This book draws connections between Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher and works of classic American literature. Chapter I explores the horrors of the Civil War as conveyed in Mosher's Walking to Gatlinburg and Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Major characters escape the battlefield and then feel a need to redeem themselves for what could be a cowardly act. Chapter II analyses how Mosher and three classic authors explore the physical and moral dangers of industrialisation, especially women's safety. Chapter III compares Mosher's Walking to Gatlinburg to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in terms of the quest for Heaven. In Chapter IV, Melville's novels are used to address evil as it appears in Mosher's Disappearances. Chapter V explores black men with white women in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Mosher's A Stranger in the Kingdom. Humour is at the core of Chapter VI, comparing Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn to Mosher's The True Account. In Chapter VII, the disappearing wilderness is the issue in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses and several of Mosher's works. Chapter VIII offers romantic love as a shield against other human beings. A conclusion draws on Steinbeck, Twain and Mosher to elaborate on how one should explore as much of the world as possible.

The Second Reform Act, passed in 1867, created a million new voters, doubling the electorate and propelling the British state into the age of mass politics. It marked the end of a twenty year struggle for the working class vote, in which seven different governments had promised change. Yet the standard works on 1867 are more than forty years old and no study has ever been published of reform in prior decades. This study provides the first analysis of the subject from 1848 to 1867, ranging from the demise of Chartism to the passage of the Second Reform Act. Recapturing the vibrancy of the issue and its place at the heart of Victorian political culture, it focuses not only on the reform debate itself, but on a whole series of related controversies, including the growth of trade unionism, the impact of the 1848 revolutions and the discussion of French and American democracy.

From the 1920s through the 1950s, the center of black social and business life in Charlottesville, Virginia, was the area known as Vinegar Hill. But in 1960, noting the prevalence of aging frame houses and ""substandard"" conditions such as outdoor toilets, voters decided that Vinegar Hill would be redeveloped. Charlottesville's black residents lost a cultural center, largely because they were deprived of a voice in government. Vinegar Hill's displaced residents discuss the loss of homes and businesses, and the impact of the project on black life in Charlottesville. The interviews raise questions about motivations behind urban renewal.

Many books have been written on fiction technique, and the chief excuse for the present addition to the number is the complexity of the subject. Its range is so wide, it calls for so many and so different capacities in one attempting to discuss it, that a new work has more than a chance to meet at least two or three deficiencies in all other treatments. I believe that the chief deficiency in most works on fiction technique is that the author unconsciously has slipped from the viewpoint of a writer of a story to that of a reader. Now a reader without intention to try his own hand at the game is not playing fair in studying technique, and a book on technique has no business to entertain him. Accordingly, I have striven to keep to the viewpoint of one who seeks to learn how to write stories, and have made no attempt to analyze the work of masters of fiction for the sake of the analysis alone...Get Your Copy Today!