The West Virginia mine war of 1920-21, a major civil insurrection of unusual brutality on both sides, even by the standards of the coal fields, involved thousands of union and nonunion miners, state and private police, militia, and federal troops. Before it was over, three West Virginia counties were in open rebellion, much of the state was under military rule, and bombers of the U.S. Army Air Corps had been dispatched against striking miners.The origins of this civil war were in the Draconian rule of the coal companies over the fiercely proud miners of Appalachia. It began in the small railroad town of Matewan when Mayor C. C. Testerman and Police Chief Sid Hatfield sided with striking miners against agents of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, who attempted to evict the miners from company-owned housing. During a street battle, Mayor Testerman, seven Baldwin-Felts agents, and two miners were shot to death.Hatfield became a folk hero to Appalachia. But he, like Testerman, was to be a martyr. The next summer, Baldwin-Felts agents assassinated him and his best friend, Ed Chambers, as their wives watched, on the steps of the courthouse in Welch, accelerating the miners' rebellion into open warfare.Much neglected in historical accounts, Thunder in the Mountains is the only available book-length account of the crisis in American industrial relations and governance that occured during the West Virginia mine war of 1920-21.

What does it take to be one of the world's best high-altitude mountain climbers? A lot of fundraising; traveling in some of the world's most dangerous countries; enduring cold bivouacs, searing lungs, and a cloudy mind when you can least afford one. It means learning the hard lessons the mountains teach. Steve House built his reputation on ascents throughout the Alps, Canada, Alaska, the Karakoram and the Himalaya that have expanded possibilities of style, speed, and difficulty. In 2005 Steve and alpinist Vince Anderson pioneered a direct new route on the Rupal Face of 26,600-foot Nanga Parbat, which had never before been climbed in alpine style. It was the third ascent of the face and the achievement earned Steveand Vince the first Piolet d"or (Golden Ice Axe) awarded to North Americans. Steve is an accomplished and spellbinding storyteller in the tradition of Maurice Herzog and Lionel Terray. Beyond the Mountain is a gripping read destined to be a mountain classic. And it

A wounded Confederate soldier treks across the ruins of America in this National Book Award–winning novel: “A stirring Civil War tale told with epic sweep.” —People Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves. His journey across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. Meanwhile, the intrepid Ada is trying to revive her father’s derelict farm and learning to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away. As it interweaves their stories, Cold Mountain asserts itself as an authentic odyssey, hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving.

In this masterpiece of nature writing, Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times and shockingly harsh at others. Her intense, poetic prose explores and records the rocks, rivers, creatures and hidden aspects of this remarkable landscape. Shepherd spent a lifetime in search of the 'essential nature' of the Cairngorms; her quest led her to write this classic meditation on the magnificence of mountains, and on our imaginative relationship with the wild world around us. Composed during the Second World War, the manuscript of The Living Mountain lay untouched for more than thirty years before it was finally published.

An extraordinary collection of mountain writing, spanning five continents, 2,500 years, and numerous genres - including poetry, myth, folktale, and short story.

New editions and facsimiles of Percy Bysshe Shelley's works are changing the landscape of Shelley studies by making complete compositions and fragments that have received only limited critical attention readily available to scholars. Building on the work begun in Weinberg and Webb's 2009 volume, The Unfamiliar Shelley, The Neglected Shelley sheds light on the breadth and depth of Shelley's oeuvre, including the poet's earliest work, written when he was not yet twenty and was experimenting with gothic romances, and other striking forms of literary expression, such as two collections of provocative verse. There are discussions of Shelley's collaboration with Mary Shelley in the composition of Frankenstein, and his skill as a translator of Greek poetry and drama, reflecting his urgent concern with Greek culture. His contributions to prose are the focus of essays on his letters, the subversive notes to Queen Mab, and his complex engagement with Jewish culture. Shelley's considerable corpus of fragments is well-represented in contributions on the later narrative fiction, 'Athanase'/'Prince Athanase', and the significant group of unfinished poems, including 'Mazenghi', 'Fiordispina', 'Ginevra' and 'The Boat on the Serchio', that treat Italian topics. Finally, there are explorations of subtle though neglected or underestimated works such as Rosalind and Helen, The Sensitive-Plant, and the verse-drama Hellas. The Neglected Shelley shows that even the poet's apparently slighter works are important in their own right and are richly instructive as expressions of Shelley's developing art of composition and the diverse interests he pursued throughout his career.

The triune God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is the only God. But why is the Holy Trinity and the doctrine of the Trinity neglected in the life and worship of many Christians? In this book Steven Tsoukalas points to several reasons for such neglect and offers a remedy by explaining the doctrine and offering practical points for the practice of Christian life and worship.

Working on the Transcontinental Railroad promises a fortune—for those who survive. Growing up in 1860s China, Tam Ling Fan has lived a life of comfort. Her father is wealthy enough to provide for his family but unconventional enough to spare Ling Fan from the debilitating foot-binding required of most well-off girls. But Ling Fan’s life is upended when her brother dies of influenza and their father is imprisoned under false accusations. Hoping to earn the money that will secure her father’s release, Ling Fan disguises herself as a boy and takes her brother’s contract to work for the Central Pacific Railroad Company in America. Life on “the Gold Mountain” is grueling and dangerous. To build the railroad that will connect the west coast to the east, Ling Fan and other Chinese laborers lay track and blast tunnels through the treacherous peaks of the Sierra Nevada, facing cave-ins, avalanches, and blizzards—along with hostility from white Americans. When someone threatens to expose Ling Fan’s secret, she must take an even greater risk to save what’s left of her family . . . and to escape the Gold Mountain alive.

Brusque, inventive, an eccentric loner who created some of the greatest music of our time while getting rich as a New York insurance broker, Charles Ives was an authentic American original. In this major biographical study, the author explores the unlikely drama of the composer's life, from his boyhood in a Connecticut village to his later years when, ignored or derided by the musical community, he shut himself up in angry silence. Then, with a high order of scholarship and crisply edged authority, the author goes on to point out the intelligence and continuity of Ives's major works - the songs, the Concord sonata, the magnificent New England Holidays (which include his famous Fourth of July), and the rest - and to trace their roots in nineteenth-century popular music, in jazz, in the homely transcendentalism of Thoreau and Hawthorne's dark Puritan dreams. Writing with a musician's understanding and sympathy, the author makes plain both the frustrations of Ives's creative life and the inevitability of his ultimate recognition, long after his death, as America's most important composer. In its rich musical insights, in its portrayal of a complex and fascinating artist, this book is a striking contribution to American cultural history.

Grade level: 9, 10, 11, 12, e, i, s.