The Percy family has amassed a tremendous amount of wealth, but the Mississippi River is threatening to break its levees in 1927 and wash away everything they've worked so hard to achieve. To make sure they keep what is theirs, they and other whites force thousands of African-Americans at gunpoint to shore up the levees. Three escape and begin an epic journey North. Among escapees is Cora Mae, a servant who works for Henry Ford and gathers the knowledge and secrets that help guide her family through the Great Depression and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Meanwhile, Bully, another survivor, begins a sixty-year love affair with Sarah, a woman he wants to call his own in spite of a mother who keeps them apart with a shotgun. Matthew escapes Panther Burn to find a love and fortune worth dying for on the streets of Detroit. Take an epic 60 year journey through the personal struggles of a family as it battles poverty, racism and seemingly insurmountable odds to find their dreams as The Children of Panther Burn.

In Dahomey, West Africa—home of the Panther People—powerful warriors battle each other for slaves to offer the gods in sacrifice or sell to slave traders. In the aftermath of a brutal tribal war, little Ehizokie is orphaned. After a mother panther raises her along with her cubs, fate decides Ehizokie’s future as she transforms into an Ahosi warrior—a group of special guards that are all women and all wives of the king. More than anything else, Ehizokie wants to please the king of her African nation. As she matures and is eventually brought to America on a slave ship, Ehizokie soon reveals to everyone around her, including her slave friend, Izogie, that she is a terror to anyone who threatens her life, the king, or those under her protection. After she finally lands at a Mississippi plantation and begins a new chapter, Ehizokie births five generations of descendants, one of whom is Cora Mae Jones. As Cora rises from the depths of poverty in Panther Burn, Mississippi, she creates a future no one could have ever imagined. The Trail of the Panther is the story of an African Ahosi warrior as her life’s journey leads her to America and to birth descendants who blaze a trail to the citadels of power around the world.

Exiled from his people, a Cheyenne fighter searches for a war The party of young Cheyenne warriors is returning home from a successful hunt when their leader, Panther Burn, spies a wayward Creek scout. Hungry for the prestige of battle, he chases the Creek into the woods, dragging his fellow warriors straight into an ambush. Two die, and for his impulsiveness, Panther Burn is banished from the tribe. But his legend does not end there. He takes shelter with the Southern Cheyenne, and finds that their attempts at modernization amount to an abandonment of tradition and enslavement to the white man. Over the next decades, the United States will try to herd the Cheyenne into reservations and destroy their way of life, and Panther Burn will become their champion. Although his battle with the Creek ended in disgrace, this warrior will find glory at last.

Recipient of the 2018 Special Achievement Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters and Recipient of a 2018 Heritage Award for Education from the Mississippi Heritage Trust The perfect book for every Mississippian who cares about the state, this is a mammoth collaboration in which thirty subject editors suggested topics, over seven hundred scholars wrote entries, and countless individuals made suggestions. The volume will appeal to anyone who wants to know more about Mississippi and the people who call it home. The book will be especially helpful to students, teachers, and scholars researching, writing about, or otherwise discovering the state, past and present. The volume contains entries on every county, every governor, and numerous musicians, writers, artists, and activists. Each entry provides an authoritative but accessible introduction to the topic discussed. The Mississippi Encyclopedia also features long essays on agriculture, archaeology, the civil rights movement, the Civil War, drama, education, the environment, ethnicity, fiction, folklife, foodways, geography, industry and industrial workers, law, medicine, music, myths and representations, Native Americans, nonfiction, poetry, politics and government, the press, religion, social and economic history, sports, and visual art. It includes solid, clear information in a single volume, offering with clarity and scholarship a breadth of topics unavailable anywhere else. This book also includes many surprises readers can only find by browsing.

Hardy's study is concerned only with Percy's fiction, rather than his life, thought or his essays. He covers all six of Percy's novels from The Moviegoer (1961) to The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), and treats them only as fiction, rather than as philosophical disquisitions or religious treatises. Hardy presents a close reading of each novel, focusing on the internal artistic consistency of the works in regard to their subgenres, adopted conventions, narrative focus, and reader/text interactions. He reveals Percy as a judicious and knowledgeable practitioner in control of his medium. ISBN 0-252-01387-5: $24.95.

A Study Guide for Alice Walker's "Roselily," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.