Bøger udgivet af University of South Carolina Press

The life of the unparalleled purveyor of the Great American Songbook, Marian McPartland, is celebrated in this engrossing biographyFrom Bobby Short to Esperanza Spalding, across the 33-year run of the acclaimed radio show, Piano Jazz, Marian McPartland conversed and played piano duets with jazz greats and, via National Public Radio syndication, brought the best of jazz standards to listeners. In Shall We Play That One Together?, Paul de Barros considers McPartland's full life and shows her to have been a courageous compositional innovator as well as an immensely talented popularizer and educator. Her standing among the jazz artists and her advocacy for women jazz musicians made McPartland a natural to host the Piano Jazz show conceived of in 1978 and first broadcast on WLTR out of Columbia, South Carolina, in 1979. That show secured her reputation in the musical form and allowed her to introduce American and then global audiences to a diverse array of musicians developing the Great American Songbook.

A haunting memoir of childhood trauma, building a life, and wounds that never heal "Not a year before I ran away from home at seventeen, I stepped out of the house at dusk, still able to see shrub oaks thinned out for winter, fame flower, too, and dun clay so wet the smell of it seemed settled in my skin." So begins Rachel M. Hanson's debut memoir about growing up impoverished, uneducated, and surrounded by violence. In lyrical, fragmented prose, she lays bare the impossible choice between self-preservation and her love for five younger siblings for whom she had become a second mother. As the years pass, Hanson struggles with guilt for leaving her siblings as she slowly realizes she could not save them. The End of Tennessee is a testament to a sister's love--to resilience and determination--a book for anyone who has left one life to create another.

An Italian émigré's dreams are shattered, and she embarks on a new and unexpected life in the American South Growing up in Rome, studying all over Europe, fleeing antisemitism, and relocating to Israel, Fania obsesses about New York City and the glory, epic friendships, and romance she will find there. When she finally moves to the city, Fania discovers a very different America from her Hollywood version. She experiences nothing but disappointments, failures, and amorous (mis)adventures--at times violent and traumatic. But, Fania stays, obstinately moving between jobs, lovers, and cities in search of herself and her idea of America.South of My Dreams is F. K. Clementi's modern immigrant story of self-discovery and resilience. Her personal journey reveals deeper truths about America as seen through the eyes of a woman, foreigner, and Jew. In the end, the America of her quest is not a specific place but who she is in that place. When life goes south, Fania moves South, too. There, surprising new prospects open for her future. South of My Dreams is a story of joy, trauma, cultural discovery, and hope that will inspire readers to pursue happiness wherever it might lead.

One of the most influential cooking primers of the Old SouthOriginally published in 1867 as Mrs. Hill's New Cook Book this encyclopedic treasury of recipes, cooking advice, and household hints brims with insight into the culinary heritage of the South in general and Georgia in particular. With its return to print, the charming volume revises popular legends about the food ways of the Old South, revealing both the bounty of the Southern table and the expertise of the Southern cook.Annabella P. Hill (1810-1878), a socially prominent woman whose rural Georgia kitchen centered on an open fireplace, records the end of an age in American culinary history and adroitly chronicles the cookery of the South. She proves that nineteenth-century Southerners ate a veritable smorgasbord and that rural Southern cooks were more cosmopolitan in their culinary knowledge than has been previously thought. Many of the instructions here--including those for blending and roasting coffee beans--remain pertinent for the contemporary gourmand. To this portrait of Southern gastronomy, Damon L. Fowler adds a biographical sketch of Hill, an explanation of the customs that shaped her writings, and a glossary to assist in translating these time-honored recipes to the modern kitchen.

A thoughtful exploration of male poets' contributions to the literature of motherhoodIn the late 1950s the notion of a "e;mother poem"e; emerged during a confessional literary movement that freed poets to use personal, psychosexual material about intimate topics such as parents, childhood, failed marriages, children, infidelity, and mental illness. In Male Poets and the Agon of the Mother, Hannah Baker Saltmarsh argues that male poets have contributed to what we think of as the literature of motherhood-that confessional and postconfessional modes have been formative in the way male poets have grappled with the stories of their mothers and how those stories reflect on the writers and their artistic identities. Through careful readings of formative elegies and homages written by male poets of this time, Saltmarsh explores how they engaged with femininity and feminine voices in the 1950s and 60s and sheds light on the inheritance of confessional motifs of gender and language as demonstrated by postconfessional writers responding to the rich subject matter of motherhood within the contexts of history, myth, and literature. A foreword is provided by Jo Gill, professor of twentieth-century and American literature in the Department of English and associate dean for education at the University of Exeter.

Ten noted religious studies scholars examine the sacred scriptures of Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Mormonism to produce an authoritative, comprehensive survey of the writings that shape the world's major religions. The Holy Book in Comparative Perspective concentrates on the origins, forms, and functions of scriptures in religious life. This volume also includes a thought-provoking chapter on the transmission of sacred traditions among nonliterate populations and a rebuttal of the widespread elevation of primitive traditions over literate traditions.

Long before there were cobblestone streets along the Charleston battery, there was rice and there were slaves--the twin pillars upon which colonial Carolina wealth was built. But by the Civil War both began to crumble, along with the planter aristocracy they supported. Seed from Madagascar chronicles the linked tragedies of the prominent Heyward family and South Carolina's rice industry while underscoring the integral role African Americans played in the fortunes of the planter class and the precious crop. As much about race as about rice, Duncan Clinch Heyward's account describes the master-slave relationship, the planting and marketing of rice, and the changes wrought by the Civil War. Peter Coclanis's vivid introduction to this Southern Classics edition places Heyward's chronicle in its historical and cultural context, making Seed from Madagascar as important today as when it first appeared in the 1930s.

A groundbreaking response to the challenges of interpreting Islamic religion in the post-9/11 and post-Orientalist eraRethinking Islamic Studies upends scholarly roadblocks in post-Orientalist discourse within contemporary Islamic studies and carves fresh inroads toward a robust new understanding of the discipline, one that includes religious studies and other politically infused fields of inquiry.Editors Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin, along with a distinguished group of scholars, map the trajectory of the study of Islam and offer innovative approaches to the theoretical and methodological frameworks that have traditionally dominated the field. In the volume's first section the contributors reexamine the underlying notions of modernity in the East and West and allow for the possibility of multiple and incongruent modernities. This opens a discussion of fundamentalism as a manifestation of the tensions of modernity in Muslim cultures. The second section addresses the volatile character of Islamic religious identity as expressed in religious and political movements at national and local levels. In the third section, contributors focus on Muslim communities in Asia and examine the formation of religious models and concepts as they appear in this region. This study concludes with an afterword by accomplished Islamic studies scholar Bruce B. Lawrence reflecting on the evolution of this post-Orientalist approach to Islam and placing the volume within existing and emerging scholarship.Rethinking Islamic Studies offers original perspectives for the discipline, each utilizing the tools of modern academic inquiry, to help illuminate contemporary incarnations of Islam for a growing audience of those invested in a sharper understanding of the Muslim world.

An examination of the role and struggles of dockworkers--enslaved and free--in Charleston between the American Revolution and the Civil WarWorking on the Dock of the Bay explores the history of waterfront labor and laborers--black and white, enslaved and free, native and immigrant--in Charleston, South Carolina, between the American Revolution and Civil War. Michael D. Thompson explains how a predominantly enslaved workforce laid the groundwork for the creation of a robust and effectual association of dockworkers, most of whom were black, shortly after emancipation. In revealing these wharf laborers' experiences, Thompson's book contextualizes the struggles of contemporary southern working people.Like their postbellum and present-day counterparts, stevedores and draymen laboring on the wharves and levees of antebellum cities--whether in Charleston or New Orleans, New York or Boston, or elsewhere in the Atlantic World--were indispensable to the flow of commodities into and out of these ports. Despite their large numbers and the key role that waterfront workers played in these cities' premechanized, labor-intensive commercial economies, too little is known about who these laborers were and the work they performed.Though scholars have explored the history of dockworkers in ports throughout the world, they have given little attention to waterfront laborers and dock work in the pre-Civil War American South or in any slave society. Aiming to remedy that deficiency, Thompson examines the complicated dynamics of race, class, and labor relations through the street-level experiences and perspectives of workingmen and sometimes workingwomen. Using this workers'-eye view of crucial events and developments, Working on the Dock of the Bay relocates waterfront workers and their activities from the margins of the past to the center of a new narrative, reframing their role from observers to critical actors in nineteenth-century American history. Organized topically, this study is rooted in primary source evidence including census, tax, court, and death records; city directories and ordinances; state statutes; wills; account books; newspapers; diaries; letters; and medical journals.

When Alexander Garden, a Scottish minister of the Church of England, arrived in South Carolina in 1720, he found a colony smoldering from the devastation of the Yamasee War and still suffering from economic upheaval, political factionalism, and rampant disease. It was also a colony turning enthusiastically toward plantation agriculture, made possible by African slave labor. In Sanctifying Slavery and Politics in South Carolina, the first published biography of Garden, Fred E. Witzig paints a vivid portrait of the religious leader and the South Carolina colony he helped shape.Shortly after his arrival, Garden, a representative of the bishop of London, became the rector of St. Philip's Church in Charleston, the first Anglican parish in the colony. The ambitious clergyman quickly married into a Charleston slave-trading family and allied himself with the political and social elite. From the pulpit Garden reinforced the social norms and economic demands of the southern planters and merchants, and he disciplined recalcitrant missionaries who dared challenge the prevailing social order. As a way of defending the morality of southern slaveholders, he found himself having to establish the first large-scale school for slaves in Charles Town in the 1740s.Garden also led a spirited-and largely successful-resistance to the Great Awakening evangelical movement championed by the revivalist minister George Whitefield, whose message of personal salvation and a more democratic Christianity was anathema to the social fabric of the slaveholding South, which continually feared a slave rebellion. As a minister Garden helped make slavery morally defensible in the eyes of his peers, giving the appearance that the spiritual obligations of his slaveholding and slave-trading friends were met as they all became extraordinarily wealthy.Witzig's lively cultural history-bolstered by numerous primary sources, maps, and illustrations-helps illuminate both the roots of the Old South and the Church of England's role in sanctifying slavery in South Carolina.

A detailed look at the historic city's architecture and designersThrough extensive use of the Charleston city archives, private papers and letters, primary writings, and secondary sources, Beatrice St. Julien Ravenel provides a detailed examination of the lives and accomplishments of the historic city's builders, engineers, and architects. Included are Robert Mills, famed for designing the Washington Monument, and such favorite Charleston sons as Gabriel Manigault and William Drayton. First published in 1945 by the Carolina Art Association as part of a group of publications on the city's cultural heritage, Architects of Charleston spans the period from Colonial times to the end of the antebellum era. Over one hundred photographs by Carl Julien emphasizes dramatically the architectural details of the structures while providing a pictorial records that parallels the narrative.

Firsthand accounts of a marine combat correspondent's experiences during World War II

Experience the exclusive, behind-the-scenes story of one of the biggest bands of the ninetiesIn 1985, Mark Bryan heard Darius Rucker singing in a dorm shower at the University of South Carolina and asked him to form a band. For the next eight years, Hootie & the Blowfish-completed by bassist Dean Felber and drummer Soni Sonefeld-played every frat house, roadhouse, and rock club in the mid-Atlantic and Southeast, becoming one of the biggest independent acts in the region.In Only Wanna Be with You, Tim Sommer,the ultimate insider who signed Hootie to Atlantic Records, pulls back the curtain on a band that defied record-industry odds to break into the mainstream by playing hacky sack music in the age of grunge. He chronicles the band's indie days; the chart-topping success-and near-cancelation-of their major-label debut, cracked rear view; the year of Hootie (1995) when the album reached no. 1, the "e;Only Wanna Be with You"e; music video collaboration with ESPN's SportsCenter became a sensation, and the band inspired a plotline on the TV show Friends; the lean years from the late 1990s through the early 2000s; Darius Rucker's history-making rise in country music; and one of the most remarkable comeback stories of the century. Featuring extensive new interviews with the band members, some of their most famous fans, and stories from the recording studio, tour bus, and golf course, this book is essential reading for Hootie lovers and music buffs.

Memories and insights of a lifetime fighting for Black freedom and social justice Millicent E. Brown's family home at 270 Ashley Avenue in Charleston, South Carolina, was a center of civil rights activity. There Brown gained intimate knowledge of the struggle for racial justice, and those experiences set her on a life course dedicated to the civil rights struggle. Best known as the named plaintiff in the federal court case that, in 1963, forced the initial desegregation of public schools in South Carolina, her experiences as an activist range across years and well beyond her native state. Another Sojourner Looking for Truth is Brown's insightful reflection on her search for freedom in a nation deeply mired in white supremacist beliefs and overt violence against people of color.In this revealing memoir, Brown writes about her fears and doubts, as well as the challenges of being a teenager expected to "represent the race" and combat negative stereotypes of African Americans. Readers also gain perspective on the interpersonal aspects of white backlash to civil rights progress and strategic machinations within the movement. Overall, Brown's words will inform, inspire, and challenge everyone to better understand the Black Freedom Struggle and confront its ongoing challenges.

"A primary source collection that offers a window into the mind of nineteenth-century author and public intellectual, William Gilmore Simms. William Gilmore Simms was in his lifetime considered the South's preeminent man of letters, and Edgar Allen Poe once claimed that Simms was 'immeasurably the greatest writer of fiction in America.' Best known as a poet, novelist, and editor, Simms was also a public intellectual who intended that his work shape public opinion and public discourse. In Honorable and Brilliant Labors, editor John D. Miller collects Simms's public orations, a body of literature that ranks among the least studied of Simms's writing. The orations are divided into four thematic parts, each with its own introduction, that frames the orations in their historical and cultural context. As a collection, these pieces reveal the voice of a literary artist attempting to define and make sense of his own society. Honorable and Brilliant Labors is the final volume of the Simms Initiatives, a collaboration between USC Press and USC Libraries that spans more than a decade of publishing and includes six scholarly volumes and more than sixty reprint editions"--

Be inspired by this grassroots civil rights lawyer's quest for democracy, equality, and justice Born in 1947 and raised in rural South Carolina, Lewis Pitts grew up oblivious to the civil rights revolution underway across the country. A directionless white college student in 1968, Pitts committed to military service and was destined for Vietnam. Five years later--after a formative period in which he underwent an intellectual and moral awakening, was discharged as a conscientious objector, and graduated from law school--he embarked on an unlikely forty-year career as a crusading social justice attorney. The Life of a Movement Lawyer: Lewis Pitts and the Struggle for Democracy, Equality, and Justice chronicles how Pitts positively affected thousands of lives and communities, while working in various social movements and then for legal aid. These grassroots efforts included fights to end nuclear proliferation; seeking justice for victims and survivors of the Greensboro Massacre; restarting the local government in Keysville, Georgia; preserving Gullah culture on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina; and ending corruption in Robeson County, North Carolina. Beyond documenting a life well-lived and shedding light on lesser-known activists and movements, Langberg, in this thoroughly researched biography, explores problems that continue to afflict the United States today: poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, racism, police misconduct, voter suppression, child maltreatment, and corporate power. The Life of a Movement Lawyer will energize, inspire, and compel action by those who seek to continue the pursuit of justice for all.

"The author's road trips through the American South lead to a personal confrontation with history. In A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road, Pete Candler offers a travel narrative drawn from twenty-five years of road-tripping through the backroads of the American South. Featuring Candler's own photography, the book taps into the public imagination and the process of both remembering and forgetting that define our collective memory of place. In this highly personal investigation of the impact of white supremacy and the regime of silence on his own family, Candler reflects on the underexplored South in his attempt to confront Southern memory and nostalgia. In the process, he realizes that he is more connected to those histories than he ever imagined. With the wit of a Southern storyteller and the eye of a photographer, Candler takes the reader on a journey that spans two continents, six states, and countless miles of asphalt. Along the way, we meet the "galaxy's no. 1 Elvis fan," stop to ponder roadside markers and small-town monuments, and contemplate what makes the South both distinct from, and emblematic of, the nation of which it is a part. The stories that he uncovers can only be found off the beaten path, away from the curated tourist experiences and mass culture located near the interstate exit ramp. A Deeper South is about Candler's journeys to see the South and understand it, and he invites us to ride along"--

"Purchasing a historic Savannah home unlocks the sweeping story of a Southern Jewish family. As Jason K. Friedman renovated his flat in a grand 1875 town house in his hometown of Savannah, he discovered a portal to the past. Liberty Street takes the reader on Friedman's personal journey to understand the history of the family who built the home. At the center of the story is a sensitive young man pulled between love and duty, a close-knit family straining under moral and political conflicts, and a city coming into its own. The Cohens, part of a Sephardic community in London, arrived in South Carolina (ca. 1750), seeking economic opportunity and personal freedoms. Becoming founding members of the Charleston Jewish community, they built home and community in the American South and rose from shopkeepers to success in business, politics, and high society in Savannah, one of the principal cities of the Confederacy. At the height of their success, the Cohens met tragedy, when their twenty-year-old golden boy, Gratz, was killed in battle wearing Rebel Grey, just weeks before the end of the Civil War. Friedman draws on letters, diaries, and his experiences traveling from Georgia to Virginia to uncover these hidden histories and explore the ways place and collective memory haunt the present. At a moment when the hard light of truth shines on gauzy lost-cause myths, Liberty Street is a timely work of historical sleuthing"--

"In Southern Strategies: Narrative Negotiation in an Evangelical Region, Michael Odom argues that through the narrative strategies of resistance, satire, and negotiation, a multigenerational group of twentieth-century white Southern writers provide unique insight into the central role evangelical religion has played in shaping the sociopolitical culture of the American South. Odom investigates how, in landmark works of nonfiction published in the 1940s, W. J. Cash and Lillian Smith confront both the racist culture of their time and the religious institutions that enabled white supremacy to flourish; in novels from the 1950s and '60s, insider-outsider Catholic writers Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy satirize American consumption and the antithetical imperative of evangelical Christianity subsumed within the same culture; and, in 1990s works of fiction and nonfiction, Doris Betts and Dennis Covington engage evangelical religion with curiosity and compassion, redefining spirituality with the aim of providing a sense of community, vision, and selfhood. Southern Strategies concludes with an analysis of contemporary responses to the evangelical activism that animates the base of American conservatism today"--

Introducing an annual collection of essays devoted to South Carolina history and culture.From the Piedmont to the Lowcountry, South Carolina is the site of countless engaging stories. The contributors to Carolina Currents share those stories, broadening our understanding of the state's unique and diverse histories and cultures. A venue for public-facing interdisciplinary scholarship, each volume presents a collection of essays that illuminate the complex interactions between the state's past and present.Includes essays by: Sarah Adeyinka-Skold, Richard A. Almeida, Fran Coleman, Erica Johnson Edwards, Jo Angela Edwins, James Engelhardt, Alyson Farzad-Phillips, Esther Liu Godfrey, Brandon Goff, Benjamin K. Haywood, Christopher E. Hendricks, Brandon Inabinet, Robert Alston Jones, M. Beth Keefauver, Jason R. Kirby, Meredith A. Love, John A. McArthur, Chiara Palladino, Lauren K. Perez, Kerington B. Shaffer, Whitni Simpson, Cherish Thomas, Jennifer L. Titanski-Hooper, Jon Tuttle, Shevaun E. Watson, Claire Whitlinger, Thomasina A. Yuille

A balanced assessment of the acclaimed writer's poetry and fictionBrevity and intensity characterized the life and literary creations of Raymond Carver, but too often his prose and poetry have been viewed in isolation rather than as interconnected parts of an artistic whole. New Paths to Raymond Carver brings together a distinguished chorus of voices to assess fully Carver's life, stories, and verse, proffering new inroads for critical investigations into the impressive corpus of work wrought during the celebrated writer's tragically brief career.Edited by Sandra Lee Kleppe and Robert Miltner, the anthology features pieces by noted Carver scholars Randolph Paul Runyon and Kirk Nesset, a chapter by Carver's longtime friend and fellow writer William Kittredge, and the first publication in English of the introduction to the Japanese edition of Ultramarine by Carver's widow, Tess Gallagher. International in scope, this collection includes essays by a number of emerging Carver scholars representing France, Norway, Canada, and the United States.The first half of the collection offers six insightful essays on Carver's poems, spanning his career and grappling with such topics as the musical quality and dreamlike nature of his verse, treatments of death and gender in his late work, themes of voyeurism, and his vocabulary of affection. The second grouping of essays focuses on current interpretations of Carver's fiction and covers topics as widely variant as McCarthyism, Alcoholics Anonymous, television, humor, voyeuristic empathy, and the crucial role of the banal in Carver's diction. The volume closes with Kittredge's moving reflections on Carver's life and premature death.

Originally published almost fifty years ago as part of the Federal Writers' Program, a division of the Works Progress Administration, this book is a reprint of the original WPA guide for Georgia. Divided into four sections, the general background, cities, tours, and appendices, the book features 17 essays on a variety of topics from Georgia's natural setting and resources to its architecture and sporta and recreation. Detailed descriptions of the state's six major cities--Athens, Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, Macon and Savannah--are also included, and there are 17 remarkably detailed guided tours to all sections of the state as well. In addition to the original chapters, Phinizy Spalding has written a new introduction and a new appendix.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to ensure edition identification: ++++ Guy Rivers: A Tale Of Georgia, Volume 7; Guy Rivers: A Tale Of Georgia; William Gilmore Simms William Gilmore Simms A. C. Armstrong

William Gilmore Simms's Norman Maurice was a lofty experiment, mixing contemporary politics with common language presented in the format of the Elizabethan tragedy. Written in strict blank verse, Norman Maurice is a play in which the Constitutional and slavery questions that continued to persist after the Missouri Compromise and Nullification Crisis are discussed in detail. Yet, the blank verse Simms used was not poetic, Shakespearean language; rather, Simms presented mid-nineteenth century American vernacular in blank verse. In presenting the political, philosophical, and moral questions of the day as essentially tragic, Simms created a powerful and moving play.One of the other dramas in this collection, Michael Bonham, is based on James Butler Bonham, a South Carolina native and lieutenant in the Texas Calvary, who died in the battle of the Alamo on March 6, 1836. The final titular drama, Benedict Arnold, is one of Simms's more obscure works. Through this text, Simms experimented with literary aesthetics -- combining drama and essay, which are two genres generally considered to be disparate. Its sophisticated intellectual exploration of the ramifications of history make it worthy of serious critical attention.

William Gilmore Simms's Carl Werner is set in the deepest parts of the German forest, based on an ancient legend. The narrator and his friend discuss ghost stories, which are birthed out of the solitude of country life (set against the counterpart of the city's unbelief and warring strifes) that fosters belief in superstition.

The Cassique of Kiawah is a colonial romance about the early days of Charleston. In this novel, Simms robustly describes the competing claims of the English and Spanish over Charleston and its environs, including the attendant violence and actions of Spanish pirates and English privateers. He presents a vision of Charleston that was not genteel and sophisticated, but rather raucous and frontier-like; Simms thus used The Cassique of Kiawah to critique his home city, with which he had long had a contentious relationship, engaging in biting satire.

A collection of unusual words defined and used in context from the works of myriad authorsWhat do wierd and wonderful words such as oology and photic (used by the likes of Nabokov and Beckett, Anthony Burgess and John Fowles) actually mean?In the past you had to look in the bulkiest, most expensive dictionaries to find out. Now, in this informative and hugely entertaining book, more than 1,300 fascinating words--erotic, poetic and abusive, from abaxial to zoophiliac--are clearly defined (with examples from major writers).If you're in pursuit of fulgent logodaedaly (dazzling skill with words), you can enrich your incondite (unpolished) prose. Better still, you'll be able to impress your friends with your brilliant vocabulary without making a complete balatron of yourself!

Rife with historical details and peppered with comic characters, The Golden Christmas remains a timeless tale of South Carolina's rich holiday heritage. Originally published in 1852, William Gilmore Simms's classic lowcountry romance chronicles the social customs and Christmas traditions of an antebellum plantation near Charleston. Drawing influence from Romeo and Juliet and A Christmas Carol, Simms centers his plot on the pride of a Huguenot family, the prejudice of an English family, and the plight of star-crossed lovers, Ned Bulmer and Paula Bonneau, to win the blessings of both feuding houses amid a festive and frantic holiday season. Simms populates his novel with a lively cast--a learned Northern professor, a young English nobleman, opinionated widows, a blustery plantation owner, a condescending servant, a pig-thieving coachman, and a good-hearted barrister. Interwoven into the text are engrossing details about the lavish decorations and festivities that were the hallmark of Christmas celebrations in the antebellum South. Vibrant fireworks, candles nestled in holly, games of whist and backgammon, Yule logs, eggnog, and a visit from Father Chrystmasse all play their parts as the narrative unfolds. Here, too, are accurate descriptions of dress, dialogue, recreation, cultural mores, social hierarchy, and a vivid tableau of a shopping trip to Charleston's King, Queen, and Meeting streets in the 1850s. Equal parts novel of manners and comic romance, The Golden Christmas is now, as it has always been, a holiday gift to lovers of Southern lore from South Carolina's most famous author.