Fall 2015 Catalog

ALABAMA The University of Alabama Press

Fall 2015

African American Studies . . . 13, 27, 29 Agriculture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Alabama . . . . . . . . . . 1–3, 5, 15, 21 Archaeology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Art & Photography . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5, 30 Caribbean Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Civil War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Communications . . . . . . . . . . 14, 31 Critical Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Cultural Anthropology . . . . . . . 16, 22 Cultural Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Deep South . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Environmental Studies . . . . . . .18, 23 Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6, 7, 32 Florida . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Folklore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 Gender Studies . . . . . . . . . . . 14, 16 Herpetology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 Higher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 History . . . . . . . 19, 21, 25, 26, 28–30 Humor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Journalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Latin American Studies . . . . . . . . . 24 Legal Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Literary Criticism . . . . . . 8, 10, 12, 13, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27, 31, 32 Memoir . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1, 5 Military History . . . . . . . . 11, 22, 27 Mississippi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4, 29 Native America . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Natural History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Organizational Theory . . . . . . . . . 33 Poetry & Poetics . . . . 8–10, 27, 32, 33 Political Science . . . . . . . . . . .20, 24 Public Administration . . . . . . . . . 33 Religious Studies . . . . . . . . . . 28, 29 Rhetoric . . . . . . 11, 12, 14, 18, 28, 31 Science & Technology . . . . . 12, 18, 30 Southern History . . . . . . . . 20, 29, 32 Technology & Culture . . . . . . . . . . 17 Tennessee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Theatre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25, 26 Virginia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 World War II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

ABOUT THE PRESS As the scholarly publishing arm of the university, The University of Alabama Press serves as an agent in the advancement of learning and the dissemination of scholarship. The Press applies the highest standards to all phases of publishing, including acquisitions, editorial, production, and marketing. An editorial board comprised of representatives from all doctoral-degree-granting public universities within the state of Alabama oversees the publishing program.

Publications are selected that support, extend, and preserve academic research. The Press also publishes books that foster an understanding of the history and culture of this state and region. The Press publishes in a variety of formats, both print and electronic, and uses short-run technologies to ensure that the works are widely available.

CONTACT INFORMATION USPS MAILING ADDRESS Box 870380 Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0380

PHYSICAL ADDRESS 200 Hackberry Lane Tuscaloosa, AL 35401

PHONE (205) 348-5180

FAX (205) 348-9201

ORDERS (800) 621-2736 PROUD MEMBER OF

THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITY PRESSES

MEMOIR / HUMOR / NATURAL HISTORY / ALABAMA

Among the Swamp People

Life in Alabama’s Mobile-Tensaw River Delta Watt Key Illustrated by Kelan Mercer

A collection of colorful and lively personal essays about life in the wilds of Alabama’s Mobile-Tensaw River Delta, Among the Swamp People, by best-selling author Watt Key, chronicles the beauties of the delta’s unparalleled natural wonders, the difficulties of survival within it, and an extraordinary community of characters.

Second in size only to the Mississippi River Delta, the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta, or “the swamp,” consists of almost 260,000 acres of wetlands located just north of Mobile Bay, formed by the confluence of the Alabama and Tombigbee Rivers. Watt Key, a Mobile native, discovered the delta twenty years ago and there have been few weekends since that he has not made it his retreat.

There is no way into the delta except by small boat. To most it would appear a maze of rivers and creeks between stunted swamp trees and mud. Key observes that there are few places where one can step out of a boat without “sinking to the knees in muck the consistency of axle grease. It is the only place I know where gloom and beauty can coexist at such extremes. And it never occurred to me that a land seemingly so bleak could hide such beauty and adventure.”

Among the Swamp People is Watt Key’s story of discovering the delta, leasing a habitable outcropping of land deep inside, and constructing from driftwood a primitive cabin to serve as a private getaway. He chronicles the beauties of the delta’s unparalleled natural wonders, the difficulties of survival within it, and an extraordinary community of characters—by turns generous and violent, gracious and paranoid, endearing and reckless—who live, thrive, and perish there.

It also chronicles Key’s maturation as a writer, from a twenty-five-yearold computer programmer with no formal training as a writer to a highly successful, award-winning writer of fiction for a young adult audience with three novels published to date.

SEPTEMBER 6 X 8 / 216 PAGES / 20 B&W ILLUSTRATIONS ISBN: 978-0-8173-1885-7 / $29.95T CLOTH ISBN: 978-0-8173-8890-4 / $29.95T EBOOK

“Among the Swamp People is laugh-out-loud funny and filled with vivid characters, salty dialogue, and poignant moments by a writer of great insight and skill.”

—John S. Sledge, author of The Mobile River “Among the Swamp People takes the form of one tall tale after another, made believable by the fact that you’d be hard-pressed to make them up. Key gives us a readable, engaging, slice-of-life insight into a world that most of us hardly know at all.”

—Frye Gaillard, author of Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America and coauthor of In the Path of the Storms: Bayou La Batre, Coden, and the Alabama Coast

In learning to make a place for himself in the wild, as in learning to write, Key’s story is one of “hoping someone—even if just myself— would find value in my creations.”

Albert Watkins “Watt” Key Jr. is a southern fiction novelist, screenwriter, and speaker living on Alabama’s Gulf Coast. His debut novel, Alabama Moon, was released to national acclaim in 2006, won the E. B. White Read-Aloud Award for Older Readers, and has been published in eight languages to date. In 2009, Alabama Moon was made into a feature film starring John Goodman. Watt’s follow-up novel, Dirt Road Home, was released in 2010 both domestically and internationally. His third novel, Fourmile, was released in September of 2012, receiving starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal. Key also writes fiction and nonfiction articles for both local and nationally distributed publications. Watt divides his time in Alabama between Mobile, Point Clear, and the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta.

www.uapress.ua.edu

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ALABAMA / ART & PHOTOGRAPHY / DEEP SOUTH

Visions of the Black Belt

A Cultural Survey of the Heart of Alabama Robin McDonald and Valerie Pope Burns

VISIONS OF THE

BLACK BELT A C U LT U R A L S U RV E Y O F T H E H E A RT O F A L A B A M A

Visions of the Black Belt offers a rich cultural overview of the emblematic core of Alabama known for its prairie soils, plantation manors, Carpenter Gothic churches, civil rights history, traditional foodways, and resilient and gracious people.

In Visions of the Black Belt, Robin McDonald and Valerie Pope Burnes offer a richly illustrated tour of the Black Belt, the fertile arc that represents the cultural efflorescence of Alabama’s heartland. Like knowledgeable friends, McDonald and Burnes guide readers through the Black Belt’s towns and architecture and introduce the region’s great panoply of citizens, farmers, craftspeople, cooks, writers, and musicians.

A constellation of Black Belt towns arose during Alabama’s early decades, communities like Selma, Eutaw, Tuskegee, Greenville, and many more. Visions of the Black Belt recounts their stories and others, such as Demopolis’s founding by exiles from Napoleon’s France. Under a stormy sky, the ruins of Cahaba—Alabama’s lost capital—reveal the secrets of this once-thriving town. Also on this picturesque tour are the Black Belt’s homes, from artless cabins wreathed in fern to architectural wonders wrapped with stately columns, such as Kirkwood and Reverie.

Among the emblematic houses of worship lovingly photographed in Visions of the Black Belt is Prairieville’s St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, noted for its Carpenter Gothic style. Also reflecting the region’s history of faith are poignant graveyards such as Greenville’s Pioneer Cemetery with its homespun memorials of seashell and concrete and the elegant lichen-clad marbles of Selma’s Live Oak Cemetery.

In photos and text, McDonald and Burnes bring to life the layers of history that shaped the Black Belt’s tastes, sounds, and colors. Their gastronomic discoveries include the picant crawfish of the Faunsdale Bar & Grill and GainesRidge Dining Club’s famed Black Bottom pie. They bring the sounds of the Black Belt to life, highlighting musicians representing a range of musical traditions from Native American to blues to country to gospel and of musical events like Eutaw’s Black Belt Folk Roots Festival. They also introduce writers who draw inspiration from the Black Belt and visit the studios and workshops of the artists and craftspeople who transform the raw materials of their environment— from wood, metal, and clay to cloth, glass, paint, and even hay—into beautiful, profound, witty, and whimsical works of art.

Including two maps and more than 370 full-color photographs, Visions of the Black Belt offers a timeless message of faith, determination, and the rich simplicity of living in harmony with the rhythms of the land and nature.

RO BI N McD O N A LD VA L E R I E P O P E B U R N E S

SEPTEMBER 11 X 11 / 264 PAGES / 378 COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS, INCLUDING 2 MAPS ISBN: 978-0-8173-1879-6 / $39.95T CLOTH ISBN: 978-0-8173-8879-9 / $39.95T EBOOK

“Illustrated with absolutely stunning collections of images, the chapters individually and collectively offer a feast for the eyes.

Images range from the most humble of structures to plantation homes and churches that would be described as magnificent in any time or place. . . . While the authors do not skirt the issues of race, poverty, and class that obtain, they simply state the facts.

There is an evenness of tone, an appreciation of the region as it has been and as it is now that makes this book less about what we have lost than about what we still have. Therefore, to my mind, this is the most valuable kind of work for a general reader: one that cherishes the past but brings us fully into the moment and even looks forward.”

—Jay Lamar, coeditor of The Remembered Gate: Memoirs by Alabama Writers “Like rural America everywhere these days, Alabama’s storied Black Belt is undergoing profound change. Yet its gentle landscapes—suffused with the sense of a haunted, romantic past—holds something timeless. And added to its natural beauty is a rich layering of architecture, nearly two hundred years’ worth, that tells a very human story at once wrenching and inspiring. In words and gorgeous, seductive images, the authors have captured a mood, an intangible spell—that anyone who lingers in this very special place must sooner or later feel. Here we have a book that seems sure to become an Alabama classic: a lovely record as well as a nostalgic evocation.”

—Robert Gamble, author of Historic Architecture in Alabama and Heart of a Small Town

Writer and photographer Robin McDonald is the author of Heart of a Small Town: Photographs of Alabama Towns. Valerie Pope Burnes is an assistant professor of history and former director of the Center for the Study of the Black Belt at the University of West Alabama.

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NATURE / ALABAMA / HERPETOLOGY

Turtles of Alabama

G O S S E N AT U R E G U I D E S

Craig Guyer, Mark A. Bailey, and Robert H. Mount

Turtles of Alabama pulls together new discoveries, research knowledge, and taxonomic changes that have occurred in herpetology within the state of Alabama since the 1975 publication of the now-classic volume Reptiles and Amphibians of Alabama by Robert H. Mount.

With thirty-nine known species, Alabama harbors more turtle species than any other state in the nation, and its Mobile River basin is the center of the world’s greatest biodiversity in turtles, surpassing all other river systems around the globe, including the Amazon and the Nile.

Turtles of Alabama documents that extraordinary wealth and presents each species in full, describing its physical appearance, habitat and range, behavior, conservation and management, and taxonomy.

In addition to providing sixty-five full-color photographs of juveniles and adults along with forty-two colorfully detailed distribution maps, this volume features an introductory section explaining the physiography, climate, and habitats of the state, and offers illustrated taxonomic keys for all the species considered, including the oceanic behemoths that lay their eggs on Alabama’s gulf beaches and the lumbering gopher tortoise that provides safe haven for countless other animals and arthropods in its underground burrows of the Coastal Plain. With fine line drawings to highlight various distinguishing attributes of the animals, this volume is the definitive guide to the state’s fascinating and diverse turtle populations—freshwater, marine, and terrestrial.

Although they are notoriously slow-moving, turtles are still surviving on Earth because of their remarkable adaptations—an exterior shell for body protection, long lives, high reproductive output, stamina, and a capacity for doing without. Turtles are cold-blooded reptiles that were here long before mammals, and they’re still around, continuing to adapt to many different habitats and ecological niches, still interbreeding, evolving, and speciating. Turtles of Alabama is a fitting celebration of that phenomenal variety and strength.

Craig Guyer is a professor of biological sciences at Auburn University. He has authored and coauthored many scientific journal articles, and is the coauthor of Amphibians and Reptiles of La Selva, Costa Rica, and the Caribbean Slope: A Comprehensive Guide. Mark A. Bailey is the owner, director, and senior biologist with Conservation Southeast, Inc., a resource management firm specializing in native habitats and species of the southeastern United States. He has authored many conservation strategies and plans, most notably, the Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Habitat Management Guidelines for Amphibians and Reptiles of the Southeast. Robert H. Mount is emeritus professor of biological sciences at Auburn University and the author of the seminal work, Reptiles and Amphibians of Alabama.

Turtles

of al abama

CRAIG GUYER, MARK A. BAILEY, and ROBERT H. MOUNT

OCTOBER 6 X 9 / 288 PAGES / 65 COLOR & 56 B&W LINE ART ILLUSTRATIONS / 42 COLOR MAPS ISBN: 978-0-8173-5806-8 / $39.95T PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-8817-1 / $39.95T EBOOK

“This book is very well written by an outstanding trio of herpetologists and will be accepted as a first-rate effort by experts in the region. It is a critical source of information for researchers, including students involved in projects anywhere in the Southeast, and is a useful reference for wildlife biologists and conservationists, as well as general naturalists in Alabama and adjoining states. The natural history facts are accurate, and the information presented about the various species is useful to all readers.”

—Whit Gibbons, coauthor of Amphibians and Reptiles of Georgia and Snakes of the Southeast “This new treatise on Alabama reptiles has been anxiously awaited. Turtles of Alabama will instantly become the de facto, must-have, authoritative book on Alabama’s turtle species for years to come.”

—Roger Clay, certified wildlife biologist with the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources

Gary R. Mullen, L. J. Davenport, Elberta G. Reid, and Edward O. Wilson, advisory panel

www.uapress.ua.edu

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MISSISSIPPI / FOLKLORE

Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey Commemorative Edition Kathryn Tucker Windham Afterword by Dilcy Windham Hilley and Ben Windham

Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey is a deluxe, commemorative edition of famed southern author and folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham’s introduction to Mississippi’s thirteen most famous haunted houses and ghostly visitations.

For as long as Mississippi has existed (and then some), flocks of phantoms have haunted the mortal inhabitants of the Magnolia State.

In Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey, best-selling folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham, along with her trusty spectral companion Jeffrey, introduces thirteen of the state’s most famous ghost stories.

Although stories about Mississippi’s spirits seemingly outnumber the ghosts themselves, Windham observes that “Southern ghost tales are disappearing because people no longer sit around on the porch on summer nights and tell stories. The old folks who grew up with these stories are dying now, and the stories are dying with them.”

Fortunately for us, Windham was a writer dedicated to preserving these tales in print. The veteran author spent many years tracking down these stories and chronicling the best ones. From the ghost of Mrs. McEwen still wearing her beloved cameo pin and keeping a watchful eye over Featherston Place, her home in Holly Springs, where, she swore, she would stay forever, to the ghostly visage fixed permanently on the bedroom window pane of Catherine McGehee, who searched the horizon ardently for her unrequited love to come to her as promised at Cold Spring Plantation in Pinckneyville, Windham’s stories cover the breadth and depth of Mississippi—at times more moonlight than magnolia.

BY KATHRYN TUCKER WINDHAM

AUGUST 7 X 10 / 152 PAGES / 33 B&W ILLUSTRATIONS ISBN: 978-0-8173-1886-4 / $29.95T CLOTH ISBN: 978-0-8173-8895-9 / $29.95T EBOOK

“In Windham’s tales . . . myth and fact intertwine to present a picture of the South that is as true as any textbook.”

—Paris Review

An enduring classic, this commemorative edition restores Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey to the ghastly grandeur of its original 1974 edition.

Kathryn Tucker Windham grew up in Thomasville, Alabama, the youngest child in a large family of storytellers. For many years a Selma resident, Windham was a freelance writer, collected folklore, and photographed the changing scenes of her native South. A nationally recognized storyteller and a regular fixture on Alabama Public Radio, her commentaries were also featured on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

Her other books include Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey, Jeffrey Introduces Thirteen More Southern Ghosts, and Thirteen Georgia Ghosts and Jeffrey.

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BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR / ALABAMA

Captain Billy’s Troopers A Writer’s Life William Cobb

Captain Billy’s Troopers is the poignant memoir of award-winning Alabama author William Cobb. It opens a candid window into the life of a writer and teacher who overcame years of addiction and serious health problems as his voice, artistic vision, and sense of self evolved and matured.

CAPTAIN BILLY’S

TROOPERS a writer’s life

In this audacious memoir, William Cobb reveals the tumultuous creative life of a distinguished practitioner of southern and Alabama storytelling. As poignant and inspiring as his own fiction, Captain Billy’s Troopers traces Cobb’s early life, education, and struggles with alcohol and the debilitating condition normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH).

Like a curving river, the broad sweep of Cobb’s turbulent life includes both startling cataracts and desultory eddies, leading sometimes into shadows or opening into unexpected sunlight. With unsentimental clarity, Cobb recounts coming of age in his native Demopolis in the churning middle years of the twentieth century. It’s there he has his first tantalizing tastes of alcohol and begins to drink habitually. Readers then travel with Cobb to Livingston University (now the University of West Alabama) and then on to Vanderbilt University. Along the way, readers relish his first experiences of love and success as a writer, leading to a career as a professor of writing at Alabama College (now the University of Montevallo) in 1963.

From there Cobb’s struggles with alcohol and depression lead to elongated years of tumbling creative output and the collapse of his marriage. The summer of 1984 found Cobb in rehab, the first step in his path to recovery. His unflinching memoir narrates both the milestones and telling details of his intense therapy and years in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). In the sober thirty years since, Cobb has published a string of critically praised novels and a prize-winning collection of short stories. The capstone of his comeback was winning the Harper Lee Award in 2007 for distinguished fiction writing.

W I L L I A M COBB SEPTEMBER 5.5 X 8.5 / 208 PAGES / 1 B&W ILLUSTRATION ISBN: 978-0-8173-1876-5 / $34.95T CLOTH ISBN: 978-0-8173-8875-1 / $34.95T EBOOK

“William Cobb’s Captain Billy’s Troopers offers an intriguing and compelling portrait of Alabama from the fifties to the present, especially in Demopolis, Livingston, and Montevallo—towns not usually featured in memoirs about the state.”

—Andrew Hudgins, author of The Joker: A Memoir

In 2000, shortly after retiring, Cobb developed NPH, which upset his sense of balance and triggered dementia symptoms and other maladies.

Nine years later in 2009, brain surgery brought Cobb a dramatic recovery, which began the third act in his writing career. Vital, honest, and entertaining, Captain Billy’s Troopers captures the life of an Alabama original.

William Cobb was born in Eutaw, Alabama, and was raised in Demopolis. He received an MA in English from Vanderbilt University in 1963 and began teaching at Alabama College (now the University of Montevallo).

In 1978, he was awarded a fellowship for creative writing by the National Endowment for the Arts. Cobb’s first novel, Coming of Age at the Y, was published in 1984. Between 1984 and 2001, he published five more novels and a collection of short stories. In the 1980s, Cobb began writing plays. Three of his plays have been produced in New York City. Cobb was made writer-in-residence at Montevallo in 1987 and continued in that position until his retirement in 2000.

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FICTION

Silence and Song FICTION

“Brilliantly imagined and infused with a raw spirituality that cuts to the bone. Thon writes with a lyric power about the lives of lost souls who nonetheless passionately believe in a God ‘no longer capable of even the smallest miracles.’”

—Kirkus

Award-winning writer Melanie Rae Thon’s Silence and Song is a diptych, two lyric fictions hinged by a short prose poem. Inspired and informed by biology, physics, music, history, intimate violence, and miraculous resilience, the three pieces move from mourning to song.

“Put simply, Thon’s stories exist on a different plane than most

Courtesy of Andi Olsen

fiction you’ll read. The language Immigrants lost in the blistering expanse of the Sonoran Desert, probis breath and smoke, keenly tuned to matters of redemption lem bears, bats pollinating saguaros, a Good Samaritan filling tanks at and healing.”

Quivering Pen emergency water stations, and the terrified runaway—The boy who shoots him pierce the heart and mind of Rosana Derais. “Vanishings,” the first University of Alabama Press story in Silence and Song, is a love letter, a prayer to The these strangers whose lives penetrate and transform Rosana’s own sorrow.

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 www.uapress.ua.edu

In “Translations,” the prose poem connecting the two longer fictions, child refugees at a multilingual literacy center in Salt Lake City discover the merciful “translation” of dance and pantomime.

FC2

I S B N 978-1-57366-053-2

90000

Cover design: Lou Robinson

http://fc2.org

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781573 660532

The convergence of two disparate events—a random murder in Seattle and the nuclear accident at Chernobyl—catalyze the startling, eruptive form of the concluding piece,“requiem: home: and the rain, after.” Narrated in first person by the killer’s sister and plural first person by the “liquidators” who come to the Evacuation Zone to bury entire villages poisoned by radioactive fallout, “requiem” navigates the immediate trauma of murder and environmental disaster; personal and global devastation; and the remarkable recovery of the miraculously diverse more-than-human world.

Recent books by Melanie Rae Thon include The Voice of the River and In This Light: New and Selected Stories. She is also the author of the novels Sweet Hearts, Meteors in August, and Iona Moon and of the story collections Girls in the Grass and First, Body. Thon’s work has been included in Best American Short Stories, three Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and O. Henry Prize Stories. She is a recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Book Award, the Gina Berriault Award, the Utah Book Award, and a writer’s residency from the Lannan Foundation. In 2009, she was the Virgil C. Aldrich fellow at the Tanner Humanities Center.

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            

Recent books by Melanie Rae Thon include The Voice of the River and In This Light: New and Selected Stories. She is also the author of the novels Sweet Hearts, Meteors in August, and Iona Moon and the story collections Girls in the Grass and First, Body. She is the recipient of many awards, among them a Whiting Writer’s Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Gina Berriault Award.

“Thon has a dark, fierce imagination expressed in a torrential sweep of words. . . . [that] leave an indelible impression of heartbreaking truth.”

—Publishers Weekly

song

Praise for Melanie Rae Thon

The catalytic fictions of Melanie Rae Thon’s Silence and Song investigate intimate violence and miraculous resilience. From the blistering expanse of the Sonoran Desert to Chernobyl’s Zone of Alienation, lost immigrants, child refugees, radioactive wolves, problem bears, liquidators, and the sister of a desperate killer seek grace in the midst of devastation.

silence

Melanie Rae Thon

FC2

SEPTEMBER 5.5 X 8.5 / 160 PAGES ISBN: 978-1-57366-053-2 / $16.95T PAPER ISBN: 978-1-57366-857-6 / $16.95T EBOOK

Praise for the Works of Melanie Rae Thon “Melanie Rae Thon belts out her stories in a tone and style reminiscent of classic blues singers. . . . The reader is swept along not only by her remarkable characterizations, but also by the taut, magic current of her prose, which carries an exhilarating rhythmic punch.”

—The New York Times Book Review “The rhythmic beauty of Thon’s writing is everywhere extraordinary: Here is a writer who can really sing the blues.”

—Kirkus “[Thon] is a writer worth reading for her soulfulness and her sensual detail.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

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FICTION

It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides Stories

Jessica Lee Richardson It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides, Jessica Lee Richardson’s debut collection of short fiction, was the tenth winner of the Fiction Collective Two (FC2) Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. The book invites readers on a bodily journey through a darkly funny, buoyantly untethered storyscape.

Winner of the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize Jessica Lee Richardson’s debut collection It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides teems with double magic—families of spiders, monsters in triplicate, and panels of bleacher-sitting grandfathers (who live in a diaphragm!) cohabitate with a starker, more familiar kind of strange in a hyper real and living tapestry of teenage porn stars, lovelorn factory workers, and art world auctioneers. From a woman who awakes from a short kidnapping with an unquenchable need for risk to a concrete boat ride gone off the rails, from Los Angeles to the Bronx, from the Midwest to North Korea, these stories explore the absurd in real spaces and the real in absurd spaces, seeking a way into something else entirely.

Here environments participate in agency, and voice compels movement forward, through, and in. Richly patterned language refuses singularity and the finger trap of the binary, seeking permeability in its reflection, a soft net to catch collective echoes. The collection begins and ends with stories that literalize descent and ascent, bookending the mirrored shape of the book’s arrangement as a vision of an inverted arc. The shape of story is literalized. We slide down from a mountaintop all the way to the inside of a womb and back, slipping on slopes unmarked by signs, catching stunning glimpses along the way.

The journey along the track of desire might be frightening if it weren’t for all the water, if it weren’t for the bounce of the ride.

Jessica Lee Richardson was born in New Jersey, began her career as a performer living in Brooklyn, and earned her MFA in 2013 from the University of Alabama. Her writing has appeared in the Indiana Review, Caketrain, and Joyland, and has been recognized with awards from the National Society of Arts and Letters and the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum.

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SEPTEMBER 5.5 X 8.5 / 160 PAGES ISBN: 978-1-57366-052-5 / $16.95T PAPER ISBN: 978-1-57366-856-9 / $16.95T EBOOK

“This book has heart and heft and heat and equal doses of wonder and quirk to keep us on our toes, not knowing what might be waiting for us, not just on the next page but inside the next sentence. Richardson’s tongue is an organ of the eye. Her prose sings cleanly, her ear hears with its hand not just cupped around it but it reaches out to pull us in and hold us all a little closer.”

—Peter Markus, author of The Fish and the Not Fish, We Make Mud, and The Singing Fish “You know how you keep that piece of paper and pen next to the bed to capture those brilliantly enriched osmotic mots justes emanating from the edge of the edge of waking sleep? And you know how the vivid quarry eludes you; how you’re left with the snare of scribbles, memories of memory, in the morning light? The stories in Jessica Lee Richardson’s teeming It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides are goddamned Google maps of those saturated hypnopompic, hypnagogic states, rendered with such exacting detail and pristine clarity that you can do nothing more than conclude the murky margins of the world have been turned inside out and the meanest meanings ever meant are sunbathing there, plain as day.”

—Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Four for a Quarter

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LITERARY CRITICISM / POETRY & POETICS

Intricate Thicket

Reading Late Modernist Poetries Mark Scroggins

Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries offers a collection of nineteen essays that deftly erodes the simplistic distinction between modernism and postmodernism, showing that many attributes of postmodernist verse form not a break with, but rather a continuation of, modernist poetry.

In Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries, Mark Scroggins writes with wit and dash about a fascinating range of key twentiethand twenty-first-century poets and writers. In nineteen lively and accessible essays, he persuasively argues that the innovations of modernist verse were not replaced by postmodernism, but rather those innovations continue to infuse contemporary writing and poetry with intellectual and aesthetic richness.

In these essays, Scroggins reviews the legacy of Louis Zukofsky, delineates the exceptional influence of the Black Mountain poets, and provides close readings of a wealth of examples of poetic works from poets who have carried the modernist legacy into contemporary poetry. He traces with an insider’s keen observation the careers of many of the most dynamic, innovative, and celebrated poets of the past half-century, among them Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ronald Johnson, Rae Armantrout, Harryette Mullen, and Anne Carson.

In a concluding pair of essays, Scroggins situates his own practice within the broad currents he has described. He reflects on his own aesthetics as a contemporary poet and, drawing on his extensive study and writing about Louis Zukofsky, examines the practical and theoretical challenges of literary biography.

While the core of these essays is the interpretation of poetry, Scroggins also offers clear aesthetic evaluations of the successes and failures of the poetries he examines. Scroggins engages with complex and challenging works, and yet his highly accessible descriptions and criticisms avoid theoretical entanglements and specialized jargon. Intricate Thicket yields subtle and multifaceted insights to experts and newcomers alike.

Mark Scroggins is a poet, biographer, and literary critic. He is the author of Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge, The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, and three collections of poetry. He is the editor of Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky and a selection of uncollected prose for Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky.

Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer, series editors 8

| fall 2015

Intricate Thicket Reading Late Modernist Poetries

MARK SCROGGINS

SEPTEMBER 6 X 9 / 264 PAGES ISBN: 9780817358044 / $49.95S PAPER ISBN: 9780817388065 / $49.95S EBOOK

“Now that we stand in the light of what feels like the last embers of postmodernism, we’re better positioned to see what Mark Scroggins has been scrutinizing for fifteen years or more: the poetic monuments of a late modernist aesthetic. Allusive, fragmented, often opaque, these late modernists range from old objectivists like Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen to figures whose creative work is flourishing even now: Rae Armantrout, John Matthias, and Anne Carson, just to name a few. Fluent, honest, and undeceivable, Mark Scroggins is just what a critic ought to be.”

—Robert Archambeau, author of Home and Variations, Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry, and The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World “Mark Scroggins takes us on a tour of the ‘intricate thicket’ of the poems and poetry that have long preoccupied him. In admirably clear prose that rises at times to an ‘electric punchiness and grace,’ he returns frequently to the writers that, for him, represent the ‘fire sources of the contemporary’—Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Ronald Johnson, and Guy Davenport—while also undertaking many side-forays, illuminating the poetics of, among others, Rae Armantrout, Anne Carson, Robert Duncan, Theodore Enslin, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Peter Gizzi, Harryette Mullen, and John Taggart. What Scroggins says of John Matthias’s long poems is true, too, of his own essays: they are ‘an effective recalling of something loved.’ Intricate Thicket is poetry criticism at its best.”

—Brian M. Reed, author of Nobody’s Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetics, Phenomenal Reading: Essays in Modern and Contemporary Poetics, and Hart Crane: After His Lights

www.uapress.ua.edu

POETRY & POETICS

Experience

Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion Norman Fischer

Norman Fischer’s Experience is the fruit of forty years of thinking on experimental writing, and its practice, as investigation of reality and as religious endeavor by a major figure in contemporary Zen Buddhist practice and theology.

By what narrow path is the ineffable silence of Zen cleft by the scratch of a pen? The distilled insights of forty years, Experience: Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion is a collection of essays by Zen master Norman Fischer about experimental writing as a spiritual practice.

Raised in a Conservative Jewish family, Fischer embraced the twin practices of Zen Buddhism and innovative poetics in San Francisco in the early 1970s. His work includes original poetry, descriptions of Buddhist practice, translations of the Hebrew psalms, and eclectic writings on a range of topics from Homer to Heidegger to Kabbalah. Both Buddhist priest and participant in avant-garde poetry’s Language movement, Fischer has limned the fertile affinities and creative contradictions between Zen and writing, accumulating four decades of rich insights he shares in Experience.

Fischer’s work has been deeply enriched through his collaborations with leading rabbis, poets, artists, esteemed Zen Buddhist practitioners, Trappist monks, and renowned Buddhist leaders, among them the Dalai Lama. Alone and with others, he has carried on a deep and sustained investigation into the intersection of writing and consciousness as informed by meditation.

The essays in this artfully curated collection range across divers, fascinating topics such as time, the Heart Sutra, God in the Hebrew psalms, the supreme “uselessness” of art making, “late work” as a category of poetic appreciation, and the subtle and dubious notion of “religious experience.” From the theoretical to the revealingly personal, Fischer’s essays, interviews, and notes point toward a dramatic expansion of the sense of religious feeling in writing.

NORMAN FI SCH ER

Experience t h i n k i ng, w r i t i ng, l a nguage & r eligion DECEMBER 6 X 9 / 312 PAGES ISBN: 978-0-8173-5828-0 / $34.95S PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-8852-2 / $34.95S EBOOK

“Experience is not so much criticism or polemic as it is a guide to living one’s life inside and outside of poetry, and of making that life consonant with one’s art.”

—Susan M. Schultz, author of A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary Poetry and editor of The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry

Readers who join Fischer on this path in Experience can discover how language is not a description of experience, but rather an experience itself: shifting, indefinite, and essential.

Norman Fischer is a former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center and the founder of the Everyday Zen Foundation. He is the author of twenty books of poetry, criticism, and theology, among them the poetry collections The Strugglers, I Was Blown Back, Success, and Questions/ Places/Voices/Seasons and the prose works Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong, Sailing Home: Using Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life’s Perils and Pitfalls, Opening to You: Zen-Inspired Translations of the Psalms, and Taking Our Places: The Buddhist Path to Truly Growing Up. Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer, series editors

www.uapress.ua.edu

fall 2015 |

9

POETRY & POETICS / LITERARY CRITICISM

The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics

JE ANNE HEUVING

Jeanne Heuving

the The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics is a probing examination of how the writing of sexual love undergoes a radical revision by avant-garde poets in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics

Today, the exploration of love by poets—long a fixture of Western poetic tradition—is thought to be in decline, with love itself understood to be a mere ideological overlay for the more “real” entities of sex and desire.

In The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics, Jeanne Heuving claims that a key achievement of poetry by Ezra Pound, H.D., Robert Duncan, Kathleen Fraser, Nathaniel Mackey, and others lies significantly in their engagement with the synergistic relations between being in love and writing love. These poets, she argues, have traded the clichéd lover of yore for impersonal or posthuman poetic speakers that sustain the gloire and mystery of love poetry of prior centuries. As Robert Duncan writes, “There is a love in which we are outcast and vagabond from what we are that we call ‘falling in love.’”

Heuving claims that this writing of love is defining for avant-garde poetics, identifying how such important discoveries as Pound’s and H.D.’s Imagism, Pound’s Cantos, and Duncan’s “open field poetics” are derived through their changed writing of love. She draws attention to how the prevailing concept of language as material is inadequate to the ways these poets also engage language as a medium—as a conduit—enabling them to address love afresh in a time defined through preoccupations with sexuality. They engage love as immanent and change it through a writing that acts on itself.

The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics ascribes the waning of love poetry to its problematic form: a genre in which empowered poetic speakers constitute their speech through the objectification of comparatively disempowered subjects, or beloveds. Refusing this pervasive practice, the poets she highlights reject the delimiting, one-sided tradition of masculine lovers and passive feminine beloveds; instead, they create a more nuanced, dynamic poetics of ecstatic exploration, what Heuving calls “projective love” and “libidinized field poetics,” a formally innovative poetry, in which one perception leads directly to the next and all aspects of a poem are generative of meaning.

Jeanne Heuving is a professor of English at the University of Washington Bothell and a graduate faculty member at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore as well as two collections of poetry.

MAY 2016 6 X 9 / 216 PAGES ISBN: 978-0-8173-5843-3 / $34.95S PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-8909-3 / $34.95S EBOOK

“Jeanne Heuving has written an ardent study of the metamorphosis of Western love and its classic poetic tropes involving desire and the poetic objects of longing, by proposing an altered configuration of eros in modern and contemporary poetry. Resisting the attack on or the reduction of love as only a literary or social convention, and acknowledging changed relations of gender and altered knowledge of sexualities in modernity, Heuving treats the poetic practices of Pound, H.D., Duncan, Fraser and Mackey and offers serious theorizing on the poetics of Amor. This vibrant contribution to poetic criticism makes claims for love as ecstatic perception, the I as ‘othered’ in love, and the affects and effects of this eros, all going beyond the poetry of the yearning gaze and the static beloved into a wider libidinal field. In fascinating readings and deft theoretical insights, she tracks the implications of this rearticulation of eros for poetic languages, formal innovations, textual subjectivities, and poetics.”

—Rachel Blau DuPlessis, author of The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice; Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work; and Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry

Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer, series editors 10

| fall 2015

www.uapress.ua.edu

RHETORIC / MILITARY HISTORY / LEGAL STUDIES

Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age Marouf Hasian Jr. Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age posits a framework for the scholarly community, policy makers, and lay readers for understanding the legal and military aspects of drone warfare.

drone warfare

lawfare and

in a Post-Heroic A ge

In the past decade, the United States has rapidly deployed militarized drones in theaters of war for surveillance as well as targeted killing. The swiftness with which drones were created and put into service has outstripped the development of an associated framework for discussing them, with the result that basic conversations about these lethal weapons have been stymied for a lack of a shared rhetoric. Marouf Hasian’s Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age fills that critical gap.

With a growing fleet of more than 7,500 drones, these emblems of what one commentary has dubbed “push-button, bloodless wars” comprise as much as a third of the US aircraft force. Their use is hotly debated, some championing air power that doesn’t risk the lives of pilots, others arguing that drone strikes encourage cycles of violence against the United States, its allies, and interests.

In this landmark study, Hasian illuminates both the discursive and visual argumentative strategies that drone supporters and critics both rely on. He comprehensively reviews how advocates and detractors parse and recontextualize drone images, casualty figures, governmental “white papers,” NGO reports, documentaries, and blogs to support their points of view. He unpacks the ideological reflexes and assumptions behind these legal, ethical, and military arguments.

Visiting both formal legal language used by legislators, political leaders, and policy makers as well as public, vernacular commentaries about drones, Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age dispassionately illuminates the emotive, cognitive, and behavioral strategies partisans use to influence public and official opinion.

Marouf Hasian Jr. is a professor of communication at the University of Utah. He is the author of Restorative Justice, Humanitarian Rhetorics, and Public Memories of Colonial Camp Cultures; Cultural Rhetorics of American Exceptionalism and the bin Laden Raid; Rhetorical Vectors of Memory in National and International Holocaust Trials; and In the Name of Necessity: Military Tribunals and the Loss of American Civil Liberties.

Ma rou f Hasia n Jr. JANUARY 2016 6 X 9 / 288 PAGES ISBN: 978-0-8173-1892-5 / $49.95S PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-8911-6 / $49.95S EBOOK

“Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age contributes fresh and insightful observations that aim to promote a healthy public debate of a policy that is presently steeped in secrecy and legitimized by legalisms and by a rhetorical discourse that plays on notions of national innocence and fantasies of clean technological warfare. The book’s analysis is especially strong and critically significant in that its genealogy of drone warfare establishes the groundwork needed to promote reflection and debate, and the genealogy itself performs a readable and convincing critique of an otherwise largely reified discourse.”

—Robert L. Ivie, author of Democracy and America’s War on Terror and coauthor of Hunt the Devil: A Demonology of US War Culture “Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age is a touchstone study for a nascent but growing scholarly literature that explores how drone warfare has achieved its own brand of public legitimacy and exceptionalism, not simply through the clever discovery of legal loopholes, but through arguments that resonate with the US public. Marouf Hasian has created a guidebook that untangles the complex issue of drone warfare and maps the terrain of argumentation and common themes as they repeatedly arise.”

—Roger Stahl, author of Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture

Rhetoric, Law, and the Humanities Clarke Rountree, series editor

www.uapress.ua.edu

fall 2015 |

11

LITERARY CRITICISM / SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY / RHETORIC

Animal, Vegetable, Digital

Experiments in New Media Aesthetics and Environmental Poetics Elizabeth Swanstrom

Animal, Vegetable, An audacious, interdisciplinary study that combines the burgeoning fields of digital aesthetics and ecocriticism, Animal, Vegetable, Digital offers a passionate and persuasive argument that digital art in the service of environmental criticism has the potential to reconnect humankind to the natural world.

D I G I TA L Experiments in New Media Aesthetics and Environmental Poetics

Winner of the Elizabeth Agee Prize in American Literature In Animal, Vegetable, Digital, Elizabeth Swanstrom makes a confident and spirited argument for the use of digital art in support of ameliorating human engagement with the environment and suggests a fourpart framework for analyzing and discussing such applications.

Through close readings of a panoply of texts, artworks, and cultural artifacts, Swanstrom demonstrates that the division popular culture has for decades observed between nature and technology is artificial.

Not only is digital technology not necessarily a brick in the road to a dystopian future of environmental disaster, but digital art forms can be a revivifying bridge that returns people to a more immediate relationship to nature as well as their own embodied selves.

To analyze and understand the intersection of digital art and nature, Animal, Vegetable, Digital explores four aesthetic techniques: coding, collapsing, corresponding, and conserving. “Coding” denotes the way artists use operational computer code to blur distinctions between the reader and text, and, hence, the world. Inviting a fluid conception of the boundary between human and technology, “collapsing” voids simplistic assumptions about the human body’s innate perimeter. The process of translation between natural and human-readable signs that enables communication is described as “corresponding.” “Conserving” is the application of digital art by artists to democratize large- and smallscale preservation efforts.

A fascinating synthesis of literary criticism, communications and journalism, science and technology, and rhetoric that draws on such disparate phenomena as simulated environments, video games, and popular culture, Animal, Vegetable, Digital posits that partnerships between digital aesthetics and environmental criticism are possible that reconnect humankind to nature and reaffirm its kinship with other living and nonliving things.

ELIZ ABETH SWANSTROM

JANUARY 2016 6 X 9 / 224 PAGES ISBN: 978-0-8173-1895-6 / $49.95S CLOTH ISBN: 978-0-8173-8929-1 / $49.95S EBOOK

“Swanstrom gives us nature and technology, not nature versus technology, and as such her book is an original and important contribution to contemporary discussions of digital media and sustainability. Animal, Vegetable, Digital is a polished piece of creative exploration aimed at nudging readers toward new ways of seeing things.”

—Lisa Gitelman, author of Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents and Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture “Animal, Vegetable, Digital offers a much-needed intervention that prompts a reexamination of two immensely popular and timely intellectual domains: digital art/culture and environmental studies. Swanstrom has produced a vital and inventive contribution that tethers together two exciting and still developing fields.”

—David Ciccoricco, author of Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media and Reading Network Fiction

Elizabeth Swanstrom is an assistant professor of English at Florida Atlantic University. Previously, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Umeå University’s HUMlab in northern Sweden and the Florence Levy Kay Fellow in the Digital Humanities in the English Department at Brandeis University.

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www.uapress.ua.edu

LITERARY CRITICISM / AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

Bound to Respect

Antebellum Narratives of Black Imprisonment, Servitude, and Bondage, 1816–1861 Keith Michael Green By examining lesser-known forms of black captivity, Bound to Respect challenges the commonplace narrative that the African American experience of captivity in the United States is reducible to the legal institution of slavery, a status remedied through emancipation.

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Winner of the Elizabeth Agee Prize in American Literature In Bound to Respect: Antebellum Narratives of Black Imprisonment, Servitude, and Bondage, 1816–1861, Keith Michael Green examines key texts that illuminate forms of black bondage and captivity that existed within and alongside slavery. In doing so, he restores to antebellum African American autobiographical writing the fascinating heterogeneity lost if the historical experiences of African Americans are attributed to slavery alone.

The book’s title is taken from the assertion by US Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in his 1857 Dred Scott decision that blacks had no rights that whites were “bound to respect.” This allusion highlights Green’s critical assertion that the dehumanizing absurdities to which defenders of slavery resorted to justify slavery only brought into more stark relief the humanity of African Americans.

A gifted storyteller, Green examines four forms of captivity: incarceration, enslavement to Native Americans, child indentured servitude, and maritime capture. By illuminating this dense penumbra of captivity beyond the strict definitions of slavery, he presents a fluid and holistic network of images, vocabulary, narratives, and history. By demonstrating how these additional forms of confinement flourished in the era of slavery, Green shows how they persisted beyond emancipation, in such a way that freed slaves did not in fact partake of “freedom” as white Americans understood it. This gap in understanding continues to bedevil contemporary American society, and Green deftly draws persuasive connections between past and present.

A vital and convincing offering to readers of literary criticism, to African American studies, and to historians, Green’s Bound to Respect brings fresh and nuanced insights to this fundamental chapter in American history.

Keith Michael Green is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University.

www.uapress.ua.edu

A n t e b e l l u m N a r r a t i v e s of

Bl ac k I m p r i son m e n t , S e r v i t u d e, a n d Bon d a ge, 1816–1861

Keith Michael Green

OCTOBER 6 X 9 / 248 PAGES / 2 B&W ILLUSTRATIONS ISBN: 978-0-8173-1883-3 / $49.95S CLOTH ISBN: 978-0-8173-8887-4 / $49.95S EBOOK

“This is a provocative and important book. Bound to Respect gets at the difficult history of the recognition of African American humanity and liberty by expanding our understanding of the means by which that recognition was denied or restricted. This is a study that gets at the complexity of African American identity, the overlapping levels of experience, and the nesting dolls of African American confinements that are involved in the construction of African American cultures of consciousness and understanding.”

—John Ernest, author of A Nation Within a Nation: Organizing African-American Communities before the Civil War and Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861 “Keith Green’s Bound to Respect will assume an important place alongside earlier studies of African and African American captivity. Green has taken to heart Roderick Ferguson’s call to rethink narrow, plot-driven analyses of black history. He instead reroutes his readings of slave narratives through the vexed terrain of black ‘respectability politics.’ This unexpected turn expands notions of bondage beyond whips, chains, and plantations into the realms of political and affective imprisonment. The results are gratifying.”

—Jennifer James, author of A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature from the Civil War to World War II

fall 2015 |

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RHETORIC / COMMUNICATIONS / GENDER STUDIES

The Motherhood Business

Consumption, Communication, and Privilege Edited by Anne Teresa Demo, Jennifer L. Borda, and Charlotte Kroløkke The essays in The Motherhood Business examine how consumer culture both constrains and empowers contemporary motherhood. The collection demonstrates that the logic of consumerism and entrepreneurship has redefined both the experience of mothering and the marketplace.

The Motherhood Business is a collection of ten original essays that reveal the rhetoric of the motherhood industry. Focusing on the consumer lives of mothers and the emerging entrepreneurship associated with motherhood, these insightful essays considers how forms of privilege (class, race, and nationality) shape discourses about mothering, consumption, and leisure.

The Motherhood Business follows the harried mother’s path into the anxious maelstrom of intelligent toys, healthy foods and meals, and educational choices. It also traces how some enterprising mothers leverage cultural capital and rhetorical vision to create thriving baby- and child-based businesses of their own, as evidenced by the rise of mommy bloggers and “mompreneurs” over the last decade.

Starting with the rapidly expanding global fertility market, The Motherhood Business explores the intersection of motherhood, consumption, and privi­lege in the context of fertility tourism, international adoption, and trans­national surrogacy. The synergy between motherhood and the marketplace demonstrated across the essays affirms the stronghold of “intensive mothering ideology” in decisions over what mothers buy and how they brand their businesses even as that ideology evolves.

Across diverse contexts, the volume also identifies how different forms of privilege shape how mothers construct their identities through their consumption and entrepreneurship.

Although social observers often commented on the link between motherhood and consumerism, little has been written within the field of rhetoric. Penetrating and interdisciplinary, The Motherhood Business illuminates how consumer culture not only shapes contemporary motherhood but evolves in response to mothers who constitute a driving force of the economy.

Anne Teresa Demo is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. She is the coeditor of Rhetoric, Remembrance, and Visual Form. Jennifer L. Borda is an associate professor of communication at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Women Labor Activists in the Movies. Charlotte Kroløkke is an associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark.

She currently heads the research project (Trans)Formations of Kinship.

NOVEMBER 6 X 9 / 304 PAGES ISBN: 978-0-8173-1890-1 / $59.95S CLOTH ISBN: 978-0-8173-8908-6 / $59.95S EBOOK

CONTRIBUTORS Jennifer L. Borda / Shira Chess / Anne Teresa Demo / Kara N. Dillard / K. Animashaun Ducre / Lisa A. Flores / Cynthia Gordon / Christine Harold / Sara Hayden / Charlotte Kroløkke / Karen Hvidtfeldt Madsen “Strong, relevant, and interesting, The Motherhood Business is unique in its explicit focus on racial and economic privilege in relation to motherhood and consumption, in its focus on the conceptual tools of rhetoric and communication studies, and in the very broad focus of its scope, both culturally and in terms of the objects of analysis that fall under the purview of motherhood.”

—Marika Seigel, author of The Rhetoric of Pregnancy “Motherhood, and parenting in general, has never been easy. It also constantly is judged. Yet, academia too often resists making space for this vital sphere of life, love, leisure, and labor. From rising trends in international fertility markets to the growing impact of mom blogs to the fraught choices we face regarding where and how to school the next generation, The Motherhood Business reminds us that ongoing debates over rhetorics of motherhood and communicative dimensions of consumption—though challenging and complicated—are worth engaging both on and off campus.”

—Phaedra C. Pezzullo, author of Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Travel, Pollution, and Environmental Justice

John Louis Lucaites, series editor 14

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www.uapress.ua.edu

ALABAMA / JOURNALISM

Cussing Dixie, Loving Dixie

Fifty Years of Commentary by H. Brandt Ayers H. Brandt Ayers and Carol Nunnelley

Cussing Dixie, Loving Dixie is a critical collection of the standout editorials, columns, and essays of Alabama journalistic lion H. Brandt “Brandy” Ayers, editor and publisher of the Anniston Star.

Cussing Dixie, Loving Dixie collects in one volume the essential writing of the legendary publisher and editor of the Anniston Star. The decades-long ribbon of prose that spilled from Ayers’s pen captured the epochal milestones of our times, such as the 1965 March on Washington, the civil rights movement, the rise and decay of the New South movement, the South’s transformation from a bulwark of Democratic entropy to a heartland of irascible conservatism, and the election of the republic’s first black president.

Cussing Dixie, Loving Dixie includes Ayers’s unforgettable descriptions of the political giants of Alabama’s turbulent twentieth century. Of George Wallace he wrote: “He lost his way in the swamp of racial politics, squandered his great talent for leadership, and, cruelly, has made his most devoted followers bear the consequences.” Ayers memorably hymned Supreme Court justice Hugo Black as having “made of the Bill of Rights a trumpet which kept calling the nation back to its original purpose.”

Ayers was so known for his passionate crusade for a fair deal for “the plain people of both races” of Alabama that enemies dubbed his family’s newspaper “The Red Star.” A loyal son of Alabama who extolls Southern culture, Ayers unapologetically calls for Alabamians to cast off the moribund ideologies of the past. He jousts against obscurantism itself: “When fear and ignorance snuff out the brains of a man,” he thunders, “he is reduced to the level of a jungle predator—a flexed mass of instincts.”

Writing from a generous heart, Ayers enlivens and enlightens. Eschewing the hifalutin, his artful writing is both accessible to the people and admired by the learned. Far from provincial, his far-ranging eye landed often on global events, and he persuasively frames the state and region as an active front on which key national issues hang. Ayers ranks among the most prolific and insightful chroniclers of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Alabama. Cussing Dixie, Loving Dixie is a monument to his enduring legacy and relevance.

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NOVEMBER 6 X 9 / 272 PAGES ISBN: 978-0-8173-1896-3 / $49.95S CLOTH ISBN: 978-0-8173-8930-7 / $49.95S EBOOK

“H. Brandt Ayers deserves credit for longevity, also for courage and insight, as a small city Southern publisher with a liberal bent and a ready pen. His Cussing Dixie, Loving Dixie, drawn from the pages of the Anniston Star, offers valuable documentation of the growing pains (sometimes the shrinking pains) of the New South.

It offers considerable reading pleasure, too.”

—Sam Hodges, author of B-Four and editor of For the Love of Alabama: Journalism by Bailey Thomson and Ron Casey

H. Brandt “Brandy” Ayers graduated from the University of Alabama and later studied at Harvard and Columbia. He served as a Washington correspondent for the Raleigh Times and covered Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department for a news bureau serving newspapers in the South and the Southwest. He later led the Anniston Star during the civil rights era. Journalist Carol Nunnelley worked for newspapers in Montgomery, Mobile, and Birmingham from the 1960s through 2000. She wrote and edited prize-winning coverage of race relations, the environment, and the state’s challenges in education, poverty, and its justice system. She was managing editor of The Birmingham News and is the author of Building Trust in the News: 101+ Good Ideas for Editors from Editors and Janie Shores: Trailblazing Supreme Court Justice.

www.uapress.ua.edu

fall 2015 |

15

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY / GENDER STUDIES

The Domesticated Penis

How Womanhood Has Shaped Manhood Loretta A. Cormier and Sharyn R. Jones

Domesticated penis THE

HOW WOMANHOOD HAS SHAPED MANHOOD

The Domesticated Penis demonstrates that not only natural selection but also female choice has played a key role in shaping male anatomy The book is the first anthropological history of the penis, incorporating evidence from evolutionary theory, primatology, archaeology, and cultural anthropology.

The Domesticated Penis challenges long-held assumptions that, in the development of Homo sapiens, form follows function alone. In this fascinating exploration, Loretta A. Cormier and Sharyn R. Jones explain the critical contribution that conscious female selection made to the attributes of the modern male form.

Synthesizing a wealth of robust scholarship from the fields of archaeology, cultural anthropology, evolutionary theory, and primatology, the authors successfully dismantle the orthodox view that each part of the human anatomy has followed a vector of development, along which only changes and mutations that increased functional utility were retained and extended. Their research animates our understanding of human morphology with insights about how choices early females made shaped the countenance of males.

In crisp and droll prose, Cormier’s and Jones’s rigorous scholarship incorporates engaging examples and lore about the male member in a variety of foraging, agrarian, and contemporary cultures. By detailing how female selection in mating led directly to a matrix of anatomical attributes in the male, their findings illuminate how the male member also acquired a matrix of attributes of the imagination and mythical powers—powers to be assuaged, channeled, or deployed for building productive societies.

These analyses offer a highly persuasive alternative to moribund biological and behavioral assumptions about prehistoric alpha males as well as the distortions such assumptions give rise to in contemporary popular culture. In this anthropological tour de force, Cormier and Jones transcend reductive gender stereotypes and restore to our concepts of evolutional biomechanics an invigorating new balance and nuance.

Loretta A. Cormier is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She specializes in cultural anthropology, primatology, languages, and medical anthropology, and is the author of The Ten-Thousand Year Fever: Rethinking Human and Wild Primate Malaria and Kinship with Monkeys: The Guajá Foragers of Eastern Amazonia. Sharyn R. Jones is an associate professor of anthropology at Northern Kentucky University. She specializes in archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, human ecology, and gender studies.

Her work has ranged from the study of Fijian cannibalism to the analysis of bones from the recently discovered Amelia Earhart site in Micronesia.

She is the author of Food and Gender in Fiji: Ethnoarchaeological Explorations and coeditor of Behaviour Behind Bones: The Zooarchaeology of Ritual, Religion, Status, and Identity.

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| fall 2015

LORETTA A. CORMIER & SHARYN R. JONES

NOVEMBER 6 X 9 / 200 PAGES / 23 B&W ILLUSTRATIONS ISBN: 978-0-8173-1874-1 / $49.95S CLOTH ISBN: 978-0-8173-8850-8 / $49.95S EBOOK

“The Domesticated Penis is a study of the anatomical distinctiveness of the genitals of the human male and diverse cultural attitudes toward them and their symbolism. This is scholarship at its liveliest: a colorful, knowledgeable romp through history and across cultures and species, to explore how the penis we know and (mostly) love today developed its characteristic shape, size, physiology, and behavior. The core argument is evolutionary: ancient women knew what they wanted, and what they wanted was smooth, substantial, long-lasting penetration. Male anatomy evolved to match female desire.”

—Beth A. Conklin, author of Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society “Assiduously avoiding tired gender stereotypes and naive evolutionary reasoning, and written in clear and sparkling prose, Cormier’s and Jones’s book advances the debate on the evolution of human sexuality.”

—Sarah S. Richardson, author of Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome

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HIGHER EDUCATION / TECHNOLOGY & CULTURE / AGRICULTURE

Service as Mandate

How American Land-Grant Universities Shaped the Modern World, 1920–2015 Edited by Alan I Marcus Completing a comprehensive history of America’s land-grant universities begun in Science as Service, the thirteen original essays in Service as Mandate examine how these great institutions both changed and were changed by the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Established by the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862, America’s land-grant universities have had far-reaching influences on the United States and the world. Service as Mandate, Alan I Marcus’s second edited collection of insightful essays about land-grant universities, explores how these universities have adapted to meet the challenges of the past sixty-five years and how, having done so, they have helped to create the modern world.

From their founding, land-grant schools have provided educational opportunities to millions, producing many of the nation’s scientific, technical, and agricultural leaders and spawning countless technological and agricultural innovations. Nevertheless, their history has not always been smooth or without controversy or setbacks. These vital centers of learning and research have in fact been redefined and reconceptualized many times and today bear only a cursory resemblance to their original incarnations.

The thirteen essays in this collection explore such themes as the emphasis on food science and home economics, the country life movement, the evolution of a public research system, the rise of aerospace engineering, the effects of the GI Bill, the teaching of military science, the sustainable agriculture movement, and the development of golf-turf science. Woven together, these expertly curated scenes, vignettes, and episodes powerfully illustrate these institutions’ ability to flex and adapt to serve the educational needs of an ever-changing American citizenry.

SERVICE

*

as

MANDATE

*

How American Land-Grant Universities Shaped the Modern World 1920–2015

edited by

ALAN I MARCUS

JANUARY 2016 6 X 9 / 368 PAGES ISBN: 978-0-8173-1888-8 / $59.95S CLOTH ISBN: 978-0-8173-8897-3 / $59.95S EBOOK

CONTRIBUTORS Amy Sue Bix / Hamilton Cravens / Donald A. Downs / Anne B. Effland / Valerie Grim / David L. Harmon / R. Douglas Hurt / Gwen Kay / Alan I Marcus / Erinn McComb / Robert C. McMath / Stephanie Statz / Melissa Walker

By dint of their mission to remedy social, economic, and technical problems; to improve standards of living; and to enhance quality of life, land-grant universities are destined and intended to be agents of change—a role that finds them at times both celebrated and hotly contested, even vilified. A readable and fascinating exploration of landgrant universities, Service as Mandate offers educators, policy makers, students, and the wider communities land-grant universities serve a vital exploration of these dynamic institutions.

Alan I Marcus is the editor of Science as Service: Establishing and Reformulating American Land-Grant Universities, 1865–1930 and the author or coauthor of several publications, including The Future Is Now: Science and Technology Policy in the United States Since 1950; Cancer from Beef: The DES Controversy, Federal Food Regulation, and Consumer Confidence in Modern America; and Technology in America: A Brief History.

ne

Xus

Alan I Marcus, Mark D. Hersey, and Alexandra E. Hui, series editors

www.uapress.ua.edu

fall 2015 |

17

RHETORIC / ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES / SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

The Everest Effect Nature, Culture, Ideology Elizabeth Mazzolini

The Everest Effect is an accessibly written cultural history of how nature, technology, and culture have worked together to turn Mount Everest into a powerful and ubiquitous physical measure of Western values.

In The Everest Effect Elizabeth Mazzolini traces a series of ideological shifts in the status of Mount Everest in Western culture over the past century to the present day and links these shifts to technologies used in climbs. By highlighting the intersections of technology and cultural ideologies at this site of environmental extremity, she shows both how nature is shaped—physically and symbolically—by cultural values and how extreme natural phenomena shape culture.

Nostalgia, myth, and legend are intrinsic features of the conversations that surround discussions of historic and contemporary climbs of Everest, and those conversations themselves reflect changing relations between nature, technology, and ideology. Each of the book’s chapters links a particular value with a particular technology to show how technology is implicated in Mount Everest’s cultural standing and commodification: authenticity is linked with supplemental oxygen; utility with portable foodstuffs; individuality with communication technology; extremity with visual technology; and ability with money. These technologies, Mazzolini argues, are persuasive—and increasingly so as they work more quickly and with more intimacy on our bodies and in our daily lives.

As Mazzolini argues, the ideologies that situate Mount Everest in Western culture today are not debased and descended from a more noble time; rather, the material of the mountain and its surroundings and the technologies deployed to encounter it all work more immediately with the bodies and minds of actual and “armchair” mountaineers than ever before. By moving the analysis of a natural site and phenomenon away from the traditional labor of production and toward the symbolic labor of affective attachment, The Everest Effect shows that the body and nature have helped constitute the capitalization that is usually characterized as taking over Everest.

Elizabeth Mazzolini is an assistant professor of English at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.

nature, culture, ideology

elizabeth mazzolini

OCTOBER 6 X 9 / 176 PAGES / 1 B&W ILLUSTRATION ISBN: 978-0-8173-1893-2 / $39.95S CLOTH ISBN: 978-0-8173-8912-3 / $39.95S EBOOK

“From The Daily Show’s quip that Mount Everest is ‘the Mount Everest of mountains’ to the copious amount of waste climbers regularly leave behind, Mazzolini guides us on a transhistorical trek of Mount Everest as a significant rhetorical place to reckon with nationalism and capitalist consumption. Do not expect this singular journey of resilience to invite another fantasy of ascent, mastery, and bravado. Instead, if you are willing to follow her lead, Mazzolini will show you environmental, material feminist, transgendered, and disability toeholds—of oxygen, food, telegraphs, IMAX, and money—that will stretch your perspective.”

–Phaedra C. Pezzullo, author of Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Travel, Pollution, and Environmental Justice “The chief strength of this excellent study is its use of a single, widely known object—Mount Everest—as the focal point for a multifaceted analysis of the relationship between the human and the natural world.”

—William A. Gleason, author Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature

John Louis Lucaites, series editor 18

| fall 2015

www.uapress.ua.edu

EDUCATION / HISTORY

Bringing Montessori to America S. S. McClure, Maria Montessori, and the Campaign to Publicize Montessori Education Gerald L. Gutek and Patricia A. Gutek Bringing Montessori to America tells the little-known story of the collaboration and clash between the indominatable educator Maria Montessori and the American publisher S. S. McClure over the launch of Montessori education in the United States.

Bringing Montessori to America traces in engrossing detail one of the most fascinating partnerships in the history of American education— that between Maria Montessori and S. S. McClure, from their first meeting in 1910 until their final acrimonious dispute in 1915.

Montessori first entered the world stage in 1906 as the innovator of a revolutionary teaching method that creates an environment where children learn at their own pace and initiate skills like reading and writing in a spontaneous way. As her school in Rome attracted attention, curiosity, and followers, Montessori recruited disciples whom she immersed in a rigorous and detailed teacher-training regimen of her own creation.

McClure was an Irish-born media baron of America’s Gilded Age, best known as the founder and publisher of McClure’s Magazine. Against the backdrop of Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose insurgency, the brilliant and mercurial McClure used his flagship publication as a vehicle to advance Progressive Party causes. After meeting in 1910, McClure and Montessori embarked on a five-year collaboration to introduce Montessori’s innovative teaching style in the United States.

Gerald and Patricia Gutek trace the dramatic arc of the partnership between the Italian teacher and American publisher united by a vision of educational change in the United States. After her triumphal lecture tour in 1913, Montessori, secure in her trust of her American partner, gave McClure her power of attorney and returned to Italy. The surge in popularity of Montessori education in America, however, deeply concerned Montessori, who had heretofore exerted total control over her method, apparatus, schools, and teacher training. The American entrepreneurial spirit, along with a desire to disseminate the Montessori Method quickly, led to major conflicts between the Italian educator and American businesspeople, particularly McClure. Feeling betrayed, Montessori ended her relationship with her erstwhile collaborator.

Gutek and Gutek describe the fascinating story of this first wave of Montessori education in the United States, which did not sustain itself during Montessori’s lifetime. It would not be until the 1950s that Montessori education was revived with the successful establishment of Montessori academies throughout the United States.

) ) ) ) ) BR I NGI NG S SOR I ) MONA TE M E R ICA ) ß ) ) to

S. S. M c c lure , M aria M onteSSori ,

and the Campaign to Publicize Montessori Education

GERALD L. GUTEK & PATRICIA A. GUTEK

FEBRUARY 2016 6 X 9 / 328 PAGES / 7 B&W ILLUSTRATIONS ISBN: 978-0-8173-1897-0 / $59.95S CLOTH ISBN: 978-0-8173-8931-4 / $59.95S EBOOK

“Bringing Montessori to America is one of the first and perhaps only treatments of the relationship between S. S. McClure and Maria Montessori—a relationship that, had it not gone awry, could have institutionalized Montessori’s promising ‘auto-education’ theory in the United States. This study should be a staple and case study for communications departments across the United States.”

—Karen L. Riley, author of Schools Behind Barbed Wire: The Untold Story of Wartime Internment and the Children of Arrested Enemy Aliens “The Guteks provide a unique view of McClure’s and Montessori’s power struggle over how to present Montessori’s method, leading to a better understanding of the split between the American Montessori Society and the Association Montessori Internationale.

Scholarly without being dense, this engaging book will appeal to a wide range of readers.”

—Martha May Tevis, professor, Department of Education at the University of Texas–Pan American

Gerald L. Gutek is a professor emeritus of education at Loyola University Chicago, where he was also the dean of the School of Education.

He is the author of Education and Schooling in America and The Montessori Method: The Origins of an Educational Innovation. Patricia A. Gutek is the coauthor with Gerald L. Gutek of seven books, including Visiting Utopian Communities: A Guide to the Shakers, Moravians, and Others.

www.uapress.ua.edu

fall 2015 |

19

FLORIDA / SOUTHERN HISTORY / POLITICAL SCIENCE

The Politics of Trust

Reubin Askew and Florida in the 1970s Gordon E. Harvey

The Politics of Trust: Reubin Askew and Florida in the 1970s recounts the extraordinary political career of Reubin Askew, governor of Florida from 1971 to 1979, under whose unorthodox leadership Florida undertook numerous successful reform initiatives.

Florida governor Reubin Askew memorably characterized a leader as “someone who cares enough to tell the people not merely what they want to hear, but what they need to know.” It was a surprising statement for a contemporary politician to make, and, more surprising still, it worked. In The Politics of Trust: Reubin Askew and Florida in the 1970s, Gordon E. Harvey traces the life and career of the man whose public service many still recall as “the Golden Age” of Florida politics.

Askew rose to power on a wave of “New South” leadership that hoped to advance the Democratic Party beyond the intransigent torpor of southern politics since the Civil War. He hoped to replace appeals to white supremacy with a vision of a more diverse and inclusive party.

Following his election in Florida, other New South leaders such as Georgia’s Jimmy Carter, Arkansas’s Dale Bumpers, and South Carolina’s John C. West all came to power.

Audacious and gifted, Askew was one of six children raised by a single mother in Pensacola. As he worked his way up through the ranks of the state legislature, few in Florida except his constituents knew his name when he challenged Republic incumbent Claude R. Kirk Jr. on a populist platform promising higher corporate taxes. When he won, he inaugurated a series of reforms, including a new 5 percent corporate income tax; lower consumer, property, and school taxes; a review of penal statutes; environmental protections; higher welfare benefits; and workers’ compensation to previously uncovered migrant laborers.

Touting honesty, candor, and transparency, Askew dubbed his administration “government in the sunshine.” Harvey demonstrates that Askew’s success was not in spite of his penchant for bold, sometimes unpopular stances, but rather because his mix of unvarnished candor, sober ethics, and religious faith won the trust of the diverse peoples of his state.

Gordon E. Harvey is the author of A Question of Justice: New South Governors and Education, 1968–1976 and coeditor of History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie: Scholarship, Activism, and Wayne Flynt in the Modern South.

NOVEMBER 6 X 9 / 224 PAGES ISBN: 978-0-8173-1882-6 / $39.95S CLOTH ISBN: 978-0-8173-8888-1 / $39.95S EBOOK

“An artful biography of Florida’s greatest governor, The Politics of Trust tells the story of Florida’s tumultuous transformation from a bulwark of the Old Confederacy into the large, urban, cosmopolitan state of today. Every chapter is a great case study of a major initiative during the Askew Administration, with lessons in how honest, principled leadership can overcome entrenched interests while healing, or at least moderating, divisions of race and class.”

—Lance deHaven-Smith, coauthor of Government in the Sunshine State: Florida Since Statehood and Florida’s Megatrends: Critical Issues in Florida “The 1970s was a significant decade in Florida’s politics. Governor Reubin Askew attempted to introduce measures to cope with growth pressures, achieve more tax equity, and bring about a more ‘open government.’ Gordon E. Harvey has produced a fine analysis of Askew’s initiatives, of the politics of reform, and of the changes that impacted Florida.”

—Robert Kerstein, author of Key West on the Edge: Inventing the Conch Republic

Kari Frederickson and Glenn Feldman, series editors 20

| fall 2015

www.uapress.ua.edu

HISTORY / CIVIL WAR / ALABAMA

Civil War Alabama Christopher Lyle McIlwain Sr. Foreword by G. Ward Hubbs

In fascinating detail, Civil War Alabama reveals the forgotten breadth of political opinions and loyalties among white Alabamians during the antebellum period. The book offers a major reevaluation of Alabama’s secession crisis and path to war and destruction.

Winner of the 2015 McMillan Prize Christopher McIlwain’s Civil War Alabama is a landmark book that sheds invigorating new light on the causes, the course, and the outcomes in Alabama of the nation’s greatest drama and trauma. Based on twenty years of exhaustive research that draws on a vast trove of primary sources such as letters, newspapers, and personal journals, Civil War Alabama presents compelling new explanations for how Alabama’s white citizens came to take up arms against the federal government.

A fledgling state at only forty years old, Alabama approached the 1860s with expanding populations of both whites and black slaves. They were locked together in a powerful yet fragile economic engine that produced and concentrated titanic wealth in the hands of a white elite.

Perceiving themselves trapped between a mass of disenfranchised black slaves and the industrializing and increasingly abolitionist North, white Alabamians were led into secession and war by a charismatic cohort who claimed the imprimatur of biblical scripture, romanticized traditions of chivalry, and the military mantle of the American Revolution.

And yet, Alabama’s white citizens were not a monolith of one mind.

McIlwain dispels the received wisdom of a white citizenry united behind a cadre of patriarchs and patriots. Providing a fresh and insightful synthesis of military events, economic factors such as inflation and shortages, politics and elections, the pivotal role of the legal profession, and the influence of the press, McIlwain’s Civil War Alabama illuminates the fissiparous state of white, antebellum Alabamians divided by class, geography, financial interests, and political loyalties.

Vital and compelling, Civil War Alabama will take its place among the definitive books about Alabama’s doomed Confederate experiment and legacy. Although he rigorously dismantles idealized myths about the South’s “Lost Cause,” McIlwain restores for contemporary readers the fervent struggles between Alabamians over their response to the epic crisis of their times.

FEBRUARY 2016 6 X 9 / 448 PAGES / 29 B&W ILLUSTRATIONS, INCLUDING 10 MAPS ISBN: 978-0-8173-1894-9 / $59.95S CLOTH ISBN: 978-0-8173-8924-6 / $59.95S EBOOK

“Civil War Alabama is one of the most interesting and provocative studies of a Confederate state that has appeared in recent years.

McIlwain presents an impressive amount of fresh research and information that advances a number of striking and controversial interpretations.”

—George C. Rable, author of God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War “McIlwain has produced an engaging, often witty, and always informative study of the development of Reconstructionist thought in Alabama. This is a topic that has only recently garnered serious attention, and so McIlwain stands as one of its pioneers.”

—Ben H. Severance, author of Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Alabama in the Civil War and Tennessee’s Radical Army: The State Guard and Its Role in Reconstruction, 1867–1869

Christopher Lyle McIlwain Sr. is an attorney in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who has spent the last twenty-five years researching nineteenth-century Alabama, focusing particularly on law, politics, and the Civil War. His article “United States District Judge Richard Busteed and the Alabama Klan Trials of 1872” appeared in the Alabama Review.

www.uapress.ua.edu

fall 2015 |

21

WORLD WAR II / MILITARY HISTORY / CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The Battle over Peleliu Islander, Japanese, and American Memories of War Stephen C. Murray An ethnographic and historical account of the commercial, cultural, and military encroachment by Japan and the United States on the island nation of Palau, and specifically Peleliu Island, The Battle over Peleliu focuses on the battle that devastated Peleliu during World War II.

Th e B a t t l e ov er Peleliu Islander, Japanese, and American

Memories of War

The expansionist Japanese empire annexed the inhabited archipelago of Palau in 1914. The airbase built on Peleliu Island became a target for attack by the United States in World War II. The Battle over Peleliu offers an ethnographic study of how Palau and Peleliu were transformed by warring great powers and further explores how their conflict is remembered differently by the three peoples who shared that experience.

Author Stephen C. Murray uses oral histories from Peleliu’s elders to reconstruct the island’s prewar way of life, offering a fascinating explanation of the role of land and place in island culture. To Palauans, history is conceived geographically, not chronologically. Land and landmarks are both the substance of history and the mnemonic triggers that recall the past. Murray then offers a detailed account of the 1944 US invasion against entrenched Japanese forces on Peleliu, a seventy-four-day campaign that razed villages, farms, ancestral cemeteries, beaches, and forests, and with them, many of the key nodes of memory and identity.

Murray also explores how Islanders’ memories of the battle as shattering their way of life differ radically from the ways Japanese and Americans remember the engagement in their histories, memoirs, fiction, monuments, and tours of Peleliu. Determination to retrieve the remains of 11,000 Japanese soldiers from the caves of Peleliu has driven high-profile civic groups from across the Japanese political spectrum to the island. Contemporary Japan continues to debate pacifist, rightwing apologist, and other interpretations of its aggression in Asia and the Pacific. These disputes are exported to Peleliu, and subtly frame how Japanese commemoration portrays the battle in stone and ritual.

Americans, victors in the battle, return to the archipelago in far fewer numbers. For them, the conflict remains controversial but is most often submerged into the narrative of “the good war.”

The Battle over Peleliu is a study of public memory, and the ways three peoples swept up in conflict struggle to create a common understanding of the tragedy they share.

Stephen C. Murray received his PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2006. He and his wife currently operate a historic preservation consulting firm, Murray & Murray Associates, in Goleta, California.

Stephen C. Murray

FEBRUARY 2016 6 X 9 / 296 PAGES / 21 B&W ILLUSTRATIONS, INCLUDING 6 MAPS ISBN: 978-0-8173-1884-0 / $59.95S CLOTH ISBN: 978-0-8173-8889-8 / $59.95S EBOOK

“In the field of Pacific Island ethnography, and more particularly studies of Palauan society, culture, and history, this book has no equal. Murray’s focus on the people of the island of Peleliu and their relationship to the bloody battle which took place there in 1944 is particularly illuminating. Also noteworthy are his very lucid sketch of Palauan social structure and his astute analysis of the differential impact of Japanese and US colonialism on that social structure.”

—Peter W. Black, coeditor Conflict Resolution: Cross-Cultural Perspectives “Among the book manuscripts I have had the honor to review, no other has impressed, inspired, and touched me as deeply as this one. For those of us trying hard to expand world history to include a focus on the Pacific, this book will be a welcome aid to refocus students’ geographical perceptions of history and challenge received wisdom. Murray’s story is at once academically grounded, intellectually integer, practically informed, and personally engaged—a combination that cannot fail to attract considerable attention.”

—Franziska Seraphim, author of War, Memory, and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005

War, Memory, and Culture Steven Trout, series editor 22

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www.uapress.ua.edu

ARCHAEOLOGY / CARIBBEAN STUDIES / ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Sugar Cane Capitalism and Environmental Transformation An Archaeology of Colonial Nevis, West Indies Marco G. Meniketti

MARCO G. MENIKETTI

SUGAR CANE CAPITALISM AND

ENVIRONMENTAL

TRANSFORMATION An Archaeology of Colonial Nevis, West Indies

Sugar Cane Capitalism and Environmental Transformation offers a rare exploration of the substantial environmental impact of capitalist sugar agriculture, colonial settlement, and the Atlantic slave trade on the Caribbean island of Nevis.

In this deeply researched and multifaceted study, Marco G. Meniketti demonstrates how the landscape of the small Caribbean island of Nevis preserves and reveals artifacts and evidence of the highly complex and interrelated seventeenth- to nineteenth-century “Atlantic Economy,” comprising early capitalist sugar production, the African slave trade, and European settlement.

Sugar Cane Capitalism and Environmental Transformation is based on twelve seasons of meticulous archaeological field work and documentary research. Although Nevis was once a bustling hub of the British colonial project, the emigration of emancipated slaves and abandonment by European planters left large swathes of Nevis vacant.

Reclaimed by forests and undisturbed by later waves of economic development, the island—dotted with fascinating ruins, debris from the sugar industry, windmills, chimneys, and multistoried great house— provided Meniketti with an ideal subject for archaeological inquiry.

Through intensive archaeological and landscape surveys of multiple key plantation sites, Meniketti traces the development of Nevis from its initial European settlement in 1627 to its central role as a British mercantile hub and a laboratory and prototype of capitalist sugar cultivation. His nuanced analysis explains the backdrop of European political and economic rivalries, of which the colonial agro-industrial enterprises were the physical manifestations, and makes telling comparisons with Dutch and French archaeological sites. The work also compares and contrasts the adoption of capitalist modes of sugar production and socialization at wealthy and middling plantation sites.

Supported with a wealth of photos, tables, and maps, Sugar Cane Capitalism and Environmental Transformation offers a vital case study of one island whose environment and archaeological record illuminates the complex webs of Atlantic history.

Marco G. Meniketti is an associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University and the director of the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Caribbean Studies.

JANUARY 2016 6 X 9 / 296 PAGES / 75 B&W ILLUSTRATIONS / 2 TABLES ISBN: 978-0-8173-1891-8 / $59.95S CLOTH ISBN: 978-0-8173-8910-9 / $59.95S EBOOK

“Sugar Cane Capitalism and Environmental Transformation is a long-overdue and highly welcomed addition to the existing body of literature on Caribbean historical archaeology. The work provides the specific case study of Nevis within the context of the region, integrating well the existing body of literature in British initiatives in the Eastern Caribbean plantocracy. The book is also one of the very few to address the environmental impact of cane agriculture on the landscape. Meniketti’s study makes a highly significant and original contribution, as it marks an important shift in current approaches to the historical archaeology of plantations in the Caribbean region.”

—Georgia L. Fox, author of The Archaeology of Smoking and Tobacco “There is a fair amount of scholarship dealing with the colonial Caribbean as a laboratory of capitalistic enterprise, but Meniketti’s study uniquely connects these views to the archaeological record of an individual island. This book will assume an important benchmark for comparative studies done elsewhere.”

—Gerald F. Schroedl, professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Caribbean Archaeology and Ethnohistory Antonio Curet, series editor

www.uapress.ua.edu

fall 2015 |

23

LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES / POLITICAL SCIENCE

Fighting Monsters in the Abyss The Second Administration of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, 2006–2010 Harvey F. Kline Fighting Monsters in the Abyss studies the complex constraints and trade-offs the second administration of Colombian President Uribe (2006–2010) encountered as it attempted to resolve that nation’s violent Marxist insurrection and to have a more efficient judicial system.

Fighting Monsters in the Abyss offers a penetrating analysis of the efforts by the second administration of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2006–2010) to resolve a decades-long Marxist insurgency in one of Latin America’s most important nations. Continuing work from his prior books about earlier Colombian presidents and yet written as a standalone study, Colombia expert Harvey F. Kline illuminates the surprising successes and setbacks in Uribe’s response to this existential threat.

In State Building and Conflict Resolution in Colombia, 1986–1994, Kline documented and explained the limited successes of Presidents Virgilio Barco and César Gaviria in putting down the revolutionaries while also confronting challenges from drug dealers and paramilitary groups. The following president Andrés Pastrana then boldly changed course and attempted resolution through negotiations, an effort whose failure Kline examines in Chronicle of a Failure Foretold. In his third book, Showing Teeth to the Dragons, Kline shows how in his first term President Álvaro Uribe Vélez more successfully quelled the insurrection through a combination of negotiated demobilization of paramilitary groups and using US backing to mount more effective military campaigns.

Kline opens Fighting Monsters in the Abyss with a recap of Colombia’s complex political history, the development of Marxist rebels and paramilitary groups and their respective relationships to the narcotics trade, and the attempts of successive Colombian presidents to resolve the crisis. Kline next examines the ability of the Colombian government to reimpose rule in rebel-controlled territories as well as the challenges of administering justice. He recounts the difficulties in the enforcement of the landmark Law of Justice and Peace as well as two significant government scandals, that of the “false positives” (“falsos positivos”) in which innocent civilians were killed by the military to inflate the body counts of dead insurgents and a second scandal related to illegal wiretapping.

In tracing Uribe’s choices, strategies, successes, and failures, Kline also uses the example of Colombia to explore a dimension quite unique in the literature about state building: what happens when some members of a government resort to breaking rules or betraying their societies’ values in well-intentioned efforts to build a stronger state?

Harvey F. Kline is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Alabama. He is the author of State Building and Conflict Resolution in Colombia, 1986–1994; Chronicle of a Failure Foretold: The Peace Process of Colombian President Andrés Pastrana; and Showing Teeth to the Dragons: State-Building by Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, 2002–2006.

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Fighting Monsters in the Abyss

the second Administration of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez 2006–2010

hArVey F. kline

DECEMBER 6 X 9 / 256 PAGES / 1 MAP ISBN: 978-0-8173-1880-2 / $54.95S CLOTH ISBN: 978-0-8173-8884-3 / $54.95S EBOOK

“Fighting Monsters in the Abyss makes an original and significant contribution to the field of Latin American politics. Kline’s research is impressive. Building on his august wealth of knowledge of Colombia, this study offers new data and insights.”

—Cynthia McClintock, author of Revolutionary Movements in Latin America: El Salvador’s FMLN and Peru’s Shining Path and coauthor of The United States and Peru: Cooperation—At A Cost “Álvaro Uribe’s second term was a time of notable improvements in security. It was also a time of mounting scandals that shook Colombia’s institutions, and of paralyzing discord between the executive and judicial branches. Understanding this period is essential to understanding the hopeful yet deeply polarized political moment Colombia is experiencing today. Fighting Monsters in the Abyss captures the complexity of the 2006 to 2010 period in a way that Álvaro Uribe’s many detractors and hero-worshippers rarely do. Harvey Kline’s painstaking research allows him to arrive at honest, balanced conclusions, which make this an important book.”

—Adam Isacson, author of Just the Facts: A Civilian’s Guide to US Defense and Security Assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean

www.uapress.ua.edu

THEATRE / HISTORY

Theatre History Studies 2015, Volume 34 Edited by Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix The 2015 volume of Theatre History Studies presents a collection of five critical essays examining the intersection of theatre studies and historiography as well as twenty-five book reviews highlighting recent scholarship in this thriving field.

Volume 34 of Theatre History Studies revisits the foundations of theatre, explores the boundaries and definitions of theatre, and illuminates how writing about the history of theatre is itself a form of historiography.

The five essays are arranged chronologically, starting with Alan Sikes’s discussion of the Abydos Passion Play. Sikes challenges the long-held interpretation of that ritualized annual reenactment of the death, dismemberment, and return to life of Egyptian god-king Osiris as the world’s first recorded dramatic production. In analyzing the “Passion Play”—Sikes argues the term is not apt—he applies semiotic theory using “sign and referent” to revise general concepts of mimesis, and in so doing clarifies the fundamental answer to the question, “What is theatre?”

In a pair of essays, Andrew Gibb and Nicole Berkin both explore theatre during America’s antebellum period. Gibb examines minstrelsy in antebellum California, exploding narrow definitions of minstrelsy as a primarily Eastern phenomenon and one reflecting a stark interaction of two races. Following the story of Jewish African Caribbean immigrant William Alexander Leidesdorff, Gibb demonstrates that national forms are always affected by their local productions and audiences. Berkin’s essay focuses on the struggles over cultural power that took place between popular entertainers and theatre managers. She examines how both parties used touring strategically to engage with antebellum notions of deception and fraud.

DECEMBER 6 X 9 / 320 PAGES / 1 B&W ILLUSTRATION ISBN: 978-0-8173-7109-8 / $29.95S PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-8948-2 / $29.95S EBOOK

CONTRIBUTORS Alan Sikes / Andrew Gibb / Nicole Berkin / Megan E. Geigner / Heidi L. Nees

The last two essays, by Megan Geigner and Heide Nees, present findings from performance studies which, by examining a wide array of dramatic and performative texts, expands the interdisciplinary foundations of theatre history studies. This fascinating collection is rounded out by an expanded selection of insightful reviews of recent literature in the area.

Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix is the dean of the College of Creative Arts and a professor of theatre at Miami University in Ohio. She is the author of Wearing the Breeches: Gender on the Antebellum Stage and the forthcoming Upon a Conspicuous Stage: Performance and the Politics of Slavery, 1850–1861, in addition to articles and book reviews published in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre History Studies, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.

www.uapress.ua.edu

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THEATRE / HISTORY

Theatre Symposium, Volume 23 Theatre and Youth

Edited by David S. Thompson

The essays in volume 23 of Theatre Symposium offer a rich exploration of depictions of youth in works of theatre as well as the role youth play in the creation and performance of drama.

The curtain rises on Theatre and Youth, volume 23 of Theatre Symposium with keynote reflections by Suzan Zeder, the distinguished playwright of theatre for youth, and presents eleven original essays about theatre’s reflections of youth and the role of young people in making and performing theatre.

The first set of essays draws from robustly diverse sources: the work of Frank Wedekind in nineteenth-century Germany, Peter Pan’s several stage incarnations, Evgeny Shvarts’s antitotalitarian plays in Soviet Russia, and Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, whose depictions of childhood comment on both the classical period as well as Marlowe’s own Elizabethan age.

The second part of the collection explores and illustrates how youth participate in theatre, the cognitive benefits youth reap from theatre practice, and the ameliorating power of theatre to help at-risk youth.

These essays show fascinating and valuable case studies of, for example, theatre employed in geography curricula to strengthen spatial thinking, theatre as an antidote to youth delinquency, and theatre teaching Latinos in the south strategies for coping in a multilingual world.

Rounding out this exemplary collection are a pair of essays that survey the state of the art, the significance of theatre-for-youth programming choices, and the shifting attitudes young Americans are bringing to the discipline. Eclectic and vital, this expertly curated collection will be of interest to educators and theatre professionals alike.

OCTOBER 6 X 9 / 144 PAGES / 2 B&W ILLUSTRATIONS ISBN: 978-0-8173-7010-7 / $29.95S PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-8913-0 / $29.95S EBOOK

CONTRIBUTORS Becky Becker / Camille Bryant / Jerry Daday / Andrea Dawn Frazier / Carol Jordan / Edward Journey / Aaron L. Kelly / Ashley Laverty / Sarah McCarroll / Beth Murray / Irania Mac¡as Patterson / Christopher Peck / Amanda Rees / Spencer Salas / David S. Thompson / Kathryn Rebecca Van Winkle / Seth Wilson / Suzan Zeder

David S. Thompson is the Annie Louise Harrison Waterman Professor of Theatre and chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at Agnes Scott College. Thompson’s articles and commentaries have appeared in theatrical publications, online sources, and a variety of leading newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Sun, and Atlanta JournalConstitution.

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| fall 2015

www.uapress.ua.edu

NEW IN PAPER

Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815

Andrew Jackson, the Creek War, and the Battle of New Orleans Tom Kanon

TO M KA N O N

TENNESSEANS AT WAR 1812 –1815 A N D R E W J AC K S O N , T H E C R E E K WA R ,

“Like the Korean War, the War of 1812 has often been overlooked by historians and the general public. Sometimes referred to as the ‘Second War of Independence,’ the conflict served for many Americans (as well as the British) as an affirmation of the young nation’s ability to defend itself. No battle in the War of 1812 was more memorable than Andrew Jackson’s victory in New Orleans, fought on January 8, 1815, weeks after the Treaty of Ghent had officially ended the war. Tom Kanon’s Tennesseans at War reconstructs the Southern theater of the conflict, culminating in Jackson’s triumph, focusing on the role Tennessean soldiers and politicians played in the war and its tremendous impact on the history of the state.”

—Tennessee Libraries “Kanon’s work demonstrates convincingly why Tennessee carries the moniker ‘Volunteer State.’ Tennesseans at War could easily be utilized as a guide while visiting the Creek War battle fields in Alabama and battlefields of New Orleans with first-hand accounts providing an image of the personal sacrifice experienced by those involved.”

—Montgomery Advertiser

Split-Gut Song

Jean Toomer and the Poetics of Modernity

A N D T H E B AT T L E O F N E W O R L E A N S

AUGUST 6 X 9 / 272 PAGES / 15 B&W ILLUSTRATIONS, INCLUDING 3 MAPS ISBN: 978-0-8173-5849-5 / $24.95S PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-8752-5 / $24.95 EBOOK

Split-Gut Song jean toomer and the poetics of modernity

Karen Jackson Ford

“An insightful study of the radicalized poetics of modernity, Split-Gut Song ultimately returns its readers to Toomer’s poems and the conditions in which they were (or were not) written. In this it serves us very well indeed.”

—Modernism/modernity “Ford’s strength as a critic lies in her elegant and often brilliant readings of [Toomer’s] poetry. Her flights incorporate contemporary criticism without ever losing sight of her thesis.”

—American Literature

karen Jackson Ford

SEPTEMBER 6 X 9 / 220 PAGES ISBN: 978-0-8173-5846-4 / $29.95S PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-8961-1 / $29.95 EBOOK

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NEW IN PAPER

Avenues of Faith

Shaping the Urban Religious Culture of Richmond, Virginia, 1900–1929 Samuel C. Shepherd Jr. “[Avenues of Faith] is important for several reasons. First, it provides a detailed account of the complex role of Protestantism in a southern city as the region was beginning to urbanize, adding to the many portraits we already have of northern urban Protestantism. Second, in his fine chapter on the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, Shepherd undermines the assumption that southerners consistently supported fundamentalism, demonstrating that Richmond Protestants rejected the extremes of fundamentalism in favor of theological diversity, practical evangelism, and religious civility. Third, Shepherd candidly chronicles the mixed, but ultimately timid, response of Richmond’s white Protestants to the issue of race relations.”

—Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture SEPTEMBER 6.125 X 9.25 / 428 PAGES / 14 B&W ILLUSTRATIONS ISBN: 978-0-8173-5847-1 / $39.95S PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-1358-6 / $39.95S EBOOK

“Shepherd’s solid work is a major contribution to the burgeoning field of southern religious history and is particularly welcome for its attention to progressivism in the urban South.”

—American Historical Review Religion and American Culture

Banning Queer Blood

Banning Queer Blood

Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance

Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance

Jeffrey A. Bennett “In Banning Queer Blood, Jeffrey Bennett succeeds marvelously in narrating the conundrum of ‘men who have sex with men’ (MSM), who at work, in social life, and in patriotic political talk are collectively hailed into the sacrificing ritual of blood donation, yet who are also wholly dispermitted from and thus perpetually fail this ritual of citizenship.

What keeps in place a policy that is unevenly supported by current scientific capabilities and undermined by current safety procedures at blood donation centers?”

—Rhetoric & Public Affairs Jeffrey A. Bennett

OCTOBER 6 X 9 / 208 PAGES ISBN: 978-0-8173-5851-8 / $29.95S PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-8963-5 / $29.95S EBOOK

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“Bennett shows how the rhetorical power of ‘blood’ as a metaphor of national belonging outweighs epidemiological knowledge about blood. Bennett’s important contribution challenges the neat divide between public health and civil rights.”

—Choice Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique

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NEW IN PAPER

Plague Among Plague the among Magnolias

Plague among the magnolias

the magnolias The 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Mississippi Deanne Stephens Nuwer is on the faculty in the Department of History, University of Southern Mississippi.

The 1878 Yellow Fever epidemic in mississippi deanne sTephens nuwer

The 1878 Yellow Fever epidemic in mississippi

Deanne Stephens Nuwer consequences of the 1878 yellow fever epidemic in mississippi. a mild winter, a long spring, and a torrid summer produced

“Nuwer’s study provides important insight into the interrelatedness of political history and public health care and further reminds us that this connection did not begin in the twentieth, or twenty-first, century.”

—Journal of Mississippi History conditions favoring the Aedes aegypti mosquito and its spread of fever. in late July, new orleans newspapers reported the epidemic, and upriver officials established checkpoints; but efforts at quarantine came too late.

“Nuwer brings to the story a detailed, thick description of events in one state, solidly based in archival sources and local newspaper accounts.

The ways in which life was completely disrupted become clear in the revelations of letters and diaries. It was not only sickness and death that wrecked the commonplace, but a lack of normal commodities such as food and clothing as trading stopped, the pervasive fear of neighbor and stranger as potential carriers of disease, and the conflicting desires to serve others and save oneself. Few books have depicted this disruption and panic as clearly as Nuwer’s account.”

—Bulletin of the History of Medicine The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 www.uapress.ua.edu ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-1653-2 ISBN-10: 0-8173-1653-1

children, in Memphis, to an overworked physician, to

hasten to their homes. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 28, 1878.

Jacket design by Todd Lape / Lape Designs

Plague among the magnolias

The author explores the social, political, racial, and economic

Front Cover Illustration: Agonizing appeal of women and

alabama

Ye sis de an th O of to tra 7p th su wi

an tie sp ha fro ge

ne re ep te in wa to na am so

deanne sTephens nuwer

OCTOBER 6 X 9 / 206 PAGES / 1 MAP / 5 TABLES ISBN: 978-0-8173-5850-1 / $29.95S PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-8244-5 / $29.95S EBOOK

Education for Liberation

The American Missionary Association and African Americans, 1890 to the Civil Rights Movement Joe M. Richardson and Maxine D. Jones “Based on extensive research in the archives at the Amistad Research Center at Tulane, which houses the AMA [American Missionary Association] papers, and primarily factual and informative rather than interpretive, this work will be of great value as a reference for all scholars concerned with black education in the South through the first half of the twentieth century. Particularly noteworthy is the coverage of the tenure of Frederick Brownlee, head of the AMA from 1920 to 1950, who brought the organization out of an era of paternalism into strong support for civil equality.”

—Choice “[Richardson and Jones’] collaborative effort here yields a rich and fascinating portrait of the people who made the American Missionary Association into one of the most long-lived and radical opponents of racism in the modernizing South.”

—Journal of Southern History

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Th

nuwer

OCTOBER 6 X 9 / 310 PAGES / 10 B&W ILLUSTRATIONS ISBN: 978-0-8173-5848-8 / $34.95S PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-8245-2 / $34.95S EBOOK

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NEW IN PAPER

William March

An Annotated Checklist Roy S. Simmonds Providing an exhaustive compendium of publications by and citations about Alabama-born writer William March, William March: An Annotated Checklist offers an invaluable resource that traces in meticulous detail the arc of March’s writing, the popular and critical reception of his books and novels, and scholarship and criticism about March and his oeuvre.

This deeply researched reference includes both primary materials, an exhaustive checklist of the forms and editions of each of March’s works, and secondary materials, which include plays and films adapted from March’s writing, biographical and critical articles, doctoral dissertations, and contemporary reviews of March’s work.

OCTOBER 6.125 X 9.25 / 216 PAGES ISBN: 978-0-8173-5852-5 / $29.95S PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-8964-2 / $29.95S EBOOK

The reissue in 2015 of the novels in his Pearl County series—Come in at the Door, The Tallons, and The Looking-Glass—is part of a fresh wave of interest in March, one of the most influential American writers from the mid-1930s until his death in 1954.

In Service to American Pharmacy

The Professional Life of William Procter Jr. Gregory J. Higby “Professor Higby successfully brings together the professional career of William Procter and the emergence of American pharmacy as a profession.”

—Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography

NOVEMBER 6 X 9 / 288 PAGES / 18 B&W ILLUSTRATIONS ISBN: 978-0-8173-5856-3 / $34.95S PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-8968-0 / $34.95S EBOOK

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“A masterful professional biography and a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of American pharmacy. . . . Higby provides an exegesis of Procter’s professional life, placing him within the context of the development of American pharmacy during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. He portrays Procter as part of an urban elite that sought to raise American pharmacy from a common trade to a profession respected by physicians and the public alike.”

—Stuart Galishoff, author of Safeguarding the Public Health: Newark, 1895–1918 History of Science and Technology

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NEW IN PAPER

Elite Oral History Discourse A Study of Cooperation and Coherence Eva M. McMahan Foreword by Ronald J. Grele

“Scholars and practitioners will welcome Eva McMahan’s work analyzing the oral history interview as a communicative event. The oral history interview is defined as a conversation with a person whose life experience is deemed memorable. The central focus in this unique book is how the communicative performances of interviewer and interviewee jointly influence the product of the interview—the oral text.”

—Communication Quarterly “There is much that is commendable about Elite Oral History Discourse.

Through a thought-provoking dissection of the oral history interview, the book reveals a great deal of the structure and underlying dynamics of that rewarding, but occasionally frustrating, exercise in documenting the past. It is a convincing contribution to a growing body of work on the context and meaning of communication in oral history, and it should have a positive effect on the interviewing styles of those who read it.”

—Indiana Magazine of History Studies in Rhetoric and Communication

NOVEMBER 6 X 9 / 192 PAGES ISBN: 978-0-8173-5854-9 / $29.95S PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-8966-6 / $29.95S EBOOK

Haunted Presence

The Numinous in Gothic Fiction S. L. Varnado

“. . . Haunted Presence is stimulating, and the author deserves a sincere compliment for exceptionally clear, graceful, and colorful writing.”

—Nineteenth-Century Literature “In [Varnado’s] hands, the Gothic tale and horror story are shown to have significance beyond the entertainment purpose of both genres.

They are forms in which serious readers may take legitimate interest and pleasure.”

—Modern Fiction Studies

NOVEMBER 5.5 X 8.5 / 176 PAGES ISBN: 978-0-8173-5855-6 / $24.95S PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-8967-3 / $24.95S EBOOK

www.uapress.ua.edu

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AVAILABLE AGAIN

St. Elmo

Or, Saved at Last

St. Elmo

Or, Saved at Last s augusta jane evans

With an Introduction by

Diane Roberts

Augusta Jane Evans With an Introduction by Diane Roberts

St. Elmo was the most famed and beloved novel by Augusta Jane Evans, a June 2015 inductee into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. First published in 1866, Evans’s rich tale of the relationship between the dashing and worldly St. Elmo and Edna Earl, an exemplar of virtuous Southern womanhood, sold over a million copies in four months and became one of the nineteenth century’s most influential novels.

This edition includes an introduction by Evans scholar Diane Roberts about the enduring relevance and legacy of St. Elmo as a work of literature as well as a reflection of gender roles and the seismic societal changes taking place in the United States in the aftermath of the Civil War.

DECEMBER 6 X 9.25 / 392 PAGES / 2 B&W ILLUSTRATIONS ISBN: 978-0-8173-0577-2 / $24.95T PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-8974-1 / $24.95T EBOOK

SIGNS AND SYMBOLS IN CHAUCER’S POETRY EDITED BY

John P. Hermann

Signs Symbols Chaucer Poetry AND

“St. Elmo appeared in 1867, and over a million people read it during the first four months. It has gone through scores of editions, has been acted on the stage in eight different dramatic versions, and in 1914 became one of Hollywood’s first box-office successes.”

—The Georgia Review

Signs and Symbols in Chaucer’s Poetry Edited by John P. Hermann and John J. Burke Jr.

John J. Burke Jr.

“An interesting volume of literary criticism; the scholarship is above reproach, and it offers literary interpretation that will be stimulating.

Although not everyone will agree with the authors’ views, they make a good volume which the profession will find worth reading.”

—Siegfried Wenzel, author of The Art of Preaching: Five Medieval Texts and Translations and Elucidations: Medieval Poetry and Its Religious Backgrounds

DECEMBER

6 X 9.125 / 268 PAGES / 31 B&W ILLUSTRATIONS ISBN: 978-0-8173-0042-5 / $29.95S PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-8973-4 / $29.95S EBOOK

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www.uapress.ua.edu

AVAILABLE AGAIN

The Story They Told Us of Light Poems

Rodney Jones

Poet Rodney Jones was born in Alabama and educated at the University of Alabama and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has published widely in leading magazines, in The Oxford Book of Contemporary American Poetry, and in eight editions of The Best American Poetry. His books include Imaginary Logic; Salvation Blues: 100 Poems, 1985–2005, which won the Kingsley Tufts Prize and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize; Elegy for the Southern Drawl, a Pulitzer finalist; Things That Happen Once, a Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist; and Transparent Gestures, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Jean Stein Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A professor and distinguished scholar emeritus at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, he teaches in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

DECEMBER 5.375 X 8.375 / 80 PAGES ISBN: 978-0-8173-0035-7 / $19.95S PAPER

Modern Organization Victor A. Thompson

“What [Thompson] has written is a plea for according specialists in organizations greater influence than they now enjoy. The argument is supported by a vast and skillfully selected array of documentation and is illuminated by some rich insights into the dynamics of organization.”

—Administrative Science Quarterly “By utilizing a sociological approach to the problem of organizational theory, Thompson has developed the thesis that there is a growing imbalance between the right to administer and the ability to do so.

The traditional organizational theory involves the monistic qualities of hierarchy, authority, and its consequent rights as a part of the role of one who commands. As science and technology have developed, the superordinate has lost to the specialists (persons skilled in a number of specific programs or units of purposive action) the ability to command in one field after another even though he retained the right to do so.

Rationalism, in the common sense meaning of the word, has been substituted for impulse.”

—Journal of Politics

www.uapress.ua.edu

DECEMBER 5.375 X 8.25 / 220 PAGES ISBN: 978-0-8173-4838-0 / $24.95S PAPER ISBN: 978-0-8173-8972-7 / $24.95S EBOOK

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RECENT BESTSELLERS

13 GHOSTS ALABAMA

AND JEFFREY

13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey Kathryn Tucker Windham and Margaret Figh One of the bestselling and most beloved books in Southern history back in its gloriously ghoulish original cloth format. National Public Radio’s Debbie Elliot reviewed the book’s famous legacy on the 2014 Halloween edition of “All Things Considered.”

7 X 10 / 128 PAGES ISBN: 978-0-8173-1842-0 / CLOTH ISBN: 978-0-8173-8705-1 / EBOOK $29.95T

Kathryn Tucker Windham and Margaret Gillis Figh

Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours Luke Goebel “If Kerouac were writing today, his work might look something like this— and despite the title, many of the stories are indeed ours, as they focus on love and loss, pain and yearning.... This is a fierce, untamed, riotous book— and from the first page you’ll know you’re not reading Jane Austen.”

5.5 X 8.5 / 184 PAGES ISBN: 978-1-57366-180-5 / PAPER ISBN: 978-1-57366-847-7 / EBOOK $16.95T

—Kirkus

Company K William March The novel that made William March famous, Company K is the story of a regiment of American soldiers serving in Europe during World War I. Each chapter tells the story of a different soldier. A perennial bestseller, the centennary of World War I has won this unique novel a new generation of readers.

William march With an Introduction by

Philip D. Beidler

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Select University of Alabama Press titles are available through these partners.

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AUTHOR/TITLE INDEX

Among the Swamp People . . . . . . . . 1

Hilley, Dilcy Windham . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Story They Told Us of Light, The . . . . . 33

Animal, Vegetable, Digital . . . . . . . . 12

Hubbs, G. Ward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Avenues of Faith . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

In Service to American Pharmacy . . . . 30

Sugar Cane Capitalism and Environmental Transformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Ayers, H. Brandt . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Intricate Thicket . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Swanstrom, Elizabeth . . . . . . . . . . 12

Bailey, Mark A. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Tennesseeans at War . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Banning Queer Blood . . . . . . . . . . . 28

It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Battle over Peleliu, The . . . . . . . . . . 22

Jones, Maxine D. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Theatre History Studies 2015, Vol. 34 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Bennett, Jeffrey A. . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Jones, Rodney . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Theatre Symposium, Vol. 23 . . . . . . . 26

Borda, Jennifer L. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Jones, Sharyn R. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Bound to Respect . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Kanon, Tom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Thirteen Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Bringing Montessori to America . . . . . 19

Key, Watt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Burke Jr., John J. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Kline, Harvey F. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Burns, Valerie Pope . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Kroløkke, Charlotte . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Captain Billy’s Troopers . . . . . . . . . . 5

Marcus, Alan I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics . . . . . . . . . . 10

Civil War Alabama . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Mazzolini, Elizabeth . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Turtles of Alabama . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Cobb, William . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

McDonald, Robin . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Varnado, S. L. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Cormier, Loretta A. . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

McIlwain Sr., Christopher Lyle . . . . . 21

Visions of the Black Belt . . . . . . . . . . 2

Cussing Dixie, Loving Dixie . . . . . . . . 15

McMahan, Eva M. . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

William March . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Demo, Anne Teresa . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Meniketti, Marco G. . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Windham, Ben . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Domesticated Penis, The . . . . . . . . . 16

Mercer, Kelan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Windham, Kathryn Tucker . . . . . . . . 4

Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Modern Organization . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Education for Liberation . . . . . . . . . 29

Mount, Robert H. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Elite Oral History Discourse . . . . . . . . 31

Mullenix, Elizabeth Reitz . . . . . . . . 25

Evans, Augusta Jane . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Murray, Stephen C. . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

Everest Effect, The . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Nunnelley, Carol . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Nuwer, Deanne Stephens . . . . . . . . 29

Fighting Monsters in the Abyss . . . . . 24

Plague Among the Magnolias . . . . . . 29

Fischer, Norman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Politics of Trust, The . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Ford, Karen Jackson . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Richardson, Jessica Lee . . . . . . . . . . 7

Green, Keith Michael . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Richardson, Joe M. . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Grele, Ronald J. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Roberts, Diane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Gutek, Gerald L. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Scroggins, Mark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Gutek, Patricia A. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Service as Mandate . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Guyer, Craig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Sheperd Jr., Samuel C. . . . . . . . . . . 28

Harvey, Gordon E. . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Hasian, Marouf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Signs and Symbols in Chaucer’s Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Haunted Presence . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Silence and Song . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Hermann, John P. . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Simmonds, Roy S. . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Heuving, Jeanne . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Split-Gut Song . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Higby, Gregory J. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

St. Elmo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

www.uapress.ua.edu

Thompson, David S. . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Thompson, Victor A. . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Thon, Melanie Rae . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Motherhood Business, The . . . . . . . 14

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Illinois Illinoisresidents: residents:add add9.5% 9% sales tax Canadian residents: add 7% sales tax International orders: add $9.50 postage for the first book and $5.00 for each additional book

DISCOUNTS T = Trade S = Short All prices and specifications are subject to change without notice.

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS ALABAMA, ALL SPECIAL ORDERS

JD Wilson Sales & Marketing Director Box 870380 Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0380 Phone: Fax: Email:

(205) 348-1566 (205) 348-9201 jdwilson@uapress.ua.edu

COLUMBIA SALES CONSORTIUM New York City & Long Island Conor Broughan Phone: (917) 826-7676 Fax: (212) 459-3678 Email: cb2476@columbia.edu

Western US

ALASKA, ARIZONA, CALIFORNIA, IDAHO, MONTANA, NEVADA, NEW MEXICO, OREGON, TEXAS, UTAH, WASHINGTON

William Gawronski Phone: (310) 488-9059 Fax: (310) 832-4717 Email: wgawronski@earthlink.net

Midwestern US

COLORADO, ILLINOIS, INDIANA, IOWA, KANSAS, KENTUCKY, MICHIGAN, MINNESOTA, MISSOURI, NEBRASKA, NORTH DAKOTA, OHIO, OKLAHOMA, SOUTH DAKOTA, WISCONSIN, WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA, WESTERN NEW YORK, AND WYOMING

Kevin Kurtz Phone: (773) 316-1116 Fax: (773) 489-2941 Email: kkurtz5@earthlink.net

Northern & Southeastern US

ARKANSAS, CONNECTICUT, DELAWARE, FLORIDA, GEORGIA, LOUISIANA, MAINE, MARYLAND, MASSACHUSETTS, MISSISSIPPI, NEW HAMPSHIRE, RHODE ISLAND, NEW JERSEY, NEW YORK, NORTH CAROLINA, PENNSYLVANIA, SOUTH CAROLINA, TENNESSEE, VERMONT, VIRGINIA, WASHINGTON DC, WEST VIRGINIA

Catherine Hobbs Phone: (804) 690-8529 Fax: (434) 589-3411 Email: catherinehobbs@earthlink.net

EUROSPAN GROUP

CODASAT CANADA

CANADA

3122 Blenheim Street Vancouver, BC V6K 4J7 Canada Phone: (604) 224-9952 Fax: (604) 222-2965 Email: info@codasat.com Orders and returns: c/o University of Toronto Distribution 5201 Dufferin Street Downsview, Ontario M3H 5T8 Canada Phone: (800) 565-9523 Fax: (800) 221-9985

EAST-WEST EXPORT BOOKS

ASIA AND THE PACIFIC (INCLUDING AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND, AND HAWAI’I)

Royden Muranaka Phone: (808) 956-8830 Fax: (808) 988-6052 Email: royden@hawaii.edu

UNITED KINGDOM, EUROPE, MIDDLE EAST, AND AFRICA

Katie Rushforth Phone: 44 (0) 1767 604972 Fax: 44 (0) 1767 601640 Web: eurospanbookstore.com/alabamapress Email: eurospan@turpin-distribution.com

DESK COPIES

EXAMINATION COPIES

Desk copy orders should be requested on departmental letterhead and should include the name and address of the bookstore where ten or more copies have been ordered.

An examination copy will be sent for consideration as a text or for supplementary assignment when requested on departmental letterhead. The book will be accompanied by an invoice, which will be canceled if notification is received within forty-five days that the book has been adopted for classroom use and that ten or more copies have been ordered. If the book is not adopted, the invoice is due or the book, in saleable condition, may be returned.

Desk copy requests should be sent to Kristi Henson at the address below.

Examination copy requests should be sent to Kristi Henson at the address below.

MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSIONS

PUBLICITY / REVIEW COPIES

DANIEL WATERMAN, INTERIM DIRECTOR / EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

JD WILSON, SALES & MARKETING DIRECTOR

Send a letter outlining project, scope, and audience to: The University of Alabama Press Box 870380 Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0380 Email: waterman@uapress.ua.edu

The University of Alabama Press Box 870380 Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0380 Phone: (205) 348-1566 Email: jdwilson@uapress.ua.edu

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

EXAM & DESK COPIES

CLAIRE LEWIS EVANS, RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS COORDINATOR

KRISTI HENSON, SALES MANAGER

The University of Alabama Press Box 870380 Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0380 Phone: (205) 348-1561 Fax: (205) 348-9201 Email: cevans@uapress.ua.edu

The University of Alabama Press Box 870380 Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0380 Phone: (205) 348-9534 Fax: (205) 348-9201 Email: khenson@uapress.ua.edu

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Alabama

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th e u n i v er sit y of a l a ba m a pr ess

Box 870380 Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0380 www.uapress.ua.edu

G O S S E N AT U R E G U I D E S

VISIONS OF THE

BLACK BELT A C U LT U R A L S U RV E Y O F T H E H E A RT O F A L A B A M A

RO BI N McD O N A LD VA L E R I E P O P E B U R N E S

Turtles

of al abama

CRAIG GUYER, MARK A. BAILEY, and ROBERT H. MOUNT