Blue Basin Island is the final resting spot of formerly enslaved Africans whose souls have flown from Earth-not to heaven or purgatory but toward freedom and a new life. Lucille, the island's seamstress, takes two forms. She lives among the inhabitants in human form and, along with the evil-repelling blue of the houses, her divine form protects ......
The McLain Family Band in Appalachia and the World
Bluegrass Ambassadors is the first book-length study of the McLain Family Band, which has spread the gospel of bluegrass for more than fifty years. Rooted in bluegrass but also collaborating with classical composers and performing folk, jazz, gospel, and even marches, the band traveled to sixty-two foreign countries in the 1970s under the auspices ......
Linked stories trace the vocational and emotional bargains made by workers at a Colorado sausage factory. It's almost a decade after the Great Recession, and in Colorado, St. Anthony Sausage has not recovered. Neither have its employees: a laid-off railway engineer, an exiled computer whiz, a young woman estranged from her infant daughter, an ......
The Impact of Mountaintop Removal Surface Coal Mining on Southern West Virginia
Coal is West Virginia's bread and butter. For more than a century, West Virginia has answered the energy call of the nation and the world by mining and exporting its coal. In 2004, West Virginia's coal industry provided almost forty thousand jobs directly related to coal, and it contributed $3.5 billion to the state's gross annual product. And in ......
The essays in this book use the nine-line poem known as ""Caedmon's Hymn"" as a lens on the world of Bede's Ecclesiastical History. A cowherd who is given a divine gift, Caedmon retells the great narratives of Christian history in the traditional form of Anglo-Saxon verse. An immense amount has been written about this episode, much of it ......
Boosterism, Memory, and Rural Suburbs in the Golden State
At the turn of the 20th century, the California dream was a suburban ideal where life on the farm was exceptional. Agrarian virtue existed alongside good roads, social clubs, cultural institutions, and business commerce. The California suburban dream was the ultimate symbol of progress and modernity. California Dreaming: Boosterism, Memory, and ......
A newly discovered nineteenth-century novel about West Virginia breaking away from Virginia, set amid the cannel coal boom and featuring an interracial abolitionist movement. Based mostly on his own experiences, Theophile Maher's local color novel Cannel Coal Oil Days challenges many popular ideas about antebellum Appalachia, bringing it more ......
A newly discovered nineteenth-century novel about West Virginia breaking away from Virginia, set amid the cannel coal boom and featuring an interracial abolitionist movement. Based mostly on his own experiences, Theophile Maher's local color novel Cannel Coal Oil Days challenges many popular ideas about antebellum Appalachia, bringing it more ......
