Analyzing a sample of 25 films, including such notables as "Red River," "Shane," "Unforgiven," "The Wild Bunch," "Wyatt EarP," and "Dances with Wolves," this work examines traditional leadership theories as reflected in the western film genre. The western vividly portrays a variety of leadership styles, motifs, and characteristics giving perspective on several traditional leadership theories. The different leadership styles the films exhibit are categorized and described through content analysis. Some of the concepts and underlying theories and styles reveal a universal quality about leadership that transcends theoretical research. As a cultural study that traces the relative popularity of leadership styles, this work provides new insight toward studying leadership effectiveness.

Through the lens of leadership theory, this unique look at the western films from 1945 to 1995 and the American culture they depict will appeal not only to leadership, film, and popular culture scholars but to leaders in business, government, and the military. Chapters group films by their similar depiction of leadership styles. Within each chapter the films are separately described, then each is explored within the context of leadership theory. Films prior to 1980 are included on the basis of their critical or commercial success, while films after 1980 are included on the basis of their box office success or their individual portrayals of gender or cultural leadership.

"[A] useful, lucid, intelligent contribution to sports scholarship." Journal of Sport History

Professional practice in health care and education is currently undergoing major reform as it adapts to complex and rapidly changing environments.

This multi-authored text explores professional practice in health, education and the creative arts in the four key practice dimensions: doing, knowing, being and becoming. These areas are used to explore the reality of professional practice as something more than the application of learned knowledge in practice situations.

Professional practice is presented as a lived experience as well as a process; a service for (and with) others, and a way of being and behaving. The text uses discourse, narrative, imagery and critical debate to explore the essential unity of knowledge and practice. The emphasis here is on understanding creative arts expertise, professional artistry and creativity in practice."

Professional Practice in Health, Education and the Creative Art" is for all those seeking to learn, improve and transform professional practice. It:
Encourages reflective, visionary, innovative and creative practice
Actively promotes the blurring of restrictive practice boundaries
Offers an interesting new perspective for the analysis of professional practice
Provides practical strategies for professional development
Includes internationally recognized authors from the fields of education, health sciences and the creative arts
Reflects the cutting edge of thinking on professional practice

This book is an essential purchase for practitioners, educators and researchers in nursing, allied health professions, medicine and the creative arts who are engaged or interested in practice, and for the otherprofessional people and members of the community interested in the way professionals practice and frame their practice.

From the worship of Michael Jordan to the downfall of O.J. Simpson, it has become clear that sports and sports heroes have assumed a role in American society far out of proportion to their traditional value. In this powerful critique of present-day American popular culture, Robert J. Higgs examines the complex and increasingly pervasive control that sports wield in shaping the national self-image. He provides a thoughtful history and analysis of how sports and religion have become intertwined and offers a stinging indictment of the sports-religion-media-education complex. Beginning with the place of sports in Puritan life, Higgs traces the contributions of various individuals and institutions to the present circumstances in which sports and religion are joined. He discusses the transfer of the Puritan ideal to the New World and then moves to the revolutionary period of the national hero and manifest destiny, through the classic period of education for a sound mind in a sound body, to the imperial phase of American supremacy. In the process of tracing this history Higgs makes clear the growing influence of "muscular" Christianity, from circuit-riding evangelists to pulpit-pounding televangelists, from Billy Sunday to Billy Graham, from the YMCA to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Finally he arrives at our present Low Roman or "bread and circuses" period in which sports simultaneously serve the purposes of entertainment, religious proselytism, distraction of the masses, and political propaganda, all under the colorful banner of Christian knighthood as seen in the stadium revivals of Billy Graham and the sporting enthusiasm of Jerry Falwell. In brief, sports and Christianity have followed similar paths. In the beginning they were nationalized, then Hellenized, then Romanized, and, in our own time, televised. The result is that spectator sports have become the reigning American religion, one sharply at odds with a traditional shepherd ethos. This well-written and innovative book makes clear the dangerous power wielded by the sports-religion-media-education complex over the minds and energies of the American people. It is a call for recognition and reevaluation of our present situation that will concern anyone interested in the future of American culture.

To examine the social and cultural significance of the athlete hero in American literature, Robert J. Higgs turns to the works of Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. Higgs views the athlete in literature not as an artistic creation but as one who reflects the tastes, attainments, beliefs, and ideals of his society. The athletes he describes as Apollonian are the know-it-alls, of whom Lardner's Busher Keefe is an example; the Dyonisian, as exemplified by Irwin Shaw's Christian Darling, worships his body as an end in itself. The Adonic seeks knowledge for the sake of self-realization and lives in a world of tension, pain, struggle, and hope. Such a figure is Wolfe's Nebraska Crane. Higgs finds in contemporary American literature a clear rejection of the Apollonian and Dyonisian models and an acceptance of the Adonic.

This research uses existing experimental wind tunnel data to develop a non-linear model that is used to characterize the stability of a flexible wing Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) with a rotatable tail. The experimental data are curve fit based on either angle of attack or angle of sideslip, and the coupled effect of tail rotation and tail deflection on the force and moment coefficients. Static optimization trims the input and state variables for Steady Level Unaccelerated Flight (SLUF). The resulting initial conditions are fed to an open loop non-linear Simulink/Matlab simulation. The study found that the bare MAV design is unstable, but parametric studies identified practical modifications that could be made to the MAV to improve its open loop stability characteristics. The study found that the coupling affect due to the dihedreal derivative, Cl, played a large role in destabilizing the lateral-directional dynamics and a feedback Stability Augmentation System is required for flight.

An Unholy Alliance offers a dissenting view to the claim by a growing number of scholars that Sports are a new religion. The last few years have seen a spate of books that might be classified by a genre called "Sports Apologetics," that is, arguments defending or celebrating in one way or another the familiar and ongoing alliance in America between sports and religion. Recently, claims have been made by scholars that sports are an authentic religion in and of themselves. They make this startling assertion not by showing connections with the teachings of Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, or Moses, but by parallels between the rites of modern games and those of preliterate man that were "religious" in nature because they were designed to propitiate powers and to ward off evil for the tribes employing them. In this evocative book, Higgs and Braswell suggest that while sports may often be good things, they are not inherently divine. They do not focus on wide-spread abuse in sports as evidence for their counterargument. Rather, they question the use of mythological parallels from prehistory as justification for viewing sports as a religion.

The two volumes of Appalachia Inside Out constitute the most comprehensive anthology of writings on Appalachia ever assembled. Representing the work of approximately two hundred authors-fiction writers, poets, scholars in disciplines such as history, literary criticism, and sociology-Appalachia Inside Out reveals the fascinating diversity of the region and lays to rest many of the reductive stereotypes long associated with it.

Edited by Robert J. Higgs, Ambrose N. Manning, and Jim Wayne Miller
These two volumes constitute the most comprehensive anthology of writings on Appalachia ever assembled. Representing the work of approximately two hundred authors--fiction writers, poets, scholars in disciplines such as history, literary criticism, and sociology--Appalachia Inside Out reveals the fascinating diversity of the region and lays to rest many of the reductive stereotypes long associated with it.
Intended as a sequel to the widely respected collection Voices of the Hills, edited by Robert Higgs and Ambrose Manning and published twenty years ago, these volumes reflect the recent proliferation of imaginative and critical writing about Appalachia--a proliferation that suggests nothing less than a renaissance of collective self-assessment. The selections are organized around a variety of themes (including "War and Revolution," "Feuds and Violence," "Nature and Progress," "Dialect and Language," "Exile, Return, and Sense of Place," and "Majority and Minority") and reveal both the radical changes the region has undergone as well as the persistence of certain defining features.
The title Appalachia Inside Out refers in part to the fact that Appalachia has never existed in timeless isolation from the rest of country and the world; rather, it has both absorbed outside influences and exerted influence of its own. The title also indicates the editors' effort to look not only at the visible Appalachia but at the forces that underlie its history and culture. What emerges in these pages is an Appalachia both familiar and strange: a mirror of lived life on the one hand and, on the other, a haunted realm of unimaginable loss and bewitching possibility.
The Editors: Robert J. Higgs is professor of English, emeritus, at East Tennessee State University and the author of Laurel and Thorn: The Athlete in American Literature.
Ambrose N. Manning is professor of English, emeritus, at East Tennessee State University and a noted collector of folk songs and folklore.
Jim Wayne Miller, a poet, novelist, and essayist, is a professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Intercultural Studies at Western Kentucky University.