On June 23, 1900, the Southern Railroad Company's Engine #7 and its passengers were greeted by a tremendous storm en route to Atlanta, Georgia. Stalled for some time in nearby McDonough, travelers grew impatient as rain pelted the roof and wind buffeted the cars. When finally given the go-ahead, their resulting joy was short-lived: the locomotive soon reached Camp Creek--and disaster. After weeks of constant showers, the swollen creek had eroded the bridge supports. Under the train's weight, the bridge collapsed, and all but nine perished in either the fiery fall or watery depths. With the help of local newspapers and eyewitness accounts, Georgia historian and professor Jeffery C. Wells recounts this tragic tale.

Much like its muddy riverbanks, the mid-South is flooded with tales of shadowy spirits lurking among us. Beyond the rhythm of the blues and tapping of blue suede shoes is a history steeped in horror. From the restless souls of Elmwood Cemetery to the voodoo vices of Beale Street, phantom hymns of the Orpheum Theatre and Civil War soldiers still looking for a fight, peer beyond the shadows of the city's most historic sites.

Author and lifelong resident Laura Cunningham expertly blends fright with history and presents the ghostly legends from Beale to Bartlett, Germantown to Collierville, in this one-of-a-kind volume no resident or visitor should be without.

With fortunes that have ebbed and flowed with the tides, Annapolis has graced the banks of the Severn River and the Chesapeake Bay since the seventeenth century. Generations have worked the docks, sailed its waters and hunted for Chesapeake Gold--oysters--even as the city became home to a proud military tradition in the United States Naval Academy. Local author Rosemary F. Williams presents a vivid image of Annapolis with tales of violent skirmishes between the dashing Captain Waddell and crews of outlaw oyster poachers, the crabbing rage of the twentieth century, feisty shipwright Benjamin Sallier and the city's Golden Age of Sailing. Williams's fluid prose and stunning vintage images chronicle the maritime history of this capital city and reveal its residents' deep connection to the ever-shifting waters.

A quest is never what you expect it to be.

Elizabeth Madeline Martin spends her days in a retirement home in Cape Town, watching the pigeons and squirrels on the branch of a tree outside her window. Bedridden, her memory fading, she can recall her early childhood spent in a small wood-and-iron house in Blackridge on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg. Though she remembers the place in detail – dogs, a mango tree, a stream – she has no idea of where exactly it is. ‘My memory is full of blotches,’ she tells her daughter Julia, ‘like ink left about and knocked over.’

Julia resolves to find the Blackridge house: with her mother lonely and confused, would this, perhaps, bring some measure of closure? A journey begins that traverses family history, forgotten documents, old photographs, and the maps that stake out a country’s troubled past – maps whose boundaries nature remains determined to resist. Kind strangers, willing to assist in the search, lead to unexpected discoveries of ancestors and wars and lullabies. Folded into this quest are the tender conversations between a daughter and a mother who does not have long to live.

Taken as one, The Blackridge House is a meditation on belonging, of the stories we tell of home and family, of the precarious footprint of life.

Among the most memorable innovations of music and poetry in thirteenth-century France was a genre that seemed to privilege sound over sense. The polytextual motet is especially well-known to scholars of the Middle Ages for its tendency to conceal complex allegorical meaning in a texture that, in performance, made words less, rather than more, audible. It is with such musical sound that this book is concerned. What did it mean to create a musical effect so potentially independent from the meaning of words? Is it possible such supermusical effects themselves had significance? The Sense of Sound offers a radical recontextualization of French song in the heyday of the motet c.1260-1330, and makes the case for listening to musical sound against a range of other potently meaningful sonorities, often premised on non-verbal meaning. In identifying new audible interlocutors to music, it opens our ears to a broad spectrum of sounds often left out of historical inquiry, from the hubbub of the medieval city; to the eloquent babble of madmen; to the violent clamor of charivari; to the charismatic chatter of prayer. Drawing on a rich array of artistic evidence (music, manuscripts, poetry, and images) and contemporary cultural theory, it locates musical production in this period within a larger cultural environment concerned with representing sound and its emotional, ethical, and social effects. In so doing, The Sense of Sound offers an experiment in how we might place central the most elusive aspect of music's history: sound's vibrating, living effect.

Once the center of agricultural prosperity in Alabama, the rich soil of the Black Belt still features beautiful homes that stand as a testimony to the region's proud heritage. Join author Jennifer Hale as she explores the history of seventeen of the finest plantation homes in Alabama's Black Belt. This book chronicles the original owners and slaves of the homes and traces their descendants, who have continued to call these plantations home throughout the past two centuries. Discover why the families of an Indian chief and a chief justice feuded for over a century about the land on which Belvoir stands. Follow Gaineswood's progress as it grew from a humble log cabin into an opulent mansion. Learn how the original builder and subsequent owners of the Kirkwood Mansion are linked by a legacy of exceptional and dedicated preservation. "Historic Plantations of Alabama's Black Belt" recounts the elegant past and hopeful future of a well-loved region of the South.

"That summer afternoon, I had no way of knowing the book would radically alter my existence. Yet that proved to be the case."

So writes folklorist José Manuel de Prada-Samper about a chance discovery more than thirty years ago of an obscure book called Specimens of Bushman Folklore in a second-hand bookshop in England.

Part historical detective story, part memoir, Fading Footprints traces the author’s journey into the magical folklore of the /xam hunter-gatherers of the Upper Karoo. Through archival research and on field trips in South Africa, De Prada-Samper is able to humanise the /xam as he delves into the work and lives of researchers William Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, who recorded the stories of San prisoners in Cape Town in the late 1800.

The author learns that many are still told to this day by farm workers in forgotten corners of the Northern Cape and that, contrary to common belief, the culture and traditions of South Africa’s first people are still alive.

This is a history not of an Enlightenment but rather the Enlightenment-the rights-oriented, formalist, secularizing, freedom-inspired eighteenth-century movement that defined modern Western law. Its principal protagonists, rather than members of a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, are non-literate, poor, and enslaved litigants who sued their superiors in the royal courts of Spain's American colonies. Despite growing evidence of the Hispanic world's contributions to Enlightenment science, the writing of history, and statecraft, it is conventionally believed to have taken an alternate route to modernity. This book grapples with the contradiction between this legacy and eighteenth-century Spanish Americans' active production of concepts fundamental to modern law. The book is intensely empirical even as it is sly situated within current theoretical debates about imperial geographies of history. The Enlightenment on Trial offers readers new insight into how legal documents were made, fresh interpretations of the intellectual transformations and legal reform policies of the period, and comparative analysis of the volume of civil suits from six regions in Mexico, Peru and Spain. Ordinary litigants in the colonies-far more often than peninsular Spaniards-sued superiors at an accelerating pace in the second half of the eighteenth century. Three types of cases increased even faster than a stunning general rise of civil suits in the colonies: those that slaves, native peasants and women initiated against masters, native leaders and husbands. As they entered court, these litigants advanced a new law-centered culture distinct from the casuistic, justice-oriented legal culture of the early modern period. And they did so at precisely the same time that a few bright minds of Europe enshrined them in print. The conclusion considers why, if this is so, the Spanish empire has remained marginal to the story of the advent of the modern West.

Oppaymolleah's curse. General Braddock's buried gold. The Original Man of Steel, Joe Magarac. Such legends have found a home among the rich folklore of Western Pennsylvania. Thomas White spins a beguiling yarn with tales that reach from the misty hollows of the Alleghenies to the lost islands of Pittsburgh. White invites readers to learn the truth behind the urban legend of the Green Man, speculate on the conspiracy surrounding the lost B-25 bomber of Monongahela and shiver over the ghostly lore of Western Pennsylvania.

Ellen Muehlberger explores the diverse and inventive ideas Christians held about angels in late antiquity. During the fourth and fifth centuries, Christians began experimenting with new modes of piety, adapting longstanding forms of public authority to Christian leadership and advancing novel ways of cultivating body and mind to further the progress of individual Christians. Muehlberger argues that in practicing these new modes of piety, Christians developed new ways of thinking about angels. The book begins with a detailed examination of the two most popular discourses about angels that developed in late antiquity. In the first, developed by Christians cultivating certain kinds of ascetic practices, angels were one type of being among many in a shifting universe, and their primary purpose was to guard and to guide Christians. In the other, articulated by urban Christian leaders in contest with one another, angels were morally stable characters described in the emerging canon of Scripture, available to enable readers to render Scripture coherent with emerging theological positions. Muehlberger goes on to show how these two discourses did not remain isolated in separate spheres of cultivation and contestation, but influenced one another and the wider Christian culture. She offers in-depth analysis of popular biographies written in late antiquity, of the community standards of emerging monastic communities, and of the training programs developed to prepare Christians to participate in ritual, demonstrating that new ideas about angels shaped and directed the formation of the definitive institutions of late antiquity. Angels in Late Ancient Christianity is a meticulous and thorough study of early Christian ideas about angels, but it also offers a different perspective on late ancient Christian history, arguing that angels were central rather than peripheral to the emergence of Christian institutions and Christian culture in late antiquity.

Visitors gazing out over the Highlands of coastal New Jersey might never guess that these rolling hills have been a stage for mankind s darkest deeds. In his thrilling new book, "Murder & Mayhem in the Highlands," John King shines a spotlight on the region s violent history of kidnapping, murder, smuggling and extortion. From axe-wielding lunatics to killers who leave calling cards, King presents each case with the care of a criminal investigator, including details from coroners reports and witness testimonies.

In this sensational and gripping read, uncover the gritty history of the Highlands, where a suspicious death usually meant foul play and staying in a hotel might cost you your life.

The study of Roman sculpture has been an essential part of the disciplines of Art History and Classics since the eighteenth century. From formal concerns such as Kopienkritic (copy criticism) to social readings of plebeian and patrician art and beyond, scholars have returned to Roman sculpture to answer a variety of questions about Roman art, society, and history. Indeed, the field of Roman sculptural studies encompasses not only the full chronological range of the Roman world but also its expansive geography, and a variety of artistic media, formats, sizes, and functions. Exciting new theories, methods, and approaches have transformed the specialized literature on the subject in recent decades. Rather than creating another chronological ARCH15OXH of representative examples of various periods, genres, and settings, The Oxford Handbook of Roman Sculpture synthesizes current best practices for studying this central medium of Roman art, situating it within the larger fields of art history, classical archaeology, and Roman studies. This volume fills the gap between introductory textbooks-which hide the critical apparatus from the reader-and the highly focused professional literature. The handbook conveniently presents new technical, scientific, literary, and theoretical approaches to the study of Roman sculpture in one reference volume and complements textbooks and other publications that present well-known works in the corpus. Chronologically, the volume addresses material from the Early Republican period through Late Antiquity. The Oxford Handbook of Roman Sculpture not only contributes to the field of classical art and archaeology but also provides a useful reference for classicists and historians of the ancient world.

Examining the diverse religious texts and practices of the late Hellenistic and Roman periods, this collection of essays investigates the many meanings and functions of ritual sacrifice in the ancient world. The essays survey sacrificial acts, ancient theories, and literary as well as artistic depictions of sacrifice, showing that any attempt to identify a single underlying significance of sacrifice is futile. Sacrifice cannot be defined merely as a primal expression of violence, despite the frequent equation of sacrifice to religion and sacrifice to violence in many modern scholarly works; nor is it sufficient to argue that all sacrifice can be explained by guilt, by the need to prepare and distribute animal flesh, or by the communal function of both the sacrificial ritual and the meal.
As the authors of these essays demonstrate, sacrifice may be invested with all of these meanings, or none of them. The killing of the animal, for example, may take place offstage rather than in sight, and the practical, day-to-day routine of plant and animal offerings may have been invested with meaning, too. Yet sacrificial acts, or discourses about these acts, did offer an important site of contestation for many ancient writers, even when the religions they were defending no longer participated in sacrifice. Negotiations over the meaning of sacrifice remained central to the competitive machinations of the literate elite, and their sophisticated theological arguments did not so much undermine sacrificial practice as continue to assume its essential validity.
Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice offers new insight into the connections and differences among the Greek and Roman, Jewish and Christian religions.

Writing the Rebellion presents a cultural history of loyalist writing in early America. There has been a spate of related works recently, but Philip Gould's narrative offers a completely different view of the loyalist/patriot contentions than appears in any of these accounts. By focusing on the literary projections of the loyalist cause, Gould dissolves the old legend that loyalists were more British than American, and patriots the embodiment of a new sensibility drawn from their American situation and upbringing. He shows that both sides claimed to be heritors of British civil discourse, Old World learning, and the genius of English culture. The first half of Writing Rebellion deals with the ways "political disputation spilled into arguments about style, form, and aesthetics, as though these subjects could secure (or ruin) the very status of political authorship." Chapters in this section illustrate how loyalists attack patriot rhetoric by invoking British satires of an inflated Whig style by Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Another chapter turns to Loyalist critiques of Congressional language and especially the Continental Association, which was responsible for radical and increasingly violent measures against the Loyalists. The second half of Gould's book looks at satiric adaptations of the ancient ballad tradition to see what happens when patriots and loyalists interpret and adapt the same text (or texts) for distinctive yet related purposes. The last two chapters look at the Loyalist response to Thomas Paine's Common Sense and the ways the concept of the author became defined in early America. Throughout the manuscript, Gould acknowledges the purchase English literary culture continued to have in revolutionary America, even among revolutionaries.

Tales of ghostly spirits envelop the northeast Tennessee landscape like a familiar mountain fog. Join Pete Dykes, editor of Kingsport's "Daily News," as he offers up a collection of spooky local stories and legends from centuries past, including such spine-chilling accounts as the foreboding ghost of Netherland Inn Road, spectral disturbances at the Rotherwood Mansion, devilish felines, ruthless poltergeists in Caney Creek Falls, the tortured cries from fallen Rebel soldiers still heard today- and could bigfoot really be buried in the woods of Big Stone Gap?

"It is safer to be feared than loved." These words embody the spirit of The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli's classic work of political philosophy. Machiavelli's advice for how a ruler should acquire and ruthlessly exercise power over others continues to be relevant to contemporary readers more than five centuries after it was first published. This is one of Barnes & Noble's 'Collectible Editions' classics. Each volume features authoritative texts by the world's greatest authors in an elegantly designed bonded-leather binding, with distinctive gilt edging. Durable and collectible, these volumes are an indispensable cornerstone of every home library.

Drawing on her work with the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute at Bauder College and Ghost Hounds Paranormal Research Society, elite psychic medium and cold case researcher Reese Christian writes of the tragic past and the haunted present of Greater Atlanta. From Peachtree Street in the heart of downtown to the plantations and battlefields surrounding the city, join her in discovering the twisted histories of some of Atlanta's most infamous landmarks and forgotten moments.

Why put Abraham Lincoln, the sometime corporate lawyer and American President, in dialogue with Karl Marx, the intellectual revolutionary? On the surface, they would appear to share few interests. Yet, though Lincoln and Marx never met one another, both had an abiding interest in the most important issue of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world-the condition of labor in a capitalist world, one that linked slave labor in the American south to England's (and continental Europe's) dark satanic mills. Each sought solutions-Lincoln through a polity that supported free men, free soil, and free labor; Marx by organizing the working class to resist capitalist exploitation. While both men espoused emancipation for American slaves, here their agreements ended. Lincoln thought that the free labor society of the American North provided great opportunities for free men missing from the American South, a kind of "farm ladder" that gave every man the ability to become a landowner. Marx thought such "free land" a chimera and (with information from German-American correspondents), was certain that the American future lay in the proletarianized cities. Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx in Dialogue intersperses short selections from the two writers from their voluminous works, opening with an introduction that puts the ideas of the two men in the broad context of nineteenth-century thought and politics. The volume excerpts Lincoln's and Marx's views on slavery (they both opposed it for different reasons), the Civil War (Marx claimed the war concerned slavery and should have as its goal abolition; Lincoln insisted that his goal was just the defeat of the Confederacy), and the opportunities American free men had to gain land and economic independence. Through this volume, readers will gain a firmer understanding of nineteenth-century labor relations throughout the Atlantic world: slavery and free labor; the interconnections between slave-made cotton and the exploitation of English proletarians; and the global impact of the American Civil War.

The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical offers new and cutting-edge essays on the most important and compelling issues and topics in the growing, interdisciplinary field of musical-theater and film-musical studies. Taking the form of a "keywords" book, it introduces readers to the concepts and terms that define the history of the musical as a genre and that offer ways to reflect on the specific creative choices that shape musicals and their performance on stage and screen. The handbook offers a cross-section of essays written by leading experts in the field, organized within broad conceptual groups, which together capture the breadth, direction, and tone of musicals studies today.
Each essay traces the genealogy of the term or issue it addresses, including related issues and controversies, positions and problematizes those issues within larger bodies of scholarship, and provides specific examples drawn from shows and films. Essays both re-examine traditional topics and introduce underexplored areas. Reflecting the concerns of scholars and students alike, the authors emphasize critical and accessible perspectives, and supplement theory with concrete examples that may be accessed through links to the handbook's website.
Taking into account issues of composition, performance, and reception, the book's contributors bring a wide range of practical and theoretical perspectives to bear on their considerations of one of America's most lively, enduring artistic traditions. The Oxford Handbook of The AmericanMusical will engage all readers interested in the form, from students to scholars to fans and aficionados, as it analyses the complex relationships among the creators, performers, and audiences who sustain the genre.