On August 31, 1886, a massive earthquake centered near Charleston, South Carolina, sent shock waves as far north as Maine, down into Florida, and west to the Mississippi River. When the dust settled, residents of the old port city were devastated by the death and destruction.

"Upheaval in Charleston" is a gripping account of natural disaster and turbulent social change in a city known as the cradle of secession. Weaving together the emotionally charged stories of Confederate veterans and former slaves, Susan Millar Williams and Stephen G. Hoffius portray a South where whites and blacks struggled to determine how they would coexist a generation after the end of the Civil War.

This is also the story of Francis Warrington Dawson, a British expatriate drawn to the South by the romance of the Confederacy. As editor of Charleston's "News and Courier," Dawson walked a lonely and dangerous path, risking his life and reputation to find common ground between the races. Hailed as a hero in the aftermath of the earthquake, Dawson was denounced by white supremacists and murdered less than three years after the disaster. His killer was acquitted after a sensational trial that unmasked a Charleston underworld of decadence and corruption.

Combining careful research with suspenseful storytelling, "Upheaval in Charleston" offers a vivid portrait of a volatile time and an anguished place.

A Devil and a Good Woman, Too is the award-winning biography of a remarkably talented, enigmatic southern woman whose fiction about rural African Americans drew on her own emotional traumas and family scandals. A white plantation mistress who vowed to ""write what is, even if it is unpleasant,"" Julia Peterkin produced five books that revolutionized American literature, including the Pulitzer Prize - winning novel ""Scarlet Sister Mary"". In the 1920s, Peterkin wrote stark, powerful stories that earned the praise of W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, and H. L. Mencken. But for reasons explored in this biography, she chose to stop writing at the height of a brilliant career and retreat to a provincial life rather than follow her characters as they moved away from the plantation.

Julia Peterkin pioneered in demonstrating the literary potential for serious depictions of the African American experience. Rejecting the prevailing sentimental stereotypes of her times, she portrayed her black characters with sympathy and understanding, endowing them with the full dimensions of human consciousness. In these novels and stories, she tapped the richness of rural southern black culture and oral traditions to capture the conflicting realities in an African American community and to reveal a grace and courage worthy of black pride.