Wren is marrying the man of her dreams just as soon as she returns from her trip to the Carolinas—on the first night there, all is changed in an instant. Why? Because the hero of my recently completed novel, Dargan’s Desire, has mistakenly taken her virginity. Set in South Carolina in 1826 this fun and sensual, the book is woven with love and deceit. Teaching two people the ultimate meaning of honesty, passion, and devotion. Charming, spirited, full of excitement and exquisitely beautiful, Wren is forced into a loveless marriage when a beast of a man who takes her innocence. Worldly and influential, Dargan Knight, feels as if he has been trapped by this sprite of a girl into a loveless marriage he will never be able to get out of. Then fate steps in to shake up both their lives when Wren realizes she is with child.

As working women invaded the public space of the factory in the nineteenth century, they challenged Victorian notions of female domesticity and chastity. With virtue at the forefront of discussions regarding working women, aspects of working-class women’s culture—fashion, fiction, and dance halls—become vivid signifiers for moral impropriety, and attempts to censure these activities become overt attempts to censure female sexuality in the workplace. The Personal and the Political in American Working-Class Literature, 1850–1939 argues that these informal and often ignored “trifles” of female community provided the building blocks for female solidarity in the workplace. While most critical approaches to working-class fiction emphasize female suffering rather than agency, this book argues that working women themselves viewed aspects of consumer culture and new avenues for courtship as extensions of their rights as breadwinners. The strike itself is an intense moment of political upheaval that lends itself to more extensive personal and sexual freedoms. Through its analysis of strike novels, this book provides a fuller picture of working-class women as they simultaneously navigate new identities as “working ladies” and enter the dramatic and sometimes violent world of labor activism. This book is recommended for scholars of literary studies, women’s studies, and US history.

The Sacred Trust represents the first such volume on SBC presidents in over a generation, and the first one to feature leaders from the Conservative Resurgence.

Liberia was founded by the American Colonization Society (ACS) in the 1820s as an African refuge for free blacks and liberated American slaves. While interest in African migration waned after the Civil War, it roared back in the late nineteenth century with the rise of Jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement throughout the South. The back-to-Africa movement held great new appeal to the South's most marginalized citizens, rural African Americans. Nowhere was this interest in Liberia emigration greater than in Arkansas. More emigrants to Liberia left from Arkansas than any other state in the 1880s and 1890s. In Journey of Hope, Kenneth C. Barnes explains why so many black Arkansas sharecroppers dreamed of Africa and how their dreams of Liberia differed from the reality. This rich narrative also examines the role of poor black farmers in the creation of a black nationalist identity and the importance of the symbolism of an ancestral continent. Based on letters to the ACS and interviews of descendants of the emigrants in war-torn Liberia, this study captures the life of black sharecroppers in the late 1800s and their dreams of escaping to Africa.