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Jack Temple Kirby's massive and engaging study examines the rural southern world of the first half of the twentieth century, its collapse, and the resulting "modernization" of southern society. Rural Worlds Lost is the first book to thoroughly assess the profound changes modernization has wrought in the US South.

Originally published in 1832 and revised in 1851, Swallow Barn, John Pendleton Kennedy's novel of antebellum life on a tidewater Virginia plantation, was described by its author as "variously and interchangeably partaking of the complexion of a book of travels, a diary, a collection of letters, a drama, and a history."

Richard M. Weaver believed that "rhetoric at its truest seeks to perfect men by showing them better versions of themselves." Language is Sermonic offers eight of Weaver's best essays on the nature of traditional rhetoric and its role in shaping society.

One of the few studies of its kind, this political history of the Louisiana penal system from its origin to the near-present places emphasis on the development of penal policy and shows how the vicissitudes of the system have reflected the prevailing social, economic, and political views of the state as a whole.

Until recently most discussions of William Faulkner have centred exclusively on his novels. Yet no chronicle of Faulkner's Growth as a literary artist can afford to overlook the years he spent struggling to establish himself as a writer of short stories. Max Putzel provides a critical study of these crucial formative years.

Dan T. Carter's When the War Was Over is a social and political history of the two years following the surrender of the Confederacy--the so-called period of Presidential Reconstruction when the South, under the watchful gaze of Congress and the Union army, attempted to rebuild its shattered society and economic structure. Working primarily from rich manuscript sources, Carter draws a vivid portrait of the political leaders who emerged after the war, a diverse group of men--former loyalists as well as a few mildly repentant fire-eaters--who in some cases genuinely sought to find a place in southern society for the newly emancipated slaves, but who in many other cases merely sought to redesign the boundaries of black servitude. Carter finds that as a group the politicians who emerged in the post-war South failed critically in the test of their leadership. Not only were they unable to construct a realistic program for the region's recovery--a failure rooted in their stubborn refusal to accept the full consequences of emancipation--but their actions also served to exacerbate rather than allay the fears and apprehensions of the victorious North. Even so, Carter reveals, these leaders were not the monsters that many scholars have suggested they were, and it is misleading to dismiss them as racists and political incompetents. In important ways, they represented the most constructive, creative, and imaginative response that the white South, overwhelmed with defeat and social chaos, had to offer in 1865 and 1866. Out of their efforts would come the New South movement and, with it, the final downfall of the plantation system and the beginnings of social justice for the freed slaves.

Offers a history of the Confederate guerrillas who, under the ruthless command of such men as William C. Quantrill and "Bloody Bill" Anderson, plunged Missouri into a bloody, vicious conflict of an intensity unequaled in any other theatre of the Civil War.

In Self-Interviews, James Dickey speaks thoughtfully and with candour of his life as a poet. He recalls how poetry came to be his career, tracing its growing importance in his life from his youth in Georgia through his years overseas with the Air Force, as a student at Vanderbilt, as a teacher, and as a successful advertising executive.

James Dickey's creativity as a poet is well known. But there have been few opportunities for his readers to become familiar with the thoughts and perceptions that lie just outside the matter of his poetry. Sorties brings together the contents of a journal kept by Dickey for several years and six essays on poetry and the creative process.

First published in 1949, Frank Lawrence Owsley's Plain Folk of the Old South refuted the popular myth that the antebellum South contained only three classes, planters, poor whites, and slaves. Owsley draws on a wide range of source materials to reconstruct the prewar South's large and significant "yeoman farmer" middle class.

Probing the social repercussions of the industrial development of South Carolina in the decades following Reconstruction, David Carlton's Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880-1920, tells of the conflict that erupted between the rising middle class of the South's small towns and the rural whites who came to labour in the towns' textile mills.

In the informal, engaging essays brought together in One South, John Shelton Reed focuses on the South's strong regional identity and on the persistence, well into the last decades if the twentieth century, of Southern cultural distinctiveness.

A lively, informal history of over three centuries of southern hospitality and cuisine, Eating, Drinking, and Visiting in the South traces regional gastronomy from the sparse diet of Jamestown settlers, who learned from necessity to eat what the Indians ate, to the lavish corporate cocktail parties of the New South.

According to William Gillette, recent reinterpretation of Reconstruction by revisionist historians has often tended to overemphasise idealistic motivations at the expense of assessing concrete achievements of the era. Thus, he maintains, the failure of both the purpose and the promise of Reconstruction has not been deeply enough analysed.

Shows how Robert Penn Warren's work, his fiction, poetry, literary criticism, historical and personal essays, journalism, is shaped largely by the circumstances not only of his birth and early career as a border-state southerner but also oh his training and later career as a transregional artist and intellectual.

Examines various dimensions of abolitionism from its religious context to its international effect, from its attitude toward the northern poor to its impact on feminism, and from wars of words waged with southern intellectuals to the bloodier conflicts begun in Kansas.

One was called "a tin can on a shingle"; the other, "a half-submerged crocodile." Yet, on a March day in 1862 in Hampton Roads, Virginia, after a five-hour duel, the USS. Monitor and the C.S.S. Virginia(formerly the USS. Merrimack) were to change the course of not only the Civil War but also naval warfare forever.

Eric Anderson studies one of the most remarkable centres of black political influence in the late nineteenth century, North Carolina's second congressional district. Race and Politics in North Carolina illuminates the complex effects upon whites of the rise of black leadership, both within the Republican party and in the larger community.

Answers two of the most intriguing questions in the history of American radicalism: why was the Socialist party stronger in Oklahoma than in any other state, and how was the party able to build powerful organisations in nearby rural southwestern areas?

Presents the best translations available - by such poets as Richard Franshawe, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Southey, and many modern poets - of poems ranging from the eleventh century to the present to make this the most complete collection of both Spanish and Spanish American poetry in English translation.

Edwin Bearss tells how he and two other Civil War historians discovered the Union gunboat Cairo still intact at the bottom of the Yazoo, her big guns loaded and ready to fire, much of the gear aboard just as it was on the December morning when the crew abandoned her - and how, almost miraculously, she was later salvaged and restored.

During the past half century the Supreme Court has been a storm center of controversy. Since 1920 the Court has shattered precedent after precedent and has leveled a number of social, political, and economic landmarks. This perceptive study of the Court during that period received much critical acclaim when it was published in 1958 and revised ten years later. In this third edition, Alpheus Thomas Mason, one of the country's leading authorities on the Court, updates his survey to include some of the most dramatic events in its history. In a new preface, Mason sets the tone for his treatment of the Burger Court, saying, "One thing seems certain: never before has the Supreme Court put its constitutional fingers in so many social, cultural, and political pies. The irony is that four of its present members were elected as 'strict constructionist.'" Mason examines the dicta of various justices against the background of the times and the issues with which they were concerned: the judicial slaughter of legislation in the early thirties and Roosevelt's retaliatory "courtpacking" attempt in 1937, judicially sanctioned federal interference in economic affairs, the bitterly contested integration decisions in 1954, and the explosive rulings of the 1960s supporting federal intervention in the fields of education, representation, and criminal justice. Mason also covers Earl Warren's resignation as Chief Justice, the Senate's refusal to confirm Johnson's nomination of Abe Fortas for Chief Justice and Fortas' later resignation under political pressure, the failure of two Nixon nominees--Haynesworth and Carswell--to receive Senate endorsement, the impeachment proceedings initiated against William O. Douglas, Nixon's avowal to reverse the Warren Court's protection of civil rights and liberties by appointing a "law and order" Court, and the implications of the Stanford Daily and Bakke cases. Professor Mason's insight into the peculiar nature of the judicial function brings a deeper understanding of the Court as a creative force in American life.

Biographical sketches of 378 writers associated with the American South are included in this important new reference work. Compiled by 172 scholars, these summaries--many of which are not readily available elsewhere--provide in their total effect a brief history of southern literature from colonial times to the present.The volume is, in part, a companion to A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature (Louis D. Rubin, Jr., ed.), a work that has become a standard reference for anyone seriously interested in the literature of the South. With its wealth of essential biographical information on the region's writers, both major and minor, this new guide will take its place alongside that earlier volume as an invaluable aid to the study of southern writing. Especially useful will be complete listings of the first printings of the books by each writer provided after the respective summaries.Included as contributors of the individual biographical summaries are most of the better-known scholars of southern literature, plus a number of promising young scholars. The editors, each of whom is an outstanding scholar in southern literary studies, are:

John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren--each began his career as one of the coterie of southern poets centered at Vanderbilt University who attracted national attention with their publication of The Fugitive magazine in the early 1920s and the celebrated essays in I'll Take My Stand. Collectively known as the Fugitives (or Agrarians as they were later called) they became ardent and influential participants in the regionalist-proletarian literary controversies of the Depression decades. Each of the four poets was personally concerned with the connection between their creative work and the social realities around them. In The Wary Fugitives Louis Rubin masterfully explores and illustrates the relationships between their poetry, novels, and literary criticism, and their work as social critics. He conducts, in the process, a revealing and provocative inquiry into the connection between American history and the twentieth-century South.

Offers a fresh and unconventional introduction to the history of Latin American international relations, from colonial times to the present. In this volume, the authors offer a pioneering study from a perspective that has been ignored in English-language books, that of the Latin American nations themselves.

This collection of fifty-two poems from the author of Angel Fire and Anonymous Sins explores the annihilation of the time-bound ego, a liberating, sometimes terrifying experience for all who live within the "fabulous beast" of history and nature. The poems explore the shifting, elusive point at which the inwardness of individual experience touches upon the larger consciousness of a species or an era, forming a connection with a "self" that goes beyond subjectivity.The poems are grouped into four parts: "Broken Connections," "Forbidden Testimonies," "The Child-Martyr" and "A Posthumous Sketch," are prose poems which, though technically different from the others, are concerned with the same theme-the relationship between the individual and a larger, all-inclusive whole. Neither fatalistic nor rebellious, the poems convey the idea that as long as we live in time we must struggle, and that is this struggle that determines our humanity.

"A magisterial and landmark work, one that merits wide and thoughtful readership not only by historians, but, more important, by those of us who count on historians to tell us truly about our past." - New York Times