"[A] vital investigation of Forsyth’s history, and of the process by which racial injustice is perpetuated in America." —U.S. Congressman John LewisForsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century, was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. But then in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One ...

Winner of the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.From the author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America and the National Book Award finalist Elegy for a Broken Machine: Poems, here is the first collection from award-winning poet Patrick Phillips.A river runs through Patrick Phillips’s collection Chattahoochee, and through a family saga as powerful and poignant as the landscape in which it unfolds. Here are tales of a van...

From New York City subway encounters to memories of pickup basketball games on Fourth Street, a love letter to the past, and to all the relationships and memories our homeplaces hold, from the National Book Award finalist.“I will consider a slice of pizza," opens Phillips's poem "Jubilate Civitas." "For rare among pleasures in Gotham, it is both / exquisite and blessedly cheap." Thus, as throughout this collection, he celebrates a simple pleasure that "in a time of...

The poet Patrick Phillips brings us a stunning third collection that is at its core a son’s lament for his father. This book of elegies takes us from the luminous world of childhood to the fluorescent glare of operating rooms and recovery wards, and into the twilight lives of those who must go on. In one poem Phillips watches his sons play “Mercy” just as he did with his brother: hands laced, the stronger pushing the other back until he grunts for mercy, “a game we played // so many times ...

Formerly known as the President's House, then the Executive Mansion, and now for a long time the White House, this famous structure has a fascinating architectural history of ongoing change. The white painted facade of James Hoban's original structure has been added to and strengthened for more than 200 years, and its interior is a repository of some of America's greatest treasures. Artists such as Benjamin Latrobe, Pierre-Antoine Bellange, the Herter Brothers, Louis Tiffany, Charles McKim...

A positive legacy of the troubled Nixon administration--and one virtually unknown to the American public--is the extensive acquisition of valuable art and antiques for the White House and the redecoration of the executive mansion by Pat Nixon. With the help of an aggressive curator, Clement Conger, and a talented interior designer, Edward Vason Jones, the First Lady quietly erased much of the historic decor of Jacqueline Kennedy's Camelot and introduced an academic look to the State Rooms ...

The history and future of the unique partnership between the City of Columbia and the University of South CarolinaState universities are more than just places of higher learning, more indeed than just campuses or buildings, and more than just students scurrying from class to class. They are a symbol of the future of the nation and a statement about the commitment the sponsoring state has made to its people. In turn each city or town that hosts, develops, and nurtur...

“Humour of the philosophical pedigree can ‘bring us up short’, break us out of our commonplace acceptance, our slumber dogmatic, and require us to reassess what we thought we knew, or ask questions about that which had previously lain fallow in our thinking. Humour may awaken the ‘sleeping metaphors’ that all of us live by….” “The philosopher Sydney Smith (1771 – 1845) identified the salutary effect of humour on the human character … he comments, ‘A man might sit down systematically, and succ...

Discover Hope After Loss: A Powerful Memoir & Self-Help Guide for Healing and TransformationTime to Move Forward by Patrick Palmer, narrated by Phillip Nathaniel Freeman and published by Native Book Publishing, is a profoundly moving blend of memoir and self-help that illuminates the path through grief, caregiving struggles, and personal rebirth. This inspirational audiobook offers a lifeline to anyone fac...

Can an alien professor decode the language of love?Professor Harak H'gin leads a peaceful life studying linguistics on his native planet of Plumeria. Until the day he stumbles across a bedraggled, beautiful human female. Dared by a colleague to transform the pitiful creature into a true member of their society, Harak takes on the challenge.Forced to eke out a meager living selling flowers, Liza is desperate to improve her situation. When a chance meeting of...

Christopher Phillips is a man on a mission: to revive the love of questions that Socrates inspired long ago in ancient Athens. “Like a Johnny Appleseed with a master’s degree, Phillips has gallivanted back and forth across America, to cafés and coffee shops, senior centers, assisted-living complexes, prisons, libraries, day care centers, elementary and high schools, and churches, forming lasting communities of inquiry”—Utne Reader. Phillips not only presents the fundamentals of ph...

In a state assumed to have a constitutionally weak governor, the Speaker of the Texas House wields enormous power, with the ability to almost single-handedly dictate the legislative agenda. The House Will Come to Order charts the evolution of the Speaker's role from a relatively obscure office to one of the most powerful in the state. This fascinating account, drawn from the Briscoe Center's oral history project on the former Speakers, is the story of transition, modernization, an...