A good ghost story can make your hair stand on end, your palms sweat, and your heart race. The bone-chilling collection Tales of Kentucky Ghosts presents more than 250 stories that do just that. In his new book, William Lynwood Montell has assembled an entertaining and diverse array of tales from across the commonwealth that will keep you checking under the bed every night. The first-person accounts in this collection showcase folklore that Montell has drawn from archives, family stories, and oral traditions throughout Kentucky. The stories include that of the ghost bride of Laurel County, who appears each year on the anniversary of her wedding day; the tale of the murdered worker who haunts the Simpson County home of his killer and former employer; and the account of the lost mandolin that plays itself in a house in Graves County. These and many other chilling stories haunt the pages of Tales of Kentucky Ghosts. In the tradition of Montell’s previous Kentucky ghost books (Ghosts across Kentucky and Haunted Houses and Family Ghosts of Kentucky), Tales of Kentucky Ghosts brings together a variety of terrifying narratives that not only entertain and frighten but also serve as a unique record of Kentucky’s rich heritage of storytelling.

The United States and the countries of Latin America were all colonized by Europeans, yet in terms of economic development, the U.S. far outstripped Latin America beginning in the nineteenth century. Observers have often tried to account for this disparity, many of them claiming that differences in cultural attitudes toward work explain the U.S.’s greater prosperity. In this innovative study, however, Camilla Townsend challenges the traditional view that North Americans succeeded because of the so-called Protestant work ethic and argues instead that they prospered relative to South Americans because of differences in attitudes towards workers that evolved in the colonial era. Townsend builds her study around workers’ lives in two similar port cities in the 1820s and 1830s. Through the eyes of the young Frederick Douglass in Baltimore, Maryland, and an Indian girl named Ana Yagual in Guayaquil, Ecuador, she shows how differing attitudes towards race and class in North and South America affected local ways of doing business. This empirical research clarifies the significant relationship between economic culture and racial identity and its long-term effects.

Here one of America’s leading poets and editors, David Baker, explores a cosmos of questions in personal interviews with nine of the most exciting poets of our day. The interviews begin with in-depth dialogue on new poems, which are also reprinted with the interviews. From here these fascinating conversations find their distinct directions—from advice about teaching to explorations of the relation of poetry to politics, art, culture, science, and the environment

In this manuscript, Hicks examines the lives and experiences of working-class black women in early twentieth-century New York. By placing the hopes, concerns, and decisions of these women at the center of an urban narrative, Hicks explores average women's expectations of themselves and their communities as well as their families' and communities' expectations of them. She presents a range of women's ideas about and responses to respectability, domesticity, safety, and sexual desire in the urban North, thereby revealing the complexity of black women's experiences from a vantage point different from that provided by uplift studies. The manuscript focuses on three major themes: urban reform and justice, gender and the criminal justice system, and the dynamics of black families. These themes work to articulate a more full and heretofore-neglected understanding of black working-class women, their relationships with their families, and their interactions with the social welfare and criminal justice systems.

Talking about a Revolution tells the story of school reform from the perspective of teachers engaged in it, illuminating the complexity of teachers’ roles in transforming policy into practice. Al, Brian, and Camille teach at a large, comprehensive high school in a suburb of a major mid-western city. They use the languages of educational reform to inspire new ways to think about teaching, to shield themselves from the confusion of contradictory understandings of reform, and to construct a shared understanding of what reformed teaching might mean.

Tradition, community, and pride are fundamental aspects of the history of Appalachia, and the language of the region is a living testament to its rich heritage. Despite the persistence of unflattering stereotypes and cultural discrimination associated with their style of speech, Appalachians have organized to preserve regional dialects -- complex forms of English peppered with words, phrases, and pronunciations unique to the area and its people. Talking Appalachian examines these distinctive speech varieties and emphasizes their role in expressing local history and promoting a shared identity. Beginning with a historical and geographical overview of the region that analyzes the origins of its dialects, this volume features detailed research and local case studies investigating their use. The contributors explore a variety of subjects, including the success of African American Appalachian English and southern Appalachian English speakers in professional and corporate positions. In addition, editors Amy D. Clark and Nancy M. Hayward provide excerpts from essays, poetry, short fiction, and novels to illustrate usage. With contributions from well-known authors such as George Ella Lyon and Silas House, this balanced collection is the most comprehensive, accessible study of Appalachian language available today.