Written by leading historians of the mid–nineteenth century United States, this book focuses on the continental dimensions of the U.S. Civil War. It joins a growing body of scholarship that seeks to understand the place of America’s mid-nineteenth-century crisis in the broader sweep of world history. However, unlike other studies that have pursued the Civil War’s connections with Europe and the Caribbean, this volume focuses on North America, particularly Mexico, British Canada, and sovere...

Rocky meets Elmore Leonard meets Miranda July as Pillow Wilson, a past-his-prime boxer, trains for his last title shot. Shenanigans ensue.Boxer ‘Pillow Fist’ Pete Wilson should be preparing for his big comeback fight. But, having recently undergone an ethical awakening, the new vegan is busy trying to find humane new homes for his menagerie of exotic pets (including Jersey Joe the sloth and Rigoberto the shark). His roommate, Sherlock Holmes, who faked his...

When we talk about the Civil War, we often describe it in terms of battles that took place in small towns or in the countryside: Antietam, Gettysburg, Bull Run, and, most tellingly, the Battle of the Wilderness. One reason this picture has persisted is that few urban historians have studied the war, even though cities hosted, enabled, and shaped Southern society as much as they did in the North.Confederate Cities, edited by Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers, shifts the focus ...

“It is well that war is so terrible,” Robert E. Lee reportedly said, “or we would grow too fond of it.” The essays collected here make the case that we have grown too fond of it, and therefore we must make the war terrible again. Taking a “freakonomics” approach to Civil War studies, each contributor uses a seemingly unusual story, incident, or phenomenon to cast new light on the nature of the war itself. Collectively the essays remind us that war is always about damage, even at i...

On May 1, 1866, a minor exchange between white Memphis city police and a group of black Union soldiers quickly escalated into murder and mayhem. Changes wrought by the Civil War and African American emancipation sent long-standing racial, economic, cultural, class, and gender tensions rocketing to new heights. For three days, a mob of white men roamed through South Memphis, leaving a trail of blood, rubble, and terror in their wake. By May 3, at least forty-six African American men, women,...

A fetish, the OED tells us, is an irrational and often obsessive reverence for a principle or thing, or in the erotic sense when a non-sexual part of the body, an object or behaviour becomes a focus for sexual desire. Most of the time, when people say they have a fetish all they mean is that they like something, boobs or bums included. But it can go much further than that, through ever stronger levels of desire, right up to a need so powerful that it becomes impossible to achieve orgasm wi...

Investigates how Americans have remembered violence and resistance since the Civil War, including Confederate monuments, historical markers, college classrooms, and history books.George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020 sparked a national reckoning for the United States that had been 400 years in the making. Millions of Americans took to the streets to protest both the murder and the centuries of systemic racism that already existed among European colonists but ...

Two deeply scarred souls struggle with forbidden feelings in this heartfelt second novel in the Nashville Sound series.Life has taught defenseman Bryant Taylor never to look back and never to get serious about a woman. His ill, pregnant wife died while he was off playing an away game, leaving him—and both their families—heartbroken. Jokes and puck bunnies are his style now, and he’s sticking to it.Gabriella Charbonnet has idolized her brother Emile since he rescued her from...

Welcome to Salvation, known to the locals as Ruination - a bawdy, ribald town where nothing is sacred except perhaps the beer, the sex and the fishing. The people who live there are villainous, perverse, and unashamedly venal: there is John, who runs the local pub, Jean Flinch whose reputation at the Virgin Wall is infamous and little orphan Ernie, whose giant jawbone is both a curse and a blessing. When Ernie re-invents himself as The Slapping Man, all hell breaks loose as the locals clam...

The Roommate Book is all about celebrating the short season of life that is the time between parental curfews and settling down with a significant other. Designed for the single and proud, and filled with whimsical drawings and quizzes, it is a non-serious look at how to live with a friend (or a total stranger). Nuggets of wisdom are included, but so are comical pie charts, illustrations, and brief essays.Meet your roommate: The Random, The BFF, The Bra-less & Lawless, The...

"Excellent, readable, and absorbing history . . . gives us a better understanding of this compelling aspect of the Civil War." — Library JournalFamilies, communities, and the nation itself were irretrievably altered by the Civil War and the subsequent societal transformations of the nineteenth century. The repercussions of the war incited a broad range of unique problems in Appalachia, including political dynamics, racial prejudices, and the regional econom...