Moving beyond familiar myths about moonshiners, bootleggers, and hard-drinking writers, Southern Comforts explores how alcohol and drinking helped shape the literature and culture of the U.S. South.Edited by Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger, this collection of seventeen thought-provoking essays proposes that discussions about drinking in southern culture often orbit around familiar figures and mythologies that obscure what alcohol consumption has meant over time. Comple...

This real oddity includes Tolkien reading from the poetry collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and a recording of the Swann musical arrangements.

First published in 1987 by the National Defense University (NDU) Press, a government publishing arm, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, publishing vital national security materials like Joint Force Quarterly, books, and monographs for military and government professionals, with the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) often selling their output. It serves as the academic publisher for NDU, furthering defense education and policy. Therefore, this work is public domain. This story ...

''Arundel'' by Kenneth Roberts was first published in 1930 by Doubleday, now public domain. The novel’s first-person narrator Steven Nason and his family are traders and proprietors of an inn serving the little town of Arundel, now known as Kennebunkport. Steven has become an accomplished backwoodsman by the time he reaches adulthood, knowledge he gained by accompanying his father on trading trips among the Indians. Steven joins Colonel Benedict Arnold’s small expeditionary force in the fa...

Does it matter how Christians in other times and places thought?If the Bible alone is God?s revelation, why spend time studying church history?Aren?t history and tradition more of a problem than a solution?For many Christians whobelieve the Bible is the ultimate authority for faith and life, questions about the role and value of the church's traditions can be difficult to tackle. But let's be honest: even those of us who admit that church history is important are often to...

When Rachel takes a country house for the summer with her niece and nephew, she expects to fill her days with relaxing social activities. But these plans take a turn for the sinister when, on the second night, a dead body is found at the bottom of the house’s circular staircase...

Julius Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 - February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist and director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. He is often credited as the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in organizing the Manhattan Project, the research and development undertaking that created the first nuclear weapons.

''Northwest Passage'' is widely considered a benchmark of the historical adventure genre for its meticulous research and vivid portrayal of colonial America during the mid-18th century. The story is told through the eyes of Langdon Towne, a young artist and Harvard student who flees trouble in New Hampshire to join the army. The novel is structurally divided into two distinct parts: Part 1: Follows the legendary Major Robert Rogers and his "Rogers' Rangers" on a harrowing expedition agains...

In "Scouting for Boys," Robert Baden-Powell employs a pioneering narrative style that intertwines practical instruction with adventurous storytelling, pioneering the youth movement known as scouting. The book serves as both a field manual and an inspirational guide, advocating for outdoor skills, self-reliance, and moral development among young boys. Illustrated with tales of camaraderie and resilience, it reflects the early 20th-century ethos of fostering individual character through natu...

Examining representations of mental difference, this collection focuses on the ways that adaptations (including remakes, reboots, and other examples of remixed narratives) can shape and shift the social contexts and narratives we use to define mental disability. The movement of narratives across media via adaptation, or within media but across time and space in the case of remakes and reboots, is a common tactic for revitalization, allowing storytellers to breathe new life into tired narra...

When this book was first published in 1940, one critic claimed that "adjectives pale before the superb drive and force of Oliver Wiswell." In the novel Kenneth Roberts portrays a very different side to the story of the American Revolution, that of the loyalists (colonists who supported the British monarchy). Spanning the years from 1775 to 1783, ''Oliver Wiswell'' traces the adventures of a Yale student who is deeply loyal to the established government of the colonies. This wonderfully far...

''My Ten Years in a Quandary, and How They Grew'' is a 1936 collection of 105 short humorous essays by Robert Benchley. The book was a best-seller upon release. The collection is considered one of Benchley's most brilliant. A reviewer at America wrote, that My Ten Years in a Quandary, and How They Grew is "bristling… with tiny, droll essays on almost every subject imaginable, and inducing in the reader a state of sustained hilarity." Robert van Gelder of the New York Times wrote, "if there...