During the English Civil War a young man joins Cromwell's Parliamentary Army to escape his humorless father only to find betrayal and tragedy in Ireland. Based on a true incident.

O Beulah Land, the second volume of The Beulah Quintet—Mary Lee Settle's unforgettable generational saga about the roots of American culture, class, and identity and the meaning of freedom—is a land-hungry story. It follows the odyssey of Johnny Church's descendants as they leave England in search of freedom and land. One of those descendants, Jonathan Lacey, settles in the backcountry of Virginia, where he battles both Native Americans and white frontier bandits and builds the beginning of a flourishing estate named Beulah. The novel closes shortly before the commencement of the Revolutionary War, with Lacey elected to the House of Burgesses and his family line firmly established in what is to become the state of West Virginia.

An autobiography that begins with one's birth begins too late, in the middle of the story, sometimes at the end. So begins Mary Lee Settle's memoir. Her story carries within it inherited choices, old habits, old quarrels, old disguises, and the river that formed the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia and the mores of her childhood. She traces effects on her family and herself as ancient as earthquakes, mountain formations, and the crushing of swamp into coal deposits. In doing so, Settle records the expectations, talents, and tragedies of a people and a place that would serve as her deep and abiding subject in The Beulah Quintet.

In the mid-1950s, when Mary Lee Settle published The Love Eaters and The Kiss of Kin, critics hailed her as a sharp and acidic writer. However, when in subsequent novels the focus of her work shifted from contemporary social realism to historical fiction, the same critics who previously had praised her work lost enthusiasm. In Mary Lee Settle’s Beulah Quintet: The Price of Freedom, Brian Rosenberg examines Settle’s work—especially Prisons, O Beulah Land, Know Nothing, The Scapegoat, and The Killing Ground—to show the magnitude and artistic merit in a single, continuous fiction—a fiction of major importance. According to Rosenberg, the Beulah quintet is one of the few grandly ambitious works of historical fiction written by an American woman. In the novels, Settle attempts to apply a European tradition of historical re-creation to American experience and, in so doing, to adapt a largely conservative form to the demands of a revolutionary history and ideology. Although the immediate subject is the history of a region in West Virginia, the deeper subject is nothing less than the history of America: the beliefs, conflicts, and illusions that gave rise to, and continue to distinguish, American culture. Rosenberg also treats the reaction to the Beulah quintet among literary critics. He looks at the neglect and misjudgment the novels have suffered by being labeled historical fiction, a genre often though to consist largely of “romance novels,” and explains why the quintet should be placed among the canonical works of contemporary American literature. Rosenberg includes in his book the transcript of an interview he conducted with Settle in which she reflects on both her intentions as a writer and the reception of her work. Mary Lee Settle’s fiction has for too long been misperceived. Brian Rosenberg’s thorough analysis of the Beulah quintet will allow a larger audience to understand the nature and scope of her achievement.

Before the Civil War, Peregrine Catlett considers freeing his slaves but believes he can only retain his plantation by slave labour. His son, Johnny, returns to his father's farm but stays only until the outbreak of hostilities. He ends up fighting family and friends with disastrous consequences.

Settle has done a remarkable job of capturing the culture that is, in a sense, the most important character in her book. -- New York Times

Richard Drake has skillfully woven together the various strands of the Appalachian experience into a sweeping whole. Touching upon folk traditions, health care, the environment, higher education, the role of blacks and women, and much more, Drake offers a compelling social history of a unique American region. The Appalachian region, extending from Alabama in the South up to the Allegheny highlands of Pennsylvania, has historically been characterized by its largely rural populations, rich natural resources that have fueled industry in other parts of the country, and the strong and wild, undeveloped land. The rugged geography of the region allowed Native American societies, especially the Cherokee, to flourish. Early white settlers tended to favor a self-sufficient approach to farming, contrary to the land grabbing and plantation building going on elsewhere in the South. The growth of a market economy and competition from other agricultural areas of the country sparked an economic decline of the region's rural population at least as early as 1830. The Civil War and the sometimes hostile legislation of Reconstruction made life even more difficult for rural Appalachians. Recent history of the region is marked by the corporate exploitation of resources. Regional oil, gas, and coal had attracted some industry even before the Civil War, but the postwar years saw an immense expansion of American industry, nearly all of which relied heavily on Appalachian fossil fuels, particularly coal. What was initially a boon to the region eventually brought financial disaster to many mountain people as unsafe working conditions and strip mining ravaged the land and its inhabitants. A History of Appalachia also examines pockets of urbanization in Appalachia. Chemical, textile, and other industries have encouraged the development of urban areas. At the same time, radio, television, and the internet provide residents direct links to cultures from all over the world. The author looks at the process of urbanization as it belies commonly held notions about the region's rural character.