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

Book SynopsisProvides an in-depth evaluation of the nine plays that established Tennessee Williams as America's greatest lyric dramatist. Describing him as the first playwright writing in English to combine full-blooded characters, theatricalism, and poetic dialogue, this considers Williams both as a literary figure and as a stage innovator.

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Book SynopsisTHE ABANDONED OCEAN offers an in-depth appraisal of United States maritime policy from the establishment of a merchant marine immediately after the Revolutionary War through radical industry transformations of the late twentieth century. In this sweeping analysis of federal policies that promote, regulate, protect, and subsidize American shipping in coastal and foreign trade, Andrew Gibson and Arthur Donovan also examine the closely related fortunes of the ship-building industry and the intertwined activities of the merchant and military navies. The authors consider why, since the middle of the nineteenth century, United States maritime policy has been so strikingly unsuccessful in achieving its stated goal of promoting a commercially viable merchant marine engaged in foreign trade.

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Book SynopsisThe first book-length examination of the award-winning author of poetry and fiction firmly rooted in AppalachiaSince his dramatic appearance on the southern literary stage with his debut novel, One Foot in Eden, Ron Rash has continued a prolific outpouring of award-winning poetry and fiction. His status as a regular on the New York Times Best Sellers list, coupled with his impressive critical acclaim—including two O. Henry Awards and the Frank O’Connor Award for Best International Short Fiction— attests to both his wide readership and his brilliance as a literary craftsman. In Summoning the Dead, editors Randall Wilhelm and Zackary Vernon have assembled the first book-length collection of scholarship on Ron Rash. The volume features the work of respected scholars in southern and Appalachian studies, providing a disparate but related constellation of interdisciplinary approaches to Rash’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.The editors contend that Rash’s work is increasingly relevant and important on regional, national, and global levels in part because of its popular and scholarly appeal and also its invaluable social critiques and celebrations, thus warranting academic attention. Wilhelm and Vernon argue that studying Rash is important because he encourages readers and critics alike to understand Appalachia in all its complexity and he consistently provides portrayals of the region that reveal both the beauty of its cultures and landscapes as well as the social and environmental pathologies that it continues to face.The landscapes, peoples, and cultures that emerge in Rash’s work represent and respond to not only Appalachia or the South, but also to national and global cultures. Firmly rooted in the mountain South, Rash’s artistic vision weaves the truths of the human condition and the perils of the human heart in a poetic language that speaks deeply to us all. Through these essays, offering a range of critical and theoretical approaches that examine important aspects of Rash’s work, Wilhelm and Vernon create a foundation for the future of Rash studies.Robert Morgan, Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University and author of fourteen books of poetry and nine volumes of fiction including the New York Times bestselling novel Gap Creek, provides a foreword.

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Book SynopsisHow do pious Shia Muslim women nurture and sustain their religious lives? How do their experiences and beliefs differ from or overlap with those of men? What do gender-based religious roles and interactions reveal about the Shia Muslim faith? In Partners of Zaynab, Diane D'Souza presents a rich ethnography of urban Shia women in India, exploring women's devotional lives through the lens of religious narrative, sacred space, ritual performance, leadership, and iconic symbols.Religious scholars have tended to devalue women's religious expressions, confining them to the periphery of a male-centered ritual world. This viewpoint often assumes that women's ritual behaviors are the unsophisticated product of limited education and experience and even a less developed female nature. By illuminating vibrant female narratives within Shia religious teachings, the fascinating history of a shrine led by women, the contemporary lives of dynamic female preachers, and women's popular prayers and rituals of petition, Partners of Zaynab demonstrates that the religious lives of women are not a flawed approximation of male-defined norms and behaviors, but a vigorous, authentic affirmation of faith within the religious mainstream.D'Souza questions the distinction between normative and popular religious behavior, arguing that such a categorization not only isolates and devalues female ritual expressions, but also weakens our understanding of religion as a whole. Partners of Zaynab offers a compelling glimpse of Muslim faith and practice and a more complete understanding of the interplay of gender within Shia Islam.

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Book SynopsisAmong the most trenchant and provocative writers of globalization, Karen Tei Yamashita is one of the most significant, ambitious, and widely taught Asian American writers today. In four genre-bending novels, a short story collection/travel essay collage, a family memoir, and more than a dozen performance/theater works, Yamashita weaves together postmodernism, magical realism, history, social protest, and a wicked sense of humor. Her fictions challenge familiar literary tropes, especially those expected of "multicultural writers," such as the now-clichéd conflict between first-generation immigrants and their American-born children. Instead her canvas is global, conjuring the unexpected intimacies and distances created by international capitalism, as people and goods traverse continents in asymmetrical circuits. Highlighting the connections between neoliberal economic policies, environmental devastation and climate change, anti-immigrant rhetoric, urban gentrification, and other issues that disproportionately affect historically underinvested and minority communities, Yamashita brings a uniquely transnational perspective to her portrayal of distinctly American preoccupations. Sheffer gives readers a concise introduction to Yamashita's life, provides lucid analysis of key motifs, and synthesizes major research on her work. Each chapter offers, in accessible prose, original interpretations of essential works and stages in her career: her Brazil-Japan migration trilogy comprising Brazil-Maru, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, and Circle K Cycles; the magical realist revision of the Los Angeles riots in Tropic of Orange; her historical magnum opus about Asian American activism in the long 1960s, I Hotel; her understudied theatrical and performance works collected in Anime Wong; and her recent familial memoir about Japanese American internment during World War II, Letters to Memory. In short the volume serves as both a lucid introduction to a challenging author and a valuable resource for students and scholars.

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Book SynopsisThe story of misunderstood immigrants and their struggle to gain recognition and acceptance in the rural SouthDespite its reputation as a melting pot of ethnicities and races, the United States has a well-documented history of immigrants who have struggled through isolation, segregation, discrimination, oppression, and assimilation. South Carolina is home to one such group— known historically and derisively as “the Turks”—which can trace its oral history back to Joseph Benenhaley, an Ottoman refugee from Old World conflict. According to its traditional narrative, Benenhaley served with Gen. Thomas Sumter in the Revolutionary War. His dark-hued descendants lived insular lives in rural Sumter County for the next two centuries, and only in recent decades have they enjoyed the full blessings of the American experience.Early scholars ignored the Turkish tale and labeled these people “tri-racial isolates” and later writers disparaged them as “so-called Turks.” But members of the group have persisted in claiming Turkish descent and living reclusively for generations. Now, in South Carolina’s Turkish People, Terri Ann Ognibene and Glen Browder confirm the group’s traditional narrative through exhaustive original research and oral interviews.In search of definitive documentation, Browder combed through a long list of primary sources, including historical reports, public records, and private papers. He also devised new evidence, such as a reconstruction of Turkish lineage of the 1800s through genealogical analysis and genetic testing. Ognibene, a descendant of the state’s Turkish population, conducted personal interviews with her relatives who had been in the community since the 1900s. They talked at length and passionately about their cultural identity, their struggle for equal rights, and the mixed benefits of assimilation. Ognibene and Browder’s findings are clear. South Carolina’s Turkish people finally know and can celebrate their heritage.

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Book SynopsisThe slave revolution that two hundred years ago created the state of Haiti alarmed and excited public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. Its repercussions ranged from the world commodity markets to the imagination of poets, from the council chambers of the great powers to slave quarters in Virginia and Brazil and most points in between. Sharing attention with such tumultuous events as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War, Haiti's fifteen-year struggle for racial equality, slave emancipation, and colonial independence challenged notions about racial hierarchy that were gaining legitimacy in an Atlantic world dominated by Europeans and the slave trade. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World explores the multifarious influence - from economic to ideological to psychological - that a revolt on a small Caribbean island had on the continents surrounding it. Fifteen international scholars, including eminent historians David Brion Davis, Seymour Drescher, and Robin Blackburn, explicate such diverse ramifications as the spawning of slave resistance and the stimulation of slavery's expansion, the opening of economic frontiers, and the formation of black and white diasporas. They show how the Haitian Revolution embittered contemporary debates about race and abolition and inspired poetry, plays, and novels. Seeking to disentangle its effects from those of the French Revolution, they demonstrate that its impact was ambiguous, complex, and contradictory.

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Book SynopsisA guide to the fantastic world of a science fiction legendAuthor of more than forty novels and myriad short stories over a three-decade literary career, Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) single-handedly reshaped twentieth-century science fiction. His influence has only increased since his death with the release of numerous feature films and television series based on his work, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle. In Understanding Philip K. Dick, Eric Carl Link introduces readers to the life, career, and work of this groundbreaking, prolific, and immeasurably influential force in American literature, media culture, and contemporary science fiction.Dick was at times a postmodernist, a mainstream writer, a pulp fiction writer, and often all three simultaneously, but as Link illustrates, he was more than anything else a novelist of ideas. From this vantage point, Link surveys Dick's tragicomic biography, his craft and career, and the recurrent ideas and themes that give shape and significance to his fiction. Link finds across Dick's writing career an intellectual curiosity that transformed his science fiction novels from bizarre pulp extravaganzas into philosophically challenging explorations of the nature of reality, and it is this depth of vision that continues to garner new audiences and fresh approaches to Dick's genre-defining tales.

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Book SynopsisNancy 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.Trade ReviewJust about everybody likes a good ghost story. And ghost hunter/author Nancy Roberts . . . has put together as shivery a selection of other worldly tales as you're likely to find anywhere. . . . And whether you believe in ghosts or not, these tales are guaranteed to give you a chill, especially before you go into a dark room alone." - Southern Living

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Book SynopsisMore than 500 years ago, a tribe of Native Americans lived peacefully next to a river in an area called Cofitachequi, near what is now Camden, South Carolina. A kind and generous woman, who was a member of the Otter Clan, ruled this tribe. She became known as the Lady of Cofitachequi. All the people of the tribe and animals in the area loved the Lady. An adoring otter tells this true historical account of what happened to the Lady and her kin when Spanish explorers led by Hernando de Soto came looking for gold and silver. De Soto demanded that the tribe hand over precious metals and gems, but all the people had to offer were freshwater pearls and copper. In anger de Soto ordered his army to loot the temples and take all the food. Before leaving, they took the Lady captive and forced her to go with them. Otter watched with tears in his eyes as the Lady was taken away. Where did the Lady of Cofitachequi go, and would Otter and the people of the town ever see her again?

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Book SynopsisExploration and analysis of the innovative screenplays and novels by an award-winning playwright. Understanding Suzan-Lori Parks is a critical study of a playwright and screenwriter who was the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Suzan-Lori Parks is also the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award, a Whiting Writers Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts, two Obie Awards, and a Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts. In this book Jennifer Larson examines how Parks, through the innovative language and narratives of her extensive body of work, investigates and invigorates literary and cultural history.Larson discusses all of Parks's genres—play, screenplay, essay, and novel—closely reading key texts from Parks's more experimental earlier pieces as well as her more linear later narratives. Larson's study begins with a survey of Parks's earliest and most difficult texts including Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. Larson then analyses Venus, In the Blood, and the Lincoln Plays: The America Play and the Pulitzer Prize–winning TopDog/Underdog.Larson also discusses two of Parks's most important screenplays, Girl 6 and Their Eyes Were Watching God. In interpreting these screenplays, Larson examines film's role in the popularisation and representation of African American culture and history. These essays suggest an approach to all genres of literature and blend creativity, form, culture, and history into a revisionary aesthetic that allows for no identity or history to remain fixed, with Parks arguing that in order to be relevant they must all be dynamic and democratic.

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Book SynopsisIn Ota Benga under My Mother's Roof, Carrie Allen McCray (1913–2008) uses poignant and personal verse to trace the ill-fated life of the Congolese pygmy who was famously exhibited in the Bronx Zoo in 1906 before being taken in by the McCray family of Lynchburg, Virginia. Rooted in the rich historical and autobiographic context of her own experiences with Benga, McCray offers compelling, dexterous poems that place Benga’s story within the racial milieu of the early twentieth century as the burgeoning science of social anthropology worked to classify humans based on race and culture. The theme of this book is a study of humanity, of people of all kinds, in which Benga’s vitality becomes the measure against which everyone is measured. With poems that revel in African American signifying, spirituality, and traditional storytelling, McCray’s collection establishes a sincere legacy for Ota Benga as she shares her friend’s harrowing tale with new generations.Trade Review“In a narrative that moves like a classical tragedy, Ota Benga is ‘caught in a web / of flawed science,’ but emerges as a complex and real figure, a man out of time, out of place, whose dignity and humanity have left us with a harrowing story shared here by one who knew him best. Carrie Allen McCray weaves a rich tapestry in this cultural epic. We hear African rhythms and tribal voices, we encounter poems that seem like plays and chants and rituals and journal excerpts, and we witness the ‘birth of anthropology’ with an awful, embedded racism in its infancy. In McCray’s loving portrait of Ota Benga, we come to relish the small touches as much as the large ones—the landscape of turn-of-the-century Virginia, the manners of folks at work and play, the sense of tribal and familial loyalty, and the voices that accumulate into a cultural symphony, sometimes broken into grief, sometimes sustained by joy.”—David Baker, poetry editor, Kenyon Review |“From the deep forests of the Congo, to the black churches of Virginia, to the steel cages of the Bronx Zoo, to the hearth of the McCray household, Ota Benga wished only to be seen as a man. When we read Carrie Allen McCray’s beautiful, haunting poems, we share her great empathy and devotion to sharing the life of another human being once here, but now gone. This is a story about humanity, cultural differences, the beginnings of anthropology, the middle of racism, and how sweetly we used to take each other in and care for the stranger walking the earth just as we cared for our own. McCray carried Ota Benga in her head and heart until she was ready to craft his cautionary tale into something truly wonderful. Now it is our turn to bear this story, to remember who we are, and to act as who we wish to be.”—Nikky Finney, National Book Award winner for Head Off & Split

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Book SynopsisA sourcebook for understanding an uprising that continues to incite historical debate. In the fall of 1739, as many as one hundred enslaved African and African Americans living within twenty miles of Charleston joined forces to strike down their white owners and march en masse toward Spanish Florida and freedom. More than sixty whites and thirty slaves died in the violence that followed. Among the most important slave revolts in colonial America, the Stono Rebellion also ranks as South Carolina's largest slave insurrection and one of the bloodiest uprisings in American history. Significant for the fear it cast among lowcountry slaveholders and for the repressive slave laws enacted in its wake, Stono continues to attract scholarly attention as a historical event worthy of study and reinterpretation. Edited by Mark M. Smith, ""Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt"" introduces readers to the documents needed to understand both the revolt and the ongoing discussion among scholars about the legacy of the insurrection. Smith has assembled a compendium of materials necessary for an informed examination of the revolt. Primary documents - including some works previously unpublished and largely unknown even to specialists - offer accounts of the violence, discussions of Stono's impact on white sensibilities, and public records relating incidents of the uprising. To these primary sources Smith adds three divergent interpretations that expand on Peter H. Wood's pioneering study Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. Excerpts from works by John K. Thornton, Edward A. Pearson, and Smith himself reveal how historians have used some of the same documents to construct radically different interpretations of the revolt's causes, meaning, and effects.

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Book SynopsisThis is a reconstructed history of a complex Jewish community in Arabia at a critical juncture in world history. The Jewish communities of Arabia had a great influence on the attitudes that Muslims hold toward Jews, and yet relatively little has been written about their history. Through techniques borrowed from anthropology, literary criticism, sociology, and comparative religion, Gordon Darnell Newby reconstructs the understanding of Jewish life in Arabia before and during the time of Muhammad. In addition, this material is used to develop a perspective on the interconfessional relations between Judaism and Islam during an era when the latter was at one of its most dynamic stages of growth.Trade ReviewA daring venture... because of its attempt at reconstructing the history of a once-important but little-known group based on very sparse data. - Religious Studies Review ""The Jews of Arabia maintained a thriving, vital Diaspora community for centuries. While Muhammad was spreading Islam around Medina in the seventh century, there were Arabian Jewish merchants, poets, pastoral nomads, farmers, sculptors, and warriors. One of the findings of this scholarly synthesis is that Arabian Jewry influenced Muhammad's developing vision of his prophetic mission.... By identifying a body of shared experiences of Jews and Muslims, Newby's study gives hope for peaceful coexistence in the Middle East."" - Publishers Weekly

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Book SynopsisWomen Mystics and Sufi Shrines in India combines historical data with years of ethnographic fieldwork to investigate women's participation in the culture of Sufi shrines in India and the manner in which this participation both complicates and sustains traditional conceptions of Islamic womanhood. Kelly Pemberton's fieldwork offers an assessment of the contemporary circumstances under which a woman may be recognized as a spiritual authority or guide--despite official denial of such status--and an examination of the discrepancies between the commonly held belief that women cannot perform in the public setting of shrines and her own observations of women doing precisely that. She demonstrates that the existence of multiple models of master and disciple relationships have opened avenues for women to be recognized as spiritual authorities in their own right. Specifically Pemberton explores the work of performance, recitation, and ritual mediation carried out by women connected with Sufi orders through kinship and spiritual ties, and she maps shifting ideas about women's involvement in public ritual events in a variety of contexts, circumstances, and genres of performance. She also highlights the private petitioning of saints, the Prophet, and God performed by poor women of low social standing in Bihar Sharif. These women are often perceived as being exceptionally close to God yet are compelled to operate outside the public sphere of major shrines.

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Book SynopsisThis work is an appraisal of six theorists who have shaped America's literary landscape; Stanley Fish, Susan Bordo, Paul de Man, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Edward W.Said and Stephen Greenblatt. Underscoring the largely heterogenous mix of strategies and suppositions that these critics represent it offers concise analyses of their principle claims and illustrates how their works reflect a range of critical perspectives, from deconstruction, African American studies, and reader-response theory to political criticism, the new historicism and feminism. The study is prefaced with a short history of theory and criticism in the twentieth century and each of the theorists is placed within the larger context of contemporary criticism. It explains their specific strategies for interpreting literature, identifies the philosophical assumptions underlying those strategies, cites specific examples of how the strategies are applied to the reading of particular works, and notes possible objections to their theories.

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Book SynopsisFew events in American history have been studied more closely than the Civil War, this book is an examination of the effort to chronicle it. Topics covered include battlefield operations and the impact of race and gender.

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Book SynopsisThe standard work on Fitzgerald, revised, enlarged, and updated; Since its first publication in 1981, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur has stood apart from other biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald for its thoroughness and volume of information. It is regarded today as the basic work on Fitzgerald and the preeminent source for the study of the novelist. In this second revised edition, Matthew J. Bruccoli provides new evidence discovered since its original edition. This new edition of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur improves, augments, and updates the standard biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald.Trade ReviewMatthew J. Bruccoli is always able to look through the events themselves to the essential fact about Fitzgerald: his existence as an artist, and not only to how it came about, but what it came to. Some sort of epic grandeur is exactly what Fitzgerald had. It is a perfect title for this book, for the grandeur is there, in the struggle to create memorable work. I fully expect that this will be the indispensable biography of a very great American writer, for the spirit of the man is in the facts, and these, as gathered and marshaled by Bruccoli over thirty years, are all we will ever need. But more important, they are what we need. - James Dickey; ""Impeccably researched...both comprehensive and judicious... Bruccoli brings Fitzgerald vividly alive."" - Newsweek; ""This masterpiece contains exactly what we need to know about this dazzling figure."" - Publishers Weekly; ""It is difficult to imagine any work on Fitzgerald and his literary product that will supplant this one."" - The New Yorker; ""Indispensable and definitive."" - The Times Literary Supplement

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

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Book SynopsisSince 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.Trade ReviewUnderstanding David Foster Wallace places incisive close readings in a rich context that Wallace's fiction emerged from and shaped—including literary postmodernism, popular culture, philosophies of language, politics, and ethics—to create an overview that is as accessible as it is illuminating. An excellent place to start and return to for scholars, teachers, students, and all readers of Wallace's challenging work." —Mary K. Holland, State University of New York, New Paltz

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Book SynopsisA well-constructed and reasoned debunking of the mythology of amateurism in for-profit NCAA athleticsThe NCAA and the Exploitation of College Profit-Athletes provides a comprehensive historical, sociological, legal, financial, and managerial argument for the reclassification of profit-athletes as employees. The authors cut through the institutional doublespeak of approved benefits, cost-of-attendance stipends, or "name, image, likeness" (NIL) collectives and provide evidence that the NCAA's amateurism has been a collusive, exploitative, and racialized "pay for play" scheme that disproportionately affects Black profit-athletes. They offer a forward-thinking structure in which individual labor contracts, or a potential collective bargaining agreement, address profit-athlete compensation and working conditions.

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Book SynopsisAn oasis of art and nature, Brookgreen Gardens is America's first public sculpture garden and largest collection of American figurative sculpture. Founded in 1931 by Archer Milton Huntington and Anna Hyatt Huntington, its lush South Carolina coastal location is an exquisite setting for the more than two thousand works by four hundred twenty-five artists-including more than one hundred sculptures and other works by Anna Huntington, many placed in the gardens she designed. In 1984, Brookgreen was designated as a National Historic Landmark, highlighting the number of women sculptors whose work is presented in the collection, as well as the significance of the work of Anna Huntington. Today, Brookgreen has become a cultural institution unlike any other, blending sculpture, historic sites, botanical gardens, and the Lowcountry Zoo. As Brookgreen begins its ninetieth year, this volume celebrates the art, nature, and history ensconced in its 9,127 acres. More than one hundred fifty color photographs; an introduction by president and CEO, Page Kiniry; and a foreword by its chairman of the board, Dick Rosen, bring Brookgreen Gardens to life on the page.

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Book SynopsisCitizenship on Catfish Row focuses on three seminal works in the history of American culture: the first full-length narrative film, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation; the first integrated musical, Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern's Showboat; and the first great American opera, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Each of these works sought to make a statement about American identity in the form of a narrative, and each included in that narrative a prominent role for Black people.Each work included jarring or discordant elements that pointed to a deeper tension between the kind of stories Americans wish to tell about themselves and the historical and social reality of race. Although all three have been widely criticized, their efforts to connect the concepts of nation and race are not only instructive about the history of the American imagination but also provide unexpected resources for contemporary reflection.

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

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Book SynopsisThe first detailed linguistic history of South Carolina, with a new preface by the authorIn Voices of Our Ancestors Patricia Causey Nichols offers the first detailed linguistic history of South Carolina as she explores the contacts between distinctive language cultures in the colonial and early federal eras and studies the dialects that evolved even as English became paramount in the state. As language development reflects historical development, Nichols's work also serves as a new avenue of inquiry into South Carolina's social history from the epoch of Native American primacy to the present day.Because Charleston was among the foremost colonial American seaports, South Carolina experienced a diverse influx of cultures and languages from the onset, drawing influences from Native Americans, enslaved African Americans, and a plethora of European peoples—Scots-Irish, English, Jewish, German, and French Huguenot chief among them. Nichols tells the richly complex story of language contact from groups representing three continents and myriad cultures. In examining how South Carolinians spoke in public and private we glean much about how they developed a common culture while still honoring as best they could the heritages and tongues of their ancestors. Nichols pays particular attention to the development of the Gullah language among the coastal African American peoples and the ways in which this language—and others of South Carolina's early inhabitants—continues to influence the communication and culture of the state's current populations.Nichols's synthetic treatment of language history makes expert use of primary source materials and is further enhanced by the author's field research with Gullah-speaking African Americans and with descendants of Native Americans, as well as her keen observation of her own European American community in South Carolina. Through her deft analysis of contemporary language variations and regional and ethnic speech communities, she advances our understanding of how diverse the South Carolina experience has been, from the lowcountry to the upcountry and all points in between, and yet how the need to communicate shared experiences and values has united the state's population with a common meaningful language in which the diverse voices of our ancestors can still be heard.

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Book SynopsisThe winner of every major American literary prize, John Updike (1932-2009) was one of the most popular and prolific novelists of his time and a major cultural figure who traced the high point and fall of midcentury American self-confidence and energy. A superb stylist with sixty books to his credit, he brilliantly rendered the physical surfaces of the nation's life even as he revealed the intense longings beneath those surfaces. In Understanding John Updike, Frederic Svoboda elucidates the author's deep insights into the second half of the twentieth century as seen through the lives of ordinary men and women. He offers extended close readings of Updike's most significant works of fiction, templates through which his entire oeuvre may be understood.A small-town Pennsylvanian whose prodigious talent took him to Harvard, a staff position at the New Yorker, and ultimately a life in suburban Massachusetts, where the pace of his literary output never slowed, Updike was very much in the American cultural tradition. His series of Rabbit Angstrom novels strongly echo Sinclair Lewis's earlier explorations of middle America, while The Witches of Eastwick and related novels are variations on Nathaniel Hawthorne's nineteenth-century classic The Scarlet Letter. His number-one best seller Couples examines what Time magazine called "the adulterous society" in the last year of the Kennedy administration, following the nation's fall from idealism into self-centeredness. Understanding John Updike will give both new readers and those already familiar with the author a firm grasp of his literary achievement. This outline of Updike's professional career highlights his importance in the life of the nation--not only as a novelist but also as a gifted essayist, reviewer, cultural critic, and poet.

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Book SynopsisCitizenship on Catfish Row focuses on three seminal works in the history of American culture: the first full-length narrative film, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation; the first integrated musical, Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern's Showboat; and the first great American opera, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Each of these works sought to make a statement about American identity in the form of a narrative, and each included in that narrative a prominent role for Black people.Each work included jarring or discordant elements that pointed to a deeper tension between the kind of stories Americans wish to tell about themselves and the historical and social reality of race. Although all three have been widely criticized, their efforts to connect the concepts of nation and race are not only instructive about the history of the American imagination but also provide unexpected resources for contemporary reflection.

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Book SynopsisRandall Kenan is an American author best known for his novel A Visitation of Spirits and his collection of stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a nominee for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and named a New York Times Notable Book. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Whiting Writers Award, Sherwood Anderson Award, John Dos Passos Award, Rome Prize, and North Carolina Award for Literature. Understanding Randall Kenan is the first book-length critical study of Kenan, offering a brief biography and an exploration of his considerable oeuvre—memoir, short stories, novels, journalism, folklore, and essays. Kenan's writing can be complex and sometimes highly stylized while covering a broad range of topics, though he often explores African Americans' complicated relationships, specifically as they struggle to make connections along other axes of class, gender, and sexual identity. Crank explores these themes and how they influence Kenan's work through a personal interview with the author.

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

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Book SynopsisAlex Engebretson offers the first comprehensive study of Marilynne Robinson's fiction and essays to date, providing an overview of the author's life, themes, and literary and religious influences. Understanding Marilynne Robinson examines this author of three highly acclaimed novels and recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Orange Prize for fiction, and the National Humanities Medal. Through close readings of the novels and essay collections, Engebretson uncovers the unifying elements of Robinson's work: a dialogue with liberal Protestantism, an emphasis on regional settings, the marked influence of nineteenth-century American literature, and the theme of home. The study begins with Housekeeping, Robinson's haunting debut novel, which undertakes a feminist revision of the Western genre. Twenty-four years later Robinson began a literary project that would bring her national recognition, three novels set in a small, rural Iowa town. The first was Gilead, which took up the major American themes of race, the legacy of the Civil War, and the tensions between secular and religious lives. Two more Gilead novels followed, Home and Lila, both of which display Robinson's gift for capturing the mysterious dynamics of sin and grace.In Understanding Marilynne Robinson, Engebretson also reviews her substantial body of non-fiction, which demonstrates a dazzling intellectual range, from the contemporary science-religion debates, to Shakespeare, to the fate of liberal democracy. Throughout this study Engebretson makes the argument for Marilynne Robinson as an essential, deeply unfashionable, visionary presence within today's literary scene.

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Book SynopsisSolitary Pagans is the first book to explore the growing phenomenon of contemporary Pagans who practice alone. Although the majority of Pagans in the United States have abandoned the tradition of practicing in groups, little is known about these individuals or their way of practice. Helen A. Berger fills that gap by building on a massive survey of contemporary practitioners. By examining the data, Berger describes solitary practitioners demographically and explores their spiritual practices, level of social engagement, and political activities. Contrasting the solitary Pagans with those who practice in groups and more generally with other non-Pagan Americans, she also compares contemporary U.S. Pagans with those in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada.Berger brings to light the new face of contemporary paganism by analyzing those who learn about the religion from books or the Internet and conduct rituals alone in their gardens, the woods, or their homes. Some observers believe this social isolation and political withdrawal has resulted in an increase in narcissism and a decline in morality, while others argue to the contrary that it has produced a new form of social integration and political activity. Berger posits the implications of her findings to reveal a better understanding of other metaphysical religions and those who shun traditional religious organizations.

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Book SynopsisAn exploration of the University of South Carolina's trailblazing approach to the first-year experienceAs an innovative educational experiment, University 101 was designed to support students' transition to and success in college. Now, fifty years after its inception, the program continues to bring national recognition to the University of South Carolina. From Educational Experiment to Standard Bearer celebrates this milestone by exploring the course's origins; its evolution and success at the university; its impact on first-year students, upper-level students serving as peer leaders, faculty and staff instructors, and the university community and culture; and its role in launching the international first-year experience movement.By highlighting the most significant takeaways, lessons learned, and insights to practitioners on other campuses, this book will serve as an inspiration and road map for other institutions to invest in this proven concept and focus on the ingredients that lead to a successful program. John N. Gardner, founding director and architect of University 101, provides a foreword.

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Book SynopsisA vivid and moving story about family, courage, and the power of educationRuth remembers the day the sheriff pulled up in front of her family's home with a white neighbor claiming Ruth's father owed her recently deceased husband money. It was 1940 in Jim Crow South Carolina, and even at the age of 11, Ruth knew a Black person's word wasn't trusted. But her father remained calm as he waited on her mother's return from the house. She had retrieved a gray book, which she opened and handed to the sheriff. Satisfied by what he saw, the sheriff and the woman left. Ruth didn't know what was in that book, but she knew it was important.In Beatrice's Ledger, Ruth R. Martin brings to life the stories behind her mother's entries in that well-worn ledger, detailing her family's daily struggle to survive. Enriched by public records and interviews with people still living in Smoaks, South Carolina, Martin weaves history, humor, and poignant reflection into a compelling narrative about the power of family and the place we call home.

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Book SynopsisSeventeen hunter-scholars explore the hunting experience and question common negative stereotypesDespite the academy having a reputation for supporting broad and open inquiry in scholarship, some academics have not extended this open-minded support to colleagues’ personal pursuits. A variety of scholars enjoy hunting, which has been stereotyped by some as an activity of the unsophisticated. In Hunting and the Ivory Tower, Douglas Higbee and David Bruzina present essays by seventeen hunter-scholars who explore the hunting experience and question negative assumptions about hunting made by intellectuals and academics who do not hunt.Higbee and Bruzina suspect most academics’ understanding of hunting is based on brief television news reports of hunter-politicians and commercials for reality TV shows such as Duck Dynasty. The editors contend that few scholars appreciate the complexities of hunting or give much thought to its ethical, ecological, and cultural ramifications. Through this anthology they hope to start a conversation about both hunting and academia and how they relate.The contributors to this anthology, all academics from a variety of disciplines, have firsthand hunting experience. Their essays vary in style and tone from the scholarly to the personal and represent the different ways in which scholars engage with their avocation. The essays are grouped into three sections: the first focuses on the often-fraught relation between hunters and academic culture; the second section offers personal accounts of hunting by academics; and the third portrays hunting from an explicitly academic point of view, whether in terms of value theory, metaphysics, or history. Combined, these essays render hunting as a culturally rich, deeply personal, and intellectually satisfying experience worthy of further discussion.A foreword is provided by Robert DeMott, the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. He is a teacher, writer, critic, and internationally respected expert on novelist John Steinbeck.

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Book SynopsisEver since his first novel, Fight Club, was made into a cult film by David Fincher, Chuck Palahniuk has been a consistent presence on the New York Times best-seller list. A target of critics but a fan favorite, Palahniuk has been loathed and loved in equal measure for his dark humor, edgy topics, and confrontational writing style. In close readings of Fight Club and the thirteen novels that this controversial author has published since, Douglas Keesey argues that Palahniuk is much more than a “shock jock” engaged in mere sensationalism. His visceral depictions of sex and violence have social, psychological, and religious significance. Keesey takes issue with reviewers who accuse Palahniuk of being an angry nihilist and a misanthrope, showing instead that he is really a romantic at heart and a believer in community. In this first comprehensive introduction to Palahniuk’s fiction, Keesey reveals how this writer’s outrageous narratives are actually rooted in his own personal experiences, how his seemingly unprecedented works are part of the American literary tradition of protagonists in search of an identity, and how his negative energy is really social satire directed at specific ills that he diagnoses and wishes to cure. After tracing the influence of his working-class background, his journalistic education, and his training as a “minimalist” writer, Understanding Chuck Palahniuk exposes connections between the writer’s novels by grouping them thematically: the struggle for identity (Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Survivor, Choke); the horror trilogy (Lullaby, Diary, Haunted); teen terrors (Rant, Pygmy); porn bodies and romantic myths (Snuff, Tell-All, Beautiful You); and a decidedly unorthodox revision of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Damned, Doomed).Drawing on numerous author interviews and written in an engaging and accessible style, Understanding Chuck Palahniuk should appeal to scholars, students, and fans alike.

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Book SynopsisPatriots and Indians examines relationships between elite South Carolinians and Native Americans through the colonial, Revolutionary, and early national periods. Eighteenth-century South Carolinians interacted with Indians in business and diplomatic affairs, as enemies and allies during times of war and less frequently in matters of scientific, religious, or sexual interest. Jeff W. Dennis elaborates on these connections and their seminal effects on the American Revolution and the establishment of the state of South Carolina.Dennis illuminates how southern Indians and South Carolinians contributed to and gained from the intercultural relationship, which subsequently influenced the careers, politics, and perspectives of leading South Carolina patriots and informed Indian policy during the Revolution and early republic. In eighteenth-century South Carolina, what it meant to be a person of European American, Native American, or African American heritage changed dramatically. People lived in transition; they were required to find solutions to an expanding array of sociocultural, economic, and political challenges. Ultimately their creative adaptations transformed how they viewed themselves and others.While Native Americans were not the only “others” of the Revolutionary world, they were nonwhite, nonslave, and non-Christian allies of Britain who inhabited many millions of acres of highly arable land. For radical spokesmen such as William Henry Drayton, along with many white people on the frontier, Indians were viewed as a defining enemy during the American Revolution. Dennis contends that the stronger the attachment these men felt to the Whig cause and their aversion to the British, the harsher their attitudes toward Indians. In contrast the closer they were to Indians, socially and psychologically, the more lenient they appeared toward Native Americans. This difference of opinion carried over into national policies toward Native Americans. Following independence, some South Carolina patriots such as Andrew Pickens imagined an American identity broad and honorable enough to include Indians.

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Book SynopsisThe Lost Woods is a collection of fifteen short stories, most of them set in and around the fictional small town of Sledge, South Carolina. The events narrated in the stories begin in the 1930s and continue to the present day. The stories aren't accounts of hunting methods or legends of trophy kills--they are serious stories about hunting that are similar in style to William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. The collection traces the evolution of two families--the Whites and the Chapmans--as well as the changes in hunting and land use of the past eighty years. Some of these stories are narrated in third person; others are told by a wide range of characters, from grown men and women to children, but only from one perspective--that of the hunter. As they walk the woods in search of turkeys, deer, or raccoons, these characters seek something more than food. They seek a lost connection to some part of themselves. The title ""the lost woods"" is adapted from Cherokee myths and stories wherein people must return again and again to the woods to find animals that were lost. Thereby, we find not only food, but who we are. Through these stories Rice reminds us that hunting is inextricably entwined with identity. As one of the oldest rituals that we as a species know, it reflects both our nobility and our depravity. Through it we return again and again to find the lost woods inside ourselves.

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Book SynopsisCapturing the rich contrasts of the land and the intimate history of generations in the Mississippi Delta, Into the Flatland, by Kathleen Robbins, is a series of photographs documenting the terrain, people, and culture of her ancestry. The photographer returned to her childhood farm in Bell Chase as an adult in 2001 after completing graduate studies in New Mexico. She and her brother then lived on their family farm for nearly two years, breathing life back into family properties that had been long dormant.In this series, which won the Photo-NOLA prize in 2011, Robbins highlights the diversity of the landscape of the Delta, from expansive, dusty cotton fields to green, vibrant swamps. Her photographs capture the people and the architecture that are present on the land and also reminiscent of a time long past, before the mechanization of farming and the exodus of her people from their native soil. The presence of Robbins’s family in some of her photographs brings an intimacy to her portrait of the Delta and shows the tension between past and present. Including a short story by a National Endowment for the Arts recipient, Cynthia Shearer, Into the Flatland transports the reader into the rich history of Mississippi. At turns both colorful and gray, the photographs capture not only the Delta landscape, but also the stark and rugged images of people and buildings that sink as deeply into the land as the roots of the trees in the woods and swamps. As large masses of birds flock to the vast blue sky, Robbins remains fixed on the ground, her lens trained on the home and the landscape of her past.

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Book SynopsisThe radical changes wrought by the rise of the salon system in nineteenth-century Europe provoked an interesting response from painters in the American South. Painterly trends emanating from Barbizon and Giverny emphasized the subtle textures of nature through warm colour and broken brush stroke. Artists' subject matter tended to represent a prosperous middle class at play, with the subtle suggestion that painting was indeed art for art's sake and not an evocation of the heroic manner. Many painters in the South took up the stylistics of Tonalism, Impressionism, and naturalism to create works of a very evocative nature, works which celebrated the Southern scene as an exotic other, a locale offering refuge from an increasingly mechanized urban environment.Scenic Impressions offers an insight into a particular period of American art history as borne out in seminal paintings from the holdings of the Johnson Collection of Spartanburg, South Carolina. By consolidating academic information on a disparate group of objects under a common theme and important global artistic umbrella, Scenic Impressions will underscore the Johnsons' commitment to illuminating the rich cultural history of the American South and advancing scholarship in the field, specifically examining some forty paintings created between 1880 and 1940, including landscapes and genre scenes. A foreword, written by Kevin Sharp, director of the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee, introduces the topic. Two lead essays, written by noted art historians Pennington, Estill Curtisand Martha R. Severens, discuss the history and import of the Impressionist movement--abroad and domestically--and specifically address the school's influence on art created in and about the American South. The featured works of art are presented in full colour plates and delineated in complementary entries written by Pennington and Severens. Also included are detailed artist biographies illustrated by photographs of the artists, extensive documentation, and indices. Featured artists include Wayman Adams, Colin Campbell Cooper, Elliott Daingerfield, G. Ruger Donoho, Harvey Joiner, John Ross Key, Blondelle Malone, Lawrence Mazzanovich, Paul Plaschke, Hattie Saussy, Alice Ravenel, Huger Smith, Anthony Thieme, and Helen Turner.

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Book SynopsisThis 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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Book SynopsisA 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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Book SynopsisFrom 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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