This reader reveals how food habits and beliefs both present a microcosm of any culture and contribute to our understanding of human behaviour. Particular attention is given to how men and women define themselves differently through food choices.

Documents how racial and social inequalities are built into our food system, and how communities are creating environmentally sustainable and socially just alternatives. Popularized by such best-selling authors as Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Eric Schlosser, a growing food movement urges us to support sustainable agriculture by eating fresh food produced on local family farms. But many low-income neighborhoods and communities of color have been systematically deprived of access to healthy and sustainable food. These communities have been actively prevented from producing their own food and often live in “food deserts” where fast food is more common than fresh food. Cultivating Food Justice describes their efforts to envision and create environmentally sustainable and socially just alternatives to the food system. Bringing together insights from studies of environmental justice, sustainable agriculture, critical race theory, and food studies, Cultivating Food Justice highlights the ways race and class inequalities permeate the food system, from production to distribution to consumption. The studies offered in the book explore a range of important issues, including agricultural and land use policies that systematically disadvantage Native American, African American, Latino/a, and Asian American farmers and farmworkers; access problems in both urban and rural areas; efforts to create sustainable local food systems in low-income communities of color; and future directions for the food justice movement. These diverse accounts of the relationships among food, environmentalism, justice, race, and identity will help guide efforts to achieve a just and sustainable agriculture.

Though Sweet Beulah Land is entirely fiction, the characters and events are true to life of rural eastern North Carolina, circa 1900. Beulah was a small village where folks married, had babies, worked hard and enjoyed a bit of fun here and there. From Jeb and Sarah Jane Gresham's farm to the country store of Nate and Laney Gresham, the stories of the citizenry of Beulah are deeply intertwined in a homespun tale of heartache, hope, and humor. Murder, mystery, love, adversity and faith-Sweet Beulah Land has it all. For the reader whose roots grow deep in the rich soil of eastern North Carolina, each page is filled with precious memories of a bygone day. For those who hail from other regions of America the Beautiful, the book offers an open door to visit a unique people who become vibrantly alive in this delightful tale of trial and triumph! Wife, mother, grandmother, business woman, teacher and speaker, Marilyn Denny Thomas began her career as a published author by writing inspirational short stories in the late eighties. She made her debut as a novelist in 2005 with The Gentile and the Jew: A Divine Romance, the prequel to her second novel, Going Home: A Divine Journey published in 2007. Sweet Beulah Land is her third book. Marilyn lives with her husband, Ricky, in Southeastern North Carolina. They have two daughters, one fine son-in-law and six precious grandchildren. www.marilyndennythomas.com

Discusses the works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, John Clare, George Darley, and others.

Central to the repertoire of Western art music since the 1700s, the symphony has come to be regarded as one of the ultimate compositional challenges. In his series The Symphonic Repertoire, the late A. Peter Brown explored the symphony in Europe from its origins into the 20th century. In Volume V, Brown's former students and colleagues continue his vision by turning to the symphony in the Western Hemisphere. It examines the work of numerous symphonists active from the early 1800s to the present day and the unique challenges they faced in contributing to the European symphonic tradition. The research adds to an unmatched compendium of knowledge for the student, teacher, performer, and sophisticated amateur. This much-anticipated fifth volume of The Symphonic Repertoire: The Symphony in the Americas offers a user-friendly, comprehensive history of the symphony genre in the United States and Latin America.

"Recounts the case of The People vs. Herman Swift, a story which ran on front pages of newspapers throughout Michigan for three years in the early 20th century. It is one of the most sensational cases to ever go to the Michigan Supreme Court and was reviewed on appeal by famous Michigan governors, Chase Osborn and Nathaniel Ferris. The story revolves around the complex, tragic figure of Herman Swift, his efforts to provide a home and guidance to orphaned and cast out boys, and a resulting scandal which gripped Michigan for years"--P. [4] of cover.

A Washington Post most anticipated fall book | One of Literary Hub's most anticipated books of 2024 A lyrical meditation on how Black Americans have envisioned utopia—and sought to transform their lives. How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black? These questions animate Aaron Robertson’s exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the conditions of their lives. Writing in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robertson makes his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit—the city where he was born, and where one of the country’s most remarkable Black utopian experiments got its start. Founded by the brilliant preacher Albert Cleage Jr., the Shrine of the Black Madonna combined Afrocentric Christian practice with radical social projects to transform the self-conception of its members. Central to this endeavor was the Shrine’s chancel mural of a Black Virgin and child, the icon of a nationwide liberation movement that would come to be known as Black Christian Nationalism. The Shrine’s members opened bookstores and co-ops, created a self-defense force, and raised their children communally, eventually working to establish the country’s largest Black-owned farm, where attempts to create an earthly paradise for Black people continues today. Alongside the Shrine’s story, Robertson reflects on a diverse array of Black utopian visions, from the Reconstruction era through the countercultural fervor of the 1960s and 1970s and into the present day. By doing so, Robertson showcases the enduring quest of collectives and individuals for a world beyond the constraints of systemic racism. The Black Utopians offers a nuanced portrait of the struggle for spaces—both ideological and physical—where Black dignity, protection, and nourishment are paramount. This book is the story of a movement and of a world still in the making—one that points the way toward radical alternatives for the future.

In the mid-1950s, when Mary Lee Settle published The Love Eaters and The Kiss of Kin, critics hailed her as a sharp and acidic writer. However, when in subsequent novels the focus of her work shifted from contemporary social realism to historical fiction, the same critics who previously had praised her work lost enthusiasm. In Mary Lee Settle’s Beulah Quintet: The Price of Freedom, Brian Rosenberg examines Settle’s work—especially Prisons, O Beulah Land, Know Nothing, The Scapegoat, and The Killing Ground—to show the magnitude and artistic merit in a single, continuous fiction—a fiction of major importance. According to Rosenberg, the Beulah quintet is one of the few grandly ambitious works of historical fiction written by an American woman. In the novels, Settle attempts to apply a European tradition of historical re-creation to American experience and, in so doing, to adapt a largely conservative form to the demands of a revolutionary history and ideology. Although the immediate subject is the history of a region in West Virginia, the deeper subject is nothing less than the history of America: the beliefs, conflicts, and illusions that gave rise to, and continue to distinguish, American culture. Rosenberg also treats the reaction to the Beulah quintet among literary critics. He looks at the neglect and misjudgment the novels have suffered by being labeled historical fiction, a genre often though to consist largely of “romance novels,” and explains why the quintet should be placed among the canonical works of contemporary American literature. Rosenberg includes in his book the transcript of an interview he conducted with Settle in which she reflects on both her intentions as a writer and the reception of her work. Mary Lee Settle’s fiction has for too long been misperceived. Brian Rosenberg’s thorough analysis of the Beulah quintet will allow a larger audience to understand the nature and scope of her achievement.