White working-class conservatives have played a decisive role in American history, particularly in their opposition to social justice movements, radical critiques of capitalism, and government help for the poor and sick. While this pattern is largely seen as a post-1960s development, Poor Man's Fortune tells a different story, excavating the long history of white working-class conservatism in the century from the Civil War to World War II. With a close study of metal miners in the Tri-State district of Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, Jarod Roll reveals why successive generations of white, native-born men willingly and repeatedly opposed labor unions and government-led health and safety reforms, even during the New Deal. With painstaking research, Roll shows how the miners' choices reflected a deep-seated, durable belief that hard-working American white men could prosper under capitalism, and exposes the grim costs of this view for these men and their communities, for organized labor, and for political movements seeking a more just and secure society. Roll's story shows how American inequalities are in part the result of a white working-class conservative tradition driven by grassroots assertions of racial, gendered, and national privilege.

A direct response to Albert Camus' call for Algerians to tell the world their story, The Poor Man's Son remains after half a century the definitive map of the Kabyle soul.

Robert Hawker was considered as the "Star of the West", due to his superlative preaching that drew thousands to Charles to hear him speak for over an hour at a time. He was a bold Evangelical, caring father, active in education and compassionate for the poor and needy of the parish, a scholar and author of many books and deeply beloved of his parishioners. Described as "one of Almighties almoners/Entrusted with supernatural wealth" .

Twelve stories, fraught with an unapologetic voice of firsthand experience, that pry the lock off of the addiction, fanaticism, violence, and fear of characters whose lives are mired in the darkness of isolation and the horror and the hilarity of the mundane. This is the Deep South: the dark territory of brine, pine, gravel, and red clay, where pavement still fears to tread. Contains interior illustrations by Ryan Murray and Patrick Traylor. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "Schuler Benson writes like the spawn of Chuck Palahniuk and Barry Hannah. While approaching his subjects with empathy, humor, and a keen eye for detail, he creates a world of snake-charming preachers, meth heads, and spurned lovers. This collection will make you laugh, make you anxious, and keep you turning the pages. Read this damn book." -Kody Ford, The Idle Class Magazine ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "A Breece D'J Pancake of the plains, Benson writes with a hell of a knack for dialect. His characters are dirty, flawed, and all-too familiar. There are no heroes here. Yet in these stories, Benson manages to lift his people to another plane; someplace where they might achieve a little redemption." -Eric Shonkwiler, author of Above All Men ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "Schuler Benson has a playwright's ear for dialogue, a poet's eye for scene, and a comic's sense for when the sane is actually crazy, the crazy actually sane. The Poor Man's Guide to an Affordable, Painless Suicide announces Benson's place in the tradition of Wells Tower, Barry Hannah, and Mark Twain: here comes another great documentarian of the agonized and hilarious souls who inhabit Rural America." -Brian Ted Jones, Electric Literature ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Find out more about Alternating Current Press at http://www.press.alternatingcurrentarts.com.

In this quietly revolutionary work of social observation and medical philosophy, Booker Prize-winning writer John Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr train their gaze on an English country doctor and find a universal man--one who has taken it upon himself to recognize his patient's humanity when illness and the fear of death have made them unrecognizable to themselves. In the impoverished rural community in which he works, John Sassall tend the maimed, the dying, and the lonely. He is not only the dispenser of cures but the repository of memories. And as Berger and Mohr follow Sassall about his rounds, they produce a book whose careful detail broadens into a meditation on the value we assign a human life. First published thirty years ago, A Fortunate Man remains moving and deeply relevant--no other book has offered such a close and passionate investigation of the roles doctors play in their society. "In contemporary letters John Berger seems to me peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience." --Susan Sontag

At the height of his powers, Per Sidenius, the son of a poor religious minister, is a fortunate man. He has the whole of the approaching twentieth century in his grasp: a fabulously rich Jewish heiress as a soon-to-be wife, burgeoning fame as a forward- and free-thinking man of the ‘New Age’ and success in having put his sorry childhood behind him. But just as he reaches the lofty heights of bourgeois success, Per begins to deeply question his life. A series of events then unfold which Nobel Prize–winning author Henrik Pontoppidan describes with unflinching honesty and intensely human passion. Here is the hectic foment of social and religious debate, the unrepentant greed of finance sharks, the hot coals of pure and illicit love. Then the biggest questions of all – who am I and what have I to do? With A Fortunate Man (1898–1904) one of Denmark’s greatest ever writers manages not only to sound the depths of his nation’s soul but also to paint a huge European canvas stretching from vintage Copenhagen to the sultry heat of Rome at the turn of the nineteenth century. Heralded by such influential figures as Thomas Mann and Georg Lukács as a seminal work, this is a truly breathtaking novel which places Henrik Pontoppidan as one of the true greats of modern European literature.

Winner of the Coretta Scott King Book Award For young readers comes a poetic commemoration of the life of an 18th-century slave, from a past poet laureate and three-time National Book Award finalist For over 200 years, the Mattatuck Museum in Connecticut has housed a mysterious skeleton. In 1996, community members decided to find out what they could about it. Historians discovered that the bones were those of an enslaved man named Fortune, who was owned by a local doctor. After Fortune’s death, the doctor rendered the bones. Further research revealed that Fortune had married, had fathered four children, and had been baptized later in life. His bones suggest that after a life of arduous labor, he died in 1798 at about the age of 60. The Manumission Requiem is Marilyn Nelson’s poetic commemoration of Fortune’s life. Detailed notes and archival photographs enhance the reader’s appreciation of the poem.