All the Fugitives’ Men
August 14, 2013 As a young English professor in the late 1960s, author and literary critic Gerald Duff held appointments at both Vanderbilt and Kenyon, where he came into frequent close contact with the major poets and critics of the Fugitive/Agrarian movement. In Fugitive Days, Duff shares both comic and poignant tales of his encounters with Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, and Donald Davidson. He also examines the impact of the Fugitives’ poetry, the New Criticism, and the controversial Agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, on the American literary landscape.
August 13, 2013 Peter Carlson’s third work of history, Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey, relates the true and little-known tale of two intrepid Yankee reporters captured and imprisoned in the Confederacy. This grand tale of adventure reveals much about the Civil War without rehashing the well-worn stories of battles and leaders. It is a gloriously entertaining book that should be on the reading list of anyone curious about the underbelly of the Civil War.
August 12, 2013 In Coup: The Day the Democrats Ousted Their Governor, Put Republican Lamar Alexander in Office Early, and Stopped a Pardon Scandal, Nashvillian Keel Hunt remembers a day in 1979 that will long stand as both a model of bipartisanship and a defense of the people’s right to honest government. Hunt will discuss Coup at the 
August 5, 2013 Denise Kiernan’s engaging new book explores the human side of the story of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the best-kept secrets in the saga of how the United States built the first nuclear weapons. Kiernan will discuss The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II at the twenty-fifth annual 
July 31, 2013 During the late sixteenth century, the city of Nuremberg was a bustling commercial metropolis at the heart of the Holy Roman Empire. As one of the first cities to convert to Lutheranism in the 1520s, it was also on the front lines of the Reformation. In The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century, Vanderbilt historian Joel Harrington considers this world as it is revealed in the extensive diary of Frantz Schmidt, the city’s public executioner for more than forty years. Harrington will appear at the twenty-fifth annual 
July 26, 2013 The eighteen contributors to An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots are a multicultural group: black, white, Native American, Asian, Latina, lesbian, straight—and that’s not even a complete list of their declared identities. But for all the writers’ apparent diversity, the personal essays in this collection reveal them to be sisters under the skin. Americans don’t like to acknowledge the profound, lingering influence of class, but the stories that Vanderbilt professor Lorraine López has collected in An Angle of Vision describe a set of experiences shaped by poverty that is shared across all boundaries of color and community. Feelings and memories echo so insistently throughout the book that the writers seem almost to be speaking with a single voice. Lopez will appear at the twenty-fifth annual 