WNOX was the eighth radio station to sign on the air in North America and the first in Tennessee. No station has left a bigger footprint on American popular music or the radio industry as WNOX. Its AM signal could be heard as far south as Daytona Beach and as far north as New York City in the day of uncluttered airwaves. It helped write the book on radio broadcasts and productions with programs like the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round and the Tennessee Barn Dance. Its legendary programs helped pioneer an entire genre of American popular music and served as a launching pad for country musics greatest stars and some of the nations best broadcasters. The call letters remain an iconic landmark of Knoxville and East Tennessee.

A black farce masterpiece, Loot follows the fortunes of two young thieves, Hal and Dennis. Dennis is a hearse driver for an undertaker. They have robbed the bank next door to the funeral parlour and have returned to Hal's home to hide-out with the loot. Hal's mother has just died and the pair put the money in her coffin, hiding the body elsewhere in the house. With the arrival of Inspector Truscott, the thickened plot turns topsy-turvy. Playing with all the conventions of popular farce, Orton creates a world gone mad and examines in detail English attitudes at mid-century. The play has been called a Freudian nightmare, which sports with superstitions about death - and life. It is regularly produced in professional and amateur productions. First produced in London in 1966, Loot was hailed as "the most genuinely quick-witted, pungent and sprightly entertainment by a new, young British playwright for a decade" (Sunday Telegraph). The Student Edition offers a plot summary, full commentary, character notes and questions for study, besides a chronology and bibliography.

Founded on a bluff overlooking the Tennessee River in 1791, Knoxville was a frontier town as well as the birthplace and first capital of Tennessee. From the postcolonial years through the Civil War and on to Knoxville's emergence as an industrial, dynamic, and thoroughly American city, downtown was where everything happened--the setting of the city's most memorable stories and legends. Spanning First and Second Creeks and connecting the river to the railroad, downtown is where Knoxvillians have built their most defining churches, opera houses, movie theaters, and hotels. Here, traditions, holidays, and the endings of wars have been celebrated; suffrage leaders exhorted politicians to pass a national amendment; conservationists planned a national park; idealistic engineers and architects of a New Deal program reimagined a multistate valley; and musicians convened to record and broadcast new forms of folk music that would be called "country." Downtown is where bizarre gunfights drew national attention and a notorious outlaw escaped from jail and rode the sheriff's horse to freedom across the Gay Street Bridge.

This easy-to-use guide, completely revised and updated in clear, concise prose, features more than hundreds of sites in 31 states--solemn battlefields, gracious mansions, state parks, cemeteries, memorials, museums, and more. Specific directions, hours, and contact information help to plan the trip; evocative description and detailed maps help orient you when you're there. Also, boxed sidebars highlight select people and events of the Civil War.

A strikingly original exploration of what it might mean to be authentically human in the age of artificial intelligence, from the author of the critically-acclaimed Interior States. • "At times personal, at times philosophical, with a bracing mixture of openness and skepticism, it speaks thoughtfully and articulately to the most crucial issues awaiting our future." —Phillip Lopate “[A] truly fantastic book.”—Ezra Klein For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes's division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness—i.e., souls—might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence—identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself—urgently require rethinking. Meghan O'Gieblyn tackles this challenge with philosophical rigor, intellectual reach, essayistic verve, refreshing originality, and an ironic sense of contradiction. She draws deeply and sometimes humorously from her own personal experience as a formerly religious believer still haunted by questions of faith, and she serves as the best possible guide to navigating the territory we are all entering.