From the Fiery Furnace to the Promise Land by Serina K. Gilbert and Learotha Williams Jr. chronicles the history of an extraordinary Tennessee community through the stories of its formerly enslaved founders and their descendants. The authors will discuss the book at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville on September 13.
In How College Presidents Succeed, Michael Nelson extracts wisdom from three generations of a family known as “Virginia’s academic dynasty.”
For Barbara Presnell, the loss of her father at age 14 would lead to a decades-long period of repressed mourning, resulting in depression and estrangement from her family. Her memoir, Otherwise, I’m Fine, recounts the pain of that time and how retracing her father’s steps during World War II brought her peace and a renewed relationship with her family.
In The Trouble of Color, Martha S. Jones interrogates how her Kentucky ancestors negotiated the “color line” and what it has meant in her own life.
The William Faulkner we meet in Lisa C. Hickman’s Between Grief and Nothing could have been one of his own doom-struck characters.
David Narrett’s magisterial, detailed The Cherokees: In War and at Peace, 1670-1840 maps the Indigenous nation’s outsized influence on the history of the republic that dispossessed them of so much land and esteem.
