Books submitted to Encompass will be reviewed for possible inclusion in EKU Libraries' collection and featured in the EKU Faculty and Staff Books Gallery. The Books Gallery showcases books written or edited by Eastern Kentucky University faculty and staff, while disseminating the work of faculty and staff to the broader academic community. Other Eastern Kentucky University faculty and staff scholarship is highlighted in our EKU Faculty and Staff Scholarship series.
Faculty and staff, you may submit your work here. NOTE: First time submitters will be prompted to create a free Encompass account.
- submit your book citation here
- submit your article pre-prints, presentations, posters, and other types of scholarship here
If you have any questions, contact linda.sizemore@eku.edu
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Fighting Sports, Gender, and the Commodification of Violence
Victoria E. Collins
Fighting Sports, Gender and the Commodification of Violence: Heavy Bag Heroines offers a glimpse into the cultural terrain of women’s boxing as it manifests in everyday gyms for novice boxers. Taking an ethnographic approach, Victoria E. Collins examines broad understandings of gender, violence, self-defense, commodification, and health and fitness from the point of view of women who engage the sport. Collins unpacks dominant assumptions about gender and the sport through her participants’ understandings of gender norms, social assumptions about physicality, sexuality, as well as challenges to masculine and feminine performativity. Central to this study is the appropriation and marketing of the boxers’ work out in cardio-boxing gym spaces (i.e., fitness boxing), where the sport has increasingly been packaged, commodified, and sold to predominantly middle class, white female consumers as a means to not only improve their health and fitness, but also to defend themselves against a would-be attacker. The body project for women in the sport of boxing, therefore, should not only be framed as a form of resistance, but one of physical feminism.
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Geometries of Crime: How Young People Perceive Crime and Justice
Avi Brisman
This book explores how young people perceive the severity of crime and delinquency. It particularly addresses whom or what they consider to be the victims of crime and delinquency, how they analyze and assess appropriate responses by the criminal justice system, as well as their place within it. The book proposes tools for developing a more elaborate and robust understanding of what constitutes crime, identifying those affected by it, and what is deemed adequate or appropriate punishment. In so doing, it offers thick description of young peoples' conceptions of and experiences with crime, delinquency, justice and law, and uses this description to interrogate the role of the state in influencing - indeed, shaping - these perceptions.
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God and Guns in America
Michael W. Austin
What if Christians did more than offer thoughts and prayers in response to gun violence? Ethicist Michael Austin argues—from a biblical but nonpacifist perspective—that we can impose firearms restrictions to make our society safer and less fearful while still respecting the rights of gun owners. God and Guns in America is a thoughtful, measured, and articulate treatment of a polarizing topic that is too often treated with more heat than light.
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Gothic and Strange True Tales of the South
Keven McQueen
Explore the macabre and morbid aspects of history with this collection of real-life happenings focusing on all aspects of dying, from burial to haunting. Taken from actual newspaper articles, these narratives prove that death can be both grotesque and ridiculous. Accidents are never expected, but perhaps they could be prevented by a little common sense; for example, do not thaw frozen dynamite in a fire. Premeditated murders are atrocious in thought and deed, but even worse than that is killing to gain literary material. This ghastly compilation includes tales from Virginia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, and other Southern states.
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Green Cultural Criminology: Constructions of Environmental Harm, Consumerism, and Resistance to Ecocide
Avi Brisman
Over the last two decades, "green criminology" has emerged as a unique area of study, bringing together criminologists and sociologists from a wide range of research backgrounds and varying theoretical orientations. It spans the micro to the macro—from individual-level environmental crimes and victimization to business/corporate violations and state transgressions. There have been few attempts, however, to explicitly or implicitly integrate cultural criminology into green criminology (or vice versa).
This book moves towards articulating a green cultural criminological perspective. Brisman and South examine existing overlapping research and offer a platform to support future excursions by green criminologists into cultural criminology’s concern with media images and representations, consumerism and consumption, and resistance. At the same time, they offer an invitation to cultural criminologists to adopt a green view of the consumption landscape and the growth (and depictions) of environmental harms.
Green Cultural Criminology is aimed at students, academics, criminologists, and sociologists with an interest in green criminology and cultural criminology: two of the most exciting new areas in criminology today.
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Horror in the Heartland: Strange and Gothic Tales from the Midwest
Keven McQueen
Brace yourself for a journey into a creepy, dark side of the American Midwest you thought you knew—a side teeming with real-life surrealism and historical horror-comedy. From tales of the booming grave-robbing industry of late 19th-century Indiana to the story of a Michigan physician who left his estate to his pet monkeys, Keven McQueen investigates a spooky and twisted side of Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Exploring burial customs, unexplained deaths, ghost stories, premature burials, the industry of grave robbing, bizarre murders, peculiar wills and much more, this creepy collection reveals the colorful untold stories of the region and offers intriguing, if sometimes macabre, insights into human nature and our history.
A fun and frightful look at a vein of darkness running through the Midwest, Horror in the Heartland promises to send chills down your spine
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House of Cleaving
Melissa Newman
Annie Cleaving watched her young son take his last breath trapped inside the mangled wreckage of her car. The drunk driver walked away without a scratch. A year later breast cancer took Annie's mother, a tender and genteel woman. As a means to escape painful memories Annie attempts to sell the old Cleaving house, leaving the only home she has ever known. Only then she discovers the botched deed and her only choice, to find her mother's siblings and convince each to release their claims. From crazy Aunt Veda, who thinks a televangelist is sending her secret love messages, to Uncle Asher who has given up his Wall Street career and joined a hippie commune, Annie is thrust into a bizarre new world where it seems the Cleaving family history has been altered. Her journey reveals the many secrets woven throughout the Cleaving family, including a murder, involve her mother.
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House of the Waterlily: A Novel of the Ancient Maya World
Kelli Carmean
Set in the Maya civilization’s Late Classic Period House of the Waterlily is a historical novel centered on Lady Winik, a young Maya royal. Through tribulations that mirror the political calamities of the Late Classic world, Winik’s personal story immerses the reader not only in her daily life, but also in the difficult decisions Maya men and women must have faced as they tried to navigate a rapidly changing world. Kelli Carmean’s novel brings to life a people and an era remote from our own, yet recognizably human all the same.
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Humility and Human Flourishing: A Study in Analytic Moral Theology
Michael W. Austin
In many Christian traditions, humility is often thought to play a central role in the moral and spiritual life. In this study of the moral virtue of humility, the methods of analytic philosophy are applied to the field of moral theology in order to analyze this virtue and its connections to human flourishing. The book is therefore best characterized as a work in analytic moral theology, and has two primary aims. First, it articulates and defends a particular Christian conception of the virtue of humility. It offers a Christological account of this trait, one that is grounded in the gospel accounts of the life of Christ as well as other key New Testament passages. The view of humility it offers and defends is biblically grounded, theologically informed, and philosophically sound. Second, this book describes ways in which humility is constitutive of and conducive to human flourishing, Christianly understood. It argues that humility is rational, benefits its possessor, and contributes to its possessor being good qua human. It also examines several issues in applied virtue ethics. It considers some of the ways in which humility is relevant to several of the classic spiritual disciplines, such as prayer, fasting, solitude, silence, and service. It considers humility’s relevance to issues related to religious pluralism and tolerance. Finally, the book concludes with a discussion of the relevance of humility for family life and how it can function as a virtue in the context of sport.
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Ideas in Argument Building Skills and Understanding for the AP® English Language Course
John R. Williamson
Look, we love a good quilt metaphor as much as anybody, but quit piecing your AP® Language course together.
Ideas in Argument provides everything a teacher needs for a successful and fully aligned AP® Language course. Each Unit includes brief, approachable skill workshops aligned to each Big Idea in the Course and Exam Description and to AP® Classroom. The book also includes
• Diverse and high-interest classic and contemporary texts
• Extensive AP Exam practice
• Scaffolded analysis instruction and practice
• Student friendly step-by-step writing instruction
• ELL support -
Ideas in Literature: Building Skills and Understanding for the AP® English Literature Course
John R. Williamson
Ideas in Literature provides everything you need for a successful and fully aligned AP® Literature course so you can focus on teaching. Each Unit includes brief skill workshops aligned to the Big Ideas in the Course and Exam Description and to AP® Classroom.
Ideas in Literature also includes:- Diverse and high-interest classic and contemporary texts
- Extensive AP® Exam practice
- Scaffolded, step-by-step instruction and practice in analysis and writing
- ELL support
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Innovating Faculty Development: Entering the Age of Innovation
Charlie Sweet, Hal Blythe, and Russell Carpenter
Innovating Faculty Development: Entering the Age of Innovation comprises the authors’ new model for the field of faculty development.
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Innovations in Teaching and Learning - Inaugural Proceedings: 2017 Pedagogicon. Stillwater, OK: New Forums Press.
Rusty Carpenter, Editor; Charlie Sweet, Editor; Hal Blythe, Editor; Matthew P. Winslow, Editor; and Shirley P. O'Brien, Editor
This collection provided presenters from the May 2017 Pedagogicon, held at the Crabbe Library on Eastern Kentucky University’s campus, with an opportunity to turn their effort into that next level of scholarship, a published article focused on valuable pedagogical approaches using the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), defined as “the study of teaching and learning and the communication of findings so that a body of knowledge can be established” (Bishop-Clark & Dietz-Uhler, 2012, p. 1).
Some of the manuscripts selected for inclusion began as 40-minute presentations, while others started out as research posters. The authors in this collection build on their presentations in important and scholarly ways to share these current strategies. Every manuscript passed through many mentored drafts. The manuscripts accepted for inclusion represent teaching and learning approaches—in varying stages of development or implementation—of value to scholars on many different campuses, many ready for you to implement or adapt on your own campus.
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In Our Midst: A Novel
Nancy Jensen
Drawing upon a long-suppressed episode in American history, when thousands of German immigrants were rounded up and interned following the attack on Pearl Harbor, In Our Midst tells the story of one family’s fight to cling to the ideals of freedom and opportunity that brought them to America.
Nina and Otto Aust, along with their teenage sons, feel the foundation of their American lives crumbling when, in the middle of the annual St. Nikolas Day celebration in the Aust Family Restaurant, their most loyal customers, one after another, turn their faces away and leave without a word. The next morning, two FBI agents seize Nina by order of the president, and the restaurant is ransacked in a search for evidence of German collusion.
Ripped from their sons and from each other, Nina and Otto are forced to weigh increasingly bitter choices to stay together and stay alive. Recalling a forgotten chapter in history, In Our Midst illuminates a nation gripped by suspicion, fear, and hatred strong enough to threaten all bonds of love―for friends, family, community, and country.
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Internationalisation of Human Resource Management: Focus on Central and Eastern Europe
József Poór, Allen D. Engle, Jana Blštáková, and Zuzana Joniaková
The aim of this monograph is to provide a comprehensive overview on the International HRM in Central and Eastern Europe supported by qualitative research results. It is the first available publication on contemporary tendencies in IHRM in Central and Eastern Europe, published and based on the CRANET (the Cranfield Network on International HRM) cooperation. Therefore, there are contributions of experienced and relevant authors active in research and publishing in Central and Eastern Europe.
This book consists of three sections. The first focuses on the major impact of internationalisation of HRM in Central and Eastern Europe, identifying impacts of foreign investments, explaining emerging HRM models in the international business environment, introducing evolution of international HRM, including relevant factors of labor market changes and cultural diversity influences. The second section introduces a reflection of business aspects and internationalization in partial HRM functions. The third section contains qualitative research results performed in international companies and delivers an empirical background in the form of case studies. This predetermines the monograph’s valuable material for researchers in the field of HRM-related disciplines, as well as for teachers and students of graduate programs in business, economics and management.
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Investigating Family, Food, and Housing Themes in Social Studies
Cynthia Williams Resor
Investigating Family, Food, and Housing Themes in Social Studies asks students to critically examine their own culture by contrasting it with the daily lives of average people in the past. What people ate, where people lived, and the functions of families are examined and contrasted to subjective, cultural ideals prescribing what families, food, and housing ought to have been. The relationship between housing, food, and family and social class, status, and gender are emphasized. Each chapter includes essential questions to focus student inquiry; historical overviews focused on changes in family, food, and housing from the pre-industrial era, through its transformation during the Industrial Revolution and into the twentieth century; learning activities; and primary source documents and images. This unique approach to teaching history and social studies supports thematic instruction, culturally responsive teaching, place-based education, and literacy in the elementary, middle, or secondary classrooms.
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Irvin S. Cobb: The Rise and Fall of an American Humorist
William Ellis
Born and raised in Paducah, Kentucky, humorist Irvin S. Cobb (1876--1944) rose from humble beginnings to become one of the early twentieth century's most celebrated writers. As a staff reporter for the New York World and Saturday Evening Post, he became one of the highest-paid journalists in the United States. He also wrote short stories for noted magazines, published books, and penned scripts for the stage and screen. In Irvin S. Cobb: The Rise and Fall of a Southern Humorist, historian William E. Ellis examines the life of this significant writer. Though a consummate wordsmith and a talented observer of the comical in everyday life, Cobb was a product of the Reconstruction era and the Jim Crow South. As a party to the endemic racism of his time, he often bemoaned the North's harsh treatment of the South and stereotyped African Americans in his writings. Marred by racist undertones, Cobb's work has largely slipped into obscurity. Nevertheless, Ellis argues that Cobb's life and works are worthy of more detailed study, citing his wide-ranging contributions to media culture and his coverage of some of the biggest stories of his day, including on-the-ground reporting during World War I. A valuable resource for students of journalism, American humor, and popular culture, this illuminating biography explores Cobb's life and his influence on early twentieth-century letter.
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It Works for Me with SoTL: A Step-by-Step Guide
Hal Blythe, Charlie Sweet, and Russell Carpenter
The authors wrote this book, the tenth in their “It Works for Me” Series, to encourage scholars to attempt to produce the fastest growing form of research, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, or SoTL. The collection begins with their essay on the rapid growth of this form from one of Boyer’s four types of scholarship to today’s SoTL, and they even provide a succinct rationale for attempting such scholarship, including personal discussions on the best articles they have written on the subject.
The next section in the book covers historical and theoretical perspectives on the scholarship of teaching and learning. Following that, another section offers actual tips for the production of SoTL, which is followed by a section describing some SoTL projects.
The authors then put forth a step-by-step guide to help you with a SoTL project and conclude with their speculations on future developments in this form.
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Kentucky Women: Their Lives and Times
Tom Appleton
Kentucky Women: Their Lives and Times introduces a history as dynamic and diverse as Kentucky itself. Covering the Appalachian region in the east to the Pennyroyal in the west, the essays highlight women whose aspirations, innovations, activism, and creativity illustrate Kentucky’s role in political and social reform, education, health care, the arts, and cultural development. The collection features women with well-known names as well as those whose lives and work deserve greater attention.
Shawnee chief Nonhelema Hokolesqua, western Kentucky slave Matilda Lewis Threlkeld, the sisters Emilie Todd Helm and Mary Todd Lincoln, reformers Madeline McDowell Breckinridge and Laura Clay, activists Anne McCarty Braden and Elizabeth Fouse, politicians Georgia Davis Powers and Martha Layne Collins, sculptor Enid Yandell, writer Harriette Simpson Arnow, and entrepreneur Nancy Newsom Mahaffey are covered in Kentucky Women, representing a broad cross section of those who forged Kentucky’s relationship with the American South and the nation at large.
With essays on frontier life, gender inequality in marriage and divorce, medical advances, family strife, racial challenges and triumphs, widowhood, agrarian culture, urban experiences, educational theory and fieldwork, visual art, literature, and fame, the contributors have shaped a history of Kentucky that is both grounded and groundbreaking. -
Kenyan Public Universities in the Age of Internationalization: Challenges and Prospects
Iddah Otieno
This book presents a comprehensive institutional level analysis of a single public institution of higher education in the Republic of Kenya using the case study method of investigation. It is the first case study to use both qualitative and quantitative research methodology to illuminate the experiences of Kenyan public universities with internationalization post-independence. Focusing on Kenya’s oldest national public university—the University of Nairobi’s experimentation with internationalization, Kenyan Public Universities in the Age of Internationalization is a first in the East African region. The book argues that attempts by institutions of higher education in Africa to engage in internationalization with the much more older and well established IHEs in the developed world has perpetuated the colonial legacy that has relegated these institutions to the position of the Other in the new international order. Several policy implications are offered on what it means to participate in internationalization from a marginal, peripheral position. The conventional assumption that political independence would bring to most African countries, and by extension their national public universities, a period of freedom from political, economic and cultural subjugation and exploitation by the more powerful world nations has proved elusive. This book is intended for a broad audience in the field of Comparative International Education. The mixed research methods used in this book will certainly appeal to instructors, students, and general readers interested in understanding the experiences of historically marginalized developing World institutions of higher education with internationalization.
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Landfall: A Ring of Stories
Julie Hensley
In this ring of connected short stories, grounded in the fictional town of Conrad’s Fork, Kentucky, everyone is staging some sort of escape. A woman harboring the dark truth about her youngest daughter’s birth, a new teacher suddenly under suspicion after a student’s disappearance, a young girl witnessing her older sister’s sexual awakening: all the people in this Appalachian community suffer a paralyzed desire in response to the stagnancy and exposure they experience in their small town. Landfall: A Ring of Stories weaves together the voices of two generations of mountain families in which secrets are carefully guarded—even from closest kin. One by one, those who leave confront the pull of the land and the people they’ve left behind. Perhaps Conrad’s Fork will save them, or, perhaps, in the wake of urban encroachment and shifting family systems, they will save it.
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Land of Pure Vision: The Sacred Geography of Tibet and the Himalaya
David Zurick
The landscapes of Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan are filled with holy places. Some are of natural origin―summits, rivers and lakes, caves, or forest sanctuaries. Others are consecrated by religious practice―shrines, temples, monasteries, or burial grounds. The holy sites of the Himalaya unite faith and geography to produce some of the most sublime places on Earth.
In Land of Pure Vision, David Zurick draws from his thirty-five years of experience as a geographer, photographer, and explorer of the Himalaya, combining scholarship and art to capture divine landscapes undergoing profound change. The stunning photographs featured in this volume cover the full geographical reach of the region, from the high plateaus of the western Himalaya to the rugged gorges of Tibet's eastern borderlands, from the icy summits of the north to the subtropical southern foothills. Some sites exist in isolation, with intact natural environments and cultural monuments. Others display the tension between the ancient, sacred character of a place and the indifferent course of the modern world.
Land of Pure Vision explores how the religious practices of Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, and shamanism interweave holy sites into a cohesive landscape of transcendent beauty and inspiration. It portrays a world of mystery, magic, and beauty, where the human spirit is in synchronicity with natural forces. Beyond elegy, this beautifully illustrated book is a visual ethnography of people and place. -
Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal
John P. Bowes
The history of Indian removal has often followed a single narrative arc, one that begins with President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 and follows the Cherokee Trail of Tears. In that conventional account, the Black Hawk War of 1832 encapsulates the experience of tribes in the territories north of the Ohio River. But Indian removal in the Old Northwest was much more complicated—involving many Indian peoples and more than just one policy, event, or politician. In Land Too Good for Indians, historian John P. Bowes takes a long-needed closer, more expansive look at northern Indian removal—and in so doing amplifies the history of Indian removal and of the United States.
Bowes focuses on four case studies that exemplify particular elements of removal in the Old Northwest. He traces the paths taken by Delaware Indians in response to Euro-American expansion and U.S. policies in the decades prior to the Indian Removal Act. He also considers the removal experience among the Seneca-Cayugas, Wyandots, and other Indian communities in the Sandusky River region of northwestern Ohio. Bowes uses the 1833 Treaty of Chicago as a lens through which to examine the forces that drove the divergent removals of various Potawatomi communities from northern Illinois and Indiana. And in exploring the experiences of the Odawas and Ojibwes in Michigan Territory, he analyzes the historical context and choices that enabled some Indian communities to avoid relocation west of the Mississippi River.
In expanding the context of removal to include the Old Northwest, and adding a portrait of Native communities there before, during, and after removal, Bowes paints a more accurate—and complicated—picture of American Indian history in the nineteenth century. Land Too Good for Indians reveals the deeper complexities of this crucial time in American history. -
Making of Mbano British Colonialism, Resistance, and Diplomatic Engagements in Southeastern Nigeria, 1906–1960
Ogechi E. Anyanwu Dr
Through in-depth, qualitative analysis of data from archives and research sites in Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the United States, The Making of Mbano: British Colonialism, Resistance, and Diplomatic Engagements in Southeastern Nigeria, 1906-1960 argues that African people in Mbano consistently and fearlessly invoked their pre-colonial socio-cultural, political, and economic values in resisting, scrutinizing, and ultimately negotiating with the British colonial government. In investigating Africa’s complex and diverse engagements with the British through the lens of the Mbano colonial experience, Ogechi E. Anyanwu highlights the fascinating intersection of foreign and indigenous notions of community, culture, political economy, religion, and gender in shaping the Mbano colonial identity. Anyanwu carefully introduces readers to a wider variety of people in colonial Mbano who contributed to the historical experience of Southeastern Nigeria and whose names do not appear in history books.
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Meeting Management & Facilitation Skills: A Practical Introduction to Productive and Engaging Meetings
Sarah Gilbert
Meeting Management & Facilitation Skills is a practical guide for making your steady stream of meetings more productive, efficient, and enjoyable. It is designed for anyone who attends meetings, from seasoned professionals to those newly embarking on their careers.
Based on the knowledge and experience of facilitators with decades of experience in a vast array of industries and projects, this book gives readers a strong foundation to immediately begin facilitating better meetings both in person and online.
Managing a successful meeting takes planning and preparation, effective facilitation skills, and a myriad of methods and techniques. This helpful introduction provides essential information on these topics, as well as the facilitation process, maximizing group work, engagement and communication, conflicts and difficult behavior, and the importance of visuals.
The Facilitation Center at EKU has been providing facilitation services and training on meeting management and facilitation since 2003. Trainees have shared that what they learned from the Center has been transformational to their meetings and the way they work. This book was developed with that core information so a broader audience can put an end to boring, frustrating, and ineffective meetings. -
Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975
Alisha L. Rhymer
Mississippi Praying examines the faith communities at ground-zero of the racial revolution that rocked America. This religious history of white Mississippians in the civil rights era shows how Mississippians’ intense religious commitments played critical, rather than incidental, roles in their response to the movement for black equality.
During the civil rights movement and since, it has perplexed many Americans that unabashedly Christian Mississippi could also unapologetically oppress its black population. Yet, as Carolyn Renée Dupont richly details, white southerners’ evangelical religion gave them no conceptual tools for understanding segregation as a moral evil, and many believed that God had ordained the racial hierarchy.
Challenging previous scholarship that depicts southern religious support for segregation as weak, Dupont shows how people of faith in Mississippi rejected the religious argument for black equality and actively supported the effort to thwart the civil rights movement. At the same time, faith motivated a small number of white Mississippians to challenge the methods and tactics of do-or-die segregationists. Racial turmoil profoundly destabilized Mississippi’s religious communities and turned them into battlegrounds over the issue of black equality. Though Mississippi’s evangelicals lost the battle to preserve segregation, they won important struggles to preserve the theology that had sustained the racial hierarchy. Ultimately, this history sheds light on the eventual rise of the religious right by elaborating the connections between the pre- and post-civil rights South.
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More Offbeat Kentuckians
Keven McQueen and Kyle McQueen
From the pages of Kentucky history come stories of offbeat, quirky, characters from the Commonwealth who, whether by choice or by circumstance, made their mark with their eccentricity. History becomes interesting again and students are entertained with tales from these oddities and oddballs.
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Morning Coffee at the Goldfish Pond: Seeing a World in the Garden
David Zurick
WINNER SILVER AWARD 2017 NAUTILUS BOOK AWARDSFINALIST, NEW GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS David Zurick, winner of the 2006 National Outdoor Book Award, recounts an event in his life that seems exceedingly uncomplicated: he builds a goldfish pond in his backyard. Yet, there is more to a goldfish pond than meets the eye. Zurick's compelling story travels the world, encompassing places of extraordinary beauty and rich cultural traditions, but the core of it is in Wolf Gap Holler, Kentucky, where he lives among hard-working and community-minded neighbors, cuts firewood to keep warm in the winter, and enjoys morning coffee by his goldfish pond . . . often with his neighbor George. Entertaining and informative, the book at first seems so simple that one barely notices its treatises on the sacred qualities of place, the contemplative virtues of nature, the dilemmas of sustainability, and the spiritual framework that undergirds life. Yet, this is what this book is about: a sacred and seamless landscape that extends from the highest mountain plateaus in Tibet to the deepest hollers of Kentucky.
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Murder in Old Kentucky: True Crime Stories from the Bluegrass
Keven McQueen
In Murder in Old Kentucky: True Crime Stories from the Bluegrass, Keven McQueen recounts dark and disturbing tales from the pages of Kentucky history, including the 1825 murder of Col. Solomon Sharp―a sordid affair that inspired Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Penn Warren―and the 1881 Ashland Tragedy, a heartbreaking murder of three innocent teenagers. This revised and expanded edition includes the story of a family terrorized by an arsonist who massacred eleven of their members and burned the property of even more, the tale of a husband and wife found shot in each other's arms with a life-sized photo of another man between them, and many more deaths that made headlines.
Meticulously researched and written with McQueen's trademark humor, Murder in Old Kentucky will captivate any fan of true crime or Kentucky history.
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Murder & Mayhem in Indiana
Keven McQueen
This grim collection of tales includes unimaginable incidents like the Indianapolis businessman whose car contained suspicious hams and the man who handed his new bride a drink of carbolic acid. It also reveals the tragedy of Gary's beautiful Arlene Draves, killed by her football player boyfriend, as well as a surprisingly comic courtroom revelation by Hammond's Hazel McNally that cleared her of all charges.
Author Keven McQueen is an instructor in the Department of English at Eastern Kentucky University. He is the author of twelve books on biography, history, folklore, ghost lore, natural disasters and historical true crime.