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In the fall of 1983 a group of scholars met at Purdue University for the American Historical Association Conference on the Study and Teaching of Afro-American history. This group included some of the most prominent historians and educators in their professions, and at this landmark meeting they assessed and evaluated the entire field of Afro-American history-its past, present, and future. The sponsorship of the American Historical Association officially acknowledged the coming of age of black history as a vital and respected part of American history. The contributions of many outstanding scholars and educators make The State of Afro-American History, the proceedings of that conference, an authoritative and provocative examination of the Afro-American experience during slavery and since emancipation. Individual essays cover the ways in which black slaves shaped their environment, the forces that influenced the black urban experience in the United States, the evolution of scholarship in Afro-American history, and the merger of American and Afro-American histories. The need for movement beyond the mere integration of blacks into existing textbooks and courses and the responsibility of the Afro-American scholar to the community are treated at length, as are media representation of black history and black women's history. The scholars are concerned with both the creation of histories and their dissemination through classrooms, texts, museums, and the popular media. Afro-American history is a relatively recent field of study, and the scholars represented in this book are only the fourth generation to pursue it. Earlier scholars have just recently gained wide recognition for their efforts. The contributors to this volume are very aware that they are living, reacting to, and shaping a history, as well as studying and teaching it. The effect of this dynamic on The State of Afro-American History is furthered by the essays' interactive structure: various pieces build on and critique other essays. This unique and remarkable volume will interest not only professional historians but students and secondary school teachers, school administrators, and librarians. It offers comprehensive and concise evaluations of where Afro-American history has been and is now, and suggestions for where it can go in the future.

Examines the work of the American black theatre's five most productive playwrights: Willis Richardson, Randolph Edmonds, Langston Hughes, LeRoi Jones, and Ed Bullins. Sanders sees the history of black theater as the process of creating a 'black stage reality' while at the same time transforming conventions borrowed from white European culture.

Together now, the four poems River, Bloodfire, Wind Mountain and Earthsleep counterpoint one another in a grand symphony, Midquest. In what he has referred to as "something like a verse novel," Fred Chappell has summoned up the rich veins of memory and brings this to bear on the contemporary sensibility.

In a 1987 article, Southern Magazine called Madison Jones's A Cry of Absence "the last pure tragedy written by a Southerner." Set in 1957 in a small Tennessee town just awakening to shifting racial and social attitudes, the novel concerns the inevitability of change and the consequences for those who resist it. Hester Cameron Glenn, a proud, well-bred southern aristocrat, is the self-appointed guardian of her family's and her community's heritage. When a young black man is chained to a tree and stoned to death, Hester deplores the brutality of the act. Slowly she comes to suspect, and finally to know, who the real murderer is, and she decides what she must do to protect the family honor.

The poems in this collection cover thirty years of loving contact with the endlessly varied surfaces of the world. They are poems in which the common furniture of our lives is always present, in which the universal resides in the local, in which elegance is born of clarity.

In the twenty years of its existence, the second series of the Southern Review continued the editorial orientation of the first series by presenting a range of regional and cosmopolitan works of fiction. This anthology is a collection of twenty-five short stories from the nearly three hundred published in the journal between 1965 and 1985.

Meticulously researched and lucidly argued, Dark Lanterns explores a controversial and puzzling aspect of the Civil War. It will be hard to dispute Frank Klements' finding that generations of historians have swallowed whole a tale that was largely the product of myth and legend.

Investigates white supremacy as it emerged from the milieu of slavery, war, politics, and Reconstruction. Tourgee argues that organizations such as the Klan appealed to the mass of white southerners as a means of ameliorating their defeat and ensuring a measure of political control. A striking, contemporary look into the mind of the carpetbagger and the genesis of both the Ku Klux Klan and the political structure of the postwar South.

When Daniel Hoffman published a brief volume of selected poems in England, the Times Literary Supplement praised "his zestful verbal performance, supple use of rhyme and other sound effects". That same vitality inform Hang-Gliding from Helicon, which presents more than forty new poems and a selection from six of Hoffman's previous books.

The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, originally published in 1853, consists of twenty-six sketches and satires drawn from Joseph G. Baldwin's experiences as an attorney on the turbulent Mississippi and Alabama frontiers in the 1830s and 1840s. Like experiences, attempted to depict a lawless and colorful era in American history. Originally from Virginia, the author paints vivid and authentic portraits of shifty lawyers, unlettered judges, and inept prosecutors, as well as serious profiles of respected colleagues such as Seargent S. Prentiss. Even the narrator, we learn, is granted a license to practice law by a circuit judge who asks him "not a single legal question." One of the collection's most memorable characters is Ovid Bolus, whom Baldwin describes as a "natural liar, just as some horses are natural pacers, and some dogs natural setters." His adventures reflect Baldwin's fascination with the meaning of the law and the legal profession under the conditions that existed on the American frontier. James H. Justus' introduction places this new edition of The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi in its historical literary context. According to Justus, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, published in 1835, is the volume credited as the first to exploit the southern backwoods In the vernacular realism we now call the humor of the Old Southwest. Justus also notes that in the preface to his book, Baldwin indirectly acknowledges his familiarity with earlier writers, and one sketch, "Simon Suggs, JR.," specifically pays homage to Johnson Jones Hooper. The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi possesses enormous value for both literary scholars and historians. It remains a classic, not simply because it is sprightly social history, but because it is also an engrossing memoir by a man of uncommon subtlety of mind who projected his own sensibility into the record.

Traces the evolution of cotton culture in the region bordering the Mississippi River. John Hebron Moore examines the society supported by that industry, emphasising technological changes that transformed cotton plantations.

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.

Tells of life in the hills of Appalachia some fifty years ago, a primal world of craggy hills and tangled forests where good and evil, charity and malice exist in their purest forms. If the pleasures of men, women, and children in these seven stories are simple, the ills and misfortunes that beset them are equally forthright and undiluted.

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.