Who is always perfectly put together and never at a loss for words? Who is professional, courteous, and harder working than anyone else? Whose Christmas cards arrive the day after Thanksgiving, year after year? Y'all know she's got to be a Southern Belle. A Southern Belle takes care of herself and makes sure people treat her right. She always gets her way, even if her man thinks it was his idea. (That's a win for you both.) But you don't have to be raised in the South to be the same fun-loving package of looks, charm, and determination that makes a Belle a Belle. That's what this little book is for! Take it from Phaedra Parks, the smart, confident, and always poised star of The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Life as a Belle is simply better--for you and for the people around you.--From publisher description.

Candace Bailey’s exploration of the intertwining worlds of music and gender shows how young southern women pushed the boundaries of respectability to leave their unique mark on a patriarchal society. Before 1861, a strictly defined code of behavior allowed a southern woman to identify herself as a “lady” through her accomplishments in music, drawing, and writing, among other factors. Music permeated the lives of southern women, and they learned appropriate participation through instruction at home and at female training institutions. A belle’s primary venue was the parlor, where she could demonstrate her usefulness in the domestic circle by providing comfort and serving to enhance social gatherings through her musical performances, often by playing the piano or singing. The southern lady performed in public only on the rarest of occasions, though she might attend public performances by women. An especially talented lady who composed music for a broader audience would do so anonymously so that her reputation would remain unsullied. The tumultuous Civil War years provided an opportunity for southern women to envision and attempt new ways to make themselves useful to the broader, public society. While continuing their domestic responsibilities and taking on new ones, young women also tested the boundaries of propriety in a variety of ways. In a broad break with the past, musical ladies began giving public performances to raise money for the war effort, some women published patriotic Confederate music under their own names, supporting their cause and claiming public ownership for their creations. Bailey explores these women’s lives and analyzes their music. Through their move from private to public performance and publication, southern ladies not only expanded concepts of social acceptability but also gained a valued sense of purpose. Music and the Southern Belle places these remarkable women in their social context, providing compelling insight into southern culture and the intricate ties between a lady’s identity and the world of music. Augmented by incisive analysis of musical compositions and vibrant profiles of composers, this volume is the first of its kind, making it an essential read for devotees of Civil War and southern history, gender studies, and music.

At the end of the Civil War, spirited Ella Swain--daughter of the University of North Carolina president--shocked citizens of Chapel Hill and the entire state when she fell in love and married the Union general whose troops occupied the town. Author Suzy Barile separates fact from lore, drawing on Ella Swain's never-before-published letters that reveal a love that transcended outrage and scandal.

JJ is a young and energetic boy. He learns valuable life lessons taught by his adoring and wise grandmother. JJ puts these lessons into action! He shares his toys and counts his blessings. JJ makes his grandmother proud. Will JJ remember these lessons when Grandma goes away? What can you learn from Grandma?

This is a new edition of the autobiography of Mary Craig Kimbrough Sinclair (1883-1961). She started life innocently and happily on her father's Mississippi Delta plantation but went on to know deprivation and danger when she married Upton Sinclair, the crusading social activist. As she joined him in his struggles to rescue the disinherited of the earth, collaborating with him in writing a shelf of books, she gave up the moonlight and magnolias but not her grace. After her death, Sinclair recalled her as the loveliest woman I have ever known. She moved North with him and began an exhilarating new life. He was a Socialist and the celebrated muckraker whose novel The Jungle (1906) was an exposé of the meatpacking industry. Later, in 1943, he would win the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Dragon's Teeth. Through him she became involved in social causes and came to know many of America's intellectuals including such eminent figures in the literary and political worlds as Walter Lippman, Sinclair Lewis, Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, and Art Young. With her husband she traveled throughout the United States and Europe. Her story is filled with many great names--including Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Dreiser, H. L. Mencken, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks--whom she and Sinclair counted among their friends. As a child she once sat on Jefferson Davis's knee. In her girlhood she was instructed in the southern graces. Later she would be immersed in the world of demonstrations, distress, and political pamphleteering for the liberal causes she and her husband espoused. Their marriage of forty-eight years was extraordinary and happy. Sinclair recalled her as the helpmeet of a man who set out to help in the ending of poverty and war in the world. . . . It required many crusades in which he bankrupted himself and her as well. It required a year-long entanglement in a bitter political campaign [for the California governorship]. She helped him to write and publish three million books and pamphlets. Of her book he said, This is the story of a southern belle, told by a real one.

"Gardner's reading of a wide range of published and unpublished texts recovers a multifaceted vision of the South. For example, during the war, while its outcome was not yet a foregone conclusion, women's writings sometimes reflected loyalty and optimism; at other times, they revealed doubts and a wavering resolve. According to Gardner, it was only in the aftermath of defeat that a more unified vision of the southern cause emerged. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, white women - who remained deeply loyal to their southern roots - were raising fundamental questions about the meaning of southern womanhood in the modern era."--BOOK JACKET.

Maxine had been called a lot of things in her lifetime, but never a Southern Belle! The title simply did not fit with her lifestyle or the history of her people in America. As she sat in a hotel bar in Hong Kong, China surrounded by colleagues from around the world, Maxine was surprised to hear herself described in such a way. She didnt know whether to be insulted that the history of her people was so poorly known that a black woman from the south was referred to as a Belle, or to be amused. She chose to be amused. Maxine sipped her Chardonnay. The wine relaxed her frontal lobe and she laughed out loud. She couldnt help thinking, I am my mothers daughter and she aint no Southern Belle. Back in the states, Maxine settled into the routine of work, family and friends with a new perspective. The China experience had been wonderfully positive and enlightening in ways that gave fresh eyes, ears and meaning to her life. "Southern Belle" details Maxine's quest for meaning in the concept of a 21st Century black southern belle. What she learned would strengthen her faith and bring her closer to the women whose lives had shaped her past, and helped to define who she was today.

Dan Knight returned to the civilian world after a stint in the Navy following high school. With a one dollar car and hope that he can catch up with his contemporaries, his world revolves around college and a job. But overnight, the world explodes and the Cold war goes flaming hot. Knight receives orders; returns to the service, immediately. The move is both salvation and sacrifice. Yeoman Knight finds himself contending with a green crew, spies, submarines and orphans while dodging bunkmates with seasickness. Knight is faced with the ultimate choice follow his heart or uphold his oath.

Most people think the reason Dee Millings married the best looking man in the Carolinas, who turned out to be a complete psycho and near-murderer, is because she was raised all wrong. Dee, a 38-year-old heroine to root for, sets out on a path winding with loveable kooks, wanting to prove there is a great life on the other side of tragedy and a crazed ex behind bars who continues to mail threatening letters from prison. Her new adventure begins two years after the crime spree that nearly stopped her heart and left her flat-lining. She packs up her two young kids and settles in her parents' South Carolina hometown where she deals with a delightful, but over-the-top mama who pretends her grown daughters are virgins. Dee finds new purpose for herself and her children, discovering joy in places she never expected it: in a nursing home where she tends to the likes of 104-year-old Annie Sue who still drives and has a hankering for cold draft beer. Offering heaps of comic relief, Dee's Aunt Weepie lives to crash funerals just to get the covered-dish meals after the gravesides, no matter she has no idea who's in the coffins. Her antics lead her to making a daring decision that could change Dee's life forever. As Dee begins a journey toward recovery and becoming a registered nurse, a dark secret resurfaces, one that if handled right, could be her ticket to allow herself to love again.