The Western and Political Thought: A Fistful of Politics offers a variety of engaging and entertaining answers to the question: What do Westerns have to do with politics? This collection features contributions from scholars in a variety of fields—political science, English, communication studies, and others—that explore the connections between Westerns (prose fiction, films, television series, and more) and politics.

African American Humor, Irony, and Satire: Ishmael Reed, Satirically Speaking includes select proceedings from the annual Heart’s Day Conference, sponsored by the Department of English at Howard University. Among the collection’s many strengths is the range of essays included here. Essays on Ishmael Reed center the collection, and satirists from George Schuyler to Aaron McGruder are examined as are popular culture comedians Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle. Thus, the collection adds broadly to the body of scholarship on traditional and non-traditional interpretations of humor, irony, and satire. What these essays also reveal is how the lens of humor, irony, and satire as a way of reading texts is especially useful in highlighting the complexity of African American life and culture. The essays also uncover crucial but no so obvious connections between African Americans and other world cultures.

Posits that Neo-HooDooism, an African Voodoo-derived aesthetic, evinces Ishmael Reed's post-colonial transformation of the English language, colonialist discourses, and imperial cultural systems into discourses of self-empowerment and self-representation.

Country music's debt to African American music has long been recognized. Black musicians have helped to shape the styles of many of the most important performers in the country canon. The partnership between Lesley Riddle and A. P. Carter produced much of the Carter Family's repertoire; the street musician Tee Tot Payne taught a young Hank Williams Sr.; the guitar playing of Arnold Schultz influenced western Kentuckians, including Bill Monroe and Ike Everly. Yet attention to how these and other African Americans enriched the music played by whites has obscured the achievements of black country-music performers and the enjoyment of black listeners. The contributors to Hidden in the Mix examine how country music became "white," how that fictive racialization has been maintained, and how African American artists and fans have used country music to elaborate their own identities. They investigate topics as diverse as the role of race in shaping old-time record catalogues, the transracial West of the hick-hopper Cowboy Troy, and the place of U.S. country music in postcolonial debates about race and resistance. Revealing how music mediates both the ideology and the lived experience of race, Hidden in the Mix challenges the status of country music as "the white man’s blues." Contributors. Michael Awkward, Erika Brady, Barbara Ching, Adam Gussow, Patrick Huber, Charles Hughes, Jeffrey A. Keith, Kip Lornell, Diane Pecknold, David Sanjek, Tony Thomas, Jerry Wever

FacultyAwards.org is the first and only university awards program in the United States based on faculty peer evaluation. Faculty Awards was created to recognize outstanding faculty members (as viewed by their Faculty peers) at colleges and universities across the United States. Faculty members voted through the 2014-2015 academic year for their peers at their academic departments and schools within a number of categories. Access to FacultyAwards.org to nominate and vote for Faculty was limited to university professors or faculty members at accredited U.S. institution of higher education. Faculty members were nominated and voted for by other faculty members in their own academic departments and schools. We strove to maintain an accurate peer-review process. Voting was not open to students or the public at large. In addition, faculty members voted for educators only at their own college or university. Winners for the 2014-2015 academic year, in all departments and colleges across U.S. institutions of higher education were announced in March 2015 and are permanently archived at FacultyAwards.org, as well as recognized in this 2015 print edition of the Faculty Awards Compendium. For the academic year 2014-2015 votes were cast to nominate and vote for Faculty members, and no self-voting was allowed, to assure the integrity of the whole process. This volume of the Faculty Awards Compendium includes Faculty awardees within Fine Arts, Humanities, Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Disciplines for the 2014-2015 academic year. A total of 1608 winning Faculty members in 584 higher education institutions were determined after tallying the votes. We would like to thank all Faculty members who participated in the voting process and to wish all the Faculty awardees continued success in their academic endeavors. We look forward to resuming the voting process for the 2015-2016 academic year awards.