Mark Twain And The South

Author: Arthur G. Pettit
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813148782
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
The South was many things to Mark Twain: boyhood home, testing ground for manhood, and the principal source of creative inspiration. Although he left the South while a young man, seldom to return, it remained for him always a haunting presence, alternately loved and loathed. Mark Twain and the South was the first book on this major yet largely ignored aspect of the private life of Samuel Clemens and one of the major themes in his writing from 1863 until his death. Arthur G. Pettit clearly demonstrates that Mark Twain's feelings on race and region moved in an intelligible direction from the white Southern point of view he was exposed to in his youth to self-censorship, disillusionment, and, ultimately, a deeply pessimistic and sardonic outlook in which the dream of racial brotherhood was forever dead. Approaching his subject as a historian with a deep appreciation for literature, he bases his study on a wide variety of Mark Twain's published and unpublished works, including his notebooks, scrapbooks, and letters. An interesting feature of this illuminating work is an examination of Clemens's relations with the only two black men he knew well in his adult years.

South!

Author: Ernest Shackleton
Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
ISBN: 1789506344
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 530

Book Description
"We had seen God in His splendours, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man." In 1914, Ernest Shackleton set out on an 1,800-mile trek across Antarctica. During the three-year expedition, his team overcame shipwreck, treacherous glaciers, and a bitterly hostile climate. They faced the elements on this icy continent with extraordinary determination, resourcefulness, and courage. This account by one of Britain's greatest explorers is at once thrilling, harrowing, and inspiring.

South

Author: Patrick McDonnell
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 0316088935
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 57

Book Description
When a little bird awakens to find that all of his friends and family have gone south for the winter, it takes a surprising friendship with Mooch the cat to help him find his way. This is a wordless and profoundly moving story--by the creator of the beloved comic strip Mutts--that explores being lost and found, crossing boundaries, saying goodbye, and broadening horizons.

Spying on the South

Author: Tony Horwitz
Publisher:
ISBN: 1101980281
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 498

Book Description
"The author retraces Frederick Law Olmsted's journey across the American South in the 1850s, on the eve of the Civil War. Olmsted roamed eleven states and six thousand miles, and the New York Times published his dispatches about slavery and its defenders. More than 150 years later, Tony Horwitz followed Olmsted's route, and whenever possible his mode of transport--rail, riverboats, in the saddle--through Appalachia, down the Ohio and Mississippi, through Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and across Texas to the Rio Grande, discovering and reporting on vestiges of what Olmsted called the Cotton Kingdom"--

South!

Author: Ernest Shackleton
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 477

Book Description
South! tells one of the most thrilling tales of exploration and survival against the odds which has ever been written. It details the experiences of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition which set off in 1914 to make an attempt to cross the Antarctic continent. Under the direction of Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition comprised two components: one party sailing on the Endurance into the Weddell Sea, which was to attempt the actual crossing; and another party on board the Aurora, under the direction of Aeneas Mackintosh, sailing into the Ross Sea on the other side of the continent and tasked with establishing depots of stores as far south as possible for the use of the party attempting the crossing. Shackleton gives a highly readable account of the fate of both parties of the Expedition. Both fell victim to the severe environmental conditions of the region, and it was never possible to attempt the crossing. The Endurance was trapped in pack-ice in the Weddell Sea and the ship was eventually crushed by the pressure of the ice, leaving Shackleton’s men stranded on ice floes, far from solid land. Shackleton’s account of their extraordinary struggles to survive is as gripping as any novel. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Tales from the Haunted South

Author: Tiya Miles
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469626349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Book Description
In this book Tiya Miles explores the popular yet troubling phenomenon of "ghost tours," frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers by routinely relying on stories of enslaved black specters. But who are these ghosts? Examining popular sites and stories from these tours, Miles shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain. "Dark tourism" often highlights the most sensationalist and macabre aspects of slavery, from salacious sexual ties between white masters and black women slaves to the physical abuse and torture of black bodies to the supposedly exotic nature of African spiritual practices. Because the realities of slavery are largely absent from these tours, Miles reveals how they continue to feed problematic "Old South" narratives and erase the hard truths of the Civil War era. In an incisive and engaging work, Miles uses these troubling cases to shine light on how we feel about the Civil War and race, and how the ghosts of the past are still with us.

The Bohemian South

Author: Shawn Chandler Bingham
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469631687
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Book Description
From the southern influence on nineteenth-century New York to the musical legacy of late-twentieth-century Athens, Georgia, to the cutting-edge cuisines of twenty-first-century Asheville, North Carolina, the bohemian South has long contested traditional views of the region. Yet, even as the fruits of this creative South have famously been celebrated, exported, and expropriated, the region long was labeled a cultural backwater. This timely and illuminating collection uses bohemia as a novel lens for reconsidering more traditional views of the South. Exploring wide-ranging locales, such as Athens, Austin, Black Mountain College, Knoxville, Memphis, New Orleans, and North Carolina's Research Triangle, each essay challenges popular interpretations of the South, while highlighting important bohemian sub- and countercultures. The Bohemian South provides an important perspective in the New South as an epicenter for progress, innovation, and experimentation. Contributors include Scott Barretta, Shawn Chandler Bingham, Jaime Cantrell, Jon Horne Carter, Alex Sayf Cummings, Lindsey A. Freeman, Grace E. Hale, Joanna Levin, Joshua Long, Daniel S. Margolies, Chris Offutt, Zandria F. Robinson, Allen Shelton, Daniel Cross Turner, Zackary Vernon, and Edward Whitley.

Stories of the South

Author: K. Stephen Prince
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469614189
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Book Description
In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the North assumed significant power to redefine the South, imagining a region rebuilt and modeled on northern society. The white South actively resisted these efforts, battling the legal strictures of Reconstruction on the ground. Meanwhile, white southern storytellers worked to recast the South's image, romanticizing the Lost Cause and heralding the birth of a New South. Prince argues that this cultural production was as important as political competition and economic striving in turning the South and the nation away from the egalitarian promises of Reconstruction and toward Jim Crow.

Deep South

Author: Paul Theroux
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544323521
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 485

Book Description
"Paul Theroux has spent fifty years crossing the globe, adventuring in the exotic, seeking the rich history and folklore of the far away. Now, for the first time, in his tenth travel book, Theroux explores a piece of America--the Deep South. He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and yet also some of the nation's worst schools, housing, and unemployment rates. It's these parts of the South, so often ignored, that have caught Theroux's keen traveler's eye."--

Sean of the South

Author: Sean Dietrich
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781515019183
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Book Description
The first volume of a collection of short stories by Sean Dietrich, a writer, humorist, and novelist, known for his commentary on life in the American South. His humor and short fiction appear in various publications throughout the Southeast.