Search results for ""University of South Carolina Press""

A series of road trips through the American South leads to a personal confrontation with history.

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Drawing on original archival research in the rhetoric of civil rights, the author explores this largely underexamined rhetorical studies site In Liturgy of Change: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting, Elizabeth Miller examines civil rights mass meetings as a transformative rhetorical, and religious, experience. While rhetorical scholars have analyzed other 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 a significant but underexamined 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.

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Founded on a small parcel of land in 1801, the University of South Carolina has expanded beyond the boundaries of its original campus, the historic Horseshoe, to become a large 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.The 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 its thrilling Gamecock sports that fans cheer throughout the year. Enjoy this colorful "walk" across campus and relive your own experience at one of America's most beautiful universities. Whether you are a current student, an alumnus, or a faithful Gamecock fan, this album will bring your memories of Carolina into focus.

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When civil rights leader Hosea Lorenzo Williams died in 2000, U.S. Congressman John Lewis said of him, "Hosea Williams must be looked upon as one of the founding fathers of the new America. Through his actions, he helped liberate all of us."In this first comprehensive biography of Williams, Rolundus Rice demonstrates the truth in Lewis's words and argues that Williams's activism in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was of central importance to the success of the larger civil rights movement. Rice traces Williams's journey from a local activist in Georgia to a national leader and one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s chief lieutenants. He helped plan the Selma-to-Montgomery march and walked shoulder-to-shoulder with Lewis across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on "Bloody Sunday." While his hard-charging tactics were counter to the diplomatic approach of other SCLC leaders, Rice argues that it was this contrast in styles that made the organization successful.Andrew Young Jr., former SCLC executive director, U.S. Congressman, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and mayor of Atlanta, provides a foreword.

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Women have played a vital role in shaping the course of South Carolina since the earliest days of human settlement. From organizers to educators, from medical professionals to civic leaders, from politicians to cultural icons, the entries in 101 Women Who Shaped South Carolina shed light on the many and varied contributions women have made both within the state and beyond. Drawing from the landmark text The South Carolina Encyclopedia, this volume presents readers with short biographical essays that are informative and accessible. Arranged chronologically, they provide, in their totality, a concise history of the state and the women who shaped it. A foreword is provided by Walter Edgar, Neuffer Professor of Southern Studies Emeritus and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina.

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The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History presents the first such narrative of the earth's tenth largest body of water. In this beautifully written and illustrated volume, John S. Sledge explores the people, ships, and cities that have made the Gulf's human history and culture so rich. Many famous figures who sailed the Gulf's viridian waters are highlighted, including Ponce de León, Robert Cavelier de La Salle, Francis Drake, Jean Laffite, Tyrone Power, Richard Henry Dana, Libbie Custer, Elizabeth Agassiz, Ernest Hemingway, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as Charles Dwight Sigsbee, at the helm of the doomed Maine. But Sledge also introduces a fascinating and diverse array of people connected to maritime life in the Gulf, including Mesoamerican pyramid builders, Spanish conquistadores, French pirates, Creole women, Cajun fishermen, African American stevedores, British jack-tars, and Greek sponge divers.Gulf events of global historical importance are detailed, such as the only defeat of armed and armored steamships by wooden sailing vessels, the first accurate deep-sea survey and bathymetric map of any ocean basin, the development of shipping containers by a former truck driver frustrated with antiquated loading practices, and the worst environmental disaster in American annals.Occasionally shifting focus ashore, Sledge explains how people representing a gumbo of ethnicities built some of the world's most exotic cities--Havana, way station for conquistadores and treasure-filled galleons; New Orleans, the Big Easy, famous for its beautiful French Quarter, Mardi Gras, and relaxed morals; and oft-besieged Veracruz, Mexico's oldest city, founded in 1519 by Hernán Cortés. Throughout history the residents of these cities and their neighbors along the littoral have struggled with challenges both natural and human-induced--devastating hurricanes, frightening epidemics, catastrophic oil spills, and conflicts ranging from dockside brawls to pirate raids, foreign invasion, civil war, and revolution. In the modern era the Gulf has become critical to energy Production, fisheries, tourism, and international trade, even as it is threatened by pollution and climate change. The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History is a work of verve and sweep that illuminates both the risks of life on the water and the riches that come from its bounty.

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Robert Smalls, born a slave in 1839 in Beaufort, South Carolina, gained fame as an African American hero of the American Civil War. The Freedom Ship of Robert Smalls tells the inspirational story of Small’s life as a slave, his boyhood dream of freedom, and his bold and daring plan as a young man to commandeer a Confederate gunboat from Charleston Harbor and escape with fifteen fellow slaves and family members. Smalls joined the Union Navy, rose to the rank of captain, and became the first African American to command a U.S. service ship. After the war Smalls returned to Beaufort, bought the home of his former master, and began a long career in state and national politics.Originally published in 1971, this new edition of The Freedom Ship of Robert Smalls features Louise Meriwether’s original narrative, now illustrated by the colorful paintings of renowned Southern artist Jonathan Green.

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The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth was originally released in 1994 and was the first published book from acclaimed writer Ron Rash. This twentieth anniversary edition takes us back to where it all began with ten linked short stories, framed like a novel, introducing us to a trio of memorable narrators - Tracy, Randy, and Vincent - making their way against the hardscrabble backdrop of the North Carolina foothills. With a comedic touch that may surprise readers familiar only with Rash's later, darker fiction, these earnest tales reveal the hard lessons of good whiskey, bad marriages, weak foundations, familial legacies, questionable religious observances, and the dubious merits of possum breeding, as well as the hard-won reconciliations with self, others, and home that can only be garnered in good time. The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth shows us the promising beginnings of a master storyteller honing his craft and contributing from the start to the fine traditions of southern fiction and lore. This Southern Revivals edition includes a new introduction from the author and a contextualizing preface from series editor Robert H. Brinkmeyer, director of the University of South Carolina Institute for Southern Studies.

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Tideland Treasure is an illustrated guide to the beaches and marshes of the Eastern United States coast, encompassing seashores and wetlands from Ocean City, New Jersey, to Cape Canaveral, Florida. Rich with true-to-life illustrations and hand-written text, this handsome guidebook captures the nature of the sea, beach, salt marsh, plants, and animals of the region in an easy to understand text. Common names are used to make the information memorable for casual beachcombers and amateur naturalists alike.This newly expanded edition includes fifty new colour illustrations, a new foreword, five new essays, a new glossary of tideland terms, and a new index of common and scientific names of tideland species.

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This book describes a career politician's pragmatic remedies for broken government, drawn from a half-century of political leadership experience.""Performance is better than promise"" has long been the motto of Ernest F. ""Fritz"" Hollings, former governor of South Carolina and 6-term U.S. Senator. In this political autobiography of his 50-year career in public service, Hollings takes to task our flawed political machine and pulls from his own experiences compelling - and often colorfully candid - accounts how one makes government work in spite of itself. Confrontational at times toward those individuals and issues he cites as to blame for deadlocking government and putting America ""in the ditch"", Hollings proves through his crystal clear prose he is deeply committed to improving our system of government, strengthening regulations on free trade, countering dependence on wooing campaign contributions, and enhancing our communication and education systems to better compete in an information-driven global market. Hollings details specific instances from his past of moments when bold leadership and smart use of resources and authority led to positive differences in the lives of Americans. It is his mission through this volume to reinvigorate a floundering system and call good people and good ideas back into the service of America's future.

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From its summits to its shores, South Carolina brims with life and unparalleled beauty thanks to its abundant array of native and naturalized flora, all carefully documented in this revised and expanded edition of A Guide to the Wildflowers of South Carolina. Dramatic advances in plant taxonomy and ecology have occurred since the guide's publication 20 years ago; new species have been discovered while others struggle to survive in the face of vanishing habitats and climate change.The authors, all experienced botanists, offer essays on carnivorous plants, native orchids, Carolina bays, the roles and effects of fire and agriculture on the landscape, and detailed descriptions of the plant communities throughout the state's major natural regions. This expanded edition catalogs nearly 1,000 species organized by habitat, with descriptions, color photographs, range maps, and comments on pharmacological uses, suitability for garden cultivation, origin of common and scientific names, and conservation status.

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Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877–1934) established a reputation as one of the early twentieth century's foremost authorities on the history of African American slavery and the Old South. An empiricist, Phillips approached his subjects analytically and dispassionately, and his scholarship shaped historical investigation of the South for decades. Phillips was an empiricist and based his writing on an array of primary sources, including a growing collection of photographs he accumulated during his research. These images of plantation crops and machinery, agricultural scenes, distinctive architecture, white southerners, and former slaves and their descendants collectively record much about the life and labour in the rural South three decades before the Farm Security Administration undertook its own documentary projects during the New Deal.In Seeing the New South, photography historian Patricia Bellis Bixel and Phillips scholar and historian John David Smith delve into the visual record Phillips left behind, publishing many of these photographs for the first time, and integrating his photographic archive with his research and teachings on the history of the South. For example, his Life and Labor in the Old South, published in 1929, was well illustrated with useful photographs. The bulk of Phillips's papers resides in the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. The collection includes sixty lantern slides and many photographic prints that Phillips employed in his work. Bixel and Smith uncovered another five hundred images that greatly expanded Phillips's visual archive. Taken between 1904 and 1930, these images provide glimpses of a Southern landscape rarely seen and even more rarely photographed, offering a striking visual account of early-twentieth-century life in the rural South.Phillips deliberately sought out images of buildings and agricultural scenes emblematic of the South, representative portraits of white and black southerners, and distinctive depictions of farm and town life. Some photographs reinforce Phillips's arguments about the general backwardness of an impoverished rural South and about the limitations of the region's agricultural and industrial economies. But his images also documented active independent black and white communities with diverse economic practices and subcultures. This first-ever collection of Phillips's photographs provides dramatic documentation of economic and social life during an era seldom captured on film, yielding striking visual portraits of human dignity in black and white.

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An examination of the influential role music played in the lives of elite southern women during the antebellum periodIn Charleston Belles Abroad, Candace Bailey examines the vital role music collections played in the lives of elite women of Charleston, South Carolina, in the years leading up to the Civil War.Bailey has studied a substantial archive of music held at several southern libraries, including the library in the historic Aiken-Rhett House, once owned by William Aiken Jr., a successful businessman, rice planter, and governor of South Carolina. Her skill as a musicologist enables her to examine the collections as primary sources for gaining a better understanding of musical culture, instruction, private performance, cultural tourism, and the history of the music industry during this period.The bound and unbound collections and their associated publications show that international travel and music education in Europe were common among Charleston’s elite families. While abroad, the budding musicians purchased the latest music publications and brought them back to Charleston, where they often performed them in private and at semipublic events.Through a narrow exploration of the collections of these elite women, Bailey exposes the cultural priorities within one of the South’s most influential cities and illuminates both the commonalities and discrepancies in the training of young women to enter society. A noteworthy contribution to southern and urban history, Charleston Belles Abroad provides a deep study of music in the context of transatlantic values, interpersonal relationships, and stability and tumult in the South during the nineteenth century.

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Peter Wolfe's study of Penelope Fitzgerald's canon illuminates writings he characterizes as possessing unerring dramatic judgment, a friendly and fluid style, and lyrical and precise descriptive passages. In this survey of Fitzgerald's life and career, Wolfe explains how the British novelist brings resources of talent and craft, thought and feeling, courage and vulnerability, to the biographies and novels that have earned her renown. With readings of a broad range of her published works, including her final novel, The Blue Flower, Wolfe describes the unfolding of Fitzgerald's writing as a subtle, ongoing process. He maintains that the novels, though plain and rambling at first glance, grow fuller, stranger, and more stirring the more we invest in them. He details Fitzgerald's skill at sequencing events so as to unsettle readers and her ability to enhance motifs by not leaning too hard on them. Wolfe suggests that Fitzgerald's refusal to overplay effects and emotions, while at first puzzling in its disdain for drama, turns out to be one of her chief virtues, for she enables larger associations to emerge as she keeps big dramatic scenes from interfering with wider patterns. While enumerating Fitzgerald's many talents, Wolfe ultimately attributes much of her success to her style. He concludes that her exceptionally disciplined prose, which gives voice to her candor and compassion, imbues her work with a sense of mood, place, and character.

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An unprecedented wave of interest in building new cultural institutions swept through America from the end of the Civil War through the first decade of the twentieth century. Traditionally historians have told us that this sea change was the work of various elites intent on controlling the turmoil and divisions that accompanied the industrialization of the American economy. In Building Culture, Richard Teichgraeber rejects this hierarchical account to pursue one that highlights the multiplicity of attitudes and interests that were on display in America's first great effort to build national cultural institutions. Teichgraeber also lays the groundwork of a new interpretive framework for understanding this multisided effort. Most native-born American champions of ""culture,"" he contends, viewed it as an authentically individualistic ideal. For them the concept continued to carry its antebellum meaning of self-culture—that is, individual self-development or self-improvement—and thus was quite resistant to closure around any single fixed definition of what being cultivated might mean. They also recognized that in America culture had to connect with the choices of ordinary men and women and therefore had to be fashioned to serve the uses of a democratic rather than an aristocratic society. To show how and why this inclusive view of culture was accompanied by a prodigious expansion of American cultural institutions, Teichgraeber also explores two of the central but still inadequately mapped developments in the intellectual and cultural history of the industrial era: the multifaceted—and ultimately successful—effort to secure Ralph Waldo Emerson a central place in American culture at large; and the growth and consolidation of the American university system, certainly the most important of the new cultural institutions built during the industrial era. Elegantly written and featuring twenty-two illustrations, Building Culture expands our knowledge of the formation of modern American culture and opens new paths of inquiry into contemporary cultural and intellectual concerns.

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Among the most celebrated American poets of the past half century, Adrienne Rich was the recipient of awards ranging from the Bollingen Prize, to the National Book Award, to the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. In this book, Jeannette E. Riley assesses the full scope of Rich's career through a chronological exploration of her poetry and prose.

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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.

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Places Greenville's experience during World War I within the context of the progressive era to better understand the rise of this New South cityGreenville, South Carolina has become an attractive destination, frequently included in lists of the "Best Small Cities" in America. While Greenville's 21st century Renaissance has been impressive, in "Our Country First, Then Greenville," author Courtney Louise Tollison Hartness explores an earlier period, revealing how Greenville's experience during World War I served to generate massive development in the city and the region. It was this moment that catalyzed Greenville's development into a modern city, setting the stage for the continued growth that persists into the present-day.World War I affected Greenville and its residents in ways both big and small. "Our Country First, Then Greenville" explores Greenville's home-front experience of race relations, dramatic population growth (the number of Greenville residents nearly tripled between 1900 and 1930s), the women's suffrage movement, and the contributions of African Americans and women to Greenville's history. Tollison Hartness studies the influenza pandemic of that time, explores the stories behind the Greenville building boom of the 1910s and 1920s, and shares the rich and scandalous story of Greenville's Confederate Memorial. She argues that Greenville's experience during World War I cannot be separated from Progressive-era civic engagement, and that wartime mobilization catapulted Greenville into the ranks of the New South's important urban centers. This important work features newly discovered photos of Greenville, found in archival collections throughout the country and dating back over 100 years.

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The battle for equality in education during the civil rights era came at a cost to Black Americans on the frontlines. In 1964 when fourteen-year-old June Manning Thomas walked into Orangeburg High School as one of thirteen Black students selected to integrate the all-White school, her classmates mocked, shunned, and yelled racial epithets at her. The trauma she experienced made her wonder if the slow-moving progress was worth the emotional sacrifice. In Struggling to Learn, Thomas, revisits her life growing up in the midst of the civil rights movement before, during, and after desegregation and offers an intimate look at what she and other members of her community endured as they worked to achieve equality for Black students in K-12 schools and higher education.Through poignant personal narrative, supported by meticulous research, Thomas retraces the history of Black education in South Carolina from the post-Civil War era to the present. Focusing largely on events that took place in Orangeburg, South Carolina, during the 1950s and 1960s, Thomas reveals how local leaders, educators, parents, and the NAACP joined forces to improve the quality of education for Black children in the face of resistance from White South Carolinians. Thomas's experiences and the efforts of local activists offer relevant insight because Orangeburg was home to two Black colleges—South Carolina State University and Claflin University—that cultivated a community of highly educated and engaged Black citizens. With help from the NAACP, residents filed several lawsuits to push for equality. In the notable Briggs v. Elliott, Black parents in neighboring Clarendon County sued the school board to challenge segregation after the county ignored their petitions requesting a school bus for their children. That court case became one of five that led to Brown v. Board of Education and the landmark 1954 decision that declared school segregation illegal. Despite the ruling, South Carolina officials did not integrate any public schools until 1963 and the majority of them refused to admit Black students until subsequent court cases, and ultimately the intervention of the federal government, forced all schools to start desegregating in the fall of 1970.In Struggling to Learn, Thomas reflects on the educational gains made by Black South Carolinians during the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, how they were achieved, and why Black people persisted despite opposition and hostility from White citizens. In the final chapters, she explores the current state of education for Black children and young adults in South Carolina and assesses what has been improved and learned through this collective struggle.

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Nancy Roberts's Southern Ghost Lore Revival--Exhumed and Improved for Fearless Readers.Nancy Roberts has often been described to as the "First Lady of American Folklore" and the Title is well deserved. Throughout her decades-long career, Roberts documented supernatural experiences and interviewed hundreds of people about their recollections of encounters with the supernatural.This nationally renowned writer began her undertaking in this ghostly realm as a freelance writer for the Charlotte Observer. Encouraged by Carl Sandburg, who enjoyed her stories and articles, Roberts wrote her first book in 1958. Aptly called a "custodian of the twilight zone" by Southern Living magazine, Roberts based her suspenseful stories on interviews and her rich knowledge of American folklore. Her stories were always rooted in history, which earned her a certificate of commendation from the American Association of State and Local History for her books on the Carolinas and Appalachia.

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Set in the early 1950s rural South, One Good Mama Bone chronicles Sarah Creamer’s quest to find her “mama bone” after she is left to care for a boy who is not her own but instead is the product of an affair between her husband and her best friend and neighbor, a woman she calls “Sister.” When her husband drinks himself to death, Sarah, a dirt-poor homemaker with no family to rely on and the note on the farm long past due, must find a way for her and young Emerson Bridge to survive. But the more daunting obstacle is Sarah’s fear that her mother’s words, seared in her memory since she first heard them at the age of six, were a prophesy: “You ain’t got you one good mama bone in you, girl.”When Sarah reads in the local newspaper that a boy won $680 with his Grand Champion steer at the recent 1951 Fat Cattle Show & Sale, she sees this as their financial salvation and finds a way to get Emerson Bridge a steer from a local farmer to compete in the 1952 show. But the young calf is unsettled at Sarah’s farm, crying out in distress and growing louder as the night wears on. Some four miles away, the steer’s mother hears his cries and breaks out of a barbed-wire fence to go in search of him. The next morning Sarah finds the young steer quiet, content, and nursing on a large cow. Inspired by the mother cow’s act of love, Sarah names her Mama Red. And so Sarah’s education in motherhood begins with Mama Red as her teacher.But Luther Dobbins, the man who sold Sarah the steer, has his sights set on winning too, and, like Sarah, he is desperate, but not for money. Dobbins is desperate for glory, wanting to regain his lost Grand Champion dynasty, and he will stop at nothing to win. Emboldened by her lessons from Mama Red and her budding mama bone, Sarah is fully committed to victory until she learns the winning steer’s ultimate fate. Will she stop at nothing, even if it means betraying her teacher?McClain’s writing is distinguished by a sophisticated and detailed portrayal of the day-to-day realities of rural poverty and an authentic sense of time and place that marks the best southern fiction. Her characters transcend their archetypes, and her animal-as-teacher theme recalls the likes of Water for Elephants and The Art of Racing in the Rain. One Good Mama Bone explores the strengths and limitations of parental love, the healing power of the human-animal bond, and the ethical dilemmas of raising animals for food. Mary Alice Monroe, a New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of eighteen novels and two children's books, provides a foreword to the novel.

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More Than a Likeness: The Enduring Art of Mary Whyte is the first comprehensive book on the life and work of one of today's most renowned watercolourists. From Whyte's earliest paintings in rural Ohio and Pennsylvania, to the riveting portraits of her southern neighbours, historian Martha R. Severens provides us with an intimate look into the artist's private world.With more than two hundred full-colour images of Whyte's paintings and sketches, as well as comparison works by masters such as Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, and John Singer Sargent, Severens clearly illustrates how Whyte's art has been shaped and how the artist forged her own place in the world today. Though Whyte's academic training in Philadelphia was in oil painting, she learned the art of watercolour on her own--by studying masterworks in museums. Today Whyte's style of watercolour painting is a unique blend of classical realism and contemporary vision, as seen in her intimate portraits of Southern blue-collar workers and elderly African American women in the South Carolina lowcountry. ""For me ideas are more plentiful than the hours to paint them, and I worry that I cannot get to all of my thoughts before they are forgotten or are pushed aside by more pressing concerns,"" explains Whyte. ""Some works take time to evolve. Like small seeds the paintings might not come to fruition until several years later, after there has been ample time for germination."" Using broad sweeping washes as well as miniscule brushstrokes, Whyte directs the viewer's attention to the areas in her paintings she deems most important. Murky passages of neutral colours often give way to areas of intense detail and colour, giving the works a variety of edges and poetic focus. Several paintings included in the book are accompanied by enlarged areas of detail, showcasing Whyte's technical mastery. More Than a Likeness is replete with engaging artwork and inspiring text that mark the mid-point in Whyte's artistry. Of what she will paint in the future, the artist says, ""I have always believed that as artists we don't choose our vocation, style, or subject matter. Art chooses us.

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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.

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Provides a corrective to a neglected aspect of Jewish history in the SouthDiane C. 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.

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in drama as well as Tony Awards for best play and best actor, Tracy Letts has emerged as one of the greatest playwrights of the twenty-first century.Understanding Tracy Letts, the first book dedicated to his writing, is an introduction to his plays and an invitation to engage more deeply with his work--both for its emotional power and cultural commentary.Experiencing a Tracy Letts play often feels akin to reading a Cormac McCarthy novel, watching a Cohen Brothers film, and seeing an episode of Breaking Bad at the same time. His characters can be ruthlessly cruel and funny, selfish and generous, delusional and incisive, and deceptive and painfully honest. They keep secrets. They harbor biases and misconceptions. And in their quest to find love and understanding, they often end up being the greatest impediments to their own happiness. As a writer, Letts can move seamlessly from the milieu of a Texas trailer park to the pulsating nightlife of London's countercultural scene, the stifling quiet of small-town Ohio to the racial tensions of urban Chicago. He thrives in the one-act format, in plays like Mary Page Marlow and The Minutes, as well as the epic scope of August: Osage County and Linda Vista. With a musician's sense of timing, Letts shifts between humor and heartache, silence and sound, and the mundane and the poetic. And he fearlessly tackles issues such as gender bias, racism, homophobia, and disability rights. Contemporary American life thus becomes a way to comment on the country's troubled history from Native American genocide to the civil rights movement. The personal narratives of his characters become gateways to the political.Understanding Tracy Letts celebrates the range of Letts's writing, in part, by applying different critical approaches to his works. Whether through the lens of disability studies, the conspiracy genre, food studies, the feminist politics of quilting, or masculinity studies, these readings help bring out the thematic richness and sociopolitical dimensions of Letts's work.

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The presence of African influence and tradition in the Americas has long been recognized in art, music, language, agriculture, and religion. T. J. Desch Obi explores another cultural continuity that is as old as eighteenth-century slave settlements in South America and as contemporary as hip-hop culture. In this thorough survey of the history of African martial arts techniques, Obi maps the translation of numerous physical combat techniques across three continents and several centuries to illustrate how these practices evolved over time and are still recognizable in American culture today. Some of these art traditions were part of African military training while others were for self-defense and spiritual discipline.Grounded in historical and cultural anthropological methodologies, Obi's investigation traces the influence of well-delineated African traditions on long-observed but misunderstood African and African American cultural activities in North America, Brazil, and the Caribbean. He links the Brazilian martial art capoeira to reports of slave activities recorded in colonial and antebellum North America. Likewise Obi connects images of the kalenda African stick-fighting techniques to the Haitian Revolution. Throughout the study Obi examines the ties between physical mastery of these arts and changing perceptions of honor.Including forty-five illustrations, this rich history of the arrival and dissemination of African martial arts in the Atlantic world offers a new vantage for furthering our understanding of the powerful influence of enslaved populations on our collective social history.

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Although he is best known as a mentor to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Howard Thurman (1900-1981) was an exceptional philosopher and public intellectual in his own right. In Howard Thurman: Philosophy, Civil Rights, and the Search for Common Ground, Kipton E. Jensen provides new ways of understanding Thurman's foundational role in and broad influence on the civil rights movement and argues persuasively that he is one of the unsung heroes of that time. While Thurman's profound influence on King has been documented, Jensen shows how Thurman's reach extended to an entire generation of activists. Thurman espoused a unique brand of personalism. Jensen explicates Thurman's construction of a philosophy on nonviolence and the political power of love. Showing how Thurman was a "social activist mystic" as well as a pragmatist, Jensen explains how these beliefs helped provide the foundation for King's notion of the beloved community.Throughout his life Thurman strove to create a climate of "inner unity of fellowship that went beyond the barriers of race, class, and tradition." In this volume Jensen meticulously documents and analyzes Thurman as a philosopher, activist, and peacemaker and illuminates his vital and founding role in and contributions to the monumental achievements of the civil rights era.

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An illuminating study of an award-winning writer who captured the complex challenges twentieth-century women faced in their struggle for independence.In Understanding Alice Adams, Bryant Mangum examines the thematic intricacies and astute social commentary of Adams’s eleven novels and five short story collections. Throughout her career Adams was known for creating and re-creating the “Alice Adams woman,” who is bright, honest, attractive, thoughtful—and sometimes a bit offbeat. As Mangum notes, Adams’s central characters—her heroes—are most often women struggling toward self-sufficiency and independence as they strive to fulfill their responsibilities, including child rearing and other societal commitments.After an overview of Adams’s life (1926– 1999), Mangum groups the novels and stories by the decades in which they were published, since shifts in the thematic arc of Adams’s fiction break conveniently along those lines. He explains how Adams used the novel as an extended workshop for her short fiction. Her novels cover wide swaths of the American experience, and from these sweeping narratives she distilled her sharp, lyrical, vibrant short stories, which earned her 23 O. Henry Awards—including six first-place recognitions and a lifetime achievement award—an honor shared with only Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, and Alice Munro.In this study Mangum explores how Adams treats love, family, work, friendship, and nostalgia. He identifies hope as a thread that links all her main characters, despite how accurately she had anticipated the complexities and challenges that accompanied increased freedom for women in the later twentieth century.

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Since the early 1980s, Jim Grimsley has received increasing acclaim for his achievements in a variety of dramatic and literary genres. Through his novels, plays, and short stories, Grimsley portrays an unrelenting search for happiness and interrogates themes of corruption, technology, poverty, domestic abuse, sexuality, and faith in the contemporary United States. Through unique characters and a multitude of forms, the award-winning author explores the complexities of southern culture, his own troubled childhood, and larger pieces of the human experience.In Understanding Jim Grimsley, David Deutsch offers the first book-length study of Grimsley’s diverse work and argues for his vital role in shaping the contemporary queer American literary scene. Deutsch helps readers navigate the intricacies of Grimsley’s influential drama, fiction, and fantasy science fiction— including his most popular novel, Dream Boy—by weaving together discussions of common themes. Placing Grimsley’s plays, novels, and short stories in conversation with one another, Deutsch reveals Grimsley’s development throughout a career in which he has investigated hope and hardship, youth and maturity, experimentation and convention. Deutsch also provides vital historical and cultural contexts for understanding how Grimsley engages, expands, and challenges literary and theatrical traditions.Deutsch demonstrates a deep, critical understanding of Grimsley’s hard-earned, pragmatic optimism. Intertwining Grimsley’s major fiction and plays and contextualizing these within a broader American landscape, this volume brings his work more completely into the conversation on southern queer literature.

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Collected letters of a Confederate officer and his family detail daily life and loss on the battlefield.Hope, sacrifice, and restoration: throughout the American Civil War and its aftermath, the Foster family endured all of these in no small measure. Drawing from dozens of public and privately owned letters, A. Gibert Kennedy recounts the story of his great-great-grandfather and his family in A South Carolina Upcountry Saga: The Civil War Letters of Barham Bobo Foster and His Family, 1860–1863.Barham Bobo Foster was a gentleman planter from the Piedmont who signed the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession and served as a lieutenant colonel in the Third South Carolina Volunteers alongside his two sons. Kennedy’s primary sources are letters written by Foster and his sons, but he also references correspondence involving Foster’s daughters and his wife, Mary Ann.The letters describe experiences on the battlefields of Virginia and South Carolina, vividly detailing camp life, movements, and battles along with stories of bravery, loss, and sacrifice. The Civil War cost Foster his health, all that he owned, and his two sons, though he was able to rebuild with the help of his wife and three daughters. Supplementing the correspondence with maps, illustrations, and genealogical information, Kennedy shows the full arc of the Foster family’s struggle and endurance in the Civil War era.

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On October 20, 1999, thirty-eight-year-old Nell Crowley Davis was bludgeoned, strangled, and stabbed to death in the backyard of her home in Bluffton, South Carolina, near Hilton Head Island. In My Ghost Has a Name: Memoir of a Murder, Rosalyn Rossignol tells the story of how Davis’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Sarah Nickel, along with the two teenage boys, came to be charged with the murder. Despite no physical evidence tying Nickel to the murder, she was convicted along with the boys. In the months that followed, Nickel vehemently insisted that she was innocent.Torn by Nickel’s pleas, Rossignol, a childhood friend of the murder victim, committed herself to answering the question that perhaps the police detectives, the press, and the courts had not: whether Sarah Nickel was indeed guilty of this crime.During five years of research, Rossignol read case files and transcripts, examined evidence from the crime scene, listened to the 9-1-1 call, and watched videotaped statements made by the accused in the hours following their arrest. She also interviewed family members, detectives, the solicitor who prosecuted the case, the lawyers who represented the defendants, and the judge who tried the case, as well as Nickel. What Rossignol uncovers is a fascinating maze of twists and turns, replete with a memorable cast of characters including a shotgun-toting grandma, a self-avowed nihilist and Satan-worshipper, and a former Azalea Queen of Savannah, Georgia. Unlike all previous investigators, Rossignol has uncovered the truth about what happened, and the reasons why, on that fateful October day.

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The life of the unparalleled purveyor of the Great American Songbook, Marian McPartland, is celebrated in this engrossing biography. In this book, Paul de Barros considers McPartland's full life and shows her to have been a courageous compositional innovator as well as an immensely talented popularizer and educator.

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In this pioneering study of the long and arduous struggle for civil rights in South Carolina, longtime journalist Claudia Smith Brinson details the lynchings, beatings, bombings, cross burnings, death threats, arson, and venomous hatred that black South Carolinians endured—as well as the astonishing courage, devotion, dignity, and compassion of those who risked their lives for equality.Through extensive research and interviews with more than one hundred fifty civil rights activists, many of whom had never shared their stories with anyone, Brinson chronicles twenty pivotal years of petitioning, preaching, picketing, boycotting, marching, and holding sit-ins. Participants' use of nonviolent direct action altered the landscape of civil rights in South Carolina and reverberated throughout the South.These firsthand accounts include the unsung petitioners who risked their lives by supporting Summerton's Briggs v. Elliot, a lawsuit that led to the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision; the thousands of students who were arrested and jailed in 1960 for protests in Rock Hill, Orangeburg, Denmark, Columbia, and Sumter; and the black female employees and leaders who defied a governor and his armed troops during the 1969 hospital strike in Charleston.Brinson also highlights contributions made by remarkable but lesser-known activists, including James M. Hinton Sr., president of the South Carolina Conference of Branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Thomas W. Gaither, Congress of Racial Equality field secretary and scout for the Freedom Rides; Charles F. McDew, a South Carolina State College student and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and Mary Moultrie, grassroots leader of the 1969 hospital workers' strike.These intimate stories of courage and conviction, both heartbreaking and inspiring, shine a light on the progress achieved by nonviolent civil rights activists while also revealing white South Carolinians' often violent resistance to change. Although significant racial disparities remain, the sacrifices of these brave men and women produced real progress—and hope for the future.

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Meet the coaches, athletes, and other larger-than-life characters that laid the foundation for today's Gamecock NationIn 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.

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Delightful tales of hunting and fishing, family, friends, dogs, and precious time well spent and cherished 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. Cold days shivering in a duck blind or deer hunting trips lost in fog all make for fine memories. And then there are the dogs. Meet boot-eating Labs, setters with fine noses, and a Brittany Spaniel that loved to bounce through frosted kudzu. Mize's humorous stories entertain and remind readers of their own turkey hunting or creek fishing excursions. Black-and-white line drawings from artist Bob White illustrate stories filled with laughter, quiet contemplation, and wonder. Mize reminds the young and old that the pleasure of the pursuit matters most.

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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.

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For centuries the Atlantic world has been a site of encounter and exchange, a rich point of transit where one could remake one's identity or find it transformed. Through this interdisciplinary collection of essays, Laura R. Prieto and Stephen R. Berry offer vivid new accounts of how individuals remapped race, gender, and sexuality through their lived experience and in the cultural imagination. Crossings and Encounters is the first single volume to address these three intersecting categories across the Atlantic world and beyond the colonial period.The Atlantic world offered novel possibilities to and exposed vulnerabilities of many kinds of people, from travelers to urban dwellers, native Americans to refugees. European colonial officials tried to regulate relationships and impose rigid ideologies of gender, while perceived distinctions of culture, religion, and ethnicity gradually calcified into modern concepts of race. Amid the instabilities of colonial settlement and slave societies, people formed cross-racial sexual relationships, marriages, families, and households. These not only afforded some women and men with opportunities to achieve stability; they also furnished ways to redefine one's status. Crossings and Encounters spans broadly from early contact zones in the seventeenth-century Americas to the postcolonial present, and it covers the full range of the Atlantic world, including the Caribbean, North America, and Latin America. The essays examine the historical intersections between race and gender to illuminate the fluid identities and the dynamic communities of the Atlantic world.

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This pictorial autobiography of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald documents two lives that have become legendary. The book draws almost entirely from the scrapbooks and photograph albums that the Fitzgeralds scrupulously kept as their personal record and provides a wealth of illustrative material not previously available. The book offers: Fitzgerald's thoughts about his early loves in St Paul, Minnesota; a photograph of the country club in Montgomery, Alabama, where the two met; reviews of ""This Side of Paradise""; poems to the couple from Ring Lardner; snapshots of their trips abroad; Fitzgerald's careful accounting of his earnings; a photograph of the house on Long Island where ""The Great Gatsby"" was conceived; postcards with Fitzgerald's drawings for his daughter. These rare photographs and memorabilia combine into a narrative augmented by selections from Scott's and Zelda's own writings, conveying the spirit of particuular moments in their lives.

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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.

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Every four years presidential hopefuls and the national media travel the primary election circuit through Iowa and New Hampshire. Once the dust Settles in these states, the nation's focus turns to South Carolina, the first primary in the delegate-rich South. Historically Iowa and New Hampshire have dominated the news because they are first, not because of their predictive ability or representativeness. In First in the South, H. Gibbs Knotts and Jordan M. Ragusa make the case for shifting the national focus to South Carolina because of its clarifying and often-predictive role in selecting presidential nominees for both the Republican and Democratic Parties. To establish the foundation for their claim, Knotts and Ragusa begin with an introduction to the fundamentals of South Carolina's primary. They then detail how South Carolina achieved its coveted "First in the South" status and examine the increasing importance of this primary since the first contest in 1980. Throughout the book they answer key questions about the Palmetto State's process, using both qualitative information--press reports, primary sources, archival documents, and oral histories--and quantitative data--election results, census data, and exit polls. Through their research Knotts and Ragusa argue that a key factor that makes the South Carolina primary so important is the unique demographic makeup of the state's Democratic and Republican electorates. Knotts and Ragusa also identify major factors that have bolstered candidates' campaigns and propelled them to victory in South Carolina. While the evidence confirms the conventional wisdom about endorsements, race, and being from a southern state, their analysis offers hope to political newcomers and candidates who have not mastered the art of fundraising. Succinct and accessible, First in the South is a glimpse behind the curtain of the often-mysterious presidential primary process.

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An anthology exploring the modernization of the South Carolina upcountry and the region’s role in creating the New South.Continuing the theme of unexplored moments introduced in Recovering the Piedmont Past: Unexplored Moments in Nineteenth-Century Upcountry South Carolina History, Timothy P. Grady joins with Andrew H. Myers to edit this second anthology that uncovers the microhistory of this northwest region of the state. Topics include the influence of railroads on traveling circuses, tourist resorts and visits by Booker T. Washington during the rise of Jim Crow, pioneering efforts by progressives to identify the cause of pellagra disease, a debate over populism involving “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, the acculturation of Greek immigrants, and the daily lives of Civilian Conservation Corps workers during the New Deal.After years of being overshadowed by the coastal elite, upcountry South Carolinians began to play a vital role in modernizing the region and making it an integral part of the “New South.” In a study of this shift in the balance of power, the contributors examine religious history, the economic boom and bust, popular recreational activities, and major trends that played out in small places. By providing details and nuance that illuminate the historical context of the New South and engaging with the upcountry from fresh angles, this second volume expresses a deep local interest while also speaking to broader political and social issues.Melissa Walker, the George Dean Johnson, Jr. Professor of History Emerita at Converse College and coeditor of Recovering the Piedmont Past: Unexplored Moments in Nineteenth-Century South Carolina History, provides a foreword.

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