From the early 1900s through the 1940s, the scenic hill country of Brown County, Indiana, was home to a flourishing colony of artists who migrated there from urban areas of the Midwest. Now back in print, The Artists of Brown County, first published in 1994, is the classic book on the history of this remarkable art colony.Following an introduction to "Peaceful Valley," as the area was affectionately called, chapters are devoted to 16 of the artists, including three couples: T. C. Steele, Will Vawter, Gustave Baumann, Dale Bessire, the photographer Frank M. Hohenberger, Adolph Shulz and Ada Walter Shulz, L. O. Griffith, V. J. Cariani and Marie Goth, Carl C. Graf and Genevieve Goth Graf, Edward K. Williams, Georges LaChance, C. Curry Bohm, and Glen Cooper Henshaw. Lavish color reproductions of the artists' work accompany the biographical sketches. Rachel Berenson Perry's introduction places the Brown County art colony within the broader context of American regional art.

"Contains an in-depth introduction by Martin Krause and autobiographical text written by Gustave Baumann (edited by Krause) about the time Baumann spent in Brown County, Indiana. Includes color reproductions of Baumann's work and historical photographs"--

Bean Blossom, Indiana is home to the annual Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival, founded in 1967 by Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass. Here, Adler discusses the development of bluegrass music, the many personalities involved in the bluegrass music scene, the interplay of local, regional, and national interests, and more.

When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Prince Edward County, Virginia, home to one of the five cases combined by the Court under Brown, abolished its public school system rather than integrate. Jill Titus situates the crisis in Prince Edward County within the seismic changes brought by Brown and Virginia's decision to resist desegregation. While school districts across the South temporarily closed a building here or there to block a specific desegregation order, only in Prince Edward did local authorities abandon public education entirely--and with every intention of permanence. When the public schools finally reopened after five years of struggle--under direct order of the Supreme Court--county authorities employed every weapon in their arsenal to ensure that the newly reopened system remained segregated, impoverished, and academically substandard. Intertwining educational and children's history with the history of the black freedom struggle, Titus draws on little-known archival sources and new interviews to reveal the ways that ordinary people, black and white, battled, and continue to battle, over the role of public education in the United States.

Forty years ago they didn't call it welfare. It was mother's pension, commissioners' relief, old age pension, or the county poor farm. The first three gave monthly payments or picked up bills for living expenses. But the last alternative meant a move to the solid brick two-storied structure along the Cottonwood River at the south end of New Ulm--the Brown County Poor Farm. Circa 1870 to 1965. In 1907, the second of the Brown County Poor Farms was build at a cost of $18,000.