Search results for ""university of south carolina press""

This third volume of The History of Beaufort County by Rowland, Lawrence S. and Stephen R. Wise encompasses the remaining 113 years of the 500-year chronicle of the legendary South Carolina Sea Islands. Bridging the Sea Islands' Past and Present, 1893-2006 begins with the devastating Sea Island Hurricane of 1893, one of the worst natural disasters in American history. The storm was followed by a hurricane of violence, political and social revolution, economic chaos, and ideological turmoil that battered twentieth-century Beaufort and the world. Paradoxically the twentieth century was also an epoch of nearly unbroken scientific and medical progress, technological innovation, cultural experimentation, and the expansion of democratic institutions throughout the world. Modern Beaufort County has been a testing ground for the reunion of North and South in the aftermaths of the Civil War, Great Depression, and defeated Jim Crow laws.The great exodus of African Americans away from Beaufort County and the post-World War II sunbelt immigration transformed Beaufort County from a majority black population in 1900 to a majority white population in 1960. Perhaps the county's most representative immigrant experience has been that of retirees and resort-home owners, a phenomenon that began in the late nineteenth century as wealthy northerners--financiers, industrialists, and industrial farmers--began purchasing former plantations and transformed them into private hunting preserves. The new Beaufortonians revolutionized lowcountry life and culture as they brought new forms of economic enterprise, social and cultural values, and worldviews different from those that had shaped Beaufort County for centuries. Monumental political events are fully addressed from an insider's point of view, but, amid all the frontiers, storms, and demographic revolutions, Rowland and Wise have also provided a business history of the American South. Enterprise and entrepreneurship, whether successful or failed, link together all the themes and unite all the actors found in this work.Here readers meet Robert Smalls, Thomas E. Miller, George Waterhouse, Niels Christensen, Thomas Talbird, Tillie O'Dell, Isabella Glen, William Keyserling, Kate Gleason, Harriet Keyserling, Charles Fraser, and Bobby Ginn--active agents of change in politics, business, and culture. Indeed Rowland and Wise have not only chronicled the lives and times of these people but have also been active participants in the stories they tell. Rowland is a Beaufort native with centuries-old lowcountry lineage. Wise, an Ohio transplant, is a scholar of the Civil War and the local history of his adopted home.

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A Confederate Englishman presents for the first time the fascinating Civil War correspondence of Henry Wemyss Feilden (1838-1921), a young British officer who resigned his commission and ran the blockade to become a Confederate staff officer in Charleston, South Carolina. Editors W. Eric Emerson and Karen Stokes have compiled Feilden's letters to chart the history of his eventful career in the Confederacy from the time of his arrival in South Carolina in 1863 to the end of the war. Born the second son of the Baronet of Feniscowles, Feilden had experienced much before his arrival in America. As a young officer, he served during the Indian Mutiny and during the Second Opium War in China. His fascination and empathy with the Confederacy, however, propelled the young Englishman to risk his life to run the Federal blockade of Charleston. After traveling to Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, to obtain a commission as captain in the Confederate Army, he returned to Charleston to serve on the staff of General P. G. T. Beauregard, whom he greatly admired. During the war Feilden married a young South Carolinian, Julia McCord. His witty, vivid, highly readable, and sometimes romantic letters to her offer a compelling view into the operations of the military department headquartered in Charleston, conditions and events in and around the besieged city, and the heart of a man in love. A Confederate Englishman provides the insight and perspective of Feilden's experiences with operations in the large and vital Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida during the war's final two years. After the war Feilden returned to England with his wife to resume his career in the British army, and later he became a noted Arctic explorer and naturalist. In addition to his Civil War correspondence, A Confederate Englishman features a selection of Feilden's letters from the early twentieth century that include his reflections on his extraordinary life, his service to the Confederacy, and his beloved wife of fifty-six years. Emerson's introduction examines Feilden's background and character and the reasons behind his choice to fight for the Confederacy. It also delves into Feilden's astute assessment of Confederate capabilities late in the war and his decision to benefit financially from blockade running.

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From his humble beginnings in Sumter, South Carolina, to his prominence on the Washington, D.C., political scene as the third highest-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, U.S. Congressman James E. Clyburn has led an extraordinary life. In Blessed Experiences, Clyburn tells in his own inspirational words how an African American boy from the Jim Crow-era South was able to beat the odds to achieve great success and become, as President Barack Obama describes him, ""one of a handful of people who, when they speak, the entire Congress listens.Born in 1940 to a civic-minded beautician and a fundamentalist minister, Clyburn began his ascent to leadership at the age of twelve, when he was elected president of his National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) youth chapter. He broke barriers through peaceful protests and steadfast beliefs in equality and justice. Of his success Clyburn says he was ""blessed with nurturing parents, a supportive family, and loyal friends."" But, he added, ""my life was not just about knocking down doors and lowering barriers. I spent some time marching in the streets and occupying the inside of South Carolina jails."" As a civil rights leader at South Carolina State College, as human affairs commissioner under John C. West and three subsequent governors, and as South Carolina's first African American congressman since 1897, Clyburn has established a long and impressive record of public leadership and advocacy for human rights, education, historic preservation, and economic development. Clyburn was elected to Congress in 1992. Serving as copresident of his freshman class, he rose quickly through the ranks and was elected chair of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1999 and House Democratic Caucus vice chair in 2002. Three years later he was unanimously elected chair of the Democratic Caucus. When Democrats regained the House majority in 2006, Clyburn was elected House majority whip. Now as assistant Democratic leader in the 112th Congress, Clyburn, a self-described independent, prides himself on working to overcome barriers and destroy myths without becoming too predictable. ""I have worked across party lines to further legislative causes, and on occasion publicly differed with some of my allies in the civil rights community,"" says Clyburn. ""My experiences have not always been pleasant, but I have considered all of them blessings."" Blessed Experiences includes a foreword from Emmy Award-winning actress and the congressman's longtime friend Alfre Woodard.

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Clawing chest pains and a fiery car crash take one life and change the destiny of four others. The Stone Necklace braids together the stories of a grieving widow, a struggling nurse, a young mother, and a troubled homeless man, reminding us of the empowering and surprising ways our lives touch one another and how, together, we can recover from even the greatest of losses.Carla Damron weaves the stories of four people in Columbia, South Carolina, whose seemingly disparate existences intersect through tragedies realized and tragedies averted. Lena Hastings survived breast cancer and marital infidelity but now faces an uncertain future and crises with her teenaged daughter Becca without the support of the one person she has always counted on. Intensive care nurse Sandy Albright, newly released from drug rehab, confronts temptations from her past and false accusations threatening her career, leaving her to wonder if a drug-free life is really living. Tonya Ladson, a mother whose child is injured in the wreck, must decide if her domineering husband is right and a lawsuit will solve their financial problems. Joe Booker, a homeless man who sleeps in a graveyard, loses his gentle benefactor and must either succumb to the real and imagined evils of his world or find the heretofore-untapped courage to care for himself and for others as a stranger once cared for him. Weighted down by their respective pasts, the characters must make life-altering choices that reverberate into the fates of the others, ultimately bringing them together in unexpected but healing acts of compassion, forgiveness, and redemption.The Stone Necklace includes a foreword from novelist Patti Callahan Henry.

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The Headmaster's Darlings is a satirical comedy of manners featuring the morbidly obese Norman Laney, an unorthodox, inspirational English teacher and college counsellor for an elite private school in Mountain Brook, a privileged community outside of Birmingham. A natural wonder from blue-collar Alabama, Laney has barged into the exclusive world of Mountain Brook on the strength of his sensational figure and its several-hundred-pound commitment to art and culture. His mission is to defeat ""the barbarians,"" introduce true civilization in place of its thin veneer, and change his southern world for the better. Although Laney is adored by his students (his ""darlings"") and by the society ladies (also his ""darlings"") who rely on him to be the life of their parties and the leader of their book clubs, there are others who think he is a larger-than-life menace to the comfortable status quo of Mountain Brook society and must be banished.When Laney is summoned to the principal's office one day in November 1983, he expects to be congratulated for a recent public-relations triumph he engineered on behalf of the school. Instead his letter of resignation is demanded with no explanation given. Faced with an ultimatum and his imminent dismissal, Laney must outflank the principal at his own underhanded game, find out who said what about him and why, and launch his current crop of Alabama students into the wider world--or at least into Ivy League colleges.In her debut novel, Clark, Katherine casts a comical eye on southern society and celebrates the power of great teachers and schools to transform the lives of young people and lift up their communities. Surrounded by a colourful cast of his colleagues, his young protégées and Mountain Brook's upper echelon, Laney emerges as a heroically idiosyncratic character with Falstaffian appetites, an inimitable wit and intellect, and a boundless generosity toward his students that reshapes their lives in profound, unexpected ways.

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This book looks into communicating psychiatric patient histories, from the asylum years to the clinics of today. In this engrossing study of tales of mental illness, Carol Berkenkotter examines the evolving role of case history narratives in the growth of psychiatry as a medical profession. ""Patient Tales"" follows the development of psychiatric case histories from their origins at Edinburgh Medical School and the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary in the mid - eighteenth century to the medical records of contemporary American mental health clinics. Spanning two centuries and several disciplines, Berkenkotter's investigation illustrates how discursive changes in this genre mirrored evolving assumptions and epistemological commitments among those who cared for the mentally ill.During the asylum era, case histories were a means by which practitioners organized and disseminated local knowledge through professional societies, affiliations, and journals. The way in which these histories were recorded was subsequently codified, giving rise to a genre. In her thorough reading of Sigmund Freud's ""Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria"", Berkenkotter shows how this account of Freud's famous patient 'Dora' led to technical innovation in the genre through the incorporation of literary devices. In the volume's final section, Berkenkotter carries the discussion forward to the present in her examination of the turn from psychoanalysis to a research-based and medically oriented classification system now utilized by the American Psychiatric Association. Throughout her work, Berkenkotter stresses the value of reading case histories as an interdisciplinary bridge between the humanities and sciences.

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This is a participant-observer's account of African American life in a small Southern town just prior to the Civil Rights era.Consisting of ""Blackways of Kent"" (1955), ""Millways of Kent"" (1958), and ""Townways of Kent"", the ""Kent Trilogy"" forms a remarkable southern ethnography that maps the social stratification of the Piedmont town of York, South Carolina, in the late 1940s, after the Great Depression and before Civil Rights era. In 1946 the University of North Carolina's Institute for Research in Social Science commissioned a series of southern community studies from which these volumes resulted.Lewis offers a participant-observer's views on small-town southern race relations in the mid-twentieth century. Based on Lewis's interviews with community informants and experiences working in York between 1948 and 1949, the dynamic descriptions of individuals and rich explorations of institutions and traditions bring the community to life once more. Wholly segregated from the townfolk and from the poor whites of the mill village, the black community constructed a fully realized culture all its own. Most telling in Lewis's astute observations into the hierarchy of this community is that, unlike the rigid white class structure based in ancestry and wealth, stratification in the black community was governed by personal behavior. This edition is expanded with a new preface by Reed on the origins and impact of the ""Kent Trilogy"" and new introduction by Stanfield detailing Lewis's field research for this volume as well as his subsequent career.

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This title features the career-spanning tales of a coastal crimefighter, ranging from the dangerous to the hilarious.Moise served with distinction as a South Carolina game warden for nearly a quarter century, patrolling the coastal woods and waters of the Palmetto State. In this colorful memoir, the cigar-chomping, ticket-writing scourge of lowcountry fish and game law violators chronicles grueling stakeouts, complex trials, hair-raising adventures, and daily interactions with a host of outrageous personalities. Along the way he paints a vivid and fluid portrait of evolving attitudes and changing regulations governing coastal conservation.In briskly paced accounts of episodes ranging from dangerous to humorous, he introduces a lively cast of watermen, lawyers, country judges, hunters, and poachers who animate the coastal environs and whose quirky personalities and foibles are the game warden's daily stock in trade. Moise's narrative highlights the working lives of commercial crabbers and shrimpers, the antics of overly enthusiastic fishermen, and the great lengths to which hunters will go in their quests for doves, ducks, and marsh hens. Moise also describes encounters with displaced ""urban wildlife,"" the coastal marijuana smuggling business, and his fellow game wardens.The memoir also features a foreword by Lloyd Newberry, celebrated hunter and senior editor of ""Sporting Classics Magazine"".

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The Cooper River Bridge opened in 1929, and for the first time connected Charleston directly to the north. This volume is a complete history of the bridge, exploring how early 20th-century Charleston helped shape the bridge, and how the bridge subsequently shaped the city.

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In The Supreme Court under Morrison R. Waite, 1874-1888, Paul Kens provides a history of the Court during a time that began in the shadow of the Civil War and ended with America on the verge of establishing itself as an industrial world power. Morrison R. Waite (1816-1888) led the Court through a period that experienced great racial violence and sectional strife. At the same time, a commercial revolution produced powerful new corporate businesses and, in turn, dissatisfaction among agrarian and labor interests. The nation was also consolidating the territory west of the Mississippi River, an expansion often marred with bloodshed and turmoil. It was an era that strained America's thinking about the purpose, nature, and structure of government and ultimately about the meaning of the constitution.Challenging the conventional portrayal of the Waite Court as being merely transitional, Kens observes that the majority of these justices viewed themselves as guardians of tradition. Even while facing legal disputes that grew from the drastic changes in post-Civil War America's social, political, and economic order, the Waite Court tended to look backward for its cues. Its rulings on issues of liberty and equality, federalism and the powers of government, and popular sovereignty and the rights of the community were driven by constitutional traditions established prior to the Civil War. This is an important distinction because the conventional portrayal of this Court as transitional leaves the impression that later changes in legal doctrine were virtually inevitable, especially with respect to the subjects of civil rights and economic regulation. By demonstrating that there was nothing inevitable about the way constitutional doctrine has evolved, Kens provides an original and insightful interpretation that enhances our understanding of American constitutional traditions as well as the development of constitutional doctrine in the late nineteenth century.

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This is a landmark volume in South Carolina marine biology for specialists and sportsmen alike. A scientific milestone, this comprehensive illustrated guide to the characteristics, distribution, and ecology of freshwater fishes in South Carolina marks the first such endeavor since 1860 to document this aspect of the Palmetto State's diverse natural history. ""Freshwater Fishes of South Carolina"" is the result of longterm collaboration between a quartet of leading experts on the state's freshwater fishes - Fred C. Rohde, Rudolf G. Arndt, Jeffrey W. Foltz, and Joseph M. Quattro. From mudminnows and sunfishes to lampreys and sturgeons, the guide describes more than one hundred fifty species of freshwater and coastal estuarine fishes that spend all or major portions of their lives in the fresh waters of South Carolina. For each species the authors provide diagnostic characteristics including size, markings, similar species, and sexual dimorphism as well as information on biology, habitat, and distribution. Color photographs and detailed distribution maps accompany each description. The volume also includes a history of ichthyology in South Carolina, a chapter on methods for the collection and identification of fishes, and a chapter on conservation biology documenting species of concern for the state and reasons for their decline. This handsome reminder of the rich biodiversity in South Carolina's rivers, streams, and lakes serves not only as a vital scientific tool for marine researchers, students, resource managers, ecologists, and state policy makers but also as a valuable resource for sportsmen and natural history enthusiasts across the region.

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Providing the most balanced and comprehensive portrayal of Wade Hampton III to date, Robert K. Ackerman's biography explores the remarkable abilities and tragic failings of the planter-statesman who would come to personify the Civil War and Reconstruction in South Carolina. Ackerman traces Hampton's esteemed lineage and his preparation for life as a Southern aristocrat. Though Hampton benefited from third-generation wealth, a classical education, and an inherent sense of noblesse oblige, as Ackerman notes, prior to the war Hampton served almost without distinction in the South Carolina General Assembly - with the exception of his opposition to reopening the slave trade. Hampton did not favor secession, but once South Carolina left the Union, he committed himself fully to the Confederate effort and thus began his path to legend. Ackerman follows Hampton from amateur soldier to decorated cavalry leader, from multiple wounds at Gettysburg to the defense of the Confederate flank at Petersburg. Hampton eventually succeeded J. E. B. Stuart as commander of Lee's cavalry in the Army of Northern Virginia and distinguished himself as one of three non - West Point graduates to attain the rank of lieutenant general in the Confederate army. Emotionally and financially devastated by the Confederacy's defeat, Hampton briefly pondered continuing the conflict as a guerrilla war before emerging as a leading advocate for policies of moderation. His election to the governorship in 1876 brought an end to Federal Reconstruction in South Carolina. Ackerman elaborates on Hampton's limited success in enacting policies of moderation and his eventual defeat at the hands of virulent racists and anti-autocratic populists. Ackerman suggests that, despite some success as governor and later as a U.S. senator, Hampton was ultimately overwhelmed by forces of racism, with tragic consequences for his state, yet he remains for many a revered icon of the Old South.

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This book offers an oral history of musical genres from the Palmetto state musicians who helped define the sounds.From Jabbo Smith, Dizzy Gillespie, and Drink Small to Johnny Helms, Dick Goodwin, and Chris Potter, South Carolina has been home to an impressive number of well-known jazz and blues musicians. Through richly detailed interviews with 19 South Carolina musicians, Franklin presents an oral history of the tradition and influence of jazz and the blues in the Palmetto State.Franklin takes as his subjects a range of musicians born between 1905 and 1971, representing every decade in between, to trace the progression of these musical genres from Tommy Benford's and Jabbo Smith's first recording sessions in the summer of 1926 to the present day. Diverse not only in age but also in race, gender, instruments, and style, these musicians exemplify the breadth of jazz and blues performers from South Carolina.In their own colorful words, the performers recall their love affairs with the distinctive sounds of jazz and blues, indoctrinations into the musical word, early gigs, life on the tour bus, fans, drugs, military service, amateur night at the Apollo Theater, and influential friendships with other well-known musicians. As the story of South Carolina musical scene is tightly interwoven with that of the nation, these narratives also include appearances by Tony Bennett, Miles Davis, Count Basie, Herman Lubinsky, Helen Merrill, Pharoah Sanders, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and other significant musicians.

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A richly illustrated study that examines the engineering as well as the commercial, environmental, and human impacts of this grand project of the early canal-building age.

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

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A poignant-and delicious-compendium of South Carolina Jewish life revealed through food and storyWhere people go, so goes their food. In Kugels & Collards: Stories of Food, Family, and Tradition in Jewish South Carolina, Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey celebrate the unique and diverse food history of Jewish South Carolina. They gather stories and recipes from diverse Jewish sources—Sephardic and Ashkenazi families who have been in the state for hundreds of years, descendants of Holocaust survivors, and more recent immigrants from Russia and Israel—and explore how cherished dishes were influenced by available ingredients and complemented by African American and regional culinary traditions. These stories are a vital part of the South's "Jewish geography" and foodways, stretching across state lines to shape southern culture. On the southern Jewish table, many cultures are savored. This lively collection includes more than eighty recipes from seventy contributors. Barnett and Harvey, drawing on family cookbooks and troves of personal recipes, highlight Jewish staples like kreplach dumplings and stuffed cabbage as well as southern favorites such as peach cobbler, modern fusions like grits and lox casserole, and of course kugels and collards. Fully illustrated with original and archival photographs, Kugels & Collards invites readers into family homes, businesses, and community centers to share meals and memories.

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

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2023 Southern Book Prize Nonfiction Finalist • A 2022 Katie Couric Media Must-Read New Book • A personal meditation on love in the shadow of white privilege and racismChild is the story of Judy Goldman's relationship with Mattie Culp, the Black woman who worked for her family as a live-in maid and helped raise her—the unconscionable scaffolding on which the relationship was built and the deep love. It is also the story of Mattie's child, who was left behind to be raised by someone else. Judy, now eighty, cross-examines what it was to be a privileged white child in the Jim Crow South, how a bond can evolve in and out of step with a changing world, and whether we can ever tell the whole truth, even to ourselves. It is an incandescent book of small moments, heart-warming, heartbreaking, and, ultimately, inspiring.

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A study of the rhetorical power of shame and its effect on reproductive politicsNot long ago, unmarried pregnant women in the United States hid in maternity homes and relinquished their "illegitimate" children to more "deserving" two-parent families—all to conceal "shameful" pregnancies. Although times have changed, reproductive politics remain fraught. In Enduring Shame Heather Brook Adams recasts the 1960s and '70s—an era of presumed progress—as a time when expanding reproductive rights were paralleled by communicative practices of shame that cultivated increasingly public interventions into unwed and teen pregnancy and new forms of injustice.Drawing from personal interviews, archival documents, legal decisions, public policy, journalism, memoirs, and advocacy writing, Adams articulates how the rhetorical power of shame persuaded the American public to think about reproduction, sexual righteousness, and unwed pregnancy. Despite the aspirational goals of reproductive liberation, public sentiment frequently reflected supremacist beliefs regarding racial, economic, and moral fitness—notions that informed new public policy. Enduring Shame maps a range of experiences across these decades from women's experiences in homes for unwed mothers to policy and legal changes that are typically understood as proof of shame's dissipation, including Title IX legislation and Roe v. Wade. Rhetorical historiography and questions of reproductive justice guide the analysis, and women's testimonies provide essential perspectives and context. Through these histories, Adams articulates a network of language, affect, and embodiment through which shame moves; expands rhetorical understandings of the discursive power of the identities of woman and mother; and considers how the gendered, raced, and classed aspects of shame can help us understand and support reproductive dignity.Enduring Shame recovers a misunderstood part of women's recent history by considering why reproductive politics continue to be so volatile despite previous gains and why shame still figures centrally in discourse about women's reproductive and sexual freedoms.

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At 7:30 a.m. on June 16, 1944, George Junius Stinney Jr. was escorted by four guards to the death chamber. Wearing socks but no shoes, the 14-year-old Black boy walked with his Bible tucked under his arm. The guards strapped his slight, five-foot-one-inch frame into the electric chair. His small size made it difficult to affix the electrode to his right leg and the face mask, which was clearly too large, fell to the floor when the executioner flipped the switch. That day, George Stinney became, and today remains, the youngest person executed in the United States during the twentieth century.How was it possible, even in Jim Crow South Carolina, for a child to be convicted, sentenced to death, and executed based on circumstantial evidence in a trial that lasted only a few hours? Through extensive archival research and interviews with Stinney's contemporaries-men and women alive today who still carry distinctive memories of the events that rocked the small town of Alcolu and the entire state-Eli Faber pieces together the chain of events that led to this tragic injustice.The first book to fully explore the events leading to Stinney's death, The Child in the Electric Chair offers a compelling narrative with a meticulously researched analysis of the world in which Stinney lived-the era of lynching, segregation, and racist assumptions about Black Americans. Faber explains how a systemically racist system, paired with the personal ambitions of powerful individuals, turned a blind eye to human decency and one of the basic tenets of the American legal system that individuals are innocent until proven guilty.As society continues to grapple with the legacies of racial injustice, the story of George Stinney remains one that can teach us lessons about our collective past and present. By ably placing the Stinney case into a larger context, Faber reveals how this case is not just a travesty of justice locked in the era of the Jim Crow South but rather one that continues to resonate in our own time.A foreword is provided by Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor of History Emerita at Baruch College at the City University of New York and author of several books including Civil War Wives: The Lives and Times of Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis, and Julia Dent Grant.

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A Short History of Charleston-a lively chronicle of the South's most renowned and charming city-has been hailed by critics, historians, and especially Charlestonians as authoritative, witty, and entertaining. Beginning with the founding of colonial Charles Town and ending three hundred and fifty years later in the present day, Robert Rosen's fast-paced narrative takes the reader on a journey through the city's complicated history as a port to English settlers, a bloodstained battlefield, and a picturesque vacation mecca. Packed with anecdotes and enlivened by passages from diaries and letters, A Short History of Charleston recounts in vivid detail the port city's development from an outpost of the British Empire to a bustling, modern city.This revised and expanded edition includes a new final chapter on the decades since Joseph Riley was first elected mayor in 1975 through its rapid development in geographic size, population, and cultural importance. Rosen contemplates both the city's triumphs and its challenges, allowing readers to consider how Charleston's past has shaped its present and will continue to shape its future.

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Savannah in the New South: From the Civil War to the Twenty-First Century, by Walter J. Fraser, Jr., traces the city’s evolution from the pivotal period immediately after the Civil War to the present. When the war ended, Savannah was nearly bankrupt; today it is a thriving port city and tourist center. This work continues the tale of Savannah that Fraser began in his previous book, Savannah in the Old South, by examining the city’s complicated, sometimes turbulent development.The chronology begins by describing the racial and economic tensions the city experienced following the Civil War. A pattern of oppression of freed people by Savannah’s white civic-commercial elite was soon established. However, as the book demonstrates, slavery and discrimination, harassment, intimidation, and voter suppression galvanized the African American community, which in turn used protests, boycotts, demonstrations, the ballot box, the pulpit—and sometimes violence—to gain rights long denied.As this fresh, detailed history of Savannah shows, economic instability, political discord, racial tension, weather events, wealth disparity, gang violence, and a reluctance to help the police continue to challenge and shape the city. Nonetheless Savannah appears to be on course for a period of prosperity, bolstered by a thriving port, a strong, growing African American community, robust tourism, and the economic and historical contributions of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Fraser’s Savannah in the New South presents a sophisticated consideration of an important, vibrant southern metropolis.

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In Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine, Richard A. Horsley offers one of the most comprehensive critical analyses of Jesus of Nazareth's mission and how he became a significant historical figure. In his study Horsley brings a fuller historical knowledge of the context and implications of recent research to bear on the investigation of the historical Jesus. Breaking with the standard focus on isolated individual sayings of Jesus, Horsley argues that the sources for Jesus in historical interaction are the Gospels and the speeches of Jesus that they include, read critically in their historical context.This work addresses the standard assumptions that the historical Jesus has been presented primarily as a sage or apocalyptic visionary. In contrast, based on a critical reconsideration of the Gospels and contemporary sources for Roman imperial rule in Judea and Galilee, Horsley argues that Jesus was fully involved in the conflicted politics of ancient Palestine. Learning from anthropological studies of the more subtle forms of peasant politics, Horsley discerns from these sources how Jesus, as a Moses- and Elijah-like prophet, generated a movement of renewal in Israel that was focused on village communities.Following the traditional prophetic pattern, Jesus pronounced God's judgment against the rulers in Jerusalem and their Roman patrons. This confrontation with the Jerusalem rulers and his martyrdom at the hands of the Roman governor, however, became the breakthrough that empowered the rapid expansion of his movement in the immediately ensuing decades. In the broader context of this comprehensive historical construction of Jesus's mission, Horsley also presents a fresh new analysis of Jesus's healings and exorcisms and his conflict with the Pharisees, topics that have been generally neglected in the last several decades.

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A unique creole language spoken on the coastal islands and adjacent mainland of South Carolina and Georgia, Gullah existed as an isolated and largely ignored linguistic phenomenon until the publication of Lorenzo Dow Turner's landmark volume Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. In his classic treatise, Turner, the first professionally trained African American linguist, focused on a people whose language had long been misunderstood, lifted a shroud that had obscured the true history of Gullah, and demonstrated that it drew important linguistic features directly from the languages of West Africa. Initially published in 1949, this groundbreaking work of Afrocentric scholarship opened American minds to a little-known culture while initiating a means for the Gullah people to reclaim and value their past. The book presents a reference point for today's discussions about ever-present language varieties, Ebonics, and education, offering important reminders about the subtleties and power of racial and cultural prejudice. In their introduction to the volume, Katherine Wyly Mille and Michael B. Montgomery set the text in its sociolinguistic context, explore recent developments in the celebration of Gullah culture, and honor Turner with a recounting of his life and scholarly accomplishments.

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The Tao of S is an engaging study of American racialization of Chinese and Asians, Asian American writing, and contemporary Chinese cultural production, stretching from the nineteenth century to the present. Sheng-mei Ma examines the work of nineteenth-century "Sinophobic" American writers, such as Bret Harte, Jack London, and Frank Norris, and twentieth-century "Sinophiliac" authors, such as John Steinbeck and Philip K. Dick, as well as the movies Crazy Rich Asians and Disney's Mulan and a host of contemporary Chinese authors, to illuminate how cultural stereotypes have swung from fearmongering to an overcompensating exultation of everything Asian. Within this framework Ma employs the Taoist principle of yin and yang to illuminate how roles of the once-dominant American hegemony—the yang—and the once-declining Asian civilization—the yin—are now, in the twenty-first century, turned upside down as China rises to write its side of the story, particularly through the soft power of television and media streamed worldwide.

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Reassesses the career of Benner C. Turner, the polarizing African American president at South Carolina State College during the civil rights eraTravis D. Boyce considers the full sweep of Benner C. Turner's life and career in the context of the contrary pressures of white and Black authority. Borrowing an expression from Michelle Obama's remarks to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Boyce casts Turner, long-serving president of South Carolina State University, as a steady and measured leader who preserved the limited resources his historically Black institution possessed in the face of often hostile social, political, and economic power structures. Previous accounts of Turner and his SC State presidency portray him as unwilling to criticize the state's white power structure and unable to contend with their open resistance to civil rights. Boyce argues that the modern view of Turner flattens a complex terrain, often relying selectively on hostile sources, underplaying the political constraints on presidents of publicly funded HBCUs in the South. Considering Turner in a richer context, with a deep awareness of Turner's early life formative influences, Boyce provides a more complete critical examination of his leadership in trying times.

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Captain James Carlin is a biography of a shadowy nineteenth-century British Confederate, James Carlin (1833–1921), who was among the most successful captains running the U.S. Navy’s blockade of Southern ports during the Civil War. Written by his descendent Colin Carlin, Captain James Carlin ventures behind the scenes of this perilous trade that transported vital supplies to the Confederate forces.An Englishman trained in the British merchant marine, Carlin was recruited into the U.S. Coastal and Geodetic Survey Department in 1856, spending four years charting the U.S. Atlantic seaboard. Married and settled in Charleston, South Carolina, he resigned from the survey in 1860 to resume his maritime career. His blockade-running started with early runs into Charleston under sail. These came to a lively conclusion under gunfire off the Stono River mouth. More blockade-running followed until his capture on the SS Memphis. Documents in London reveal the politics of securing Carlin’s release from Fort Lafayette.On his return to Charleston, General P. G. T. Beauregard gave him command of the spar torpedo launch Torch for an attack on the USS New Ironsides. After more successful trips though the blockade, he was appointed superintending captain of the South Carolina Importing and Exporting Company and moved to Scotland to commission six new steam runners.After the war Carlin returned to the southern states to secure his assets before embarking on a gun-running expedition to the northern coast of Cuba for the Cuban Liberation Junta fighting to free the island from Spanish control and plantation slavery.In researching his forebear, the author gathered a wealth of private and public records from England, Scotland, Ireland, Greenland, the Bahamas, and the United States. The use of fresh sources from British Foreign Office and U.S. Prize Court documents and surviving business papers make this volume distinctive.

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An inside look at why the Republican Party has come to dominate the rural American South Beginning with the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948 and extending through the 2020 election cycle, political scientists M.V. Hood III and Seth C. McKee trace the process by which rural white southerners transformed from fiercely loyal Democrats to stalwart Republicans. While these rural white southerners were the slowest to affiliate with the Grand Old Party, they are now its staunchest supporters. This transition and the reasons for it are vital to understanding the current electoral landscape of the American South, including states like Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, all of which have the potential to exert enormous influence over national electoral outcomes.In this first book-length empirically based study focusing on rural southern voters, Hood and McKee examine their changing political behavior, arguing that their Democratic-to-Republican transition is both more recent and more durable than most political observers realize. By analyzing data collected from their own region-wide polling along with a variety of other carefully mined sources, the authors explain why the initial appeal of 1950s Republicanism to upscale white southerners in metropolitan settings took well over a half-century to yield to, and morph into, its culturally conservative variant now championed by rural residents. Hood and McKee contend that it is impossible to understand current American electoral politics without understanding the longer trajectory of voting behavior in rural America and they offer not only a framework but also the data necessary for doing so.

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In Understanding William T. Vollman, Isil Özcan studies the maturing career of one of the most important voices in contemporary letters. Vollmann's major works of fiction and nonfiction include his National Book Award winner, Europe Central; his highly acclaimed Seven Dreams novels; and his magnum opus, Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Urgent Means, and Justifications. Özcan examines the common threads that interlace Vollmann's corpus and grapples with the depth and Complexity of his massive output. In her readings of Vollmann's works, she identifies a rich but accessible Set of themes that he explores afresh in each text, including death, war, violence, suffering, and love.Vollmann has written in many genres, and his writing is informed by his extensive research and travels around the world, his familiarity with red-light zones, and his war correspondence. The highly Subjective and participative nature of much his writing has foregrounded his personality to such an Extent that he became simultaneously a cult figure and a notorious adventurer. In her readings Özcan contends that Vollmann compels our attention because he registers a diversity of voices and discourses that makes us hear what the subjugated, the unrecognized, the weak, and the marginalized have to say; the scope and the force of Vollmann's openness to the Other is inseparable from his method and conduct.In addition to close readings of Vollmann's texts, Özcan also examines his influences and literary connections, tracing his ties to John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, James Agee, and Danilo Kiš and situating him not only in the American canon but also in the longer duration of world literature.

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An inside look at why the Republican Party has come to dominate the rural American South Beginning with the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948 and extending through the 2020 election cycle, political scientists M.V. Hood III and Seth C. McKee trace the process by which rural white southerners transformed from fiercely loyal Democrats to stalwart Republicans. While these rural white southerners were the slowest to affiliate with the Grand Old Party, they are now its staunchest supporters. This transition and the reasons for it are vital to understanding the current electoral landscape of the American South, including states like Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, all of which have the potential to exert enormous influence over national electoral outcomes.In this first book-length empirically based study focusing on rural southern voters, Hood and McKee examine their changing political behavior, arguing that their Democratic-to-Republican transition is both more recent and more durable than most political observers realize. By analyzing data collected from their own region-wide polling along with a variety of other carefully mined sources, the authors explain why the initial appeal of 1950s Republicanism to upscale white southerners in metropolitan settings took well over a half-century to yield to, and morph into, its culturally conservative variant now championed by rural residents. Hood and McKee contend that it is impossible to understand current American electoral politics without understanding the longer trajectory of voting behavior in rural America and they offer not only a framework but also the data necessary for doing so.

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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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2021 Choice Outstanding Academic TitleBharati Mukherjee was the first major South Asian American writer and the first naturalized American citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in Kolkata, India, she immigrated to the United States in 1961 and went on to publish eight novels, two short story collections, two long works of nonfiction, and numerous essays, book reviews, and newspaper articles. She was professor emerita in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, until her death in 2017. In Understanding Bharati Mukherjee, Ruth Maxey discusses Mukherjee's influence on younger South Asian American women writers, such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Divakaruni. Mukherjee's powerful writing also enjoyed popular appeal, with some novels achieving best-seller status and international acclaim; her 1989 novel Jasmine was translated into multiple languages. One of the earliest writers to feature South Asian Americans in literary form, Mukherjee reflected upon the influence of non-European immigrants to the United States, following passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the quota system. Her vision of a globalized, interconnected world has been regarded as prophetic, and when Mukherjee died, diverse North American writers—Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Michael Ondaatje, Ann Beattie, Amy Tan, and Richard Ford—came forward to praise her work and its importance. Understanding Bharati Mukherjee is the first book to examine this pioneering author's complete oeuvre and to identify its legacy. Maxey offers new insights into widely discussed texts and recuperates overlooked works, such as Mukherjee's first and last published short stories, her neglected nonfiction, and her many essays. Critically situating both well-known and under-discussed texts, this study analyzes the aesthetic and ideological complexity of Mukherjee's writing, considering her sophisticated, erudite, multilayered use of intertextuality, especially her debt to cinema. Maxey argues that understanding the range of formal and stylistic strategies in play is crucial to grasping Mukherjee's work.

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In recent years, the debate over the future of Confederate monuments has taken center stage and caused bitter clashes in communities throughout the American South. At the heart of the debate is the question of what these monuments represent. The arguments and counterarguments are formulated around sets of assumptions grounded in Southern history, politics, culture, and race relations. Comprehending and evaluating accurately the associated claims and counterclaims calls for a careful examination of facts and legal considerations relevant to each side's assertations. In Monumental Harm, Roger C. Hartley offers a road map to addressing and resolving this acrimonious debate.Although history and popular memory play a vital role in the discussion, there have been distortions of both parts. Monumental Harm reviews the fact-based history of the initial raising of these monuments and distinguishes it from the popular memory held by many Confederate-monument supporters. Hartley also addresses concerns regarding the potential erasure of history and the harm these monuments have caused the African American community over the years, as well as the role they continue to play in politics and power.The recent rise in White nationalism and the video-recorded murders of Black citizens at the hands of White police officers have led to nationwide demonstrations and increased scrutiny of Confederate monuments on public land. As injustice is laid bare and tempers flare, the need for a peaceful resolution becomes ever-more necessary. Monumental Harm offers a way to break the rhetorical deadlock, urging that we evaluate the issue through the lens of the U.S. Constitution while employing the overarching democratic principle that no right is absolute. Through constructive discourse and good-faith compromise, a more perfect union is within reach.

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Madness and Identity is a study of the linguistic negotiations at the heart of mental illness identification and patient diagnosis. Through an examination of individual psychiatric case records from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Cristina Hanganu-Bresch and Carol Berkenkotter show how the work of psychiatry was navigated by patients, families, doctors, the general public, and the legal system. The results of examining those involved and their interactions show that the psychiatrist's task became one of constant persuasion, producing arguments surrounding diagnosis and asylum confinement that attempted to reconcile shifting definitions of disease and to respond to sociocultural pressures. By studying patient cases, the emerging literature of confinement, and patient accounts viewed alongside institutional records, the authors trace the evolving rhetoric of psychiatric disease, its impact on the treatment of patients, its implications for our contemporary understanding of mental illness, and the identity of the psychiatric patient. Madness and Identity helps elucidate the larger rhetorical forces that contributed to the eventual decline of the asylum and highlights the struggle for the professionalization of psychiatry.

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Since its publication in 2003, Understanding David Foster Wallace has served as an accessible introduction to the rich array of themes and formal innovations that have made Wallace's fiction so popular and influential. A seminal text in the burgeoning field of David Foster Wallace studies, the original edition of Understanding David Foster Wallace was nevertheless incomplete as it addressed only his first four works of fiction--namely the novels The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest and the story collections Girl with Curious Hair and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. This revised edition adds two new chapters covering his final story collection, Oblivion, and his posthumous novel, The Pale King.Tracing Wallace's relationship to modernism and postmodernism, this volume provides close readings of all his major works of fiction. Although critics sometimes label Wallace a postmodern writer, Boswell argues that he should be regarded as the nervous leader of some still-unnamed (and perhaps unnamable) third wave of modernism. In charting a new direction for literary practice, Wallace does not seek to overturn postmodernism, nor does he call for a return to modernism. Rather his work moves resolutely forward while hoisting the baggage of modernism and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on its back.Like the books that serve as its primary subject, Boswell's study directly confronts such arcane issues as postmodernism, information theory, semiotics, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and poststructuralism, yet it does so in a way that is comprehensible to a wide and general readership- the very same readership that has enthusiastically embraced Wallace's challenging yet entertaining and redemptive fiction.

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Bharati Mukherjee was the first major South Asian American writer and the first naturalized American citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in Kolkata, India, she immigrated to the United States in 1961 and went on to publish eight novels, two short story collections, two long works of nonfiction, and numerous essays, book reviews, and newspaper articles. She was professor emerita in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, until her death in 2017. In Understanding Bharati Mukherjee, Ruth Maxey discusses Mukherjee's influence on younger South Asian American women writers, such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Divakaruni. Mukherjee's powerful writing also enjoyed popular appeal, with some novels achieving best-seller status and international acclaim; her 1989 novel Jasmine was translated into multiple Languages. One of the earliest writers to feature South Asian Americans in literary form, Mukherjee reflected upon the influence of non-European immigrants to the United States, following passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the quota system. Her vision of a globalized, interconnected world has been regarded as prophetic, and when Mukherjee died, diverse North American writers--Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Michael Ondaatje, Ann Beattie, Amy Tan, and Richard Ford--came forward to praise her work and its importance. Understanding Bharati Mukherjee is the first book to examine this pioneering author's complete oeuvre and to identify its legacy. Maxey offers new insights into widely discussed texts and recuperates overlooked works, such as Mukherjee's first and last published short stories, her neglected nonfiction, and her many essays. Critically situating both well-known and under-discussed texts, this study analyzes the aesthetic and ideological Complexity of Mukherjee's writing, considering her sophisticated, erudite, multilayered use of intertextuality, especially her debt to cinema. Maxey argues that understanding the range of formal and stylistic strategies in play is crucial to grasping Mukherjee's work.

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What Marcel Proust wanted from life most of all was unconditional requited love, and the way he went after it—smothering the objects of his affection with gifts—cost him a fortune. To pay for such extravagance, he engaged in daring speculations on the stock exchange. The task of his cousin and financial adviser, Lionel Hauser, was to make sure these speculations would not go sour. In Proust and His Banker, Gian Balsamo reveals that Proust was quite aware of the advantageous trade-off between financial indulgence and artistic inspiration; his liberal squandering of money provided the grist for fictional characters and incidents of surprising effectiveness, both in the artistic sphere and later on in the commercial one. But Hauser was not aware of this odd aspect of Proust’s creativity, nor could he have been since the positive returns from the writer’s masterpieces were late in coming. Focusing on more than 350 letters between Proust and Hauser and drawing on records of the Rothschild Archive and financial data assembled from the twenty-one-volume Kolb edition of Proust’s letters, Balsamo reconstructs Proust’s finances and provides a fascinating window into the writer’s creative and speculative process. Balsamo carefully follows Proust’s financial activities, including investments ranging from Royal Dutch Securities to American railroads to Eastern European copper mines, his exchanges with various banks and brokerage firms, his impetuous gifts, and the changing size and composition of his portfolio. Successes and failures alike provided material for Proust’s fiction, whether from the purchase of an airplane for the object of his affections or the investigation of a deceased love’s intimate background. Proust was, Balsamo concludes, a master at turning financial indulgence into narrative craftsmanship, economic costs into artistic opportunities.Over the course of their fifteen-year collaboration, the banker saw Proust squander three-fifths of his wealth on reckless ventures and on magnificent presents for the men and women who struck his fancy. To Hauser the writer was a virtuoso in resource mismanagement. Nonetheless, Balsamo shows, we owe it to the altruism of this generous relative, who never thought twice about sacrificing his own time and resources to Proust, that In Search of Lost Time was ever completed.

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A detailed account of the struggle to cultivate connectedness out of the divisiveness of apartheid In Managing Vulnerability, Richard C. Marback analyses the tension surrounding the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa through a rhetorical lens. Marback studies the heart of South Africa's desire for reconciliation and contends that this goal could be achieved only through the creation of a language of vulnerability in which former enemies become open to the influence of each other, to the constraints of their respective circumstances, and to the prospects of a shared future. Through a series of informative case studies, Marback illustrates how the cultivation of openness and the management of vulnerability take shape through the circulation of artefacts, symbols, and texts that give empowering expression to virtues of connectedness over the temptations of individual autonomy. Marback discusses the construction and impact of the narrative tours of Robben Island, the silencing of Robert Sobukwe, the debates over a proposed Freedom Monument, a brief gesture of ubuntu from Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela to Eugene de Kock, and the transformation of the title character in the film adaptation of the 1980 novel Tsotsi. Ultimately, Marback contends, finding a means to manage vulnerability is both the immediate success of and the ongoing challenge to South African democracy and is indicative of the nature of rhetoric in democracies in general and in contemporary civic life.

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In 1781 South Carolina patriot militiamen played an integral role in helping the Continental army reclaim their state from its British conquerors. Martyr of the American Revolution is the only book-length treatment that examines the events that set an American militia colonel on a disastrous collision course with two British officers, his execution in Charleston, and the repercussions that extended from the battle lines of South Carolina to the Continental Congress and across the Atlantic to the halls of British Parliament.On August 4, 1781, in Charleston, South Carolina, the British army hanged Col. Isaac Hayne for treason. Rather than a strict chronological retelling of the events, which led to his execution during the British occupation of Charleston, what is offered instead is a consideration of factors, independently set in motion that culminated in the demise of a loving father and devout patriot.Hayne was the most prominent American executed by the British for treason. He and his two principal antagonists, Lt. Col. Nisbet Balfour and Lt. Col. Francis Lord Rawdon, were unwittingly set on a collision course that climaxed in an act that sparked perhaps the most notable controversy of the war. Martyr of the American Revolution sheds light on why two professional soldiers were driven to commit a seemingly wrongheaded and arbitrary deed that halted prisoner exchange and nearly brought disastrous consequences to captive British officers.The death of a patriot in the cause of liberty was not a unique occurrence, but the unusually well-documented events surrounding the execution of Hayne and the involvement of his friends and family makes his story compelling and poignant. Unlike young Capt. Nathan Hale, who suffered a similar fate in 1776, Hayne did not become a folk hero. What began as local incident, however, became an international affair that was debated in Parliament and the Continental Congress.

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Clyde Edgerton’s Raney is the comic love story of a marriage between Raney, a small-town Southern Baptist, and Charles, a librarian with liberal leanings from Atlanta, united by their shared enthusiasm for country music. The novel both interrogates and honors the faiths and foibles of its subjects as the relationship is tested through trials and revelations. Despite the couple’s differences, their marriage slowly evolves into a relationship of equals in which both are willing to compromise for the good of the other and the marriage. Told though Raney’s naive and mesmerizing perspective as a southern storyteller, serious and sometimes heartbreaking moments give way to a humorous and joyful tale that pokes fun at and holds respect for just about everyone who passes through these pages. Raney, Edgerton’s first novel, was originally published in 1985. It represents some of Edgerton’s most comic, candid, and ambitious writing. This Southern Revivals edition includes a new introduction by the author and a preface from series editor Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr., director of the University of South Carolina Institute for Southern Studies.

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Henry Veggian introduces readers to one of the most influential American writers of the last half- century. Winner of the National Book Award, American Book Award, and the first Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, Don DeLillo is the author of short stories, screenplays, and fifteen novels, including his breakthrough work White Noise (1985) and Pulitzer Prize finalists Mao II (1992) and Underworld (1998).Veggian traces the evolution of DeLillo's work through the three phases of his career as a fiction writer, from the experimental early novels, through the critically acclaimed works of the mid-1980s and 1990s, into the smaller but newly innovative novels of the last decade. He guides readers to DeLillo's principal concerns - the tension between biography and anonymity, the blurred boundary between fiction and historical narrative, and the importance of literary authorship in opposition to various structures of power - and traces the evolution of his changing narrative techniques.Beginning with a brief biography, an introduction to reading strategies, and a survey of the major concepts and questions concerning DeLillo's work, Veggian proceeds chronologically through his major novels. His discussion summarizes complicated plots, reflects critical responses to the author's work, and explains the literary tools used to fashion his characters, narrators, and events. In the concluding chapter Veggian engages notable examples of DeLillo's other modes, particularly the short stories that reveal important insights into his "modular" working method as well as the evolution of his novels.

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The saga of the precipitous rise and ultimate fall of the Jonathan Lucas family's rice-mill dynastyIn the 1780s Jonathan Lucas, on a journey from his native England, shipwrecked near the Santee Delta of South Carolina, about forty miles north of Charleston. Lucas, the son of English mill owners and builders, found himself, fortuitously, near vast acres of swamp and marshland devoted to rice cultivation. When the labor-intensive milling process could not keep pace with high crop yields, Lucas was asked by planters to build a machine to speed the process. In 1787 he introduced the first highly successful water-pounding rice mill—creating the foundation of an international rice mill dynasty. In Rice to Ruin, Roy Williams III and Alexander Lucas Lofton recount the saga of the precipitous rise and ultimate fall of that empire.Lucas’s invention did for rice, South Carolina’s first great agricultural staple, what Eli Whitney did for cotton with his cotton gin. With his sons Jonathan Lucas II and William Lucas, Lucas built rice mills throughout the lowcountry. Eventually the rice kingdom extended to India, Egypt, and Europe after the younger Jonathan Lucas moved to London to be at the center of the international rice trade. Their lives were grand until the American Civil War and its aftermath, when the end of slave labor changed the family’s fortunes. The capital tied up in slaves evaporated; the plantations and town houses were sold off one by one; and the rice fields once described as “the gold mines of South Carolina” often failed or were no longer planted. Disease and debt took its toll on the Lucas clan, and, in the decades that followed, efforts to regain the lost fortune proved futile. In the end the once-glorious Carolina gold rice fields that had brought riches left the family in ruin.

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