Each year, tens of thousands of people flock to Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, and to more than two hundred other locations across the country to attend Scottish Highland Games and Gatherings. There, kilt-wearing participants compete in athletics, Highland dancing, and bagpiping, while others join clan societies in celebration of a Scottish heritage. As Celeste Ray notes, however, the Scottish affiliation that Americans claim today is a Highland Gaelic identity that did not come to ...

Examines the impact of the Scottish legacy on North American cultures and heritageDuring the past four decades, growing interest in North Americans' cultural and ancestral ties to Scotland has produced hundreds of new Scottish clan and heritage societies. Well over 300 Scottish Highland games and gatherings annually take place across the U.S. and Canada.Transatlantic Scots is a multidisciplinary collection that studies the regional organiz...

How ritualized public ceremonies affirm or challenge cultural identities associated with the American SouthW. J. Cash's 1941 observation that “there are many Souths and many cultural traditions among them” is certainly validated by this book. Although the Civil War and its “lost cause” tradition continues to serve as a cultural root paradigm in celebrations, both uniting and dividing loyalties, southerners also embrace a panoply of public rituals—parades, ...

Lonely Planet Guatemala is your passport to the most relevant, up-to-date advice on what to see and skip, and what hidden discoveries await you. Visit Tika's monumental restored temples, learn to speak Spanish while admiring picture-postcard vistas in Antigua or hike Lago de Atitlan's lakeshore trails -all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of Guatemala and begin your journey now!Inside Lonely Planet Guatemala Travel Guid...

Two months after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana took control of nearly all the public schools in New Orleans. Today, all of the city’s public schools are charter schools. Although many analyses mark the beginning of education reform in New Orleans with Katrina, in Public Schools, Private Governance, J. Celeste Layargues that the storm merely accelerated the timeline for reforms that had inched along incrementally over the previous decade. Both before and after Katrina, white reforme...

THE GREEN, THE BLACK, AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA is the debut novel by writing partners Balestri & Celeste introducing Summer Kane, a 17-year-old lifeguard on Narragansett Beach, and Gabriel, a handsome young fisherman working on a fishing trawler out of Point Judith, Rhode Island, who guards a deep secret. Eight years before, Summer lost her only brother in a gigantic freak wave while sailing with her family in Narragansett Bay. Traumatized by the accident, she spent her childhood mostly a...

Describing sacred waters and their associated traditions in over thirty countries and across multiple time periods, this book identifies patterns in panhuman hydrolatry. Supplying life’s most basic daily need, freshwater sources were likely the earliest sacred sites, and the first protected and contested resource. Guarded by taboos, rites and supermundane forces, freshwater sources have also been considered thresholds to otherworlds. Often associated also with venerated stones, trees and h...

Transcending familiar categories of “black” and “white,” this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture complicates and enriches our understanding of “southernness” by identifying the array of cultures that combined to shape the South. This exploration of southern ethnicities examines the ways people perform and maintain cultural identities through folklore, religious faith, dress, music, speech, cooking, and transgenerational tradition.Accessibly written and info...

Interlacing varied approaches within Historical Ecology, this volume offers new routes to researching and understanding human–environmental interactions and the heterarchical power relations that shape both socioecological change and resilience over time. Historical Ecology draws from archaeology, archival research, ethnography, the humanities and the biophysical sciences to merge the history of the Earth’s biophysical system with the history of humanity.Considering landsc...