front cover of The Land Between the Lakes
The Land Between the Lakes
A Geography of the Forgotten Future
Ronald A. Foresta
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
Between Barkley and Kentucky Lakes—two great, artificial bodies of water in western Tennessee and western Kentucky—lies a wooded land that looks from above like the flattened thumb of a green giant. Once a land of marginal farms and small settlements, this 240-square-mile peninsula, known as the Land Between the Lakes, has been a national recreation area for the last half-century. Its rolling, wooded hills and open bottomlands give the place charm but little majesty.  The place swallows up its few campgrounds and visitors they attracts, creating a vacuous tranquility. In this volume, Foresta explores how this forgotten and bypassed region became a national recreation area.  He uses its history to retrieve our old attitudes toward nature, progress, and personal development. He also uses its history to retrieve a vision of the future that rallied idealists, intellectuals, and even public officials to its banner. 
    In the early 1960s, the Tennessee Valley Authority set out to create a great park for posterity at the Land Between the Lakes.  The park was to host the vast stretches of leisure that wealthy, secure, and more equal Americans of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would have at their disposal. It would be a place where such Americans could turn that leisure into happiness, psychic well-being, and strength of character. The TVA cleared the land of its inhabitants to create the park, removing people from their homes and severing their roots, thus effacing the history of the place. It then set about reshaping the land in the image of an anticipated future.  But when that future never arrived, managers struggled to fit the place to the America that actually came into being.  In the end they failed, leaving the Land Between the Lakes enveloped in a haunting sense of emptiness.
    A deft blend of environmental history, geography, politics, and cultural history, Land Between the Lakes demonstrates both the idealism of mid-twentieth-century planners and how quickly such idealism can fall out of alignment with the flow of history.  In so doing it explores a forgotten vision of the future that was in many ways more appealing than the present that came into being in its place.
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Landscape Archaeology
Reading and Interpreting the American Historical Landscape
Rebecca Yamin
University of Tennessee Press, 1996

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The Last Billion Years
A Geologic History of Tennessee
Don W. Byerly
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
Tennessee’s geologic history has evolved in myriad ways since its initial formation more than a billion years ago, settling into its current place on the North American supercontinent between 300 and 250 million years ago. Throughout that long span of “deep time,” Tennessee’s landscape morphed into its present form.
The Last Billion Years: A Geologic History of Tennessee is the first general overview in more than thirty years to interpret the state’s geological record. With minimal jargon, numerous illustrations and photographs, and a glossary of scientific terms, this volume provides the tools necessary for readers with little or no background in the subject to learn about the geologic formation of Tennessee, making it an excellent resource for high school students, college students, and interested general readers. Yet, because of the depth of its scholarship, the book is also an invaluable reference for professional geologists.
Recognizing that every reader is familiar with the roles of wind, water, gravity, and organisms in their everyday environment, author Don Byerly employs the Earth Systems Science approach, showing how the five interacting parts of the Earth—the geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and cryosphere—have worked together for eons to generate the rock compositions that make up Tennessee’s geologic past.
All regions of the state are covered. Featuring a unique time chart that illustrates the state’s geologic history from east to west, The Last Billion Years shows that while the geologic aspects of the state’s three grand divisions are related in many ways, each division has a distinctly different background. The organization of the book further enhances its usability, allowing the reader to see and compare what was happening contemporaneously across the state during the key sequences of its geologic history. Written in a clear and engaging style, The Last Billion Years will have broad appeal to students, lay readers, and professionals.
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The Last Bizarre Tale
Stories by David Madden
David Madden
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
Though he has authored more than eleven novels including, Cassandra Singing, The Suicide’s
Wife, Abducted by Circumstance
, and the recent London Bridge in Plague and Fire, David
Madden has been publishing short stories for all six decades of his active career. The Last
Bizarre Tale
consists of works that appeared in journals but that have not appeared together
as a collection.

Madden used two stories, “The Singer” and “Second Look Presents: the Rape of an
Indian Brave,” as chapters in his 1980 novel On the Big Wind. “The Headless Girl’s Mother”
was first published as a chapter in a serialized novel entitled Hair of the Dog. Two other stories
developed out of longer versions of Madden’s novels. “A Demon in My View” is part of
a sequel, not yet published, to Bijou.

All of the stories in David Madden’s third collection are distinguished by variety of content
and by shifting styles and often innovative techniques. They are to varying degrees and
in various ways bizarre in their characters and their relationships, in the kinds of internal
and external conflicts, and in locales and themes. The title story, The Last Bizarre Tale, involving
a corpse that has hung on a hook in a funeral home garage for decades, is evocative
of Poe and, in its dark, grotesque humor, Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers.
“Process is as important as product to David Madden,” writes editor James Perkins,
“and one can learn as much about the process of writing as about the human condition by a
careful reading of these stories.”
[more]

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The Last Letter
A Father's Struggle, a Daughter's Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust
Karen Baum Gordon
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

Born a German Jew in 1915, Rudy Baum was eighty-six years old when he sealed the garage door of his Dallas home, turned on the car ignition, and tried to end his life. After confronting her father’s attempted suicide, Karen Baum Gordon, Rudy’s daughter, began a sincere effort to understand the sequence of events that led her father to that dreadful day in 2002. What she found were hidden scars of generational struggles reaching back to the camps and ghettos of the Third Reich.

In The Last Letter: A Father’s Struggle, a Daughter’s Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust, Gordon explores not only her father’s life story, but also the stories and events that shaped the lives of her grandparents—two Holocaust victims that Rudy tried in vain to save in the late 1930s and early years of World War II. This investigation of her family’s history is grounded in eighty-eight letters written mostly by Julie Baum, Rudy’s mother and Karen’s grandmother, to Rudy between November 1936 and October 1941. In five parts, Gordon examines pieces of these well-worn, handwritten letters and other archival documents in order to discover what her family experienced during the Nazi period and the psychological impact that reverberated from it in the generations that followed.

Part of the Legacies of War series, The Last Letter is a captivating family memoir that spans events from the 1930s and Hitler’s rise to power, through World War II and the Holocaust, to the present-day United States. In recreating the fatal journeys of her grandparents and tracing her father’s efforts to save them an ocean away in America, Gordon discovers the forgotten fragments of her family’s history and a vivid sense of her own Jewish identity. By inviting readers along on this journey, Gordon manages to honor victim and survivor alike and shows subsequent generations—now many years after the tragic events of World War II—what it means to remember.

[more]

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Last to Leave the Field
The Life and Letters of First Sergeant Ambrose Henry Hayward, 28th Pennsylvania Volunteers
Timothy J. Orr
University of Tennessee Press, 2011

Revealing the mind-set of a soldier seared by the horrors of combat even as he kept faith in his cause, Last to Leave the Field showcases the private letters of Ambrose Henry Hayward, a Massachusetts native who served in the 28th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry.

Hayward’s service, which began with his enlistment in the summer of 1861 and ended three years later following his mortal wounding at the Battle of Pine Knob in Georgia, took him through a variety of campaigns in both the Eastern and Western theaters of the war. He saw action in five states, participating in the battles of Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg as well as in the Chattanooga and Atlanta campaigns. Through his letters to his parents and siblings, we observe the early idealism of the young recruit, and then, as one friend after another died beside him, we witness how the war gradually hardened him. Yet, despite the increasing brutality of what would become America’s costliest conflict, Hayward continually reaffirmed his faith in the Union cause, reenlisting for service late in 1863.

Hayward’s correspondence takes us through many of the war’s most significant developments,
including the collapse of slavery and the enforcement of Union policy toward Southern civilians. Also revealed are Hayward’s feelings about Confederates, his assessments of Union political and military leadership, and his attitudes toward desertion, conscription, forced marches, drilling, fighting, bravery, cowardice, and comradeship.

Ultimately, Hayward’s letters reveal the emotions—occasionally guarded but more often expressed with striking candor—of a soldier who at every battle resolved to be, as one comrade described him, “the first to spring forward and the last to leave the field.”

Timothy J. Orr is an assistant professor of military history at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

[more]

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Late Night, Early Morning
Stories
Allen Wier
University of Tennessee Press, 2017

While Allen Wier is perhaps best known as a prizewinning novelist, he is also a master of the short story, an art he has perfected over four decades. Late Night, Early Morning contains twenty-two of Wier’s tales: the stories in his first collection (Things About to Disappear), six uncollected stories, and seven stories that became part of his four novels. Richly textured and often lyrical, with intense images and diverse subjects, these stories feature indelible characters who imprint themselves onto readers’ minds. A man with no family finds the abandoned corpse of an infant and adopts the dead baby as his son. A Texas laborer, while repairing hen houses, learns that the stench of the egg ranch is the smell of money. In 1862 Louisiana, a runaway slave comes face to face with a white sharecropper’s wife who may turn him in, but something unexpected momentarily unites them. An American widow in Mexico as a photographer meets a florist from Texas who widens her angle of view. After discovering an underground cavern, a man lives his entire life in an imagined world shaped from stalactites and stalagmites.

Allen Wier’s skillfully written and compassionate stories reveal the shimmering moments in day-to-day life

[more]

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Late Night, Early Morning
Stories
Allen Wier
University of Tennessee Press

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Lee and His Generals
Essays in Honor of T. Harry Williams
Lawrence L. Hewitt
University of Tennessee Press, 2012

A legendary professor at Louisiana State University, T. Harry Williams not only produced such acclaimed works as Lincoln and the Radicals, Lincoln and His Generals, and a biography of Huey Long that won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, but he also mentored generations of students who became distinguished historians in their own right. In this collection, ten of those former students, along with one author greatly inspired by Williams’s example, offer incisive essays that honor both Williams and his career-long dedication to sound, imaginative scholarship and broad historical inquiry.
    The opening and closing essays, fittingly enough, deal with Williams himself: a biographical sketch by Frank J. Wetta and a piece by Roger Spiller that place Williams in larger historical perspective among writers on Civil War generalship. The bulk of the book focuses on Robert E. Lee and a number of the commanders who served under him, starting with Charles Roland’s seminal article “The Generalship of Robert E. Lee,” the only one in the collection that has been previously published. Among the essays that follow Roland’s are contributions by Brian Holden Reid on the ebb and flow of Lee’s reputation, George C. Rable on Stonewall Jackson’s deep religious commitment, A. Wilson Greene on P. G. T. Beauregard’s role in the Petersburg Campaign, and William L. Richter on James Longstreet as postwar pariah.
    Together these gifted historians raise a host of penetrating and original questions about how we are to understand America’s defining conflict in our own time—just as T. Harry Williams did in his. And by encompassing such varied subjects as military history, religion, and historiography, Lee and His Generals demonstrates once more what a fertile field Civil War scholarship remains.

Lawrence Lee Hewitt is professor of history emeritus at Southeastern Louisiana University. Most recently, he and Arthur W. Bergeron, now deceased, coedited three volumes of essays under the collective title Confederate Generals in the Western Theater.

Thomas E. Schott served for many years as a historian for the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Special Operations Command. He is the author of Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography, which won both the Society of American Historians Award and the Jefferson Davis Award.

[more]

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Lee and Jackson's Bloody Twelfth
The Letters of Irby Goodwin Scott, First Lieutenant, Company G, Putnam Light Infantry, Twelfth Georgia Volunteer Infantry
Johnnie Perry Pearson
University of Tennessee Press, 2010

Offering a fascinating look at an ordinary soldier's struggle to survive not only the horrors of combat but also the unrelenting hardship of camp life, Lee and Jackson's Bloody Twelfth brings together for the first time the extant correspondence of Confederate lieutenant Irby Goodwin Scott, who served in the hard-fighting Twelfth Georgia Infantry.

The collection begins with Scott's first letter home from Richmond, Virginia, in June 1861, and ends with his last letter to his father in February 1865. Scott miraculously completed the journey from naïve recruit to hardened veteran while seeing action in many of the Eastern Theater's most important campaigns: the Shenandoah Valley, the Peninsula, Second Manassas, and Gettysburg. His writings brim with vivid descriptions of the men's activities in camp, on the march, and in battle. Particularly revelatory are the details the letters provide about the relationship between Scott and his two African American body servants, whom he wrote about with great affection. And in addition to maps, photographs, and a roster of Scott's unit, the book also features an insightful introduction by editor Johnnie Perry Pearson, who highlights the key themes found throughout the correspondence.

By illuminating in depth how one young Confederate stood up to the physical and emotional duress of war, the book stands as a poignant tribute to the ways in which all ordinary Civil War soldiers, whether fighting for the South or the North, sacrificed, suffered, and endured.

Johnnie Perry Pearson is a retired state service officer formerly with the North Carolina Division of Veteran Affairs. He served as an infantry platoon sergeant during the Vietnam War and lives in Hickory, North Carolina.

[more]

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Lee's Last Casualty
The Life and Letters of Sgt. Robert W. Parker, Second Virginia Cavalry
Catherine M. Wright
University of Tennessee Press, 2008
The letters assembled in this extraordinarily rich collection were written by Robert W. Parker, an enlisted Confederate cavalryman who is thought to have been the last man killed in action in the Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War. He is representative of the Confederate Everyman: a modest farmer in the antebellum years, his patriotic fervor spurred him at the beginning of the war to enlist in the Confederate Army, in which he served until his death during the last charge at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.

Parker fought in most of the major campaigns in Virginia, including the 1862 Valley Campaign, the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, the 1863 Maryland Campaign, and the 1864 Overland Campaign. In letters to his wife Rebecca back home in Bedford County, Virginia, Parker described his life as an enlisted soldier in the Second Regiment Virginia Cavalry. His letters reveal how local communities worked together to provide the necessary stuff of war to soldiers, from food and clothing to moral support. They also show the importance of correspondence and religion in sustaining Confederate morale and nationalism.

Catherine Wright provides a valuable introduction that illuminates not only these particular letters but also the many roles of correspondence during the Civil War. She points out how women-in this case, Parker's wife and his mother-made sure that men in the ranks understood that more than politics or manly honor was at stake in fighting the Yankees. Parker believed that the war was a supreme test in which God would look deep into the souls of Northerners and Southerners. His private beliefs informed his public views on how Southerners should act as citizens of a Confederate nation. People of all classes, Parker reasoned, had to give themselves to country and to God if Southern armies were to succeed on the battlefield. Parker's steadfastness was surely due in part to the words of his family, who instilled in him “just cause” to continue fighting.

Anyone with an interest in how a typical soldier experienced the Civil War will find these letters both absorbing and enlightening.
[more]

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The Legacy of American Copper Smelting
Industrial Heritage versus Environmental Policy
Bode J. Morin
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
     Throughout world history, copper has been a significant metal for a vast number of cultures, from the oldest civilizations on record to the Bronze Age and Greek and Roman antiquity. Though replaced by iron as the primary metal for tools and weapons in ancient civilizations, copper found new resurgence in the nineteenth century when it was discovered to have particularly high thermal and electrical conductivity. Copper mining quickly escalated into a large-scale industry, and because of its vast reserves and innovative mining techniques, the United States seized the reins of global production with the opening of significant copper mines in Tennessee and Michigan in the 1840s and Montana in the 1870s.
     Copper-mining prosperity and America’s dominance of the industry came with a heavy environmental price, however. As rich copper deposits declined with increased mining efforts, large deposits of leaner ores—oftentimes less than one percent pure—had to be mined to keep pace with America’s technological thirst for copper. Processing such ore left an inordinate amount of industrial waste, such as tailings and slag deposits from the refining process and toxic materials from the ores themselves, and copper mining regions around the United States began to see firsthand the landscape degradation wrought by the industry.
     In The Legacy of American Copper Smelting, Bode J. Morin examines America’s three premier copper sites: Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, Tennessee’s Copper Basin, and Butte- Anaconda, Montana. Morin focuses on what the copper industry meant to the townspeople working in and around these three major sites while also exploring the smelters’ environmental effects. Each site dealt with pollution management differently, and each site had to balance an EPA-mandated cleanup effort alongside the preservation of a once-proud industry.
     Morin’s work sheds new light on the EPA’s efforts to utilize Superfund dollars and/or protocols to erase the environmental consequences of copper-smelting while locals and preservationists tried to keep memories of the copper industry alive in what were dying or declining post-industrial towns. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the American history of copper or heritage preservation studies, as well as historians of modern America, industrial technology, and the environment.

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The Legacy of Tamar
Courage, Faith, and the Common Road of Hope in a West Tennessee Community
Raye Springfield
University of Tennessee Press, 2000
The Legacy of Tamar centers on Brownsville, Haywood County, Tennessee, where Elbert Williams became the first NAACP official to be abducted and murdered my a white supremacist mob. This fascinating book is a good history of the people of Haywood County through a lens of five generations of an African American family. They endured one of those most oppressive white supremacist societies in the southern United States, but survived, advanced through higher education and training, and for generations achieved great things in their careers and lives despite the harmful effects of Jim Crow and continued racism in America.”
--Bobby L. Lovett, author of The Civil Rights Movement in Tennessee: A Narrative History
 
In this second edition, Raye Springfield brings the story of the Taylor-Springfield family and the community of Brownsville, Haywood County, Tennessee, into the twenty-first century. In 2015, as the fifteenth anniversary of The Legacy of Tamar approached, another important but relatively unknown event was also reaching its seventy-fifth anniversary: the June 1940 lynching of Elbert “Dick” Williams, the first known NAACP official killed during civil rights activities. Williams was a longtime Brownsville resident and secretary of the local NAACP chapter and was killed while organizing a voter registration drive for Haywood County’s black residents. In her preface to the second edition, Springfield recounts the services for Williams (services that were not allowed to be held in 1940), how times in Brownsville, and the nation, have changed, and yet how African Americans continue the fight for racial equality.
 
The Legacy of Tamar spans two world wars, the Great Depression, the civil rights era, and now the changing of the millennium. For the Taylor-Springfield family, ultimately, the dreams of prior generations were realized in the youth of the present day. More than just the story of one family in rural Tennessee, The Legacy of Tamar reflects historic nationwide struggles by African Americans and offers hope for new generations.
[more]

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The Letters of General Richard S. Ewell
Stonewall’s Successor
Donald C. Pfanz
University of Tennessee Press, 2012
“The Letters of General Richard S. Ewell provide a sweeping view of the nineteenth century. Such chronological breadth makes this volume truly exceptional and important. Through Ewell’s eyes we see the many worlds of an American people at war. His thoughtful observations, biting wit, and ironic disposition offer readers a chance to rethink the paper-thin generalizations of Ewell as a quirky neurotic who simply crumbled under the legacy of Stonewall Jackson.” —from the foreword by Peter S. Carmichael

Richard S. Ewell was one of only six lieutenant generals to serve in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and of those he was but one of two—the other being Stonewall Jackson, his predecessor as commander of the Second Corps—to have left behind a sizable body of correspondence. Forty-nine of Ewell’s letters were published in 1939. This new volume, drawing on more recently available material and scrupulously annotated by Ewell biographer Donald Pfanz, offers a much larger collection of the general’s missives: 173 personal letters, 7 official letters, 4 battle narratives, and 2 memoranda of incidents that took place during the Civil War.
    The book covers the full range of Ewell’s career:  his days at West Point, his posting on the western frontier, his role in the Mexican War, his Civil War service, and, finally, his postwar years managing farms in Tennessee and Mississippi. Some historians have judged Ewell harshly, particularly for his failure to capture Cemetery Hill on the first day at Gettysburg, but Pfanz contends that Ewell was in fact a brilliant combat general whose overall record, which included victories at the battles of  Cross Keys, Second Winchester, and Fort Harrison, was one of which any commanding officer could be proud.   Although irritable and often critical of others, Ewell’s correspondence shows him to have been generous toward subordinates, modest regarding his own accomplishments, and upright in both his professional and personal relationships.   His letters to family and friends are a mixture of wry humor and uncommon sense.   No one who reads them will view this important general in quite the same way again.

DONALD C. PFANZ is the author of Richard S. Ewell: A Soldier’s Life, Abraham Lincoln at City Point, and War So Terrible:  A Popular History of the Battle of Fredericksburg.


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Liars, Damn Liars, and Storytellers
Essays on Traditional and Contemporary Storytelling
Joseph Sobol
University of Tennessee Press, 2020

Joseph Sobol is one of a select few contemporary scholar-practitioners to chart the evolution of storytelling from traditional foundations to its current multifarious presence in American life. The years since his classic The Storytellers’ Journey: An American Revival (1999), have brought seismic shifts in storytelling circles. Essays gathered here move between cultural history, critical analysis, and personal narratives to showcase the efforts of traditional and contemporary storytellers to make their presence felt in the world.

The book begins with an account of recent changes in the storytelling landscape, including the growth of a new generation of urban personal storytelling venues sparked by The Moth. Next is a suite of essays on Appalachian Jack tales, the best-known cycle of traditional American wonder tales, and an account of its most celebrated practitioners, including close encounters with the traditional master, Ray Hicks. The next set examines frames through which storytellers capture truth—historical, legendary, literary, oral traditional, and personal. Stylistic differences between northern and southern tellers are affectionately portrayed, with a special look at the late, much-loved Alabaman Kathryn Tucker Windham.

The final section makes the case for informed critical writing on storytelling performance, through a survey of notable contemporary storytellers’ work, a look at the ethics of storytelling genres, and a nuanced probe of truth and fiction in storytelling settings. A tapestry of personal stories, social criticism, and artistic illuminations, Liars, Damn Liars, and Storytellers is valuable not only to scholars and students in performance, folklore, cultural studies, and theater, but also to general readers with a love for the storytelling art.

[more]

front cover of The Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee
The Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee
Michael A. Lofaro
University of Tennessee Press, 2020
The legendary Davy Crockett arose simultaneously with the emergence of the historical Crockett as a public figure, and once established, the man and the myth were forevermore entangled. The present work, his Life and Adventures (1833), ushered in a series of biographical and autobiographical books that thrust Crockett fully onto the national and international scene. This work, quickly retitled Sketches and Eccentricities, was the most outlandish. Its purported author, J. S. French, mixed two nineteenth-century genres of storytelling—the Humor of the Old Southwest and the sketch—all presented within a historical framework to create an early version of the King of the Wild Frontier. The Crockett encountered here is the marksman who can shoot an elk from 140 yards with his beloved rifle, Betsy, grin the bark off a tree knot, and choose bows and arrows as weapons when challenged to a duel by a fellow congressman. Within a year, Crockett disavowed this book, preferring his autobiography—Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee—but this rollicking story, often bouncing along from tall tale, hunting anecdote, faux moral tale, to humorous pratfall, became a major source for the later biographical writings and a later cultural industry that swept up newspapers, books, political propaganda, plays, and films—and almost every way in which a frontier figure could appear in popular culture. And, while Crockett’s image was a source of entertainment and humor, it also pointed toward something far more serious: after his death at the Alamo it presented Americans with a fictional Frontier hero who progressively embodied their views on topics as varied as manliness, manifest destiny, and even white supremacy. However, the Crockett of Sketches—canny, adaptable, intelligent but not educated, hilarious—was above all a perfect reflection of the aspirations, interests, and beliefs of Jacksonian-era Americans 
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The Life and Wars of Gideon J. Pillow
Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr.
University of Tennessee Press, 2011

One of nineteenth-century America’s most controversial military figures, Gideon Johnson Pillow gained notoriety early in the Civil War for turning an apparent Confederate victory at Fort Donelson into an ignominious defeat. Dismissed by contemporaries and historians alike as a political general with dangerous aspirations, his famous failures have overshadowed the tremendous energy, rare talent, and great organizational skills that also marked his career. In this exhaustive biography, Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. and Roy P. Stonesifer Jr. look beyond conventional historical interpretations to provide a full and nuanced portrait of this provocative and maligned man.

While noting his arrogance, ambition, and very public mistakes, Hughes and Stonesifer give Pillow his due as a gifted attorney, first-rate farmer, innovator, and man of considerable political influence. One of Tennessee’s wealthiest planters, Pillow promoted scientific methods to improve the soil, preached crop diversification to reduce the South’s dependence on cotton, and endorsed railroad construction as a means to develop the southern economy. He helped secure the 1844 Democratic nomination for his friend and fellow Tennessean James K. Polk and was rewarded after Polk’s victory with an appointment as brigadier general. While his role in the Mexican War earned him a reputation for recklessness and self-promotion, his organization of what would become the Army of Tennessee put him at the forefront of the Confederate war effort. After the disaster at Donelson, he spent the rest of the war directing Confederate conscription in the West and leading Rebel cavalry forces—a role of continuing service which, the authors show, has been insufficiently acknowledged.

Updated with a new foreword by noted Civil War scholar Timothy D. Johnson, The Life and Wars of Gideon J. Pillow portrays a colorful, enigmatic general who moved just outside the world of greatness he longed to enter.

Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. is the author or editor of twenty books relating to the American Civil War, including Refugitta of Richmond; Brigadier General Tyree H. Bell, C.S.A.: Forrest’s Fighting Lieutenant; and Yale’s Confederates. The late Roy P. Stonesifer Jr. was a professor of history at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.

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Life Beyond the Holocaust
Memories and Realities
Mira Ryczke Kimmelman
University of Tennessee Press, 2005
“For the rare Jews of Poland who managed to survive the Holocaust, the very idea of a return to what had been one’s homeland might seem both physically and psychologically impossible, perhaps even absurd. Yet it is precisely this paradoxical journey that Mira Kimmelman undertakes with great dignity and generosity. In words that are both direct and intimate, she exposes the ambivalence of what it means to learn to live again after Auschwitz—to experience love, raise a family, and assume a steadfast place in the Jewish community of a new land. At the same time, she acknowledges the abyss of losses that can never be retrieved. Perhaps even more importantly, Mira reveals how the pain of a return is transformed into a new adventure of discovery and reconciliation to be shared with her sons, their families, and her readers for generations to come.”—Karen D. LevyProfessor of French StudiesUniversity of Tennessee

“This book is written with intelligence, sensitivity, and eloquence. As a post-Holocaust memoir, it is an excellent volume, inasmuch as it brings out the scope of the Holocaust, its impact on future generations, and how it affects our understanding of past generations. The author explores and elucidates the problems of liberation from death and the return to life that forever confront Holocaust survivors.” —David Patterson Bornblum Chair in Judaic Studies University of Memphis

“Life beyond the Holocaust brings to mind in its power to document painful memories Primo Levi’s The Reawakening. Ms. Kimmelman’s memoir is, above all, a beautiful love story of herself and her husband, Max. She writes in a vernacular style that evokes her experiences with specific details. Her book is alive … and celebrates in good prose human values triumphing over radical evil.” —Hugh Nissenson
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Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk
An Autobiography
Michael A. Lofaro
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

Originally published in 1833, the autobiography of the Sauk war chief Black Hawk was the first memoir written by a Native American who was actively resisting US Indian removal policy. Donald Jackson edited the first scholarly version of this work—Black Hawk: An Autobiography—in 1955. Since then, the Life has become a classic and seminal text in the fields of Native American literature and studies, American history, literature, autobiography, and cultural studies.

This edition of Black Hawk’s 1833 autobiography includes explanatory, historical, and textual notes that significantly enrich the understanding of Black Hawk’s memoir, his life, and the Black Hawk War of 1832. The notes and a chronology make this key Native American text available to scholars in several new ways. Likewise, in its preface and critical essay, this edition moves beyond Jackson’s historical work to incorporate insights from numerous other disciplines that have since engaged the text. These investigations reflect the new developments in scholarship since 1955, suggest future possibilities for the crosscultural study of Black Hawk’s Life, and examine the continuity of his autobiography within Native American and other life-story traditions. This volume also includes the biographical continuation of Black Hawk’s Life—recounting subsequent events in his life until his death in 1838—written by J. B. Patterson for his 1882 reissued and expanded edition of the original autobiography.

Scholars of Native American literature and history and settler colonialism will find much to engage them in this remarkable new edition.

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Liminal Zones
Where Lakes End and Rivers Begin
Kim Trevathan
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
     After the death of his paddling companion, a German shepherd–labrador retriever mix named Jasper, Kim Trevathan began a series of solitary upstream kayaking quests in search of what he calls “liminal zones,” transitional areas where dammed reservoirs give way to the current of the rivers that feed them. For four years he scoured the rivers and lakes of America, where environmentally damaging, and now decaying, man-made structures have transformed the waterways. In this thoughtful work, he details his upriver adventures, describing the ecological and aesthetic differences between a dammed river and a free-flowing river and exploring the implications of what liminal zones represent—a reassertion of pure, unadulterated nature over engineered bodies of water.
     Trevathan began by exploring the rivers and creeks of his childhood: the Blood River and Clarks River in western Kentucky. He soon ventured out to the Wolf River, the Big South Fork of the Cumberland, and other waterways in Tennessee. In 2008, he looped around the country with trips to Indiana’s Tippecanoe River, Montana’s Clearwater River, Oregon’s Deschutes and Rogue Rivers, and Colorado’s Dolores River, as well as adventures on such southeastern rivers as the Edisto, the Tellico, and the Nantahala. To Trevathan, paddling upstream became a sort of religion, with a vaporous deity that kept him searching. Each excursion yielded something unexpected, from a near-drowning in the Rogue River to a mysterious fog bank that arose across the Nantahala at midday.
     Throughout Liminal Zones, Trevathan considers what makes certain places special, why some are set aside and protected, why others are not, and how free-flowing streams remain valuable to our culture, our history, and our physical and spiritual health. This contemplative chronicle of his journeys by water reveals discoveries as varied and complex as the rivers themselves.
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The Limits of Literary Historicism
Allen Dunn
University of Tennessee Press, 2012

         The Limits of Literary Historicism is a collection of essays arguing that historicism, which has come to dominate the professional study of literature in recent decades, has become ossified. By drawing attention to the limits of historicism—its blind spots, overreach, and reluctance to acknowledge its commitments—this provocative new book seeks a clearer understanding of what historicism can and cannot teach us about literary narrative.
            Editors Allen Dunn and Thomas F. Haddox have gathered contributions from leading scholars that challenge the dominance of contemporary historicism. These pieces critique historicism as it is generally practiced, propose alternative historicist models that transcend mere formula, and suggest alternatives to historicism altogether. The volume begins with the editors’ extended introduction, “The Enigma of Critical Distance; or, Why Historicists Need Convictions,” and then is divided into three sections: “The Limits of Historicism,” “Engagements with History,” and “Alternatives to History.”
            Defying convention, The Limits of Literary Historicism shakes up established modes to move beyond the claustrophobic analyses of contemporary historicism and to ask larger questions that envision more fulfilling and more responsible possibilities in the practice of literary scholarship.

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The Limits of Tyranny
James A. Delle
University of Tennessee Press, 2015
The long history of slavery in the Americas has left a wealth of archaeological evidence from excavations of southern and Caribbean plantations. These excavations have largely informed our ideas of African slavery, but, more recently, scholars have also focused on northern slave sites and the various degrees of slavery pertaining not only to Africans but to Native Americans and even European immigrants as well. The Limits of Tyranny brings together nine essays that illuminate the struggles of slaves against the structure of inequality found throughout the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
            These essays use the concept of struggle to explore the archaeological dimensions of various sites in the Caribbean and the American South and Northeast. The actions of the enslaved, both collectively and as individuals, altered or eliminated the social forces that oppressed them. The contributors discuss the physical struggle through slave uprisings and organized rebellions and the moral struggle through historic laws and ethical behavior common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They also define the limits of oppression and use the material evidence associated with each site to determine the lengths to which slaves would go to fight their enslavement.
            The Limits of Tyranny advances the study of the African diaspora and reconsiders the African American experience in terms of dominance and resistance. This volume will appeal to any archaeologist looking to move beyond the common discourse on slavery and assess more closely the African struggle against tyranny.
 
James A. Delle is a professor in the Anthropology and Sociology Department at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. He is coauthor, with Mark Leone, of An Archaeology of Social Space and coeditor, with Stephen Mrozowski and Robert Paynter, of Lines That Divide: Historical Archaeologies of Race, Class, and Gender.
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Lincoln Memorial University and the Shaping of Appalachia
Earl J. Hess
University of Tennessee Press, 2011

Located near Cumberland Gap in the rugged hills of East Tennessee, Lincoln Memorial University (LMU) was founded in 1897 to help disadvantaged Appalachian youth and reward the descendents of Union loyalists in the region. Its founder was former Union General Oliver Otis Howard, a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln, who made it his mission to sustain an institution of higher learning in the mountain South that would honor the memory of the Civil War president.

In Lincoln Memorial University and the Shaping of Appalachia, LMU Professor Earl J. Hess presents a highly readable and compelling history of the school. Yet the book is much more than a chronology of past events. The author uses the institution’s history to look at wider issues in Appalachian scholarship, including race and the modernization of educational methods in Appalachia. LMU offered a work-learn program to help students pay their way, imparting the value of self-help, and it was hit by a massive student strike that nearly wrecked the institution in 1930. LMU has played an important role in shaping what higher learning could be for young people in its region of southern Appalachia.

The volume examines the involvement of O. O. Howard and his unflagging efforts to establish and fund the school; the influence of early twentieth-century industrial capitalism—
Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were benefactors—on Appalachia and LMU in particular; and the turn-of-the-century cult of Lincoln that made the university a major repository of Lincolniana.

Meticulously researched and richly illustrated, Lincoln Memorial University and the Shaping of Appalachia is a fresh look at the creation, contributions, and enduring legacies of LMU. Students, alumni, and friends of the university, as well as scholars of Appalachian culture and East Tennessee history, will find this book both enlightening and entertaining.

Earl J. Hess holds the Stewart W. McClelland Chair in History at Lincoln Memorial University. He is the author of more than a dozen books on Civil War military history, the latest of which is Into the Crater: The Mine Attack at Petersburg.

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Lines That Divide
Historical Archaeologies Of Race, Class, And Gender
James A. Delle
University of Tennessee Press, 2000
"A truly creative, rigorous, and novel interdisciplinary collection that rethinks some of historical archaeology’s most fundamental questions."—Paul Mullins, Indiana University–Purdue University

The division of human society by race, class, and gender has been addressed by scholars in many of the social sciences. Now historical archaeologists are demonstrating how material culture can be used to examine the processes that have erected boundaries between people.
    Drawing on case studies from around the world, the essays in this volume highlight diverse moments in the rise of capitalist civilization both in Western Europe and its colonies. In the first section, the contributors address the dynamics of the racial system that emerged from European colonialism. They show how archaeological remains shed light on the institution of slavery in the American Southeast, on the treatment of Native Americans by Mormon settlers, and on the color line in colonial southern Africa. The next group of articles considers how gender was negotiated in nineteenth-century New York City, in colonial Ecuador, and on Jamaican coffee plantations. A final section focuses on the issue of class division by examining the built environment of eighteenth-century Catalonia and material remains and housing from early industrial Massachusetts.
    These essays constitute an archaeology of capitalism and clearly demonstrate the importance of history in shaping cultural consciousness. Arguing that material culture is itself an active agent in the negotiation of social difference, they reveal the ways in which historical archaeologists can contribute to both the definition and dismantling of the lines that divide.
    The Editors: James A. Delle is an assistant professor of anthropology at Franklin and Marshall College and the author of An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica's Blue Mountains.
    Stephen A. Mrozowski is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts–Boston, director of the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research, and co-author of Living on the Boott: Historical Archaeology of the Boott Cotton Mills, Lowell, Massachusetts.
    Robert Paynter is a professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, author of Models of Spatial Inequality, and co-editor of The Archaeology of Inequality.
    The Contributors: Marjorie R. Abel, Mark Bograd, James A. Delle, Terrence W. Epperson, William B. Fawcett, Ross W. Jamieson, David L. Larsen, Walter Robert Lewelling, Patricia Hart Mangan, Stephen A. Mrozowski, Michael S. Nassaney, Thomas C. Patterson, Robert Paynter, Warren Perry, Paul A. Shackel, Theresa A. Singleton, Diana diZerega Wall.


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Little to Eat and Thin Mud to Drink
Letters, Diaries, and Memoirs from the Red River Campaigns, 1863–1864
Gary D. Joiner
University of Tennessee Press, 2007
Little to Eat and Thin Mud to Drink does more than just document the history of the Trans-Mississippi conflict of the Civil War. It goes much deeper, offering a profound, extended look into the innermost thoughts of the soldiers and civilians who experienced the events that took place in Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas. Gleaning from a rich body of rare journals, diaries, and letters, this groundbreaking book demonstrates the significant impact that military operations in this region had on the local population in years between 1863 and 1865.

Readers will be introduced to the many different individuals who were touched by the campaign, both Confederate and Union. Ably edited by Joiner, a leading expert on the Trans-Mississippi conflict, and others, some of these manuscripts are witty, others somber, some written by Harvard- and Yale-educated aristocrats, others by barely literate farmers. All profoundly reflect their feelings regarding the extraordinary circumstances and events they witnessed.

In Little to Eat and Thin Mud to Drink, readers will have access to the diary of James A. Jarratt, a Confederate sergeant whose cogent narratives dispute commonly held views of the Battle of Mansfield. Representing a much different point of view is the diary of Private Julius Knapp, whose lengthy diary sheds light on the life of a Northern soldier fighting in the ill-fated Union march through Louisiana in 1864. A rare glimpse into the diary of a Southern woman is offered through the fascinating and melancholy musings of plantation belle Sidney Harding. Readers will also encounter the private letters of a French prince turned Confederate officer; of Elizabeth Jane Samford Fullilove, the angst-ridden wife of a Confederate soldier; and many others.

These first-person narratives vividly bring to life the individuals who lived through this important, but often neglected, period in Civil War history. Little to Eat and Thin Mud to Drink will engross anyone interested in exploring the human side of the Civil War.

Gary Joiner is an assistant professor of history at Louisiana State University in Shreveport and the director of the Red River Regional Studies Center at LSUS. His books include One Damn Blunder from Beginning to End: The Red River Campaign of 1864 and Union Failure in the West and Through the Howling Wilderness: The 1864 Red River Campaign and Union Failure in the West. He is also the coeditor, with Marilyn S. Joiner and Clifton D. Cardin, of another volume in the Voices of the Civil War series, No Pardons to Ask, nor Apologies to Make: The Journal of William Henry King, Gray's 28th Louisiana Infantry Battalion.
 
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Little X
Growing Up In The Nation Of Islam
Sonsyrea Tate
University of Tennessee Press, 2004
"Instead of writing a bitter condemnation of the Nation of Islam, Tate has adroitly described its purpose as well as its shortcomings." —USA Today

"A temperate and sympathetic treatment of an African-American family's religious evolution." —Publishers Weekly

"A compelling story. It provides an honest, inside view of one of America's most controversial religious movements and perceptively points to social tensions of race, gender and religious identity." —Kirkus Reviews

"Extremely valuable. Recent literature is interested almost exclusively in male leaders. Tate's book provides a new perspective. I have used the book in a number of teaching contexts to very good results." —Judith Weisenfeld, Vassar College

In Little X, Sonsyrea Tate reveals, through the acute vision and engaging voice of a curious child, the practices and policies of the mysterious organization most know only through media portrayals of its controversial leaders Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan. First published in 1997, Little X chronicles the multigenerational experience of Tate's family, who broke from the traditional black church in the 1950s to join the radical Nation of Islam, then struggled to remain intact through disillusionment, shifting loyalties, and forays into Orthodox Islam.

Little X is also an absorbing story of a little girl whose strict Muslim education filled her with pride, confidence, and a longing for freedom, of a teenager in an ankle-length dress and headwrap struggling to fit in with non-Muslim peers, and of a young woman whose growing disillusionment with the Nation finally led to her break with the Muslim religion. Little X offers a rare glimpse into the everyday experience of the Nation of Islam, and into a little-understood part of America's history and heritage.

Sonsyrea Tate-Montgomery has been a staff writer for the Virginian Pilot, Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post. The recipient of four coveted Echoes of Excellence awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, Tate has also worked as assistant to Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton. She currently works as a political reporter for The Gazette, a Post-Newsweek publication.
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Local Baptists, Local Politics
Churches and Communities in the Middle and Uplands South
Clifford A., Jr. Grammich
University of Tennessee Press, 2022
“This meticulously researched study reveals how the localism inherent among Baptists carries over into political attitudes and involvement. Grammich's 'bible-based' Baptist sectarians also show how diverse Baptists really are and how strong and enduring a social ethic many smaller Baptist groups have cultivated.”—Charles H. Lippy, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga

This provocative book explores the political views and actions of religious adherents who claim to base their faith on a literal interpretation of the Bible. Focusing on several small Baptist sects scattered throughout the middle and uplands South, Clifford Grammich finds that these groups are often highly engaged politically at the local level. He thus challenges the traditional view of these Baptists as politically aloof, concerned only with matters of faith and personal conduct.

Grammich shows that the politics arising from these groups’ religious beliefs are not those of any consistent, pervasive ideology. Rather, he argues, such politics more often reflect a series of adaptations to local circumstances. Among the sects that he studies, there is a strong emphasis on the local authority to interpet the Bible and, thus, to shape religious commands to very specific conditions. Beyond the broad concerns of preserving the traditional family and curbing excessive worldliness, these Baptists are free to adapt their theology to meet their particular needs—and can often do so more readily than those belonging to more hierarchical churches. Since these people are typically more rural, more southern, less educated, and less affluent than most Americans, the author notes, they can face special problems in dealing with modernity—problems that their religion helps them address.

The book includes two case studies that show in depth both the possiblities and limitations of politics within these groups. In a local labor struggle in Tennessee, Baptist sectarians were able to generate more religious support for a United Mine Workers local than was offered by the usual supporters of organized labor in other churches. On the other hand, in an environmental conflict in Kentucky, these Baptists’ traditional community concerns inhibited their participation in a broader reform movement.

Relating the beliefs and actions of the “local Baptists” to various larger themes—including those of cultural traditionalism, economic populism, and increasing affluence—Grammich offers a valuable study of the complex ways in which religious faith can affect political involvement. His book will effect a new understanding of American fundamentalism itself.

The Author: Clifford A. Grammich Jr. is director of research at Heartland Center, a social research institute in Hammond, Indiana.

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London Bridge in Plague and Fire
A Novel
David Madden
University of Tennessee Press, 2012
“Like Dr. Frankenstein’s invented creature, the larger-than-life, flesh-and-blood characters of London Bridge in Plague and Fireare made from pieces of the dead past that are forged in the consciousness of an historian—himself a creation of history and of David Madden’s literary magic.  Struck by the lightning bolt of the co-joined imaginations of Madden and his reader, the fabricated beings rise up and walk on London Bridge, and they have the audacity to speak for themselves in completely convincing and haunting voices.” —Allen Wier, author of Tehano

For more than two thousand years, Old London Bridge evolved through many fragile wooden forms until it became the first bridge built of stone since the Roman invaders. With over two hundred houses and shops built directly upon the bridge, it was a wonder of the world until it was dismantled in 1832.
    In this stunningly original novel, Old London Bridge is as much a living, breathing character as its architect, the priest Peter de Colechurch, who began work on it in 1176, partly to honor Archbishop Thomas à Becket, murdered in Canterbury Cathedral. In 1665, the year of the Great Plague, Peter’s history is unknown, but Daryl Braintree, a young poet living on the bridge, resurrects him through inspired flights of imagination. As Daryl chronicles the history of the bridge and composes poems about it, he reads his work to his witty mistress, who prefers making love.
    Among other key characters is Lucien Redd, who as a boy was sexually brutalized by both Puritans and Cavaliers during the English Civil War before being kidnapped off London Bridge onto a merchant ship. Thus traumatized, he aspires to become Lucifer’s most evil disciple. Twenty years later, young Morgan Wood is forced into seafaring service to pay off his father’s debts; and, compelled by obsessive nostalgia for his early life on the bridge, he keeps a journal. Joining Morgan aboard ship, Lucien “befriends” him—to devastating effect.
    The shops and houses on the bridge survive both the Great Plague and Great Fire, believed to be God’s wrath upon sinful London. Fearing that God may next destroy the bridge and its eight hundred denizens, seven of its merchant leaders revert to a pagan appeasement ritual by selecting one of their virgin daughters for sacrifice. To enact their plan, they hire Lucien, who has returned to the bridge to burn it out of pure meanness. But as Lucien discovers, the chosen victim may be more Lucifer’s favorite than he is.
    Like his creation Daryl Braintree, David Madden employs diverse innovative ways to tell this complex, often shocking, but also lyrical story. The author of ten novels—including The Suicide’s Wife, Bijou, and most recently, Abducted by Circumstance and Sharpshooter—Madden has, with London Bridge in Plague and Fire, given us the most ambitious and imaginative work of his distinguished career.

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London Bridge in Plague and Fire
A Novel
David Madden
University of Tennessee Press
"I am still living on London Bridge myself. The world of this novel has merged with my life. Under Madden's pen, the web of human connection is woven over water, through space, and beyond time." —Allen Wier, author of Tehano

For more than two thousand years, Old London Bridge evolved through many fragile wooden forms until it became the first bridge built of stone since the Roman invaders. With over two hundred houses and shops built directly upon the bridge, it was a wonder of the world until it was dismantled in 1832.
    In this stunningly original novel, Old London Bridge is as much a living, breathing character as its architect, the priest Peter de Colechurch, who began work on it in 1176, partly to honor Archbishop Thomas à Becket, murdered in Canterbury Cathedral. In 1665, the year of the Great Plague, Peter’s history is unknown, but Daryl Braintree, a young poet living on the bridge, resurrects him through inspired flights of imagination. As Daryl chronicles the history of the bridge and composes poems about it, he reads his work to his witty mistress, who prefers making love.
    Among other key characters is Lucien Redd, who as a boy was sexually brutalized by both Puritans and Cavaliers during the English Civil War before being kidnapped off London Bridge onto a merchant ship. Thus traumatized, he aspires to become Lucifer’s most evil disciple. Twenty years later, young Morgan Wood is forced into seafaring service to pay off his father’s debts; and, compelled by obsessive nostalgia for his early life on the bridge, he keeps a journal. Joining Morgan aboard ship, Lucien “befriends” him—to devastating effect.
    The shops and houses on the bridge survive both the Great Plague and Great Fire, believed to be God’s wrath upon sinful London. Fearing that God may next destroy the bridge and its eight hundred denizens, seven of its merchant leaders revert to a pagan appeasement ritual by selecting one of their virgin daughters for sacrifice. To enact their plan, they hire Lucien, who has returned to the bridge to burn it out of pure meanness. But as Lucien discovers, the chosen victim may be more Lucifer’s favorite than he is.
    Like his creation Daryl Braintree, David Madden employs diverse innovative ways to tell this complex, often shocking, but also lyrical story. The author of ten novels—including The Suicide’s Wife, Bijou, and most recently, Abducted by Circumstance and Sharpshooter—Madden has, with London Bridge in Plague and Fire, given us the most ambitious and imaginative work of his distinguished career.
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The Long Civil War in the North Georgia Mountains
Confederate Nationalism, Sectionalism, and White Supremacy in Bartow County, Georgia
Keith Hebert
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

Civil War historians have long noted that support for the Confederacy in the antebellum South tended to align with geography: those who lived in towns, along railroads, and on land suited for large-scale farming tended to side with the Confederacy, while those who lived a more isolated existence and made their livings by subsistence farming and bartering usually remained Unionist. Bartow County in northwest Georgia, with its distinctive terrain of valley, piedmont, and Appalachian hill country, is an ideal microcosm to examine these issues.

Keith S. Hébert examines the rise and precipitous fall of Confederate nationalism in Bartow County, a shared experience among many counties in the upland South. Hébert’s story tells us much about the war’s origins, Confederate defeat, and the enduring legacy of white supremacy in these rural areas. Although no major battles were fought in Bartow County, Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign saw Federal troops occupying the area, testing the loyalties of Bartow County soldiers serving in the Army of Tennessee and elsewhere. As the home front collapsed, they had to decide if they should remain in the army and fight or return home to protect their families and property. Locals hardly knew whom to trust as Unionists and Confederates—from both home and afar—engaged in guerilla warfare, stole resources from citizens, and made the war a confusing trap rather than a struggle for an emergent nation.

Drawing on the primary source record of newspapers, letters, diaries, and official documents from the county, Hébert compellingly works personalized vignettes into a scholarly study of developments from the advent of war through Reconstruction and the decades following. The Long Civil War in the North Georgia Mountains solidifies recent scholarship about the war in southern Appalachia and opens a window into a community deeply divided by civil war.

KEITH S. HÉBERT, assistant professor of history at Auburn University, was formerly state historian at the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Historic Preservation Division. His writing has appeared in The Georgia Historical Quarterly and Reconstructing Appalachia: The Civil War’s Aftermath.

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Lost in Transition
Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia
Aaron D. Purcell
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

In Lost in Transition: Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia, Aaron D. Purcell presents a thematic and chronological exploration of twentieth-century removal and resettlement projects across southern Appalachia. The book shares complex stories of loss and recollection that have grown and evolved over time.

This edited volume contains seven case studies of public land removal actions in Virginia, Kentucky, the Carolinas, and Tennessee from the 1930s through the 1960s. Some of the removals include the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Norris Basin, Shenandoah National Park and the New River, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the Keowee-Toxaway Project in northwestern South Carolina. Each essay asks key questions: How did governmental entities throughout the twentieth century deal with land acquisition and removal of families and communities? What do the oral histories of the families and communities, particularly from different generations, tell us about the legacies of these removals? This collection reveals confrontations between past and present, federal agencies and citizens, and the original accounts of removal and resettlement and contemporary interpretations. The result is a blending of practical historical concerns with contemporary nostalgia and romanticism, which often deepen the complexity of Appalachian cultural life.

Lost in Transition provides a nuanced and insightful study of removal and resettlement projects that applies critical analysis of fact, mythology, and storytelling. It illustrates the important role of place in southern Appalachian history. This collection is a helpful resource to anthropologists, folklorists, and Appalachian studies scholars, and a powerful volume of stories for all readers who reflect upon the importance of place and home.

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Louisa May Alcott And Charlotte Bronte
Transatlantic Translations
Christine Doyle
University of Tennessee Press, 2003
“Doyle demonstrates that Alcott kept up a running dialogue with her distinguished British counterpart, both contesting and adapting Brontë’s treatments of woment’s spiritual, social, and vocational lives so as to develop her own distinctively American talent.” —Elizabeth Keyser, author of Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott

“Doyle provides an illuminating discussion of the full range of Louise May Alcott’s writing. Comparisons with Charlotte Brontë spark keen insights into literary traditions and cultural events. General readers will enjoy this book; Alcott and Brontë scholars will need it.” —Beverly Lyon Clark, author of Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys

The work and life of British author Charlotte Brontë fascinated America’s Louisa May Alcott throughout her own literary career. As a nineteenth-century writer struggling with many of the same themes and issues as Brontë, Alcott was drawn toward her British counterpart, but cultural differences created a literary distance between them sometimes as wide as the Atlantic.

In this comparative study, Christine Doyle explores some of the intriguing parallels and differences between the two writers’ backgrounds as she traces specific references to Brontë and her work—not only in Alcott’s children’s fiction, but also in her novels for adults and “sensation fiction.” Doyle compares the treatment of three themes important to both writers—spirituality, interpersonal relations, and women’s work—showing how Alcott translated Brontë’s British reserve and gender- and class-based repression into her own American optimism and progressivism.

In her early career, Alcott was so fascinated by Brontë’s works that she patterned many of her characters on those of Brontë; she later adapted these British elements into a more recognizably American form, producing independent, strong heroines. In observing differences between the writers, Doyle notes that Alcott expresses less anti-Catholic sentiment than does Brontë. She also discusses the authors’ attitudes toward the theater, showing how for Brontë drama is associated with falseness and hypocrisy, while for Alcott it is a profession that expresses possibilities of power and revelation.

Throughout her insightful analysis, Doyle shows that Alcott responds as a uniquely American writer to the problems of American literature and life while never denying the powerful transatlantic influence exerted by Brontë. Doyle’s work reflects a wide range of scholarship, solidly grounded in an understanding of the Victorian temperament, nineteenth-century British and American literature, and recent Alcott criticism and gives fuller voice to the multiple dimensions of Alcott as a nineteenth-century writer.

The Author: Christine Doyle is an associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University.
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Louisa May Alcott's
Fairy Tales Fantasy Stories
Daniel Shealy
University of Tennessee Press, 1992

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Lucky Joe's Namesake
The Extraordinary Life and Observations of Joe Wilson
Fred Bartenstein
University of Tennessee Press, 2017

Joe Wilson (1938-2015), a native of rural East Tennessee, was a civil rights activist, self-educated scholar, founder/administrator of nationally important roots music enterprises, and was legendary for his colorful writing and opinions. Lucky Joe’s Namesake, a companion to Roots Music in America: Collected Writings of Joe Wilson (also published by the University of Tennessee Press), brings us Wilson’s life and observations, mostly in his own words.

From humble mountain beginnings, Wilson’s career progressed through Nashville, Tennessee; Birmingham, Alabama; and New York City, before settling him for twenty-eight years near the seats of power in Washington, D.C. as the executive director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts. In that role, he developed a national model for folk festival presentations, stalked the halls of federal representatives seeking support for traditional artists, and filled concert venues throughout the world with audiences eager to experience the work of master folk musicians.  A powerful advocate on behalf of agrarian values, social justice, artistic authenticity, and cultural democracy, Joe wrote in an engaging, humorous, and memorable style.

This eclectic anthology is filled with Joe Wilson’s brilliant published writing for magazines, books, and newspapers as well as privately circulated unpublished works, including an extended autobiographical essay. Readers are sure to benefit from Wilson’s lessons and artful ruminations culled from a lifetime of devotion to music and cultural and social activism.

Fred Bartenstein teaches country and bluegrass music history at the University of Dayton. He is the editor of Bluegrass Bluesman: Josh Graves, a Memoir and coauthor and editor of The Bluegrass Hall of Fame: Inductee Biographies, 1991–2014.

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