An insightful and wide-ranging look at one of America’s most popular genres of music, Walking the Line: Country Music Lyricists and American Culture examines how country songwriters engage with their nation’s religion, literature, and politics. Country fans have long encountered the concept of walking the line, from Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” to Waylon Jennings’s “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line.” Walking the line requires following strict codes, respecting territories, and, sometime...

This two-volume anthology conveniently contains useful academic tools for studying the combative arts. Each chapter will prove special to all interested in the intellectual side to the martial arts. Some chapters provide fine details for categorizing the variety of what we commonly refer to as "martial arts." Other chapters focus on the martial arts as living culture and social implications. The quality of instruction can either encourage negative traits such as violence or allow a practit...

This study examines the complicated legacy of Stalinism in the twentieth century. The descent of the Russian Revolution into Stalinism has given rise to an oft-accepted truism that revolutions are like Saturn and will devour their own children. For anticommunists, Stalinism is condemned as a “bolt from blue,” whether an insidious contagion, Big Brother, or totalitarian reason that socialism cannot escape from. On the other end, Communists and their fellow-travelers have seen Stalinism as a...

When John Clark Married Ann Rogers in 1749 in Virginia, they would eventually produce ten children six sons and four daughters. Like most early American rural couples, John and Ann thought that they were raising farm hands and kitchen help. Little did they dream that their children and two more generations of Clarks would have such a great impact on Americas development from coast to coast. Three of the Clark sons would become officers, and help to win the Revolutionary War in the east. Ge...

Astronomers around the world are pointing their telescopes toward the heavens, searching for signs of intelligent life. If they make contact with an advanced alien civilization, how will humankind respond? In thinking about first contact, the contributors to this volume present new empirical and theoretical research on the societal dimensions of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Archaeologists and astronomers explore the likelihood that extraterrestrial intelligence exis...