When Lou Schell and her husband Fletcher first read Charles Kuralt's America, the two were captivated by the stories of his travels and the people he met along the way. The Schell's began planning their dream trip: a year-long Odyssey tracing Kuralt's route around the country, visiting his favorite U.S. locations during their most scenic seasons. They would spend time in each town he'd chronicled, perhaps even meeting some of the characters he'd described so vividly. Fletcher's sudden death put an end to that dream for awhile, but Lou couldn't shake the feeling this was a trip she was supposed to take. At the age of 77, Lou Schell gathered her children to her home on a Sunday afternoon and presented them with the news: she would be spending the next year traveling America - and she would be spending their inheritance to do it. Her children's response? "Go for it." While Lou began the trip with her 72 year old sister Janie, Janie was unable to complete the trip. Undaunted, Lou continued on alone. For the next several months, she drove from city to city, staying a full month in each location for so she could fully experience its culture, people, food and ambiance. In the pages of Revisiting America you'll join Lou as she shares a courtyard--and snacks--with Iggy the Iguana in Key West, dines at The Fat Hen restaurant in Charleston and takes an intrepid stroll across a mile high swinging bridge in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Join this ever-young adventurer as she milks life for all it's worth, making friends from New Orleans to Taos, and Boothbay Harbor, Maine to Ketchikan, Alaska, and proving to everyone who hears her story that it's never too late to follow your dream.

Combining mastery of existing scholarship with a fresh approach to new material, Born in the Country continues to define the field of American rural history.

"Engravings for the people" a fresh appraisal of the printmakers Currier & Ives and their vision of America Currier & Ives was a powerhouse of 19th-century publishing and had an immeasurable influence on American visual culture. Founded in New York in 1834 by Nathaniel Currier, the company expanded to include a new partner, James Merritt Ives, after 1857. Currier & Ives produced millions of affordably priced copies of over 7,000 original lithographs, living up to its self-appointed title as "The Grand Central Depot for Cheap and Popular Prints." The firm took advantage of New York City's booming arts culture in the latter half of the 19th century, but its output was not seen as fine art by critics, nor was it intended as such. Its prints were first and foremost commodities; the choice subjects often determined by popularity and sales figures. Currier & Ives perpetuated Victorian ideals in its depictions of family, history, politics and urban and suburban life. But these prints also served as an important record of a nation in the midst of an extraordinary transformation from a rural and agricultural landscape to an industrialized and urbanized global power. Along with their popular appeal, Currier & Ives's images offer a new opportunity to uncover the complexities and contradictions of our history and help shape our understanding of America's past.

Religious toleration appears near the top of any short list of core liberal democratic values. Theorists from John Locke to John Rawls emphasize important interconnections between the principles of toleration, constitutional government, and the rule of law. Conscience and Community revisits the historical emergence of religious liberty in the Anglo-American tradition, looking deeper than the traditional emergence of toleration to find not a series of self-evident or logically connected expansions but instead a far more complex evolution. Murphy argues that contemporary liberal theorists have misunderstood and misconstrued the actual historical development of toleration in theory and practice. Murphy approaches the concept through three "myths" about religious toleration: that it was opposed only by ignorant, narrow-minded persecutors; that it was achieved by skeptical Enlightenment rationalists; and that tolerationist arguments generalize easily from religion to issues such as gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, providing a basis for identity politics.

The British victory on the Plains of Abraham in September 1759 and the subsequent Conquest of Canada were undoubtedly significant geopolitical events, but their nature and implications continue to be debated. Revisiting 1759 provides a fresh historical reappraisal of the Conquest and its aftermath using new approaches drawn from military, imperial, social, and Aboriginal history. This cohesive collection investigates many of the most hotly contested questions surrounding the Conquest: Was the battle itself a crucial turning point, or just one element in the global struggle between France and Great Britain? Did the battle's outcome reflect the superior strategy of General James Wolfe or rather errors on both sides? Did the Conquest alter the long-term trajectories of the French and British empires or simply confirm patterns well underway? How formative was the Conquest in defining the new British America and those now living under its rule? As this collection makes vividly clear, the Conquest's most profound consequences may in fact be quite different from those that have traditionally been emphasized.

From the configuration of Empire in the colonial period to the multiple facets of modern coloniality, this book offers a challenging approach to the developments and effects of imperial domination and neocolonial rule in Latin American.

What does one contested account of an enslaved woman tell us about our difficult racial past? Part history, part anthropology, and part detective story, The Accidental Slaveowner traces, from the 1850s to the present day, how different groups of people have struggled with one powerful story about slavery. For over a century and a half, residents of Oxford, Georgia (“the birthplace of Emory University”), have told and retold stories of the enslaved woman known as “Kitty” and her owner, Methodist bishop James Osgood Andrew, first president of Emory’s board of trustees. Bishop Andrew’s ownership of Miss Kitty and other enslaved persons triggered the 1844 great national schism of the Methodist Episcopal Church, presaging the Civil War. For many local whites, Bishop Andrew was only “accidentally” a slaveholder, and when offered her freedom, Kitty willingly remained in slavery out of loyalty to her master. Local African Americans, in contrast, tend to insist that Miss Kitty was the Bishop’s coerced lover and that she was denied her basic freedoms throughout her life. Mark Auslander approaches these opposing narratives as “myths,” not as falsehoods but as deeply meaningful and resonant accounts that illuminate profound enigmas in American history and culture. After considering the multiple, powerful ways that the Andrew-Kitty myths have shaped perceptions of race in Oxford, at Emory, and among southern Methodists, Auslander sets out to uncover the “real” story of Kitty and her family. His years-long feat of collaborative detective work results in a series of discoveries and helps open up important arenas for reconciliation, restorative justice, and social healing.

A 2016 Coretta Scott King Author Honor book, and recipient of the Walter Dean Myers Award for Outstanding Children’s Literature. In this New York Times bestselling novel, two teens—one black, one white—grapple with the repercussions of a single violent act that leaves their school, their community, and, ultimately, the country bitterly divided by racial tension. A bag of chips. That’s all sixteen-year-old Rashad is looking for at the corner bodega. What he finds instead is a fist-happy cop, Paul Galluzzo, who mistakes Rashad for a shoplifter, mistakes Rashad’s pleadings that he’s stolen nothing for belligerence, mistakes Rashad’s resistance to leave the bodega as resisting arrest, mistakes Rashad’s every flinch at every punch the cop throws as further resistance and refusal to STAY STILL as ordered. But how can you stay still when someone is pounding your face into the concrete pavement? There were witnesses: Quinn Collins—a varsity basketball player and Rashad’s classmate who has been raised by Paul since his own father died in Afghanistan—and a video camera. Soon the beating is all over the news and Paul is getting threatened with accusations of prejudice and racial brutality. Quinn refuses to believe that the man who has basically been his savior could possibly be guilty. But then Rashad is absent. And absent again. And again. And the basketball team—half of whom are Rashad’s best friends—start to take sides. As does the school. And the town. Simmering tensions threaten to explode as Rashad and Quinn are forced to face decisions and consequences they had never considered before. Written in tandem by two award-winning authors, this four-starred reviewed tour de force shares the alternating perspectives of Rashad and Quinn as the complications from that single violent moment, the type taken directly from today’s headlines, unfold and reverberate to highlight an unwelcome truth.

The untold story of how America’s secret war in Laos in the 1960s transformed the CIA from a loose collection of spies into a military operation and a key player in American foreign policy. January, 1961: Laos, a tiny nation few Americans have heard of, is at risk of falling to communism and triggering a domino effect throughout Southeast Asia. This is what President Eisenhower believed when he approved the CIA’s Operation Momentum, creating an army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces there. Largely hidden from the American public—and most of Congress—Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States. The brutal war lasted more than a decade, left the ground littered with thousands of unexploded bombs, and changed the nature of the CIA forever. With “revelatory reporting” and “lucid prose” (The Economist), Kurlantzick provides the definitive account of the Laos war, focusing on the four key people who led the operation: the CIA operative whose idea it was, the Hmong general who led the proxy army in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong forces, and the State Department careerist who took control over the war as it grew. Using recently declassified records and extensive interviews, Kurlantzick shows for the first time how the CIA’s clandestine adventures in one small, Southeast Asian country became the template for how the United States has conducted war ever since—all the way to today’s war on terrorism.