The career of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, reflects the political battles of nearly thirty years of English politics. In an age when duplicity, intrigue, personality, and an immediate history of violence characterized politics, John Churchill was a constant, steady military success even while his political and personal fortunes alternately plunged and soared. His military ability insured his importance to the Grand Alliance and his victories brought the reverence of the European powers opposing Louis XIV as well as that of his own people, but, at the same time, his successes also...

This one-of-a-kind collection of poems about the American South ranges over four centuries of its dramatic history.

The arc of poetry of the South, from slave songs to Confederate hymns to Civil War ballads, from Reconstruction turmoil to the Agrarian movement to the dazzling poetry of the New South, is richly varied and historically vibrant. No other region of the United States has been as mythologized as the South, nor contained as many fascinating, beguiling, and sometimes infuriating contradictions. Poems of the American South includes poems both by Southerners and by famous...