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.

"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.

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

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.

"Throughout Chinese history mountains have been integral components of the religious landscape. They have been considered divine or numinous sites, the abodes of deities, the preferred locations for temples and monasteries, and destinations for pilgrims. Early in Chinese history a set of five mountains were co-opted into the imperial cult and declared sacred peaks, yue, demarcating and protecting the boundaries of the Chinese imperium. The Southern Sacred Peak, or Nanyue, is of interest to scholars not the least because the title has been awarded to several different mountains over the years. The dynamic nature of Nanyue raises a significant theoretical issue of the mobility of sacred space and the nature of the struggles involved in such moves. Another facet of Nanyue is the multiple meanings assigned to this place: political, religious, and cultural. Of particular interest is the negotiation of this space by Daoists and Buddhists. The history of their interaction leads to questions about the nature of the divisions between these two religious traditions. James Robson’s analysis of these topics demonstrates the value of local studies and the emerging field of Buddho–Daoist studies in research on Chinese religion."

Placing the South offers a selection of work published between 1985 and 2005 by one of the most incisive historians and literary critics of the South. The pieces seek to situate the South in a variety of contexts and offer a compelling defense of what Kwame Anthony Appiah has called "rooted cosmopolitanism." This is a mode of understanding based on respect for what is local and an awareness that regionalism is not enough. Hybridity, in both culture and literature, is inescapable and desirable. The first section of the book ("Placing") contains three comparative analyses that look at how regionalism has recently been conceptualized globally, how the modern South has acquired pertinence for those outside the United States, and how the relationship between Britain and the South has worked. The second section ("Ideologies") scrutinizes political ideas--freedom, imperialism, nationalism, racial ideology--which have transformed American discourse. The third section ("Forms") examines genre and how the South has been constructed and reconstructed by such literary forms as autobiography, biography, history, and literary history. The final section ("Writers") contains critical appreciations of political thinkers, novelists, poets, critics, historians, and sociologists important to southern intellectual life. Taken together, the essays offer a robust analysis of a dynamic region. Michael O'Brien is professor of American intellectual history at University of Cambridge and a fellow at Jesus College. He is the author of Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860 and other books.