Product Code: P143
ISBN: 9780865545168
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $17.95
The Melungeons shares the story of a people ravaged, and nearly destroyed, by the senseless excesses of racism and genocide, a people who were, a century ad a half later, crushed beneath the violent onslaught of unbridled Anglo jingoism. Recognizing the truth of who the Melungeons were, and are, will redefine our view of the settlement of this nation, and, more to the point, of our own self-identity. It will also render incomplete and possibly obsolete much of what has been written and preserved about our Southern ethnic heritage.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P548
ISBN: 9780881466232
Price: $17.00
Christian Bend isn’t the kind of place where one expects to find the sorts of secrets the widow Burdy Luttrell has been harboring. Tucked in the hills of East Tennessee, Christian Bend is a place of piercing beauty, where the rivers and love run constant. Burdy never could bring herself to tell Rain Hurd the truth about his father. She’d always meant to, but put it off until that day she was nearly killed in the shooting at Bean Station. As soon as he heard about the shooting, Rain left his job in Rhode Island and flew to Burdy’s bedside at that Knoxville hospital. That’s when Burdy told him about the letters.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P550
ISBN: 9780881466270
Price: $20.00
Fresh hams cook slowly for eight hours over hickory wood as smoke drifts through Bullock’s Hollow in Northeast Tennessee. It’s a smell both ancient and alluring. The technique is as old as cooking itself. Gas and electricity play no part. Wood, fire, and smoke are the elements. Pressures to modernize are constant, but labor-intensive tradition prevails at Ridgewood Barbecue near Bluff City. The restaurant has been located at the same spot since 1948, and it has been owned and operated by the Proffitt family all that time. THE PROFFITTS OF RIDGEWOOD: AN APPALACHIAN FAMILY'S LIFE IN BARBECUE, by Fred W. Sauceman, tells a story of persistence, respect for tradition, and loyalty to the land.
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Product Code: P245
ISBN: 9780865548619
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $19.00
Hirschman's research indicates the earliest American settlers were of Mediterranean extraction, and of a Jewish or Muslim religious persuasion. Sometimes called “Melungeons,” these early settlers were among the earliest nonnative “Americans” to live in the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia, perhaps including Daniel Boone, John Sevier, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Andrew Jackson.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P589
ISBN: 9780881467185
Price: $25.00
In 1969, Hancock County, Tennessee was the eighth poorest county in the United States. Isolated by rugged mountains and far from population centers or major highways, the county had few natural resources, couldn't attract industry, and had lost half its population in just a few decades. Hoping to develop a tourist industry, county leaders decided to stage an outdoor drama about the Melungeons, a mysterious, racially-mixed people that had attracted newspaper and magazine writers to Hancock County for more than a century. To stage the drama, the organizers had to overcome long-standing local prejudice against the dark-skinned Melungeons, the reluctance of the Melungeons to call attention to themselves, the physical isolation of the county, and their own lack of experience in any aspect of this project.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P512
ISBN: 9780881465372
Price: $17.00
Within the tightly knit Cherokee community in the Smoky Mountains, a secret society of Snake Dancers is led by a group of elders, four of whom guard an artifact of incredible power. Guardianship has been passed from father to son for over 300 years. Theses artifacts belonged to Kanegwa’ti, a medicine man who controlled the power of Uktena (an evil spirit) in order to protect the tribe. Even the four guardians cannot reveal what they guard. The tradition of secrecy was set up by Kanegwa’ti to prevent anyone from awakening Uktena and bringing destruction.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P581
ISBN: 9780881467024
Price: $17.00
THROUGH THE NEEDLE'S EYE is told through the authentic voice of Jessie, a precocious girl raised in the Blue Ridge Foothills of Southern Appalachia after World War II. Saddled with an alcoholic narcissistic father and a passive mother, Jessie is charged with mothering her siblings as generational curses and poverty never cease to overwhelm her family. As providence would have it, Granny Isabelle sets her eagle eye upon Jessie, the child neither parents nor teachers think worthwhile.
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Product Code: P226
ISBN: 9780865547988
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $19.00
In Taking Up Serpents: A History of Snake Handling Kimbrough explains the history and practice of serpent-handling believers from the perspective of a respectful and scholarly participant-observer.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P590
ISBN: 9780881467215
Price: $16.00
On foot and in a leaky canoe, award-winning poet and naturalist Thorpe Moeckel meanders for a year through the fragmented forests of the Eno and Haw watersheds. He seeks the alive interiors of a world covered over in asphalt, seeks to shed its hard exterior and "wonder the woods." In doing so he makes a record both physical and numinous. His writing--lyrical and leapy with cellular, porous perceptiveness--invites readers to journey with him around every surprising bend and twisting turn of phrase.
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Product Code: P340
ISBN: 9780881460742
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $19.00
Some oppressed groups fought with guns, some fought in court, some exercised civil disobedience; the Melungeons, however, fought by telling folktales. Whites and blacks gave the name "children of perdition" to mixed Americans during the 300 years that marriage between whites and nonwhites was outlawed. Mixed communities ranked socially below communities of freed slaves although they had lighter skin. To escape persecution caused by the stigma of having African blood, these groups invented fantastic stories of their origins, known generally as "lost colony" legends.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P562
ISBN: 9780881466539
Price: $16.00
SPECTER MOUNTAIN is a book-length poetry collaboration between Jesse Graves and William Wright that imagines the spiritual and ecological life of an embattled landscape. The collection fuses two striking poetic visions into a cohesive and innovative new perspective on nature and the inevitable imprint of human interaction with wilderness. Readers will gain a sense of the permanent beauty of rivers and mountains, timeless images of the sublime, and the grandeur that reaches beyond human life and influence.
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Product Code: P481
ISBN: 9780881464795
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $21.00
In his latest collection of writings about the foodways of the Appalachian region, Fred W. Sauceman guides readers through country kitchens and church fellowship halls, across pasture fields and into smokehouses, down rows of vegetable gardens at the peak of the season and alongside ponds resonant with the sounds of a summer night.
The scenes and subjects are oftentimes uniquely personal, and they combine to tell a love story, a chronicle of one person’s affection for a region and its people, its products, and its places. BUTTERMILK AND BIBLE BURGERS is most of all an expression of gratitude for the persistence of the people who feed us.
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