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: P514
ISBN: 9780881465396
Price: $15.00
Sequel to the award-winning MOTHER OF RAIN.
When it is a healing they need, the people at Christian Bend, Tennessee, turn to one woman—Burdy Luttrell.
Melungeon by birth, Burdy learned the therapeutic properties of roots from the women in her family. When Burdy discovers that Lincoln Memorial University is hosting a class on healing roots, she persuades her friend, Mayne, to drive her up. The two women make a fateful stop at Laidlow Pharmacy at Bean Station where an armed gunman executes three people and critically injures another.
Burdy—the woman able to cure others—is now fighting for her life at University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville.
Karen Spears Zacharias has crafted a mesmerizing novel of tragedy and transformation, a beautiful rendering of fact and fiction, and a tenderhearted narrative of survivors and the battles they face.
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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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Product Code: P340
ISBN: 9780881460742
Product Format: Paperback
Availability: Not currently available. ( Backorder policy)
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: 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: 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: 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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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P545
ISBN: 9780881466164
Price: $16.00
As the opening poem “The Labyrinth Galaxy” suggests, this is not a book of astronomy, but a book of seeking and beseeching. Cathryn Hankla’s GALAXIES forms a collective of connected but disparate things. Each galaxy grouping constitutes a gravitational system of concern, finding its own music and approach to what a poem can be. Together the poems create a spiritual pilgrimage, a sequence sending up an alarm for the earth, inviting the reader to walk a path to the heart’s center.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P647
ISBN: 9780881468526
Price: $20.00
Ann Hite takes her readers back to Black Mountain with this haunted short story collection. An array of new characters on the mountain experience ghostly encounters. The collection took inspiration from her beloved readers, who provided writing prompts.
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Product Code: P302
ISBN: 9780865548480
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $25.00
Jimmy Morrow, a pastor and serpent handler for over a quarter of a century, explores the history of serpent handling from a variety of sources, including his extensive familiarity with families whose roots are deep in Appalachia. It will be of interest to anyone interested in Appalachian culture or religion in the South.
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Product Code: P324
ISBN: 9780865549838
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $25.00
How They Shine is the first book of its kind—a book about books with Melungeon characters. Its clear, readable presentation invites scholarly attention from a variety of disciplines, lay readers, residents of Appalachia, and readers who love good books that ask an interesting question: “Why would someone choose to write about Melungeons?”
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P691
ISBN: 9780881469240
Price: $20.00
LOCAL SIGNS AND WONDERS is an essay collection describing how attachment to a family homestead creates a sense of wellbeing, fulfillment, and belonging. Richard Rankin lives on family property settled in the mid 1760s and farmed until the 1970s. The Rankin home place sits in a shrinking countryside about twenty miles west of fast-growing Charlotte, North Carolina. Despite rural decline and environmental peril, these essays show how staying on family land benefits personal wholeness, rich relationships with family, neighbors and wildlife, and service to creation.
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