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Spirits of Just Men
"Following the end of Prohibition in 1933, demand for moonshine remained high due to taxes imposed on large liquor producers. Seeking to answer this demand were the distillers of Appalachia who, having established illegal networks of moonshine distribution under Prohibition, continued their activities and effectively skirted the federal liquor tax scheme. Spirits of Just Men chronicles the Great Moonshine Conspiracy Trial of 1935, held in Franklin County, Virginia, a place that many still refer to as the "Moonshine Capital of the World." While the trial itself made national news, Thompson uses the event as a stepping-off point to explore Blue Ridge Mountain culture, economy, and political en...
Going Over Home
Booklist Editors’ Choice “Best Books of 2019” An intimate portrait of the joys and hardships of rural life, as one man searches for community, equality, and tradition in Appalachia Charles D. Thompson, Jr. was born in southwestern Virginia into an extended family of small farmers. Yet as he came of age he witnessed the demise of every farm in his family. Over the course of his own life of farming, rural education, organizing, and activism, the stories of his home place have been his constant inspiration, helping him identify with the losses of others and to fight against injustices. In Going Over Home, Thompson shares revelations and reflections, from cattle auctions with his grandfather to community gardens in the coal camps of eastern Kentucky, racial disparities of white and Black landownership in the South to recent work with migrant farm workers from Latin America. In this heartfelt first-person narrative, Thompson unpacks our country’s agricultural myths and addresses the history of racism and wealth inequality and how they have come to bear on our nation’s rural places and their people.
Border Odyssey
This blend of travelogue and reportage from the US-Mexico border is “an exploration of 2,000 miles of fraught, rugged and deeply contested territory” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). In a quest to capture a real-life, close-up view of the land where so many have been kicked, cussed, spit on, arrested, detained, trafficked, or killed—and the subject that has been debated for decades by politicians and commentators—Charles D. Thompson records his journey from Boca Chica to Tijuana, and his conversations with everyone from border officials to migrant workers to local residents. Along the journey, five centuries of cultural history (indigenous, French, Spanish, Mexican, African American...
The Old German Baptist Brethren
Since arriving nearly 250 years ago in Franklin County, Virginia, German Baptists have maintained their faith and farms by relying on their tightly knit community for spiritual and economic support. Today, with their land and livelihoods threatened by the encroachment of neighboring communities, the construction of a new highway, and competition from corporate megafarms, the German Baptists find themselves forced to adjust. Charles D. Thompson Jr.'s The Old German Baptist Brethren combines oral history with ethnography and archival research--as well as his own family ties to the Franklin County community--to tell the story of the Brethren's faith on the cusp of impending change. The book traces the transformation of their operations from frontier subsistence farms to cash-based enterprises, connecting this with the wider confluence of agriculture and faith in colonial America. Using extensive interviews, Thompson looks behind the scenes at how individuals interpret their own futures in farming, their hope for their faith, and how the failure of religiously motivated agriculture figures in the larger story of the American farmer.
The Human Cost of Food
Finding fresh fruits and vegetables is as easy as going to the grocery store for most Americans—which makes it all too easy to forget that our food is cultivated, harvested, and packaged by farmworkers who labor for less pay, fewer benefits, and under more dangerous conditions than workers in almost any other sector of the U.S. economy. Seeking to end the public's ignorance and improve workers' living and working conditions, this book addresses the major factors that affect farmworkers' lives while offering practical strategies for action on farmworker issues. The contributors to this book are all farmworker advocates—student and community activists and farmworkers themselves. Focusing on workers in the Southeast United States, a previously understudied region, they cover a range of issues, from labor organizing, to the rise of agribusiness, to current health, educational, and legal challenges faced by farmworkers. The authors blend coverage of each issue with practical suggestions for working with farmworkers and other advocates to achieve justice in our food system both regionally and nationally.
Indigenous Diasporas and Dislocations
Indigenous religions are now present not only in their places of origin but globally. They are significant parts of the pluralism and diversity of the contemporary world, especially when their performance enriches and/or challenges host populations. Indigenous Diasporas and Dislocations engages with examples of communities with different experiences, expectations and evaluations of diaspora life. It contributes significantly to debates about indigenous cultures and religions, and to understandings of identity and alterity in late or post-modernity. This book promises to enrich understanding of indigenity, and of the globalized world in which indigenous people play diverse roles.
A Glimpse of Hell
Probes the explosion of the center gun on the USS Iowa, a disaster that killed several sailors onboard instantly, and the fouled investigation that took followed, resulting in a large-scale cover-up that almost ruined forever the reputation of innocent men.
Darwin's Most Wonderful Plants
For many people, the story of Charles Darwin goes like this: he ventured to the Galapagos Islands on the Beagle, was inspired by the biodiversity of the birds he saw there, and immediately returned home to write his theory of evolution. But this simplified narrative is inaccurate and lacking: it leaves out a major part of Darwin’s legacy. He published On the Origin of Species nearly thirty years after his voyages. And much of his life was spent experimenting with and observing plants. Darwin was a brilliant and revolutionary botanist whose observations and theories were far ahead of his time. With Darwin’s Most Wonderful Plants, biologist and gardening expert Ken Thompson restores this i...
The Death of Elvis
This well-researched probe into Elvis Presley's death includes interviews with Colonel Tom Parker, conclusive autopsy documents, and a thorough account of the autopsy and why its findings are so hotly debated
