South African children gather to welcome home their fathers who have been away for several months working in the mines.

The chase was over. In April 1969, nineteen-year-old Jerry Shepherd stares in his rearview mirror at the two policemen approaching his car. He wants to run, make his escape, perhaps his final escape from life. Then he curls his fingers around the small Bible in his back pocket as the words Peace be still whisper through his head. He holds to those words as he steps from the car to handcuffed and arrested. Angels at the Crossroads is the compelling true story of Shepherd's amazing journey from wrongdoing to redemption. Convicted of a crime he can hardly believe he could have committed, Shepherd faces life in prison and fears not only that he won't survive behind bars, but also that he has stepped beyond the hope of prayer or forgiveness. His parents say no as they cover him with fervent prayers, but Shepherd must find his own way through the jungle of prison life to the people - earth angels - who can help him discover God's love knows no limit. On this pilgrimage to self-acceptance, Shepherd learns to forgive the past and completely and unconditionally love again. If you face a crossroads in your life, Shepherd's inspirational journey may help lead you down a new pathway to a life filled with compassion and love. Visit author Ann H. Gabhart online at www.annhgabhart.com.

Table of contents

There are few places where mobility has shaped identity as widely as the American West, but some locations and populations sit at its major crossroads, maintaining control over place and mobility, labor and race. In Collisions at the Crossroads, Genevieve Carpio argues that mobility, both permission to move freely and prohibitions on movement, helped shape racial formation in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining policies and forces as different as historical societies, Indian boarding schools, bicycle ordinances, immigration policy, incarceration, traffic checkpoints, and Route 66 heritage, she shows how local authorities constructed a racial hierarchy by allowing some people to move freely while placing limits on the mobility of others. Highlighting the ways people of color have negotiated their place within these systems, Carpio reveals a compelling and perceptive analysis of spatial mobility through physical movement and residence.

Winner of the Mormon History Association Best International Book Award The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continues to contend with longstanding tensions surrounding gender and race. Yet women of color in the United States and across the Global South adopt and adapt the faith to their contexts, many sharing the high level of satisfaction expressed by Latter-day Saints in general. Caroline Kline explores the ways Latter-day Saint women of color in Mexico, Botswana, and the United States navigate gender norms, but also how their moral priorities and actions challenge Western feminist assumptions. Kline analyzes these traditional religious women through non-oppressive connectedness, a worldview that blends elements of female empowerment and liberation with a broader focus on fostering positive and productive relationships in different realms. Even as members of a patriarchal institution, the women feel a sense of liberation that empowers them to work against oppression and against alienation from both God and other human beings. Vivid and groundbreaking, Mormon Women at the Crossroads merges interviews with theory to offer a rare discussion of Latter-day Saint women from a global perspective.

Music is powerful and transformational, but can it spur actual social change? A strong collection of essays, At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice studies the meaning of music within a community to investigate the intersections of sound and race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and differing abilities. Ethnographic work from a range of theoretical frameworks uncovers and analyzes the successes and limitations of music's efficacies in resolving conflicts, easing tensions, reconciling groups, promoting unity, and healing communities. This volume is rooted in the Crossroads Section for Difference and Representation of the Society for Ethnomusicology, whose mandate is to address issues of diversity, difference, and underrepresentation in the society and its members' professional spheres. Activist scholars who contribute to this volume illuminate possible pathways and directions to support musical diversity and representation. At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice is an excellent resource for readers interested in real-world examples of how folklore, ethnomusicology, and activism can, together, create a more just and inclusive world.

"Should sound a national alert to society that even our most privileged girls still pursue normal femininity at great risk to personal and civic health." THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE Lyn Mike Brown and Carol Gilligan ask "What, on the way to womanhood, does a girl give up?" One hundred girls gave voice to what is rarely spoken and often ignored: that the passage out of girlhood is a journey into silence and disconnection, a troubled crossing when a girl loses a firm sense of self and becomes tentative and unsure. These changes mark the endge of adolescence as a watershed in women's psychological development and the stories the girls tell are by turns heartrending and courageous. Listening to these girls provides us with the means of reaching out to them at this critical time, and of better understanding what we as women and men may have left behind at our own crossroads. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

The devil is the most charismatic and important figure in the blues tradition. He's not just the music's namesake ("the devil's music"), but a shadowy presence who haunts an imagined Mississippi crossroads where, it is claimed, Delta bluesman Robert Johnson traded away his soul in exchange for extraordinary prowess on the guitar. Yet, as scholar and musician Adam Gussow argues, there is much more to the story of the devil and the blues than these cliched understandings. In this groundbreaking study, Gussow takes the full measure of the devil's presence. Working from original transcriptions of more than 125 recordings released during the past ninety years, Gussow explores the varied uses to which black southern blues people have put this trouble-sowing, love-wrecking, but also empowering figure. The book culminates with a bold reinterpretation of Johnson's music and a provocative investigation of the way in which the citizens of Clarksdale, Mississippi, managed to rebrand a commercial hub as "the crossroads" in 1999, claiming Johnson and the devil as their own.

Varla Ventura, fan favorite on Huffington Post’s Weird News, frequent guest on Coast to Coast, and bestselling author of The Book of the Bizarre and Beyond Bizarre, introduces a new Weiser Books Collection of forgotten cryptoclassics. Magical Creatures is a hairraising herd of affordable digital editions, curated with Varla’s affectionate and unerring eye for the fantastic. Beware the death bogle! A sighting of this fearsome creature will likely lead to sudden illness and untimely death. Folklorist Elliot O'Donnell warns of this relative of The Bogieman and all that lurk at the crossroads in this Edwardianera collection about the notsofair fairies of old.