A Year in the South is about four ordinary people in an extraordinary time. They lived in the South during 1865 -- a year that saw war, disunion, and slavery give way to peace, reconstruction, and emancipation. One was a slave determined to gain freedom, one a widow battling poverty and despair, one a man of God and planter's son grappling with spiritual and worldly troubles, and one a former Confederate soldier seeking a new life. Between January and December 1865 they witnessed, from very different vantage points, the death of the Old South and the birth of the New South. Civil War historian Stephen V. Ash reconstructs their daily lives, their fears and hopes, and their frustrations and triumphs in vivid detail, telling a dramatic story of real people in a time of great upheaval and offering a fresh perspective on a pivotal moment in history.

James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters. Initially, ex-slaves attempted to create an educational system that would support and extend their emancipation, but their children were pushed into a system of industrial education that presupposed black political and economic subordination. This conception of education and social order--supported by northern industrial philanthropists, some black educators, and most southern school officials--conflicted with the aspirations of ex-slaves and their descendants, resulting at the turn of the century in a bitter national debate over the purposes of black education. Because blacks lacked economic and political power, white elites were able to control the structure and content of black elementary, secondary, normal, and college education during the first third of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, blacks persisted in their struggle to develop an educational system in accordance with their own needs and desires.

A slave determined to gain freedom, a widow battling poverty and despair, a man of God grappling with spiritual and worldly troubles, and a former Confederate soldier seeking a new life. They lived in the South during 1865 -- a year that saw war, disunion, and slavery give way to peace, reconstruction, and emancipation. Between January and December 1865, these four people witnessed, from very different vantage points, the death of the Old South and the birth of the New South. Civil War historian Stephen V. Ash reconstructs their daily lives, their fears and hopes, and their frustrations and triumphs in vivid detail -- telling a dramatic story of real people in a time of great upheaval and offering a fresh perspective on a pivotal moment in history.

African American schools in the segregated South faced enormous obstacles in educating their students. But some of these schools succeeded in providing nurturing educational environments in spite of the injustices of segregation. Vanessa Siddle Walker tells the story of one such school in rural North Carolina, the Caswell County Training School, which operated from 1934 to 1969. She focuses especially on the importance of dedicated teachers and the principal, who believed their jobs extended well beyond the classroom, and on the community's parents, who worked hard to support the school. According to Walker, the relationship between school and community was mutually dependent. Parents sacrificed financially to meet the school's needs, and teachers and administrators put in extra time for professional development, specialized student assistance, and home visits. The result was a school that placed the needs of African American students at the center of its mission, which was in turn shared by the community. Walker concludes that the experience of CCTS captures a segment of the history of African Americans in segregated schools that has been overlooked and that provides important context for the ongoing debate about how best to educate African American children. African American History/Education/North Carolina

The highly acclaimed novelist and biographer Albert Murray tells his classic memoir of growing up in Alabama during the 1920s and 1930s in South to a Very Old Place. Intermingling remembrances of youth with engaging conversation, African-American folklore, and astute cultural criticism, it is at once an intimate personal journey and an incisive social history, informed by "the poet's language, the novelist's sensibility, the essayist's clarity, the jazzman's imagination, the gospel singer's depth of feeling" (The New Yorker). "His perceptions are firmly based in the blues idiom, and it is black music no less than literary criticism and historical analysis that gives his work its authenticity, its emotional vigor and its tenacious hold on the intellect...[It] destroys some fashionable socio-political interpretations of growing up black."--Toni Morrison, The New York Times Book Review

In late 2005, the total casualties in Afghanistan were just barely over one hundred; meanwhile, the news agencies were publicizing, each day, the thousands of American soldiers who were dying in Iraq. There was rarely any mention at all of the conflict going on in Afghanistan. Little did Daniel Flores know that one year later he would be witness to the Taliban resurgence and lose some of his friends in the war. He was locked in a battle for his life against a determined enemy, in one of the most notorious and highly contested valleys in the Hindu Kush, in his Apache gunshipwithout bullets. South of Heaven is the searing memoir of Floress year-long tour of duty in Afghanistan. One of his missions was featured in a segment on the Military Channels My War Diary program. The segment was based on the rescue of an American Convoy in the Tagab Valley in Afghanistan. The video and audio footage of the actual battle that he shot with his own equipment was used in the production. The final week of his rotation in-country was a true test of his faith and his daughters faith that he would return home unharmed.