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...

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...

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...

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...

️ "Once you learn to read, you will be forever free." ️ Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is one of the most powerful and enduring autobiographies ever written—a firsthand account of oppression, resistance, and the unbreakable spirit of freedom. Published in 1845, this landmark work chronicles Douglass's journey from enslavement to emancipation, detailing his early life on Maryland plantations, his brutal treatment under slavery, and his ultimate escape t...

To escape slavery, light-skinned Ellen Craft disguised herself as a male enslaver. Her husband, William, who was darker skinned, posed as her valet. They successfully traveled to the North, and eventually to England, where they published a narrative recounting their lives in slavery and their daring escape.

Howard Fast's controversial essay on the proper role of literature, offering insight into his life and worksIn this 1950 essay, Howard Fast argues that all writers have a duty to reflect the truth of the world in their works, particularly regarding social justice. Fast's treatise on literary criticism allows for a fuller understanding of his early novels, in which his political beliefs remain inseparable from his writing.Literature and Reality, whic...