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.

In the 1920s, drawn by spectacular vistas and colorful fall foliage, photojournalist Frank Hohenberger (1876-1962) traveled to the hills of Brown County. Once there, he found more to photograph than just a picturesque landscape and he set out to record the lives of the people who lived among the hills. If You Don't Outdie Me is a brilliantly revealing volume about Hohenberger's encounter with the people of Brown County. Rather than a society of amusing and peaceful rustics, Hohenberger discovered that there were "tragedies in the valleys" and rancorous complexities that belied sentimental notions about small town life. Reproduced here are Hohenberger's incomparable photographs, not only the carefully crafted "art prints," but also the casual snapshots that show him to have been one of the pioneers of ethnographic photography. The book includes Hohenberger's previously unpublished diary notes, which record the humor, gossip, legends, oral history, figures of speech, and proverbs of the Brown County folk, as well as his astute and unguarded observations.

A delightful memoir of life in the hills of Brown County, Indiana.

Revealing, entertaining window on the music of the ’50s and ’60s

Finding Charity’s Folk highlights the experiences of enslaved Maryland women who negotiated for their own freedom, many of whom have been largely lost to historical records. Based on more than fifteen hundred manumission records and numerous manuscript documents from a diversity of archives, Jessica Millward skillfully brings together African American social and gender history to provide a new means of using biography as a historical genre. Millward opens with a striking discussion about how researching the life of a single enslaved woman, Charity Folks, transforms our understanding of slavery and freedom in Revolutionary America. For African American women such as Folks, freedom, like enslavement, was tied to a bondwoman’s reproductive capacities. Their offspring were used to perpetuate the slave economy. Finding loopholes in the law meant that enslaved women could give birth to and raise free children. For Millward, Folks demonstrates the fluidity of the boundaries between slavery and freedom, which was due largely to the gendered space occupied by enslaved women. The gendering of freedom influenced notions of liberty, equality, and race in what became the new nation and had profound implications for African American women’s future interactions with the state.