First-person narratives of former Alabama slaves edited from WPA slave narratives.

An irritating best friend gained during a childhood spent in a Catholic orphanage, a father who became a Communist and went to Russia in the 1930s, and 3:00 a.m. visits to The Pancake House. Such is the life of Lyla Hopewell. But in the summer of 2005, when her old boyfriend Bill has a heart attack, her best friend Bel really gets on her nerves, and Finn Fest comes to Marquette, things will change for Lyla. Joined by a cast of Marquette’s most eccentric and endearing characters—the foul-mouthed fourteen-year-old Josie; ninety-three-year-old Eleanor, still trying to fix her little brother’s love life; ex-boyfriend and blunt womanizer, Bill; blind Mary Mitchell and her ornery sister Florence; the sweet but romantically confused cabdriver Sybil; and many, many more—Lyla recounts her life-story as she comes to terms with her past. After years of feeling unloved, neglected, frustrated, and unfulfilled, can Lyla finally find her own best place?

First-person narratives of 27 former Texas slaves edited from WPA slave narratives.

The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as “medical superbodies” highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.

An accessible and interesting survey of the rise of the state of Alabama from frontier society to the Civil War.

It is said that one never forgets oneÍs first love. But rarely does that love transcend all other things, becoming an obsession, a career, or a reason for living. First-time novelist and renowned literary critic Bruce-Novoa explores the very relationship between love and art in this highly lyrical and experimental novel set to the backdrop of the babyboomer era, especially as expressed in film, music and popular culture from the 1960s to the 1980s. The protagonist, a talented cinematographer, sees his beloved everywhere, in his mind as well as through the lens of his camera. Despite the turns of fortune that have determined PaulÍs life, a series of lovers and even marriage to another, Paul clings to the hope of ultimately finding his true love and living out the rest of his life with her. Obsession and the fateful possibility of reunion are the suspenseful, driving forces behind this artful romance.