Most Hilltoppers believe that Western Kentucky University is unique. They take pride in its lovely campus, its friendly spirit, the loyalty of its alumni, and its academic and athletic achievements. But Western's development also illustrates a major trend in American higher education during the past century. Scores of other institutions have followed the Western pattern, growing from private normal school to state normal school, to teachers college, to general college, finally emerging as an important state university. Historian Lowell Harrison traces the Western story from the school's origin in 1875 to the January 1986 election of its seventh president. For much of its history, Western has been led by paternalistic presidents whose major battles have been with other state schools and parsimonious legislatures. In recent years the presidents have been challenged by students and faculty who have demanded more active roles in university governance, and by a Board of Regents and the Council on Higher Education, which have raised challenging new issues. Harrison's account of the institution's development is laced with anecdotes and vignettes of some of the school's interesting personalities: President Henry Hardin Cherry, whose chapel talks convinced countless students that "the Spirit Makes the Master"; "Uncle Ed" Diddle, whose flying towel and winning teams earned national basketball fame; "Daddy" Bur-ton who could catch flies while lecturing; Miss Gabie Robertson, who held students into the next class period; the lone Japanese student who was on campus during World War II. Harrison also recalls steamboat excursions, the Great Depression and the Second World War, the astounding boom in enrollment and buildings in the 1960s, the period of student unrest, and the numerous fiscal crises that have beset the school. This is the story of an institution proud of its past and seeking to chart its course into the twenty-first century.

This in-depth study offers a new examination of a region that is often overlooked in political histories of the Bluegrass State. George G. Humphreys traces the arc of politics and the economy in western Kentucky from avid support of the Democratic Party to its present-day Republican identity. He demonstrates that, despite its relative geographic isolation, the region west of the eastern boundary of Hancock, Ohio, Butler, Warren, and Simpson Counties to the Mississippi River played significant roles in state and national politics during the New Deal and postwar eras. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral history interviews, Humphreys explores the area's political transformation from a solid Democratic voting bloc to a conservative stronghold by examining how developments such as advances in agriculture, the diversification of the economy, and the civil rights movement affected the region. Addressing notable deficiencies in the existing literature, this impressively researched study will leave readers with a deeper understanding of post-1945 Kentucky politics.

A Most Anticipated Summer Read by SheReads * Motherly * Palm Beach Daily News * Frolic * Crime Reads and more! "Fans of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot may want to check this one out."--Publishers Weekly "With hints of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, this is a riveting thriller."--Palm Beach Daily News "Grabs you by the throat and never lets go...with a twist you’ll never see coming.” --Liv Constantine, bestselling author of The Last Mrs. Parrish "Sounds like Wonder Boys times Patricia Highsmith. Yes please!"--Crime Reads When a student disappears and is presumed dead, her professor passes off her manuscript as his own—only to find out it implicates him in an unsolved murder in this new thriller from the USA Today bestselling author of The Request. After years of struggling to write following the deaths of his wife and son, English professor Connor Nye publishes his first novel, a thriller about the murder of a young woman. There’s just one problem: Connor didn’t write the book. His missing student did. And then she appears on his doorstep, alive and well, threatening to expose him. Connor’s problems escalate when the police insist details in the novel implicate him in an unsolved murder from two years ago. Soon Connor discovers the crime is part of a disturbing scandal on campus and faces an impossible dilemma—admit he didn’t write the book and lose his job or keep up the lie and risk everything. When another murder occurs, Connor must clear his name by unraveling the horrifying secrets buried in his student’s manuscript. This is a suspenseful, provocative novel about the sexual harassment that still runs rampant in academia—and the lengths those in power will go to cover it up.

"When a man agrees to do a favor for a friend, he gets more than he bargained for as he becomes embroiled in a woman's murder in this new thriller from the USA Today bestselling author of Layover. Ryan Francis has it all--great job, wonderful wife, beautiful child. That is until an old friend, Blake Norton, asks Ryan to help keep his affair a secret by retrieving an incriminating item from the woman's home. Ryan refuses to help, but when Blake threatens to reveal his deepest and darkest secret--which could put everything in Ryan's life in jeopardy--Ryan has no choice. When he arrives at the woman's house, Ryan is shocked to learn two things: he knows the woman Blake is having an affair with, and she is dead on her bedroom floor. With the sound of police sirens rapidly approaching, Ryan flees, wondering why his old friend was setting him up for murder. Determined to keep his life intact and to clear his name, Ryan can't rest until he finds out who the real murderer is--but solving the crime may lead him closer to home than he ever could have imagined"--

Captain Adolph G. Metzner's stunning visual diary of sketches, drawings and watercolors depict his world during three years of service with the First German, Thirty-second Regiment Indiana Volunteer Infantry campaigning in the Western Theater during the Civil War.

This book examines tragedy and tragic philosophy from the Greeks through Shakespeare to the present day. It explores key themes in the links between suffering and ethics through postcolonial literature. Ato Quayson reconceives how we think of World literature under the singular and fertile rubric of tragedy. He draws from many key works – Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes, Medea, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear – to establish the main contours of tragedy. Quayson uses Shakespeare's Othello, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Tayeb Salih, Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee to qualify and expand the purview and terms by which Western tragedy has long been understood. Drawing on key texts such as The Poetics and The Nicomachean Ethics, and augmenting them with Frantz Fanon and the Akan concept of musuo (taboo), Quayson formulates a supple, insightful new theory of ethical choice and the impediments against it. This is a major book from a leading critic in literary studies.

This text argues that the hillbilly - in his various guises - has been viewed by mainstream Americans simultaneously as a violent degenerate who threatens the modern order and as a keeper of traditional values and thus symbolic of a nostalgic past free of the problems of contemporary life.