In Ben Robertson: South Carolina Journalist and Author, Jodie Peeler tells the story of a man consumed with a need to see the world but whose heart never really left home. Drawing heavily on Robertson's writings and personal papers, Peeler describes his active career as a journalist, which took him to Hawaii, Australia, Europe, Java, New York, and Washington, D.C. The early years of Robertson's career were spent as a reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune. After several years as a freelance writer, he became a World War II correspondent covering England for the New York newspaper PM. While Robertson's wartime dispatches drew attention and praise, they represented but one aspect of the man's wide-ranging works and career, for the Ben Robertson who witnessed destruction and heroism in the fires of London was also a proud son of South Carolina. In addition to his work as a journalist. Robertson wrote three books. Travelers' Rest, a fictionalized account of his ancestors' settling in South Carolina, ruffled southern feathers. In I Saw England he presents a firsthand account of the Battle of Britain and advocates for the United States to intervene in World War II. His heartfelt memoir, Red Hills and Cotton, which recalls his boyhood days in Pickens County and calls for the South to look to the future, became a southern classic. In 1943, while en route to his new job as London bureau chief for the New York Herald-Tribune, Robertson lost his life in a plane crash. Throughout his decidedly brief but adventurous life, Robertson never stopped being what one friend described as "a sentimental South Carolinian who carried his dreams on the tip of his tongue." And over time he evolved into a progressive voice calling on the South to reevaluate its attitudes on race and economics. This is the story of that proud South Carolinian, from the dreams that propelled him around the world to the sentiment that always called him home.

A vivid narrative of an ill-fated Pan American flight during World War II that captures the dramatic backstories of its passengers and, through them, the impact of Americans' global connections. On February 21, 1943, Pan American Airways' celebrated seaplane, the Yankee Clipper, took off from New York's Marine Air Terminal and island-hopped its way across the Atlantic Ocean. Arriving at Lisbon the following evening, it crashed in the Tagus River, killing twenty-four of its thirty-nine passengers and crew. Americans in a World at War traces the backstories of seven worldly Americans aboard that plane, their personal histories, their politics, and the paths that led them toward war. Combat soldiers made up only a small fraction of the millions of Americans, both in and out of uniform, who scattered across six continents during the Second World War. This book uncovers a surprising history of American noncombatants abroad in the years leading into the twentieth century's most consequential conflict. Long before GIs began storming beaches and liberating towns, Americans had forged extensive political, economic, and personal ties to other parts of the world. These deep and sometimes contradictory engagements, which preceded the bombing of Pearl Harbor, would shape and in turn be transformed by the US war effort. The intriguing biographies of the Yankee Clipper's passengers--among them an Olympic-athlete-turned-export salesman, a Broadway star, a swashbuckling pilot, and two entrepreneurs accused of trading with the enemy--upend conventional American narratives about World War II. As their travels take them from Ukraine, France, Spain, Panama, Cuba, and the Philippines to Java, India, Australia, Britain, Egypt, the Soviet Union, and the Belgian Congo, among other hot spots, their movements defy simple boundaries between home front and war front. Americans in a World at War offers fresh perspectives on a transformative period of US history and global connections during the "American Century."

Red Hills and Cotton is suffused with Ben Robertson's deep affection for his native Upcountry South Carolina. An internationally known and respected journalist, Robertson had a knack for finding the interesting and exotic in seemingly humble or ordinary folk and a keen eye for human interest stories. His power of description and disarmingly straightforward narrative were the hallmarks of his writing. A loyal Southern son, Robertson cherished what he judged to be the South's best traditions: personal independence and responsibility, the rejection of crass materialism, a deep piety, and a love of freedom. He repeatedly lamented the region's many shortcomings: poverty, racial hierarchy, political impotence, lack of inttellectual curiosity, and its tendency to blame all of its twentieth-century problems on the defeat of the Confederacy. An informative and entertaining new introduction by Lacy K. Ford, Jr., associate professor of history at the University of South Carolina, provides fascinating new facts about Robertson's life and recasts his achievements in Red Hills and Cotton as social commentary. Ford captures the essence of Robertson's restless and questioning, but unfailingly Southern, spirit.

How We Live Now is an inspiring guide to making the most of every square inch of your available space. When the housing market takes a dip, fewer of us move as we just can't afford it. That's the time to take a long hard look at your home and work out how to make the most of every room – even every corner. Perhaps you're trying to carve out more space to accommodate a growing family, or maybe you're wondering where you can squeeze in a home office, a utility room or a kids' playroom. Whatever your particular needs, in How We Live Now Rebecca Winward explores ways to make your home work harder for you. She explores open-plan living, opting for more flexible room configurations, and using pockets of 'dead space' – under the stairs, on the landing or in the garden – that have unrecognized potential. Multi-tasking furniture and smart storage both have their role to play, as does versatile lighting. Streamline everyday life with How We Live Now.

A paradise of breathtaking waterfalls, flawless vistas, and picturesque lakes, Pickens County enjoys a remarkable natural beauty along the stream-laced foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The county, named for early settler and Revolutionary War hero Andrew Pickens, was once part of the Old Pendleton District, a portion of the Palmetto State that also included Anderson and Oconee Counties, and like much of the Upstate, echoes its Cherokee heritage through local names such as Lake Keowee and the Cateechee community. This volume, containing over 200 black-and-white images, provides readers a unique opportunity to step back into the Pickens County of yesteryear, a time remembered for clay main streets, horse-drawn buggies, railroads, and early textile mills, gristmills, and sawmills. Covering the county's towns, such as Easley, Pickens, Liberty, and Central, Pickens County recounts the intriguing stories of hardships and accomplishments of the area's pioneering families and descendants, who have continued to shape the county without destroying the area's natural environment.

This new edition of Southern Writers assumes its distinguished predecessor's place as the essential reference on literary artists of the American South. Broadly expanded and thoroughly revised, it boasts 604 entries-nearly double the earlier edition's-written by 264 scholars. For every figure major and minor, from the venerable and canonical to the fresh and innovative, a biographical sketch and chronological list of published works provide comprehensive, concise, up-to-date information. Here in one convenient source are the South's novelists and short story writers, poets and dramatists, memoirists and essayists, journalists, scholars, and biographers from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. What constitutes a "southern writer" is always a matter for debate. Editors Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel have used a generous definition that turns on having a significant connection to the region, in either a personal or literary sense. New to this volume are younger writers who have emerged in the quarter century since the dictionary's original publication, as well as older talents previously unknown or unacknowledged. For almost every writer found in the previous edition, a new biography has been commissioned. Drawn from the very best minds on southern literature and covering the full spectrum of its practitioners, Southern Writers is an indispensable reference book for anyone intrigued by the subject.