An engaging collection of essays by an astute observer of the South. In 1935, Robert Bechtold Heilman, a native Pennsylvanian and recent Harvard Ph.D., accepted a position in the Louisiana State University English department. He came to the Bayou State bringing with him a sense of curiosity in people and places a delight in the drama of life. that was compatible with the temperament of the South's still largely rural and storytelling society. He came, moreover, to one of the most dramatic contemporary settings in the South, the Louisiana of Huey P. Long. (He was present at the Louisiana State Capitol on the day Long was assassinated.) In Baton Rouge, he found a provincial university in the capital city that was acquiring for the first time in its history a faculty of some distinction. Heilman's enduring association with the South, both personally and professionally, is the focus of The Southern Connection, a collection of seventeen delightful and thought-provoking essays. The first section of the book consists of essays in which Heilman recalls Louisiana and LSU as he found them in the autumn of 1935. He describes the atmosphere at the University and in the surrounding town; offers vivid portraits of some of his colleagues, including Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and Eric Vogelin; and meditates on the reasons an obscure university in an impoverished southern state was able to attract and nurture a faculty of outstanding talent and achievement. Having been at LSU during the scandals of the late 1930s and the war years of the 1940s, Heilman makes a significant contribution, through his recollections, to the history of these crucial times. In the book's second section Heilman presents critical essays on a number of important southern writers and their works. There are discussions of the Agrarian movement and its connection with European culture; on Cleanth Brooks and The Well Wrought Urn; on Eudora Welty's work, especially Losing Battles; and on Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools. Heilman also includes two essays on Robert Penn Warren's work. The first discusses All the King's Men as tragedy, and the second examines the moral complexities of World Enough and Time. Another essay in the group compares Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman with Eudora Welty's "The Death of a Traveling Salesman." Finally, Heilman offers two extended reflections on the South as a region and a culture. In "The South Falls In," he discusses the paradoxes in the southern character and in national perceptions of the South. In "The Southern Temper," he considers the southern "sense of the concrete" as it is reflected in the work of various southern writers and in the southern character in general. As a whole, The Southern Connection offers an enjoyable and illuminating assessment of the South by one of the most perceptive and sensitive critics of our time.

Though Cather (1837-1947) moved with her family to Nebraska when she was nine, her fiction throughout her life drew heavily from the people, places, and issues of her native Reconstruction South. Novice and veteran literature scholars from around the US examine such connections as racial language, sexual dynamics, and clothes and gender. The 17 essays were selected from a 1997 symposium in Frederick County, Virginia. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

"They had been told their sacrifice was for the public good. They were never told how much they would miss it, or for how long." Drowned Town explores the multigenerational impact caused by the loss of home and illuminates the joys and sorrows of a group of people bound together by western Kentucky's Land Between the Lakes and the lakes that lie on either side of it. The linked stories are rooted in a landscape forever altered by the mid-twentieth-century impoundment of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers and the seizing of property under the power of eminent domain to create a national recreation area on the narrow strip of land between the lakes. The massive federal land and water projects completed in quick succession were designed to serve the public interest by providing hydroelectric power, flood control, and economic progress for the region—at great sacrifice for those who gave up their homes, livelihoods, towns, and history. The narrative follows two women whose lives are shaped by their friendship and connection to the place, and their stories go back and forth in time to show how the creation of the lakes both healed and hurt the people connected to them. In the process, the stories emphasize the importance of sisterhood and family, both blood and created, and how we cannot separate ourselves from our places in the world.

Vanessa Walker's Principles in Power explores the relationship between policy makers and nongovernment advocates in Latin America and the United States government in order to explain the rise of anti-interventionist human rights policies uniquely critical of U.S. power during the Cold War. Walker shows that the new human rights policies of the 1970s were based on a complex dynamic of domestic and foreign considerations that was rife with tensions between the seats of power in the United States and Latin America, and the growing activist movement that sought to reform them. By addressing the development of U.S. diplomacy and politics alongside that of activist networks, especially in Chile and Argentina, Walker shows that Latin America was central to the policy assumptions that shaped the Carter administration's foreign policy agenda. The coup that ousted the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, sparked new human rights advocacy as a direct result of U.S. policies that supported authoritarian regimes in the name of Cold War security interests. From 1973 onward, the attention of Washington and capitals around the globe turned to Latin America as the testing ground for the viability of a new paradigm for U.S. power. This approach, oriented around human rights, required collaboration among activists and state officials in places as diverse as Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Washington, DC. Principles in Power tells the complicated story of the potentials and limits of partnership between government and nongovernment actors. Analyzing how different groups deployed human rights language to reform domestic and international power, Walker explores the multiple and often conflicting purposes of U.S. human rights policy.

Better urban transport systems and the need for a healthier environment are continuous requirements that create a fertile atmosphere for original ideas, innovative approaches and applications of advanced technologies, their tests and evaluations in practice. Moreover, there is a growing need for integration with IT systems and applications to improve safety and efficiency. Meanwhile, the substantial growth of maritime shipping has resulted in large transported quantities around the world, creating a demand for innovative solutions for ports and fleets. The apparently parallel topics of Urban Transport and Maritime Transport meet in the transport and environmental management of coastal cities, both being affected positively and negatively by landslide and seaside traffic. Maritime Transport is highly interconnected with rail, road and air services, as well as inland waterways. Each of these must therefore operate complimentary of one another to maximise efficiency and respond rapidly to variable economic and political contingencies. The variety of topics covered in this volume reflects the complex interaction of transport systems with their environment and the need to establish integrated strategies. The goal is to arrive at optimal socio-economic solutions while reducing the negative environmental impacts of transportation systems typically by interdisciplinary approaches.

Share our experiences, our successes and failures, and our ideas and dreams, all with the goal of getting better at the work we love: building tunnels. Every two years, industry leaders and practitioners from around the world gather at the Rapid Excavation and Tunneling Conference (RETC), the authoritative program for the tunneling profession, to learn about the most recent advances and breakthroughs in this unique field. The information presented helps professionals keep pace with the ever-changing and growing tunneling industry. This book includes the full text of 111 papers presented at the 2019 conference covering such topics as contracting practices, design and planning, geotechnical considerations, hard-rock tunnel boring machines, new and innovative technologies, pressure-face TBM case histories, and tunneling for sustainability. The papers will inform, challenge, and stimulate each reader.

How does one begin to understand the idea of a distinctive southern way of life—a concept as enduring as it is disputed? In this examination of the American South in national and global contexts, celebrated historian Charles Reagan Wilson assesses how diverse communities of southerners have sought to define the region's identity. Surveying three centuries of southern regional consciousness across many genres, disciplines, and cultural strains, Wilson considers and challenges prior presentations of the region, advancing a vision of southern culture that has always been plural, dynamic, and complicated by race and class. Structured in three parts, The Southern Way of Life takes readers on a journey from the colonial era to the present, from when complex ideas of "southern civilization" rooted in slaveholding and agrarianism dominated to the twenty-first-century rise of a modern, multicultural "southern living." As Wilson shows, there is no singular or essential South but rather a rich tapestry woven with contestations, contingencies, and change.