Allusions to the epic poets Virgil and Lucan in the writing of the Roman historian Tacitus (c. 55 - c. 120 C.E.) have long been noted. This monograph argues that Tacitus fashions himself as a rivaling literary successor to these poets; and that the emulative allusions to Virgil's Aeneid and Lucan's Bellum Civile in Books 1-3 of his inaugural historiographical work, the Histories, complement and build upon each other, and contribute significantly to the picture of repetitive, escalating civil war in the work. The argument is founded on the close reading of a series of...

Mississippi, the late 1950s. After the death of his father, eleven-year-old Jory Sheppard runs away from an unwanted life in foster care. Trying to make it on his own, he is caught in a violent storm on the Mississippi River, but when he is rescued from the raging waters by an old black man named Moses, it becomes the event that will change his life.

Taken into Moses' family as one of their own, Jory is introduced to a world so familiar and yet so very different from the one he once knew. As he learns and grows under the benevolent care of his new family, he struggles to make sense of the...