Bøger udgivet af University of Georgia Press

"Using testimonies written between the middle of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, nourished by ethology and the human and social sciences, Feline Cultures extends the unique track of animal studies that âEric Baratay pursues from book to book. As with his Animal Biographies: Toward a History of Individuals, Baratay breaks the model of human exceptionalism to create innovative accounts of these animals' lives in a way that challenges the reader's thinking about animals. Baratay is not interested in seeing how humans think about or treat these animals. Instead, he chooses to observe the animal's perspective to document how individual cats have carried out their lives. He writes from the point of view of these animals to understand what they felt and experienced and how they reacted. Whether they be street cats, farm cats, pet cats, companion cats, or "catdogs," cats show a great plasticity of behavior. This book establishes that cats have their own cultures and adaptations and, therefore, their own history. Through tight portraits, the dynamic construction of what we can call cultures is revealed. Here we are far from the eternal portrait of the cat-independent, unpredictable, and mysterious-that has become commonplace. For each of the domestic cats whose existence can be reconstructed from his sources, Baratay pays attention to their perceptions of the world, their sensations and their emotions, their sensitivity and character, their bodily expressiveness, and their interactions with the environment, other animals, and humans. Ethology becomes, under the alert pen of âEric Baratay, an ethnology"--

On January 6, 2021, more than two thousand rioters stormed the doors of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., hoping to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power from former president Donald Trump to his successor, Joseph Biden. The deaths, property damage, and vicious rampage that ensued were witnessed on live television as an unprecedented attack on the democratic process and those who strive to protect it. As an installment of UGA Press's History in the Headlines series, this book offers a rich discussion between highly respected scholars on the historical backdrop and context for contemporary issues from the headlines. In addition to the historical context, this conversation demonstrates how historians speak to one another about contentious topics and how they contribute in meaningful ways to the public's understanding of momentous events. This volume focuses on the historical context of the January 6 attack and employs a free-flowing conversation style that allows the historians a more unconventional format. The participants discuss if--and if so, how--historians should engage in public debates and what that engagement means to their roles as academic authorities in the public.

Born into slavery in Hampton County, Virginia, orphaned soon thereafter, and raised for almost two years among Native Americans, the charismatic Rev. Peter Thomas Stanford (c. 1860-May 20, 1909) rose from humble and challenging beginnings to emerge as an inventive and passionate activist and educator who championed social justice. During the post- Reconstruction era and early twentieth century, Stanford traversed the United States, Canada, and England advocating for the rights of African Americans, including access to educational opportunities; attainment of the full rights and privileges of citizenship; protections from racial violence, social stereotyping, and a predatory legal system; and recognition of the artistic contributions that have shaped national culture and earned global renown. His imprint on working-class urban residents, Afro-Canadian settlements, and African American communities survives in the institutions he led and the works that presented his imaginative, literate, ardent, and often comic voice. With a reflection by Highgate Baptist Church's former pastor, Rev. Dr. Paul Walker, this collection highlights Stanford's writings: sermons, lectures, newspaper columns, entertainments, and memoirs. Editors Barbara McCaskill and Sidonia Serafini annotate his life and work throughout the volume, placing him within the context of his peers as a writer and editor. As an American expatriate, Stanford was seminal in redirecting antislavery activism into an international antilynching movement and a global campaign to dismantle slavery and slave trading. This book squarely inserts this influential thinker and activist in the African American literary canon.

In Jessica Tanck's debut collection, narrative and lyric converge to confront the marks left by violence, loss, and longing. Winter Here troubles the boundaries between home and the outside world, between reverence and terror, asking whether and where safety can be found in the wake of a mother's suicide. Both intimate and expansive, this collection revels in pleasure as much as it contends with pain. Whether studying the way a violinist is bruised in the act of playing, invoking the crush of ice around a ship's hull during a silence, or conjuring a crown of light surrounding strangers speaking in tongues, these poems are unflinching, imaginative, and relentless in their searching. By moving between the explicit and the oblique, pairing scorching imagery with razor-edged thought, Tanck evokes a history that haunts every word and place.

From 1845 to 1865 the Gulf of Mexico was at the center of American expansion and southern imperialism. A Continuous State of War tells the story of several communities, such as Galveston, New Orleans, and Pensacola as well as countries such as Mexico and Cuba to uncover the way that that wars within the upper rim of the Gulf of Mexico facilitated American and southern attempts to conquer Latin American nations. In the push for westward expansion that preceded the Civil War, white southerners along with other Americans engaged in violent conquest in Latin America and the American West. Through the wars that are chronicled here, white southern concepts of race became more rigidly fixed. Maria Angela Diaz covers several conflicts leading up to the Civil War with Mexicans, Cubans, and Native Americans. She places the Civil War within this framework and follows the trajectory of relations with Latin America through the end of the Civil War and ex-Confederates' attempts to emigrate abroad. Gulf Coast communities facilitated both the physical efforts to seize territory and the construction of the highly racialized imperialist ideas that reimagined Latin America as a region that could secure the South's future. Yet the pursuit of that territory created a fluctuating and uncertain situation that shaped the choices of the diverse peoples who lived along the upper rim of the Gulf of Mexico in ways they did not expect.

Beginning in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, a new generation of LGBT students in California began to organize publicly on college and university campuses, inspired by contemporaneous social movements and informed by California's rich history of LGBT community formation and political engagement. Here Are My People documents how a trailblazing group of queer student activists in California made their mark on the history of the modern LGBTQ movement and paved the way for generations of organizers who followed. Rooted in extensive archival research and original oral histories, Here Are My People explores how this organizing unfolded, comparing different regions, types of campuses, and diverse student populations. Through campus-based organizations and within women's studies programs, and despite various forms of reactionary resistance, student organizers promoted LGBT-themed educational programming and changes to curriculum, provided peer support like counseling and hotlines, and sponsored events showcasing queer creative practices including poetry, theater, and film. Collaborating across various campuses, they formed regional and statewide alliances. And, importantly, LGBT student organizers engaged California's vibrant gay liberation and lesbian feminist political communities, forging new and important relationships in the movement which enhanced both on and off-campus LGBT organizing.

Despite its apparent isolation as an older region of the country, the Southeast provided a vital connecting link between the Black self-emancipation that occurred during the American Revolution and the growth of the Underground Railroad in the final years of the antebellum period. From the beginning of the revolutionary war to the eve of the First Seminole War in 1817, hundreds and eventually several thousand Africans and African Americans in Georgia, and to a lesser extent South Carolina, crossed the borders and boundaries that separated the Lowcountry from the British and Spanish in coastal Florida and from the Seminole and Creek people in the vast interior of the Southeast. Even in times of peace, there remained a steady flow of individuals moving south and southwest, reflecting the aspirations of a captive people. A Southern Underground Railroad constitutes a powerful counter-narrative in American history, a tale of how enslaved men and women found freedom and human dignity not in Jefferson's "Empire of Liberty" but outside the expanding boundaries of the United States. It is a potent reminder of the strength of Black resistance in the post-revolutionary South and the ability of this community to influence the balance of power in a contested region. Paul M. Pressly's research shows that their movement across borders was an integral part of the sustained struggle for dominance in the Southeast not only among the Great Powers but also among the many different racial, ethnic, and religious groups that inhabited the region and contended for control.

Despite the increasing volume of scholarship that shows children as political actors, prior to this book, a cohesive framework was lacking that would more fully examine and express children's relationship with political power. Rather than simply hitching children's resistance to standard theories of resistance, Heidi Morrison seeks to meet children on their own terms. Through the case study of Palestinian children, contributors theorize children's resistance as an embodied experience called lived resistance. A critical aspect of the study of lived resistance is not just documenting what children do but specifically how scholars approach the topic of children's resistance. With Lived Resistance against the War on Palestinian Children, the authors account for the vessel (i.e., the body in flesh and mind) through which such resistance generates and operates. The diverse group of chapter authors examine Palestinian children's art and media, imprisonment, parenting experiences, bereavement, neoliberalism, refugee camps, and protest movements as aspects of their collective and individual political power. Through these outlets, the book shows consistencies and contends that these children's relationship to political power operates from an inclusive model of citizenship and is social justice oriented, symbolically oriented, and contingently based.

"Radical Volunteers tells the largely unknown story of southern student activism in Tennessee between the Brown decision in 1954 and the national backlash against the Kent State University shootings in May 1970. As one of the first statewide studies of student activism-and one of the few examinations of southern student activism-it broadens scholarly understanding of New Left and Black student radicalism from its traditionally defined hotbeds in the Northeast and the West Coast. By incorporating accounts of students from both historically Black and predominantly white colleges and universities across Tennessee, this research places events that might otherwise appear random and intermittent into conversation with one another. This methodological approach reveals that students' joined organizations and became activists in an effort to assert their autonomy and, as a result, student power became a rallying cry across the state. It illuminates a broad movement comprised of many different sorts of students-white and Black, private and public, western, middle, and east Tennesseans. Importantly, Ballantyne doesn't confine her analysis to just campuses. Indeed, Radical Volunteersalso situates campus activism with their broader communities. Tennessee student activists built upon relationships with Old Left activists and organizations, thereby fostering their otherwise fledgling enterprises, and creating the possibility for radical change in the politically-conservative region. But framing student activism over a long period of time across Tennessee as a whole reveals disjuncture as much as coherence in the movement. Though all case studies contain particular and representative features, Tennessee's diversity lends itself well to a study of regional variations. Though outnumbered, Tennessee student activists secured significant campus reforms, pursued ambitious community initiatives, and articulated a powerful countervision for the South and the United States"--

"Significant Food is a collaborative work of textual analysis and criticism that chews on the role and prominence of food in American literature. The volume offers close readings of many well-known, and some less well-known, examples of American writing, as studied through the food culture sensibilities of a well-stocked cupboard of contributors who offer their analyses for public consumption. Editors Jeff Birkenstein and Robert C. Hauhart find that literary criticism has focused on the role food plays in literary production to a greater extent than recognized at first glance and that its role has become increasingly common only in the last two decades. Still, while there is critical commentary regarding authors' use of food across the expanse of American literature, there has been a lack of a unifying critical theories to guide these analyses. Birkenstein and Hauhart offer the theory of "significant food"-a method that asks literary critics to evaluate and assess the extent, nature, and role that food plays in literary production. When food and "food moments" are used intensively and "significantly" within the drama, memoir, poem, novel, short story, or other writing, then one can say that it has achieved a status that makes it indispensable to the work at hand"--

Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess is a literary and cultural history of a place: the Gullah Geechee Coast, a four-state area that's one of only a handful of places that can truly be said to be the "cradle of Black culture" in the United States. Romancing the Gullah seeks to fill a gap and correct the maps. While there is a veritable industry of books on literary Charleston and on "the lowcountry," along with a plenitude of Gullah-inspired studies in history, anthropology, linguistics, folklore, and religion, there has never been a comprehensive study of the region's literary influence, particularly in the years of the Great Migration and the Harlem (and Charleston) Renaissance. By giving voice to artists and culture makers on both sides of the color line, uncovering buried histories, and revealing secret connections between races amid official practices of Jim Crow, Romancing the Gullah sheds new light on an only partially told tale. A labor of love by a Charleston insider, the book imparts a lively and accessible overview of its subject in a manner that will satisfy the book lover and the scholar.

Following emancipation, African Americans continued their quest for an education by constructing schools and colleges for Black students, mainly in the U.S. South, to acquire the tools of literacy, but beyond this, to enroll in courses in the Greek and Latin classics, then the major curriculum at American liberal arts colleges and universities. Classically trained African Americans from the time of the early U.S. republic had made a link between North Africa and the classical world; therefore, from almost the beginning of their quest for a formal education, many African Americans believed that the classics were their rightful legacy. The Classics in Black and White is based extensively on the study of course catalogs of colleges founded for Black people after the Civil War by Black churches, largely White missionary societies and White philanthropic organizations. Kenneth W. Goings and Eugene O'Connor uncover the full extent of the colleges' classics curriculums and showcase the careers of prominent African American classicists, male and female, and their ultimately unsuccessful struggle to protect the liberal arts from being replaced by Black conservatives and White power brokers with vocational instruction such as woodworking for men and domestic science for women. This move to eliminate classics was in large part motivated by the very success of the colleges' classics programs. As Goings and O'Connor's survey of Black colleges' curriculums and texts reveals, the lessons they taught were about more than declensions and conjugations--they imparted the tools of self-formation and self-affirmation.

From Empire to Revolution is the first biography devoted to an in-depth examination of the life and conflicted career of Sir James Wright (1716-1785). Greg Brooking uses Wright's life as a means to better understand the complex struggle for power in both colonial Georgia and the larger British Empire. James Wright lived a transatlantic life, taking advantage of every imperial opportunity afforded him. He earned numerous important government posts and amassed an incredible fortune, totaling over £100,000 sterling. An England-born grandson of Sir Robert Wright, James Wright was raised in Charleston, South Carolina, following his father's appointment as the chief justice of that colony. Young James served South Carolina in a number of capacities, public and ecclesiastical, prior to his admittance to London's famed Gray's Inn to study law. Most notably, he was appointed South Carolina's attorney general and colonial agent to London prior to becoming the governor of Georgia in 1761. Wright's long imperial career delicately balanced dual loyalties to Crown and colony and offers a new perspective on loyalism and the American Revolution. Through this lens, Greg Brooking connects several important contexts in recent early American and British scholarship, including imperial and Atlantic history, Indigenous borderlands, race and slavery, and popular politics.

"Green City Rising is an ethnographic account of collective organizing for environmental justice in an era of growing concern about environmental and climate challenges. The conventional sustainability paradigm promises improved environmental conditions for all, such as fresh air and clean water, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods, green space access, and protection from climate crises. Yet, without particular interventions, the pursuit of such environmental amenities often contributes to displacement and further harm for communities that have historically borne the brunt of land theft, racial capitalism, and toxic industries. Drawing on the work of an alliance of grassroots organizations called the Portland Harbor Community Coalition (PHCC), Erin Goodling shows how communities have come together across lines of race and class to work for a more just, green future in Portland, Oregon. Green City Rising reveals that the violence of settler colonialism and white supremacy are far from endpoints: a collective vision for a better future is emerging, and ordinary people are building the understanding, skills, and relationships necessary to usher it in"--

"With cue, Siwar Masannat follows up her prize-winning debut with poems that wrestle with intimacy and distance, posing questions about privacy and circulation, gender and family, as well as ecological agency. Through intertextual and lyric experiments, Masannat engages a host of writers and artists, such as artist Akram Zaatari, photographer Hashem El-Madani, poet Joy Harjo, Sufi master Ibn 'Arabi, and the late Etel Adnan, all to offer a suggestive mapping of the slippages between ontology and cosmology"--

"The Wet Wound: An Elegy is a collection of lyric essays that discuss grief and overcoming loss. Inspired by the period of grief Norris went through in the wake of her father's death, the collection approaches death from a head-on perspective, arguing that the best way to take care of a wound, both physically and emotionally, is to open it up. It uses a medical lens to discuss grief. The essays approach the narrative through the investigation of body preservation, the history of skin grafts, or a deep dive into physical pain, but they all examine how Norris carries this fundamental loss. The text pushes against the stereotypical notion of "letting go" and "moving on." The Wet Wound: An Elegy unpacks the question of "what happens when, instead of following steps prescribed by those outside of loss, we let ourselves dwell in the grief?""--

"Launched in 2004, the Latin American regional institution of ALBA (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra: Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) sought to overcome the historical legacies of neo-colonial domination by consecrating the values of cooperation, inclusive development, and popular power. As part of a region-wide effort among states and social movements to break the socio-ecologically destructive effects of capitalist agriculture, the elevation of food sovereignty - based on the protections of rural livelihoods, land redistribution and sustainable agricultural production (agroecology) - became a cornerstone of ALBA's development policy. And yet, these regional aspirations barely saw the light of day, while Venezuela (the beating heart of ALBA) experienced the worst food crisis in its history. How did this come to pass? Based on extensive fieldwork in Venezuela, where the majority of ALBA's food policies reside, Cultivating Socialism provides the first in-depth study of the ways in which peasants, workers and states attempted to redress the inequities of commercialised agriculture, and the limits and contradictions encountered on the road to a regional food sovereignty regime. The politics of food sovereignty within ALBA thus offers important lessons for how we might think about emancipatory politics today, and for the future"--

"Co-edited by two activists with deep experience in organizing prison books programs (PBPs), Books Behind Bars introduces readers to PBPs and their decentralized organization. PBPs are a grassroots-level and nationwide activist movement challenging the largest prison industry in the world by refusing to let incarcerated people remain isolated and forgotten. Operating on shoestring budgets, will all-volunteer workforces and donated libraries, books to prisoner programs are examples of ordinary people acting to undermine the isolation and judgment of incarceration. Although there are currently fifty-three books to prisoners groups serving in all fifty states, these programs remain relatively unknown. The goal of this book is to bring awareness to this diffuse and long-standing social movement and offer readers a way to get involved. In addition to highlighting voices from PBPs throughout the United States, the volume also includes essays, images, and artwork from independent bookstore owners, formerly and currently incarcerated folks, activists, artists, journalists, volunteers, organizers, and scholars"--

Although Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957) published only two novels-Ultramarine and Under the Volcano-in his lifetime, numerous other works, most of which have since been edited for publication, were in various stages of composition at his death. La Mordida, the longest and most significant of the manuscripts that have not been previously published, is a draft of a novel based on Lowry's visit to Mexico in 1945-46, which ended in the arrest and deportation of Lowry and his wife following a nightmarish run-in with corrupt immigration authorities. On its most immediate level, the title La Mordida-which means "the little bite," Mexican slang for the small bribe that officials are apt to demand in order to expedite matters-refers to the autobiographical protagonist's legal difficulties. In a larger sense, however, it also represents his inability to escape his past, to repay the fine, or debt, that he owes.The central narrative of La Mordida involves a descent into the abyss of self, culminating in the protagonist's symbolic rebirth at the book's end. Lowry planned to use this basic narrative pattern as the springboard for innumerable questions about such concerns as art, identity, the nature of existence, political issues, and alcoholism. Above all, La Mordida was to have been a metafictional work about an author who sees no point in living events if he cannot write about them and who is not only unable to write but suspects that he is just a character in a novel.A reading of La Mordida in the context of Lowry's aesthetic theories and psychological problems shows why he dreaded the completion of his projects to such an extent that he called success a "horrible disaster" and compared death to "the accepted manuscript of one's life." The reason, La Mordida makes clear, lies partly in the aesthetic theories that led Lowry to attempt a book that he prophetically called "something never dreamed of before, a work of art so beyond conception it could not be written."Patrick A. McCarthy's edition of La Mordida is based on materials held in the Malcolm Lowry Archive at the University of British Columbia. Its publication provides essential evidence for a balanced assessment of Lowry's creative processes and his achievement as a writer.

Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment is an essay collection that explores the inner and outer natures of remarkable human and nonhuman beings. It is a book about paying attention--with the mind and with the heart. The essays confront the ethical and personal challenges Renata Golden faced in a harsh and isolated environment and examine the power of nature to influence her understanding of the human spirit. The lessons she learned on the borders of Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico jolted her out of her customary way of seeing the world--which is the transformative power of a thin place, where the borders between the sublime and the profane melt away. The essays call attention to the animals that are often shunned--pack rats, rattlesnakes, ants, prairie dogs, and other desert dwellers that some consider better dead than alive. Many of the animals in these essays are at risk of extinction. The essays honor these animals for the role they play in the wild world and for their unique abilities, such as cooperative societies and complex language skills. By recognizing the animals' value, Golden gives readers reasons to be moved to save them, if it's not too late.

In this richly suggestive overview, a noted historian illuminates the variety and vitality of southern religion by examining three major Protestant denominational families in the region: Baptists, "Christians" (for example, the Churches of Christ), and the "of God" groups (Pentecostals, among others). Ranging in coverage from the colonial period to the present, with special emphasis on the nineteenth century, Samuel S. Hill traces the growth and diversification of each of these groups as they have sloughed off old patterns, conventions, and constraints in their never-ending searches for systems of belief and modes of expression that better embody their convictions and fit their socioeconomic situations. Throughout One Name but Several Faces, Hill turns again and again to the interrelated themes of freedom, creativity, and discontinuity that emerge from the major transitions of southern religious history: the toppling of the old Europe-influenced religious establishment and the emergence of Baptists and Methodists; the informal, unofficial "establishment" of folk religious formations; the rapid growth of separate and independent black churches and denominations; and the beginning of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements. Within this context of religious trends and events, Hill also points to other factors that have affected both the formation and the ongoing capacity for transformation of southern religious groups. Such factors include war, sectionalism, urbanization, industrialization, and new currents of thought. Internal forces are also constantly at work in the religious South, says Hill. He points to a medley of sacred and secular concerns, manifested as "freedoms," that have driven religious history from the bottom up and fueled the seemingly constant splinterings and regroupings of some denominations. Some of these ideals stem from democratic principles and the theological heritage of the Reformation; others are in response to major economic and social changes. Among them are the freedoms from church and theological systems; from constraining conventions of polite society; from domination by higher social classes or by traditions perceived as inviolate; and from restraints on holistic human expression, in spirit, body, and emotions. The story of southern religion, says Hill, is one of courage, imagination, and persistence. Not only does One Name but Several Faces bring into sharper focus some of the political, social, and economic contours of the religious South, it also affirms the value of some challenging new trends in historiography that allow for southern religious complexity and division without deadening or downplaying its dynamism.

The Percys, one the most distinguished families in the South, are notable not only for their prominence in the political and economic development of the Mississippi Delta but also for their literary creativity. In The Literary Percys, noted historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown examines the role of gender and family history in the writings of this exceptional lineage. Few families in American can claim so many gifted writers as the Percys. The best-known among them are novelist Walker Percy, who died in 1990, and his cousin and guardian, William Alexander Percy, poet and author of the classic memoir Lanterns on the Levee. In researching the family's history, however, Wyatt-Brown discovered that Walker and Will were not the first in the family to take up the pen. In the nineteenth century, four Percy-related women--Eleanor Percy Ware Lee, Catherine Ann Ware Warfield, Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey, and Kate Ferguson--published a total of eighteen works, chiefly novels, but also books of poetry and a biography. Wyatt-Brown examines these achievements in the context of contemporary Delta society and in light of these writers' lives within a family of powerful planters and lawyers. Through these four women he also draws connections between the Percys' literary inclinations and the family's tendency toward melancholy--a disorder with which Walker Percy was burdened throughout his life. In the twentieth century, Wyatt-Brown observes, the male authors--Will and Walker Percy--reflected on the ravages of modern life using a wider range of forms, from philosophical essay to memoir to science fiction. Curiously, in composing Lancelot (1977) Walker Percy chose the gothic form that his collateral ancestors had sometimes adopted, and fashioned a plot and villainous hero bearing uncanny resemblances to those of a bestseller by Catherine Warfield, published more than one hundred years earlier. Finally, Wyatt-Brown explores Walker Percy's use of a purely male genre--namely, the mock-heroic--and how it reflected his personal and familial concerns. The Literary Percys uncovers an impressive family history and offers fascinating details about southern literary life.

This is the long-awaited second volume of Godfrey and Wooten's definitive survey of aquatic and wetland plants of the southeastern United States. It focuses on native and naturalized dicotyledons of the region and provides well-written, concise descriptions and keys for the identification of 1,084 species. A glossary of terms, list of references, separate indexes of common and scientific names, and nearly 400 well-executed drawings complete the volume. The first comprehensive survey of the aquatic and wetland plants of the Southeast, the Godfrey and Wooten volumes will prove invaluable to botanists, ecologists, college students, government agencies involved in land-use management, and nonspecialists interested in the plant life and ecology of the region.

In September 1857, Léon Chautard, Charles Bivors, and Hippolyte Paon arrived in Salem, Massachusetts. These refugees from the French Revolution of 1848 were "homeless, penniless, friendless, strangers in a strange land, among a people of strange speech," as one of their advocates, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, later put it. The only thing they had was a story to tell--an affecting, yet thrilling story of revolutionary upheaval, forced exile, and hairbreadth escapes over three continents. Following the June Days uprising in Paris, the three French socialists had been transported first to Algeria, then to Cayenne. After years of hard labor, they had escaped the penal colony and made their way to the United States via British Guiana. These experiences brought them into close contact with the colonial frontiers and slave societies of the Americas. In Salem, Chautard soon published an account of their trials under the title Escapes from Cayenne (1857). His pamphlet, which has long sunk into oblivion, deserves rediscovery. Escapes from Cayenne sheds light on the ideological connections between the European "spirit of 1848" and U.S. radical abolitionism and reveals the scope of cosmopolitan solidarities available to fugitives of different national and racial origins in the mid-nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Written in English by a Frenchman, and reminiscent of literary traditions such as the slave narrative and the picaresque novel, it is a tale of adventure as well as a passionate cri de coeurfor universal justice.

Heartsick and Astonished features twenty-seven divorce cases from mid-nineteenth century America. More than dry legal documents, these cases provide a captivating window into marital life--and strife--in the border South during the tumultuous years before, during, and after the Civil War. Allison Dorothy Fredette has brought these primary documents to light, revealing the inner thoughts, legal hardships, and day-to-day struggles of these average citizens. In Wheeling, West Virginia, the seat of Ohio County, courtrooms bore witness to men and women from various ethnic, racial, and class backgrounds who shared shockingly intimate details of their lives and relationships. Some tried desperately to defend their masculinity or femininity; others hoped to restore their reputations to the legal system and to their community. In an era of uncertainty--when the country was torn in two, when the Wheeling community became the capital of a new state, and when activists across the country began to push for women's rights in the household and family--the divorce cases of ordinary couples reveal changing attitudes toward marriage, gender, and legal separation in a booming border city perched on the edge of the South.

Designed specially for undergraduate course use, this new textbook is both an introduction to the study of American slavery and a reader of core texts on the subject. No other volume that combines both primary and secondary readings covers such a span of time--from the early seventeenth century to the Civil War. The book begins with a substantial introduction to the entire volume that gives an overview of slavery in North America. Each of the twelve chapters that follow has an introduction that discusses the leading secondary books and articles on the topic in question, followed by an essay and three primary documents. Questions for further study and discussion are included in the chapter introduction, while further readings are suggested in the chapter bibliography. Topics covered include slave culture, the slave-based economy, slavery and the law, slave resistance, pro-slavery ideology, abolition, and emancipation. The essays, by such eminent historians as Drew Gilpin Faust, Don E. Fehrenbacher, Eric Foner, John Hope Franklin, and Sylvia R. Frey, have been selected for their teaching value and ability to provoke discussion. Drawing on black and white, male and female experiences, the primary documents come from a wide variety of sources: diaries, letters, laws, debates, oral testimonies, travelers' accounts, inventories, journals, autobiographies, petitions, and novels.

Until recently, the American South has often been treated in isolation by historians and literary critics. In these essays five scholars of southern history and literature evaluate elements of contemporary--and future--southern experience, including place, community, culture, class, gender, and racial roles. Fred Hobson observes in his introductory essay that the U.S. South must be seen in relation to a larger world--the Caribbean and Central and South America, as well as European countries with a similar grounding in hardship and defeat. Moreover, the South can no longer be viewed in black-and-white terms--especially if the subject is race. Joel Williamson's essay challenges fellow historians to broaden their purview by getting acquainted with Gone with the Wind, Elvis Presley, and other phenomena of southern culture(s). Linda Wagner-Martin discusses the innovative ways in which contemporary southern writers such as Charles Frazier take on traditional southern concerns and shows us how "place becomes space" for Alice Walker, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, and other southern-born writers whose works are often set outside the geographical South. Thadious Davis looks at the "youngsters" of southern poetry, fiction, and drama, revealing how their work reflects a racially and ethnically mixed, digitized, and otherwise reconfigured South. In the writings of Shay Youngblood, Randall Kenan, Donna Tartt, Mona Lisa Salloy, and others, one can see the collapsing of distinctions between the literary and the popular, and a greater comfort with social fluidity and mobility. The concluding essay by Edward Ayers, set in 2076, offers a witty glimpse of things-perhaps-to-come. Through a series of short dispatches from a sixteen-year-old narrator of Scottish-Ghanian-Honduran-Korean-Cherokee descent, Ayers transports us to the Consolidated South that counts Incarceration Incorporated among its largest employers. As these writings signal new depths and directions in southern historical and literary studies, they compose a witty and erudite album of snapshots, revealing a region on the verge of big changes.

At once upholding and refuting the South's conservative image, The Countercultural South explores the politically divergent cultures of resistance created by poor white and working-class black southern men. With humor and insight, Jack Temple Kirby traces these racially and politically opposed cultures back to the antebellum encounter between the anti-capitalistic South and the capitalist individualism identified with the North. In a wide-ranging discussion encompassing the blues, sharecropping, and contemporary black intellectuals, Kirby shows how the needful practice of black labor bargaining in the South resulted in a progressive black tradition of verbal negotiation. The conservative separatism and retro-resistance of rural whites, Kirby argues, is embedded in an inherited and adversarial frontier ethos valuing self-sufficiency and access to wilderness. With the southern landscape imaginatively as well as factually linked to social class, crime--particularly forest arson--becomes the most important form of southern white countercultural expression. Kirby continues his look at white resistance in a review of "redneck" discourse, examining the public reputation of southern whites through a range of cultural phenomena, from literature to country music to the computer network known as BUBBA-L. Original, personal, and artfully written, The Countercultural South offers fresh reflections on southern exceptionalism in American political life and culture.

The Souls of Jewish Folk argues that late nineteenth-century Germany's struggle with its "Jewish question"--what to do with Germany's Jews--served as an important and to-date underexamined influence on W.E.B. Du Bois's considerations of America's anti-Black racism at the turn of the twentieth century. Du Bois is well known for his characterization of the twentieth century's greatest challenge, "the problem of the color line." This proposition gained prominence in the conception of Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which engages the questions of race, racial domination, and racial exploitation. James M. Thomas contends that this conception of racism is haunted by the specter of the German Jew. In 1892 Du Bois received a fellowship for his graduate studies at the University of Berlin from the John F. Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen. While a student in Berlin, Du Bois studied with some of that nation's most prominent social scientists. What The Souls of Jewish Folk asks readers to take seriously, then, is how our ideas, and indeed intellectual work itself, are shaped by and embedded within the nexus of people, places, and prevailing contexts of their time. With this book, Thomas examines how the major social, political, and economic events of Du Bois's own life--including his time spent living and learning in a late nineteenth-century Germany defined in no small part by its violent anti-Semitism--constitute the soil from which his most serious ideas about race, racism, and the global color line sprang forth.

These twelve previously unpublished essays present innovative and practical ideas for addressing the harmful effects of sprawl. Sprawl is not only an ongoing focus of specialized magazines like Dwell; indeed, Time magazine has cited "recycling the suburbs" as the second of "Ten Ideas Changing the World Right Now." While most conversations on sprawl tend to focus on its restriction, this book presents an overview of current thinking on ways to fix, repair, and retrofit existing sprawl. Chapters by planners, geographers, designers, and architects present research grounded in diverse locales including Phoenix, Arizona; Seattle, Washington; Dublin, Ohio; and the Atlanta, Georgia, and Washington, D.C. metro areas. The authors address head-on the most controversial aspects of sprawl--issues of power and control, justice and equity, and American attitudes about regulating private development. But they also put these issues in practical contexts, bringing in examples of redesign that are already occurring around the country, including the retrofitting of corridors and the repurposing of cul-de-sacs. Whether fixing sprawl requires a "cultural shift" in thinking or a "coordinated effort" by local government, these essays testify that a combination of forethought and creative thinking will be needed.