The American 1920s had many names: the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the Dry Decade, and the Flapper generation. Whatever the moniker, these years saw the birth of modern America. This volume shows the many colorful ways the decade altered America, its people, and its future. American Popular Culture Through History volumes include a timeline, cost comparisons, chapter bibliographies, and a subject index. Writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Damon Runyon presented distinct literary visions of the world. Jazz, blues, and country music erupted onto the airwaves. The exploits of Babe Ruth and "Murderers' Row" helped save baseball from its scandals, while such players as Red Grange and Notre Dame's "Four Horsemen" brought football to national prominence. Yo-yos, crossword puzzles, and erector sets appeared, along with fads like dance marathons and flagpole sitting. Rudolph Valentino, "talkies," and Clara Bow's "It" girl appeared on the silver screen. Prohibition indirectly led to bootlegging and speakeasies, while the growing rebelliousness of teenagers highlighted an increasing generation gap.

On New Year's Day 1953, Hank Williams-numbed by a deadly combination of whiskey and narcotics-died in the back seat of his Cadillac en route to a performance in Canton, Ohio. He was only twenty nine years old at the time of his death and his passing appeared to bring his rags-to-riches success and destructive lifestyle to an abrupt end. Few figures before or since have cast as long or as broad a shadow over American popular music. Today, Hank Williams is considered by many to be the greatest singer and songwriter in the history of country music, and it is the combination of his remarkable musical achievements, his tumultuous personal life, and his tragic and still-mysterious demise that make him such a compelling historical figure. As volume demonstrates, Williams's death was the beginning of an equally gripping second act: for more than sixty years, an ever-lengthening parade of journalists, family and friends, musical contemporaries, biographers, historians and scholars, fans, and novelists have attempted to capture in words the man, the artist, and the legend. The Hank Williams Reader, the first book of its kind devoted to this giant of American music, collects more than sixty of the most compelling, insightful, and historically significant of these writings. The selections cover a broad assortment of themes and perspectives, ranging from heartfelt reminiscences and shocking tabloid exposes to thoughtful meditations and critical essays. Featured authors include Hank Williams, Jr., Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, David Halberstam, Greil Marcus, Rick Bragg, and Lee Smith, to name but a few. The Hank Williams Reader also features a lengthy interpretive introduction and the most extensive bibliography of Williams-related writings ever published. Over time, writers have sought to explain Williams in a variety of ways, and in tracing these shifting interpretations, this anthology chronicles his cultural transfiguration from star-crossed hillbilly singer to enduring American icon.

Contrary to popular belief, the roots of American country music do not lie solely on southern farms or in mountain hollows. Rather, much of this music recorded before World War II emerged from the bustling cities and towns of the Piedmont South. No group contributed more to the commercialization of early country music than southern factory workers. In Linthead Stomp, Patrick Huber explores the origins and development of this music in the Piedmont's mill villages. Huber offers vivid portraits of a colorful cast of Piedmont millhand musicians, including Fiddlin' John Carson, Charlie Poole, Dave McCarn, and the Dixon Brothers, and considers the impact that urban living, industrial work, and mass culture had on their lives and music. Drawing on a broad range of sources, including rare 78-rpm recordings and unpublished interviews, Huber reveals how the country music recorded between 1922 and 1942 was just as modern as the jazz music of the same era. Linthead Stomp celebrates the Piedmont millhand fiddlers, guitarists, and banjo pickers who combined the collective memories of the rural countryside with the upheavals of urban-industrial life to create a distinctive American music that spoke to the changing realities of the twentieth-century South.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy has sparked a remarkable number of historical controversies, particularly surrounding the Warren Commission's official findings of a lone gunman and its so-called magic bullet theory. One of the lesser-known controversies, however, involves Father Oscar L. Huber, C.M. (1893-1975), the Roman Catholic priest who administered last rites, on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, to the mortally wounded president. The Vincentian priest's ministrations unexpectedly thrust him into the national spotlight when the New York Times, the Dallas Morning News, and other major newspapers interviewed him about his moments with the slain president. But the modest, soft-spoken priest found neither glory nor honor in his service that day, because several reporters, including Time magazine correspondent Hugh Sidey, claimed that Father Huber had leaked the news of the president's death a few minutes before the official White House announcement, a charge the priest vehemently denied. What began as Father Huber's proverbial "fifteen minutes of fame" evolved, for him, into a decade-long crusade to correct the historical record, as he saw it, and to restore what he believed was his tarnished reputation. The story of Father Huber's role in Dallas that day and the subsequent controversy that came to consume him is the subject of this commemorative book published to mark the fiftieth anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination.

The American 1920s had many names: the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the Dry Decade, and the Flapper generation. Whatever the moniker, these years saw the birth of modern America. This volume shows the many colorful ways the decade altered America, its people, and its future." American Popular Culture Through History" volumes include a timeline, cost comparisons, chapter bibliographies, and a subject index.

Writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Damon Runyon presented distinct literary visions of the world. Jazz, blues, and country music erupted onto the airwaves. The exploits of Babe Ruth and Murderers' Row helped save baseball from its scandals, while such players as Red Grange and Notre Dame's Four Horsemen brought football to national prominence. Yo-yos, crossword puzzles, and erector sets appeared, along with fads like dance marathons and flagpole sitting. Rudolph Valentino, talkies, and Clara BoW's It girl appeared on the silver screen. Prohibition indirectly led to bootlegging and speakeasies, while the growing rebelliousness of teenagers highlighted an increasing generation gap.