A higher education innovator identifies a surprising element missing in today’s leadershipOver the course of her remarkable career in American higher education, Mary Dana Hinton has accumulated a great store of wisdom, applicable not just to her own field but to all walks of life. Hinton’s unexpected contention in this accessible and uplifting book is that the essential component of all effective leadership is, of all things, love. Part memoir and part leadership t...

From the cotton boll to the Cotton Bowl in modern American cultureThere are few places on earth as thoroughly identified with a crop as the American South is with cotton. Burgundy is known for wine, and Java has coffee. In the South, for most of its history, cotton was king. Through much of the twentieth century, cotton cultivation determined nearly every aspect of life in the region. In Bale After Bale, leading historians and cultural critics offer multif...

Driven to the Field traces the culture of sharecropping—crucial to understanding life in the southern United States—from Emancipation to the twenty-first century. By reading dozens of works of literature in their historical context, David A. Davis demonstrates how sharecropping emerged, endured for a century, and continues to resonate in American culture. Following the end of slavery, sharecropping initially served as an expedient solution to a practical problem, but it quickly de...

Moving beyond familiar myths about moonshiners, bootleggers, and hard-drinking writers, Southern Comforts explores how alcohol and drinking helped shape the literature and culture of the U.S. South.Edited by Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger, this collection of seventeen thought-provoking essays proposes that discussions about drinking in southern culture often orbit around familiar figures and mythologies that obscure what alcohol consumption has meant over time. Comple...

Winner of the 2018 Eudora Welty PrizeWhen the United States entered World War I, parts of the country had developed industries, urban cultures, and democratic political systems, but the South lagged behind, remaining an impoverished, agriculture region. Despite New South boosterism, the culture of the early twentieth-century South was comparatively artistically arid. Yet, southern writers dominated the literary marketplace by the 1920s and 1930s.World War I...

The autobiographies of former slaves contributed powerfully to the abolitionist movement in the United States, fanning national — even international — indignation against the evils of slavery. The four texts gathered here are all from North Carolina slaves and are among the most memorable and influential slave narratives published in the nineteenth century. The writings of Moses Roper (1838), Lunsford Lane (1842), Moses Grandy (1843), and the Reverend Thomas H. Jones (1854) provide a movin...

New Modernist Studies, while reviving and revitalizing modernist studies through lively, scholarly debate about historicity, aesthetics, politics, and genres, is struggling with important questions concerning the delineation that makes discussion fruitful and possible. This volume aims to explore and clarify the position of the so-called ‘core’ of literary modernism in its seminal engagement with the Great War. In studying the years of the Great War, we find ourselves once more studying ‘t...

Scarlett O'Hara munched on a radish and vowed never to go hungry again. Vardaman Bundren ate bananas in Faulkner's Jefferson, and the Invisible Man dined on a sweet potato in Harlem. Although food and stories may be two of the most prominent cultural products associated with the South, the connections between them have not been thoroughly explored until now.Southern food has become the subject of increasingly self-conscious intellectual consideration. The Southern Foodways Alliance...

**A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2014From one of England’s most distinguished intellectual historians comes “an exhilarating ride…that will stand the test of time as a masterful account of” (The Boston Globe) one of the West’s most important intellectual movements: Atheism.**In 1882, Friedrich Nietzche declared that “God is dead” and ever since tens of thousands of brilliant, courageous, thoughtful individuals have devoted their creative energies to devi...

Direct, powerful, and unforgettable, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is one of the most important autobiographies ever written. In his own words, Douglass recounts his experiences as an enslaved person and his courageous escape to freedom, exposing the cruelty and injustice of slavery with undeniable truth. The book played a vital role in the abolitionist movement and remains deeply relevant for its moral clarity and emotional strength. Praised for its eloquence and hi...

Is a tower block, your unmade bed, your lavatory basin, or the bicycle chained to the gate next door a work of art? Why should a novel have a beginning, a middle, and an end; or even a story? Whether we recognise it or not, virtually every aspect of our life today has been influenced in part by the aesthetic legacy of Modernism. In this Very Short Introduction Christopher Butler examines how and why Modernism began, explaining what it is and showing how it has gradually informed a...

Ellen Craft and William Craft were slaves from Georgia who escaped to the North in 1848. They became famous due to the daring way they made their escape. Ellen, being light skinned, passed herself off as a white male, with William as her servant, allowing them to basically travel openly by train and steamboat. They eventually emigrated to England where they lived for almost 20 years. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom is their biographical account.