"While Puckett offers a valuable perspective on schooling in the twentieth-century rural South, she also captures the essence of daily life in the communities in which she taught. We read of how she sometimes boarded with the parents of her pupils; of how teachers, students, and parents joined together in observance of holidays; and of how schooling managed to continue through the busy growing seasons. Personal details of Puckett's life also emerge, from her relationship with her parents to her life at home with her husband and their eight children.".

My storied career as an educator began in a one-room schoolhouse deep in the hills of Harlan County, Kentucky, when I was only nineteen years old. From that somewhat inauspicious start, my journey as a teacher took me to a three-room school as the teacher-principal in Bell County, Kentucky, to another one-room school in Bell County, to Tucker High School in Georgia, to Georgia Military Academy, ending at Augusta College in Augusta, Georgia, as a professor of United States history. Of course, there were several stops along the way: a two-year hitch in the United States Army, a stint of several months as a blue-collar laborer, and a brief sojourn in retailing. This book is an account of the career of an educator who loved to teach and who loved all his pupils and students.

The author recounts her many happy Chistmases spent with eight brothers and sisters, including one Christmas when the family hosted a chain gang and their guards

More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth. Moreover, Levin shows that belief in the existence of black Confederate soldiers largely originated in the 1970s, a period that witnessed both a significant shift in how Americans remembered the Civil War and a rising backlash against African Americans' gains in civil rights and other realms. Levin also investigates the roles that African Americans actually performed in the Confederate army, including personal body servants and forced laborers. He demonstrates that regardless of the dangers these men faced in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield, their legal status remained unchanged. Even long after the guns fell silent, Confederate veterans and other writers remembered these men as former slaves and not as soldiers, an important reminder that how the war is remembered often runs counter to history.

Wachtang Botso Korisheli was born in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, in 1921, the year in which his country was forcibly annexed to the Soviet Union. Raised in an artistic and cultured family, his life changed drastically when his father, a famous actor, was arrested in 1936 and executed as an enemy of the state. This cataclysm in the young man's life started a chain of circumstances which led him through the Soviet and German armies of World War II, to lumberjacking in Bavaria, and finally to emigrating to California in 1950, where he studied piano and music education and became a treasured teacher and mentor to generations of students in the small seaside town of Morro Bay. Botso lives there now with his wife Margaret and their daughters, Lia and Ellena; he also has two grown children, Temmo and Tina.