A collection of essays representing forty-five years of reflection on the central problems of southern history bound together by a common concern with defining the crucial interaction of race and class in the formation of southern politics and life “The tourist archipelagoes of my South / are prisons, too, corruptible” writes the poet Derek Walcott. While Walcott refers to the islands of the Caribbean, the analogous idea of a land made into solitary islands by an imprisoned and inherited corruption is historian J. Mills Thornton III’s American South. The captivating essays in Archipelagoes of My South: Episodes in the Shaping of a Region, 1830–1965 address this overarching and underlying narrative of Alabama politics and the history of the South. Highlighting events as significant as the role of social and economic conflict in the southern secession movement, various aspects of Reconstruction, and the role of the Ku Klux Klan in the politics of the 1920s, Thornton draws from various points in the southern past in an effort to identify and understand the sources of the region’s power. Moreover, each essay investigates its subject matter and peels back layers with an aim to clarify why the enormous diversity of the southern experience makes that power so great, all the while allowing the reader to see connections that would not otherwise be apparent. Archipelagoes of My South gathers previously uncollected essays into a single volume covering the entire length and breadth of Thornton’s career. The author’s principal concerns have always been the arc of regional evolution and the significance of the local. Thus, the mechanisms of political and social change and the interrelationships across eras and generations are recurring themes in many of these essays. Even those who have spent their entire lives in the South may be unaware of the fractured layers of history that lie beneath the landscape they inhabit. For those southern residents who seek to comprehend more of their own past, this landmark compilation of essays on Alabama and southern history endeavors to provide illumination and enlightenment.

Celebrate the three-hundredth anniversary of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe with this vibrant atlas in which an international gathering of illustrators conjure imaginary islands and castaway dreams. What is it about islands that is so alluring, and why do so many people find these self-contained worlds irresistible? Utopia and Atlantis were islands, and islands have captured the imaginations of writers and artists for centuries. In 1719, Daniel Defoe published his tale of a castaway on a desert island, Robinson Crusoe, one of the first great novels in the history of English literature and an instant bestseller. Defoe’s tale combined the real and the imagined into a compelling creative landscape, establishing a whole literary genre and unleashing the power of islands in storytelling. To celebrate the tercentenary of the publication of Robinson Crusoe, Archipelago presents a truly international range of leading illustrators who imagine they too have washed up on their own remote island. In specially created maps, they visualize what their island looks like, what it’s called, and what can be found on its mythical shores. In a panoply of astonishingly creative responses, we are invited to explore a curious and fabulous archipelago of islands of invention that will beguile illustrators, cartographers, and dreamers alike.

The Word as Archipelago is the first complete translation into English of La Parole en archipel, an important book that René Char published in 1962, and a book whose title is an apt figure for the whole body of poetry that Char wrote over a period of fifty years. The author of this book is a lover, a visionary of the natural world, an elegist, a phenomenologist of encounter, a mystic of the night, a spirit of defiant freedom who in the Second World War had been a leader in the French Resistance. The book includes work in the different forms Char fluently moves among--the verse poem, the prose poem, and the aphoristic sequence--and displays his characteristic stylistic gifts: vivid concreteness, speculative incisiveness, archipelago-like scope. The word is an island belonging to a unity always partially hidden. Robert Baker's resonant translation brings into English this language of intuitive crossings. A poet of pessimism and hope at once, perhaps the greatest French practitioner of the prose poem since Rimbaud, Char writes a beautifully open poetry of his avventura amorosa with life itself.

While our politicians argue, the truth is that climate change is already here. Nobody knows this better than Indigenous peoples who, having developed an intimate relationship with ecosystems over generations, have observed these changes for decades. For them, climate change is not an abstract concept or policy issue, but the reality of daily life.After two decades of working with indigenous communities, Gleb Raygorodetsky shows how these communities are actually islands of biological and cultural diversity in the ever-rising sea of development and urbanization. They are an “archipelago of hope” as we enter the Anthropocene, for here lies humankind’s best chance to remember our roots and how to take care of the Earth.We meet the Skolt Sami of Finland, the Nenets and Altai of Russia, the Sapara of Ecuador, the Karen of Myanmar, and the Tla-o-qui-aht of Canada. Intimate portraits of these men and women, youth and elders, emerge against the backdrop of their traditional practices on land and water. Though there are brutal realities—pollution, corruption, forced assimilation—Raygorodetsky's prose resonates with the positive, the adaptive, the spiritual—and hope.

A historical geographical comparison of the Indo-Pacific Indian indenture labour experience, revealing the hitherto unexplored movements of labourers between colonies.