"We sorely need an edition of the writings of Louisa S. McCord, and this one is as comprehensive as Miss Louisa's most devoted admirers could hope for". -- Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

Louisa Susanna Cheves McCord (1810-1879)...

A mother writes to her faraway daughter: "I keep all your letters. Someday you might want to do something with them." Those words foretold "Shared Histories," although neither woman would live to see the book. This is the first known published collection of letters to include correspondence between civilian family members on both sides of the Atlantic during World War II. Separated for most of their adult lives, Virginia Dickinson Reynolds and her daughter, Virginia Potter, wrote to each other for nearly forty years. This selection from their long exchange is filled with unguarded...

Our problem is not racial, but human and economic. . . . We hold the Negro racially responsible for conditions common to all races on his economic plane. The writings of reformer Lily Hardy Hammond (1859-1925) are filled with such forthright criticisms of southern white attitudes toward African Americans--enough so that her stature as a southern progressive thinker would seem assured. Yet Hammond, who once stood at the intellectual center of the southern women s social gospel movement and was in her time the South s most prolific female writer on the race question, has been...

This volume collects the most important writings on viticulture by Nicholas Herbemont (1771-1839), who is widely considered the finest practicing winemaker of the early United States. Included are his two major treatises on viticulture, thirty-one other published pieces on vine growing and wine making, and essays that outline his agrarian philosophy. Over the course of his career, Herbemont cultivated more than three hundred varieties of grapes in a garden the size of a city block in Columbia, South Carolina, and in a vineyard at his plantation, Palmyra, just outside the city.

Born...

A rogue, a megalomaniac, a plodder, and a depressive: the men whose previously unpublished diaries are collected in this volume were four very different characters. But they had much in common too. All were from the Deep South. All were young, between seventeen and twenty-five. All had a connection to cotton and slaves. Most obviously, all were diarists, enduring night upon night of cramped hands and candle bugs to write out their lives.

Down the furrows of their fathers' farms, through the thickets of their local woods, past the familiar haunts of their youth, Harry Dixon, Henry...

John Bachman (1790-1874) was an internationally renowned naturalist and a prominent Lutheran minister. This is the first collection of his writings, containing selections from his three major books, his letters, and his articles on plants and animals, education, religion, agriculture, and the human species.

Bachman was the leading authority on North American mammals. He was responsible for the descriptions of the 147 mammal species included in "Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America," a massive work produced in collaboration with John James Audubon. Bachman relied entirely on...