regional hub. Butler's discussion of the role of African Americans in the Charleston horse world and their relation to white owners and competing immigrants is especially perceptive. I recommend it highly."—Joel A. Tarr, Carnegie Mellon University
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content: Discover the fascinating history and legacy of working equines in Charleston, South Carolina.

Featuring thorough research, absorbing storytelling, and captivating photographs, Charleston Horse Power takes readers back to an equine-dominated city of the past, in which horses and mules pervaded all aspects of urban life. Author, scholar, and preservationist Christina Rae Butler describes carriage types and equines roles (both privately owned animals and those in the city's streets, fire, and police department herds), animal power in industrial settings, regulations for animals and their drivers, horse-racing culture, and Charleston's equine lifestyles and architecture. Butler profiles the people who made their living with horses and mules—from drivers, grooms, and carriage makers, to farriers, veterinarians, and trainers.

Charleston Horse Power is a richly illustrated and comprehensive examination of the social and cultural history and legacy of Charleston's equine economy. Urban historians, historic preservationists, general readers, and Charleston visitors interested in discovering a vital aspect of the city's past and present will enjoy and appreciate this impressive work.

categories: Literary Studies, Projects of the Simms Initiatives, paperback, Books,
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custom_subtitle:Supplement, 1834-1870
custom_byline1: edited by Mary C. Simms Oliphant and T. C. Duncan Eaves
custom_byline2: with contributions by Alexander Moore
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