First Published in 2002. Transcending Boundaries is an autobiography tracing the multifaceted and wide­ranging career of choreographer. director, performer and professor of dance Donald McKayle. His chance meeting with the legendary Bill Robinson, who obligingly responded to the entreaties of an adoring nine-year-old and executed an impromptu version of his infectious stair tap-dance, and an electric encounter as a teenager sitting in a darkened theatre witnessing a performance by concert artist Pearl Primus, are key early experiences which bring about McKayle's life in dance, theatre, film, television, entertainment and education. He learned at the feet of the masters, trained and developed some of the profession's top practitioners, and worked in theatres and studios around the world -on Broadway, in Hollywood -creating a repertoire of acclaimed masterworks. He experienced failure, success, love, marriage and family. Readers will find his autobiography a revelation in an ongoing and still evolving story.

Howard W. Odum (1884-1954), the pioneering social scientist and founder of the University of North Carolina's department of sociology, played a leading and well-documented role in the modernization of the South. This is the first book-length study of Odum's contributions to southern folklore, which had important but largely unappreciated consequences for his legacy of social justice. Lynn Moss Sanders shows how Odum, as a collector of African American blues and work songs, anticipated some important precepts of modern folklore. Notably, Odum perceived the benefits of a collaborative and nonhierarchical approach to folk studies. Influenced by a racially tolerant former student and by one of his black folk informants, Odum changed his previous paternal, segregationist attitudes about race. Comparing Odum's two song collections, The Negro and His Songs (1925) and Negro Workaday Songs (1926), Sanders links the growing influence of Odum's coauthor and former student, Guy Johnson, to a decrease in instances of racial condescension between the first and second book. The three "folk" novels in Odum's Black Ulysses trilogy (completed in 1931) also reveal a progressive refinement of Odum's racial views. The change, Sanders believes, came with Odum's growing ability to see John Wesley "Left-Wing" Gordon, the black, working-class model for the trilogy's hero, as a friend rather than simply as a representative of "the Negro." From his authorship of Social and Mental Traits of the Negro (1910), now a relic of scientific racism, to his final publication, Agenda for Integration, Odum exemplifies how the study of folklore changed the folklorist--a change felt by a whole generation of southern liberals whose work Odum encouraged and shaped.

These memoirs are a history of pioneering siblings orphaned by a murder/suicide who settled virgin prairie to build an international cattle empire only to lose it in the Great Depression. It is also a story of courage, faith, determination and family values as one family struggles to keep their home and the land they tamed. It is not heroic, it is every day life. It is about a family struggling with the realities of life while dreaming of a better future. Rich only in the blessings of life in America, solid values and devoted family they had all the things that money couldn't buy and through it all, one man who was "so damn grateful". Written from the perspective of an Iowa farmer who was born and lived on the same land for 92 years, this is a history tempered by 368 change of seasons, World Wars, a Great Depression and technology advances that have rocked the very foundations of our world. But most of all, 92 years of working with and sometimes battling Mother Nature tempered by family, friends and God. That makes this not so much a history of a family as a way of life.

New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.

Paul Clayton and the Folksong Revival is the first biography of the folk singer and song collector Paul Clayton (1931-1967). Preeminently a scholar-balladeer, Clayton is credited with the Top-Ten hit "Gotta Travel On" and single-handedly brought hundreds of obscure folksongs to light for the mid-century radio and recording market. He influenced listeners and friends from Dave Van Ronk to Bob Dylan, who considered Clayton a mentor, "mindguard," and well of folksong.