First Fieldwork: Pacific Anthropology, 1960-1985 explores what a generation of anthropologists experienced during their first visits to the field at a time of momentous political changes in Pacific island countries and societies and in anthropology itself. Answering some of the same how and why questions found in Terence E. Hays' Ethnographic Presents: Pioneering Anthropologists in the Papua New Guinea Highlands (1993), First Fieldwork begins where that collection left off in the 1950s and covers a broader selection of Pacific Islands societies and topics. Chapters range from candid reflections on working with little-known peoples to reflexive analyses of adapting research projects and field sites, in order to better fit local politics and concerns. Included in these accounts are the often harsh emotional and logistical demands placed on fieldworkers and interlocutors as they attempt the work of connecting and achieving mutual understandings. Evident throughout is the conviction that fieldwork and what we learn from and write about it are necessary to a robust anthropology. By demystifying a phase begun in the mid-1980s when critics considered attempts to describe fieldwork and its relation to ethnography as inevitably biased representations of the unknowable truth, First Fieldwork contributes to a renewed interest in experiential and theoretical nuances of fieldwork. Looking back on the richest of fieldwork experiences, the contributors uncover essential structures and challenges of fieldwork: connection, context, and change. What they find is that building relationships and having others include you in their lives (once referred to as "achieving rapport") is determined as much by our subjects as by ourselves. As they examine connections made or attempted during first fieldwork and bring to bear subsequent understandings and questions-new contexts from which to view and think-about their experiences, the contributors provide readers with multidimensional perspectives on fieldwork and how it continues to inspire anthropological interpretations and commitment. A crucial dimension is change. Each chapter is richly detailed in history: theirs/ours; colonial/postcolonial; and the then and now of theory and practice. While change is ever present, specifics are not. Reflecting back, the authors demonstrate how that specificity defined their experiences and ultimately their ethnographic re/productions.

In September 1865 Eli Calhoon, Lieutenant Colonel, Confederate States Army, returnsed to his war-ravished plantation home, of Camellia Creek, outside Port Gibson, Mississippi, resolved to begin again. But Mississippi, like the rest of the South, lies prostrate in the wake of a devastating conflict that wasted its population and destroyed what had been, only four years earlier, the third strongest economy in the world. More troubling, the South's recovery is now overseen by a victorious enemy determined that the economy, as well as the South's influence within the Union, will never be revived. For Southerners, getting a spring crop in the field is as far out of reach as is the payment of five years' back taxes, demanded by Congress demands from the states in Rebellion to pay for the war it waged against them. Orphaned Alice Shelto has come to Mississippi with her aunt and uncle, Betty and Peter Franklin. Peter is a speculator in search of investment. A veteran of the war, who'd seen duty in Mississippi and Louisiana, he knows opportunity exists in the defeated South. His preference for a home for his wife, daughter, and niece is the lovely bayou plantation home called Camellia Creek. outside Port Gibson, Mississippi. In company with the Franklins is Peter's widowed sister-in-law Eustacia from New York and her son, Jonathan, who Peter believes is the perfect match for Alice, heiress to a fortune. Betty Shelton is the sister of Alice's widowedr father, Jacob Shelton, and his two sons were killed in action during the late war, fighting for the Union.to bring the rebellious states back into the Union. The losses have left Alice in despair so deep her aunt fears Alice might take her own life. Seth Parker, Major, United States Marine Corps, has come to Mississippi at the request of a friend and military senior to investigate the murder of a U.S. Treasury agent, which military authorities in the state believemay ties into cotton thefts rampant among the white army officers stationed in Mississippi. The powers that be prefer a Southerner be found to blame, but his immediate the senior officer is not so sure. To investigate the death, Seth is given a troop of nine men, all colored members of Mississippi's Loyal Native Guard, for the most part ex-slaves recruited into the Union army during the war. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and in a lawless South where justice is arbitrary and order is maintained by the unprincipled and undisciplined, desperate acts measures are gambles that sometimes pay off. When an indiscretion lands the lovely Alice into the hands of a determined Eli Calhoon, he blackmails her into marriage, taking her person and her money, and brings her to Camellia Creek, where she is haunted by Jocelyn LeBlanc, an ill-fated beauty who reputedly took her own lifedied under mysterious circumstances decades earlier. Jocelyn's unresolved purpose inIn addition to Jocelyn's ghostly presence, Alice's life is overshadowed by war's aftermath, intrigue, murder, and jealousy, and greed which threaten Alice's new-found desire to live, a desire ignited by the very man who could be plotting to snuff it out.

Lionel Augustus left his estate to his bastard son, Clay Boudreaux, and stepdaughter, Olivia Lee, with one bizarre stipulation, they wed. But days after her marriage by proxy, Olivia's groom is dead and her family is contesting the will. Now a stranger invades her home claiming to be her groom, and Olivia finds herself allied with a stranger who could prove her greatest ally or most dangerous foe.

Let Charlsie Russell spirit you away to eighteenth-century Spanish Natchez, where a young nation vies with an old for control of the Old Southwest and a haunted man fights for the love of a beautiful woman, threatened by an unknown evil. Gothic suspense against the savage and passionate backdrop of a region becoming Southern, in a place that would become Mississippi.

Confederate veteran Jeff Dawson returns to Adams County, MS to confront the powerful family that shattered his own. What he finds is the shell of an old enemy and an innocent beauty struggling to hold on to her heritage. Set against the turbulent backdrop of Federal tyranny in the Reconstructed South, Wolf Dawson is a love story rife with Gothic suspense and the vindication of Southern justice.