Arthel ""Doc"" Watson (1923-2012) is arguably one of the most influential musicians Appalachia has ever produced. A musician's musician, Doc grew up on a subsistence farm in the North Carolina mountains during the Depression, soaking up traditional music and learning to play guitar even though he was blind. Rising to fame in the 1960s as part of ......
The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity
When James Ogilvie arrived in America in 1793, he was a deeply ambitious but impoverished teacher. By the time he returned to Britain in 1817, he had become a bona fide celebrity known simply as Mr. O, counting the nation's leading politicians and intellectuals among his admirers. And then, like so many meteoric American luminaries afterward, he ......
Summoning everyday Catholic laywomen to the forefront of twentieth-century Catholic history, Mary J. Henold considers how these committed parishioners experienced their religion in the wake of Vatican II (1962-1965). This era saw major changes within the heavily patriarchal religious faith-at the same time as an American feminist revolution caught ......
This collection of essays inverts the way we see the Cold War by looking at the conflict from the perspective of the so-called developing world, rather than of the superpowers, through the birth and first decades of India's life as a postcolonial nation. Contributors draw on a wide array of new material, from recently opened archival sources to ......
The American Civil War began with a laying down of arms by Union troops at Fort Sumter, and it ended with a series of surrenders, most famously at Appomattox Courthouse. But in the intervening four years, both Union and Confederate forces surrendered en masse on scores of other occasions. Indeed, roughly one out of every four soldiers surrendered ......
In this history of the black peasants of Amazonia, Oscar de la Torre focuses on the experience of African-descended people navigating the transition from slavery to freedom. Drawing on social and environmental history, he connects the Amazonians intimately to their natural landscapes. Relying on the natural world as a repository for traditions, ......
While the hindquarters of swine have been preserved in salt the world over for thousands of years, there are only a few places on earth where ham is as celebrated or integral to the cuisine as it is in the American South. To begin to understand the place that this iconic food holds in the hearts of southerners, Damon Lee Fowler writes, one has ......
From the earliest days of European settlement in the South, as in manyrural economies around the globe, cured pork became a main source of sustenance,and the cheaper, lower-on-the-hog cuts-notably, bacon-becamesome of the most important traditional southern foodstuffs. In this cookbook,Fred Thompson captures a humble ingredient's regional ......
Jennifer Brule is on a mission, southern style, to teach people to cook.Her method: master twenty-five classic southern dishes, and then-usingsimilar ingredients or cooking techniques or both-make two variations,one contemporary and one inspired by international tastes. Brule's line-upof beloved southern dishes is irresistible in itself, but she ......
