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When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War
When Slavery Was Called Freedom uncovers the cultural and ideological bonds linking the combatants in the Civil War era and boldly reinterprets the intellectual foundations of secession. John Patrick Daly dissects the evangelical defense of slavery at the heart of the nineteenth century’s sectional crisis. He brings a new understanding to the role of religion in the Old South and the ways in which religion was used in the Confederacy.
Southern evangelicals argued that their unique region was destined for greatness, and their rhetoric gave expression and a degree of coherence to the grassroots assumptions of the South. The North ...Read More
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The Shame of Southern Politics: Essays and Speeches
As a leader of the Southern Regional Council in the early 1960s, and later as executive director of the Field Foundation, Leslie Dunbar’s advocacy and behind-the-scenes organizing made him one of the most significant (but least recognized) people in the civil rights movement. His essays and speeches often helped set the agenda. They also continue to offer a prophetic voice in our struggle to create a more humane and fully integrated America.
The Shame of Southern Politics gathers for the first time fourteen of Dunbar’s essays and speeches on the courage and values of the southern civil rights movement. Dunbar’s ...Read More
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American Grit: A Woman's Letters from the Ohio Frontier
In 1826 thirty-year-old Anna Briggs Bentley, her husband, and their six children left their close Quaker community and the worn-out tobacco farms of Sandy Spring, Maryland, for frontier Ohio. Along the way, Anna sent back home the first of scores of letters she wrote her mother and sisters over the next fifty years as she strove to keep herself and her children in their memories. With Anna’s natural talent for storytelling and her unique, female perspective, the letters provide a sustained and vivid account of everyday domestic life on the Ohio frontier. She writes of carving a farm out of ...Read More
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Roadside History: A Guide to Kentucky Highway Markers
We have all spied them as we blast down I-75 scanning the roadside for anything of interest or rolled past one while trying to find an elusive gas station in an unfamiliar small town. Perhaps we have even stopped to read one outside the local courthouse. Since 1949, the Kentucky Historical Highway Marker program has erected more than 1,800 markers that highlight the rich diversity of the state’s local and regional history as well as topics of statewide, and sometimes national, importance. They provide on-the-spot Kentucky history lessons, depicting subjects as diverse as a seven-year-old boy who served as a ...Read More
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Lafcadio Hearn's America: Ethnographic Sketches and Editorials
The American essays of renowned writer Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) artistically chronicle the robust urban life of Cincinnati and New Orleans. Hearn is one of the few chroniclers of urban American life in the nineteenth century, and much of this material has not been widely available since the 1950s. Lafcadio Hearn's America collects Hearn's stories of vagabonds, river people, mystics, criminals, and some of the earliest accounts available of black and ethnic urban folklife in America. He was a frequently consulted expert on America during his years in Japan, and these editorials reflect on the problems and possibilities of American life ...Read More
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The Last Days of Big Grassy Fork
The Last Days of Big Grassy Fork recounts newspaperman Hunter James’s attempts to save his 100-year-old family farm and homestead from extinction. Wise, irreverent, pugnacious, and often hilarious, James fights back against the galloping urbanization of his beloved North Carolina Piedmont. Interweaving current affairs and family history, James details the growth of the Winston-Salem area as a center of Moravian piety and later as the world’s largest tobacco manufacturing center.
This personal history shows he is not the only James to have had a difficult time fitting in with the neighbors’ idea of progress; his family’s trouble in the Piedmont ...Read More
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Jefferson on Jefferson
A new and more complex portrait of Thomas Jefferson, as told by Jefferson himself. Not trusting biographers with his story and frustrated by his friends’ failure to justify his role in the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson wrote his autobiography on his own terms at the age of seventy-seven. The resulting book ends, well before his death, with his return from France at the age of forty-six. Asked for additional details concerning his life, Jefferson often claimed to have a “decayed memory.” Fortunately, this shrewd politician, philosopher, architect, inventor, farmer, and scientist penned nearly eighteen thousand letters in his lifetime, saving ...Read More
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The Bizarre Careers of John R. Brinkley
Tells the story of the infamous “Goat Gland Doctor”—controversial medical charlatan, groundbreaking radio impresario, and prescient political campaigner—and recounts his amazing rags to riches to rags career. A popular joke of the 1920s posed the question, “What’s the fastest thing on four legs?” The punch line? “A goat passing Dr. Brinkley’s hospital!”
It seems that John R. Brinkley’s virility rejuvenation cure—transplanting goat gonads into aging men—had taken the nation by storm. Never mind that “Doc” Brinkley’s medical credentials were shaky at best and that he prescribed medication over the airwaves via his high-power radio stations. The man built an empire. ...Read More
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Footloose in Jacksonian America: Robert W. Scott and his Agrarian World
In the fall of 1829, young Robert Wilmot Scott rode away from Frankfort, Kentucky, on a trip that would take him through nine states. His journal entries about those travels present a vivid picture of Jacksonian America and of the prominent people of that era. Excellent pen portraits of James and Dolly Madison, James Monroe, John Marshall, James Buchanan, Sam Houston, Edward Everett, John C. Calhoun, John Randolph, John Quincy Adams, and others show Scott to be a careful and detailed observer. Present at the famous Webster-Hayne debate, he gives a rich account of that discussion and its personalities.
But ...Read More
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Anna Hubbard: Out of the Shadows
Anna Eikenhout (1902-1986) was an honors graduate of Ohio State University, a fine-arts librarian, a skilled pianist, and an avid reader in three languages. Harlan Hubbard (1900-1988), a little-known painter and would-be shantyboater, seemed an unlikely husband, but together they lived a life out of the pages of Thoreau’s Walden . Much of what is known about the Hubbards comes from Harlan’s books and journals. Concerning the seasons and the landscape, his writing was rapturous, yet he was emotionally reticent when discussing human affairs in general or Anna in particular. Yet it was through her efforts that their life on ...Read More
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