The Jargon Society, a boundary-pushing publisher of poetry and experimental writing, was founded by Jonathan Williams (1929–2008) in 1951. Jargon quickly gained a reputation as the home of the poetic and literary avant-garde, including noted midcentury poets like Charles Olson and Lorine Niedecker. Williams himself looms large in this story as the publisher at Jargon until his death, making this book as much about his life and work as the press he founded, which today operates through the Black Mountain College Museum in Asheville, North Carolina. Andy Martrich authors this story in a manner befitting Jargon's ethos of literary experimentation by focusing on the books the Society cataloged but never published. While it's not uncommon for a small press to plan for books that don't make it to publication, Martrich argues that Jargon's incessant financial difficulties, coupled with Williams's impressive network, makes its trail of unfinished projects unique and an ideal way to chronicle the press itself. Using archival research, interviews with volunteers at Jargon, and more, Martrich gives readers not only an intimate look into a Southern press and publisher but also an important history of modern and experimental literature in twentieth-century America. Shy of the Squirrel's Foot includes an epilogue by Anne Midgette, an afterword by Nicole Raziya Fong, and Jargon's complete annotated bibliography, which details every book the press published, compiled in one place for the first time.

Describes the construction and launching of the USS North Carolina and discusses the battleship's participation in major campaigns in the Pacific theater during World War II. Carefully selected photographs illustrate the text, bringing to life the vessel's dramatic history.

The evangelical publishing community has been growing for more than two hundred years. Candy Gunther Brown explores the roots of this far-flung conglomeration of writers, publishers, and readers, from the founding of the Methodist Book Concern in 1789 to the 1880 publication of the runaway best-seller Ben-Hur.

When Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, he dreamed of inspiring a "race of singers" who would celebrate the working class and realize the promise of American democracy. By examining how singers such as Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen both embraced and reconfigured Whitman's vision, Bryan Garman shows that Whitman succeeded. In doing so, Garman celebrates the triumphs yet also exposes the limitations of Whitman's legacy. While Whitman's verse propounded notions of sexual freedom and renounced the competitiveness of capitalism, it also safeguarded the interests of the white workingman, often at the expense of women and people of color. Garman describes how each of Whitman's successors adopted the mantle of the working-class hero while adapting the role to his own generation's concerns: Guthrie condemned racism in the 1930s, Dylan addressed race and war in the 1960s, and Springsteen explored sexism, racism, and homophobia in the 1980s and 1990s. But as Garman points out, even the Boss, like his forebears, tends to represent solidarity in terms of white male bonding and homosocial allegiance. We can hear America singing in the voices of these artists, Garman says, but it is still the song of a white, male America.

In colonial North Carolina, German-speaking settlers from the Moravian Church founded a religious refuge--an ideal society, they hoped, whose blueprint for daily life was the Bible and whose Chief Elder was Christ himself. As the community's demand for labor grew, the Moravian Brethren bought slaves to help operate their farms, shops, and industries. Moravians believed in the universalism of the gospel and baptized dozens of African Americans, who became full members of tightly knit Moravian congregations. For decades, white and black Brethren worked and worshiped together--though white Moravians never abandoned their belief that black slavery was ordained by God. Based on German church documents, including dozens of rare biographies of black Moravians, A Separate Canaan is the first full-length study of contact between people of German and African descent in early America. Exploring the fluidity of race in Revolutionary era America, it highlights the struggle of African Americans to secure their fragile place in a culture unwilling to give them full human rights. In the early nineteenth century, white Moravians forsook their spiritual inclusiveness, installing blacks in a separate church. Just as white Americans throughout the new republic rejected African American equality, the Moravian story illustrates the power of slavery and race to overwhelm other ideals.

Reynolda: Her Muses, Her Stories is your invitation to explore Reynolda House Museum of American Art, North Carolina's nationally acclaimed art museum showcasing paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts in the restored 1917 home of tobacco magnate R. J. Reynolds and his wife, Katharine. Their sixty-four-room bungalow sits at the center of an estate that beckons thousands of visitors each year to its formal gardens, meadows, woodlands, shops, and restaurants. In this volume, David Park Curry has captured the essence of Reynolda House Museum of American Art through a lavishly illustrated essay that blends Reynolda's fifty years as a beloved family home with her second life as a museum of American art. Using the lenses of time, landscape, home, social context, history, and memory, Curry connects you to the remarkable place called Reynolda. Highlighting the fascinating--and often surprising--stories of the myriad ways signature works of art came into this stellar collection, Martha R. Severns offers insights about the artists, writers, donors, and, most importantly, the museum's founder, Barbara Babcock Millhouse. Each of the eighty concise essays is afforded a generous two-page layout that includes a full-page color image. This beautifully illustrated book takes you through an American place and an American collection. Consider it your personal tour with behind-the-scenes access to all the stories you might wish to learn, but cannot, in the limited span of a single visit to this Museum.