Books published by West Virginia University Press

Seasons for Fasting, a late Old English poem probably composed in the early eleventh century, focuses on proper fasting observances in England. This poem, composed in eight-line stanzas, survives only in a sixteenth-century transcript. This is a new text and translation of the poem, accompanied by an extensive introduction, commentary, and glossary.

Written in 1905, this is a compelling tale of the post-Civil War South's degeneration into a region awash with virulent racist practices against African Americans: segregation, lynchings, disenfranchisement, convict-labor exploitation, and endemic violent repression. The events are powerfully depicted from the point of view of a philanthropic but unreliable southern white colonel.

After Sadie's son, Mark, is gone, she doesn't have much use for other people, including her husband. The last person she wants to see is Tinley Greene, who shows up claiming she's pregnant with Mark's baby. Sadie refuses to help, and she doesn't breathe a word about it to anybody. But in a small, southern town like Garnet, nothing stays secret for long.

Secrets and snakes, rock and gospel, guilt and grace. The Psalms of Israel Jones is the story of a father and son's journey towards spiritual redemption. This novel tells the tale of a famous father trapped inside the suffocating world of rock and roll, and his son who is stranded within the bounds of conventional religion.

Presents the reader with explanatory commentary that encompasses both the scientific and the poetic and treats them both with equal felicity. The volume also contains something that is exceptionally valuable and cannot be found in English: a compact and serviceable grammar of Old Saxon and an appended glossary that defines all of the vocabulary found in this edited version of the Heliand.

Collects twelve essays that analyse the rise of craft beer from social and cultural perspectives. These essays tackle such questions as: How does the growth of craft beer connect to trends like the farm-to-table movement, gentrification, the rise of the "creative class", and changing attitudes toward both cities and farms? How do craft beers conjure history, place, and authenticity?

In a series of columns published in the African American newspaper "The Christian Recorder, " the young, charismatic preacher Henry McNeal Turner described his experience of the Civil War, first from the perspective of a civilian observer in Washington, D.C., and later, as one of the Union army's first black chaplains. In the halls of Congress, Turner witnessed the debates surrounding emancipation and black enlistment. As army chaplain, Turner dodged "grape" and cannon, comforted the sick and wounded, and settled disputes between white southerners and their former slaves. He was dismayed by the destruction left by Sherman's army in the Carolinas, but buoyed by the bravery displayed by black soldiers in battle. After the war ended, he helped establish churches and schools for the freedmen, who previously had been prohibited from attending either. Throughout his columns, Turner evinces his firm belief in the absolute equality of blacks with whites, and insists on civil rights for all black citizens. In vivid, detailed prose, laced with a combination of trenchant commentary and self-deprecating humor, Turner established himself as more than an observer: he became a distinctive and authoritative voice for the black community, and a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal church. After Reconstruction failed, Turner became disillusioned with the American dream and became a vocal advocate of black emigration to Africa, prefiguring black nationalists such as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. Here, however, we see Turner's youthful exuberance and optimism, and his open-eyed wonder at the momentous changes taking place in American society. Well-known in his day, Turner has been relegated to the fringes of African American history, in large part because neither his views nor the forms in which he expressed them were recognized by either the black or white elite. With an introduction by Jean Lee Cole and a foreword by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "Freedom's Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner "restores this important figure to the historical and literary record.

In They'll Cut Off Your Project, Huey Perry reveals his efforts to help the poor of an Appalachian community challenge a local regime. He describes this community's attempts to improve school programmes and conditions, establish cooperative grocery stores, and expose electoral fraud. Along the way, Perry unfolds the local authority's hostile backlash to such change.

The miners' strike against Pittston Coal in 1989-1990, which spread throughout southwestern Virginia, southern West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky, was one of the most important strikes in the history of American labour. In A Strike like No Other Strike, Richard Brisbin offers a compelling study of the exercise of political power.

Virtually unknown outside of her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, Jane Edna Harris Hunter was one of the most influential African American social activists of the early-to mid-twentieth century. In her autobiography A Nickel and a Prayer, Hunter presents an enlightening two-part narrative that recollects her formative years in post-Civil War South and her activist years in Cleveland.

Recounts the difficulties the state of West Virginia faced during the post-World War II period. While documenting this turmoil, this valuable analysis also traces the efforts of the New Frontier and Great Society programmes, which stimulated maximum feasible participation and lead to the ultimate rise of grass roots activities and organisations that improved life and labour in the region.

Examines the economic and social conditions of the state of West Virginia before, during, and after the Great Depression. Jerry Bruce Thomas's exploration of personal papers by political and social figures, newspapers, and the published and unpublished records of federal, state, local, and private agencies, traces a region's response to an economic depression and a presidential stimulus programme.

How does a state, tarnished with a racist, violent history, emerge from the modern civil rights movement with a reputation for tolerance and progression? Old South, New South, or Down South? exposes the image, illusion, and reality behind Florida's hidden story of racial discrimination and violence.

Terrorism and national security have been in the foreground of the nation's political landscape since the uncertain times brought on by the attacks of September 11, 2001. This collection of scholarly essays provides a chance to learn from the past by offering an analytic - and sometimes provocative - look at the inseparability of security and history.

In this ambitious study of contemporary poetics, Joe W. Moffett deciphers the twentieth-century long poem. He focuses on issues like postcolonialism, nation, modernism, and postmodernism, and conceptualizes his theories by using what he calls "originiary moments", historical periods or specific events from which a poet contends our culture descends.