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"Walker, Melissa, author"
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Why can't I be you
\"Claire Ladd knows that this summer is going to be special. She and her two best friends, Ronan and Brianna, are turning twelve ... She feels everything starting to change. But things don't always change for the better. With Brianna's cousin Eden visiting for the summer, Claire feels like a third wheel. Even though she is only a year older, Eden seems so much more sophisticated and glamorous ... But that doesn't explain why things have felt awkward with Brianna ever since she moved to a fancy new house, or why Ronan, who lives in the trailer next to Claire's, has started acting moody anytime anyone mentions his dad. Claire has always been happy with her life just as it is, but as the summer wears on and the issues with her friends start to grow, she can't help but wonder: Would everything be better if she could just be someone else?\"--Amazon.com.
Book
Recovering the Piedmont Past
The history of South Carolina’s lowcountry has been well documented by historians, but the upcountry—the region of the state north and west of Columbia and the geologic fall line—has only recently begun to receive extensive scholarly attention. The essays in this collection provide a window into the social and cultural life of the upstate during the nineteenth century. The contributors explore topics ranging from the history of education in the region to the pugnacity of the Scots-Irish, from post–Civil War occupation by Union troops to upcountry tourism, from the Freedman’s Bureau’s efforts to educate African Americans to the complex dynamics of lynch mobs in the late nineteenth century. Recovering the Piedmont Past illustrates larger trends of social transformation occurring in the region at a time that shaped religion, education, race relations and the economy well into the twentieth century. The essays add depth and complexity to our understanding of nineteenth century southern history and challenge accepted narratives about a homogeneous South. Ultimately each of the eight essays explores little known facets of the history of upcountry South Carolina in the nineteenth century. The collection includes a foreword by Orville Vernon Burton, professor of history and director of the Cyberinstitute at Clemson University.
eBook
Let's pretend we never met
\"If it were up to Mattie Markham, there would be a law that said your family wasn't allowed to move in the middle of the school year. After all, sixth grade is hard enough without wondering if you'll be able to make new friends or worrying that the kids in Pennsylvania won't like your North Carolina accent. But when Mattie meets her next-door neighbor and classmate, she begins to think maybe she was silly to fear being the 'new girl' ... [until she realizes that] at school Agnes is known as the weird girl who no one likes\"--Amazon.com.
Book
Living on Wilderness Time
Melissa Walker set out on a journey that many women of her generation have mapped only in their dreams. Like many American chroniclers before her who have surrendered to the aimless pleasures of the road, Walker had no geographical destination in mind, but she did have two definite goals-one personal, one political-for her journey. She was looking for the peace and solitude of the backcountry, certainly, but she also wanted to learn the dynamics of preserving wild places and to devote herself to that cause. In the Sky Islands of southern Arizona, on the banks of the Popo Agie River and the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming, in Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Rocky Mountain, and Olympic National Park, in Gila and Glacier Peak Wilderness, she encountered the hazards of wild animals and extreme weather, and she began to reassess what parts of her life she could control.
Living on Wilderness Time is a book for those who have visited wild places and want to return, and for others whose overcommitted urban lives make them long for land where time is measured differently and human beings are scarce. Above all it is a call to join those who, like Aldo Leopold, see wilderness as vital to the human community.
Melissa Walker is vice president of National Wilderness Watch, chair of the Georgia chapter of Wilderness Watch, serves on the Southern Appalachian Council of the Wilderness Society, and is the author of Reading the Environment and Down from the Mountaintop. She has been Professor of English at the University of New Orleans and Mercer University and a fellow of Women's Studies at Emory University. Walker lives with her husband in Atlanta, Georgia.
eBook
Southern Farmers and Their Stories
The industrial expansion of the twentieth century brought with it a profound shift away from traditional agricultural modes and practices in the American South. The forces of economic modernity -- specialization, mechanization, and improved efficiency -- swept through southern farm communities, leaving significant upheaval in their wake. In an attempt to comprehend the complexities of the present and prepare for the uncertainties of the future, many southern farmers searched for order and meaning in their memories of the past. In Southern Farmers and Their Stories, Melissa Walker explores the ways in which a diverse array of farmers remember and recount the past. The book tells the story of the modernization of the South in the voices of those most affected by the decline of traditional ways of life and work. Walker analyzes the recurring patterns in their narratives of change and loss, filling in gaps left by more conventional political and economic histories of southern agriculture. Southern Farmers and Their Stories also highlights the tensions inherent in the relationship between history and memory. Walker employs the concept of \"communities of memory\" to describe the shared sense of the past among southern farmers. History and memory converge and shape one another in communities of memory through an ongoing process in which shared meanings emerge through an elaborate alchemy of recollection and interpretation. In her careful analysis of more than five hundred oral history narratives, Walker allows silenced voices to be heard and forgotten versions of the past to be reconsidered. Southern Farmers and Their Stories preserves the shared memories and meanings of southern agricultural communities not merely for their own sake but for the potential benefit of a region, a nation, and a world that has much to learn from the lessons of previous generations of agricultural providers.
eBook
The Battles of Kings Mountain and Cowpens
The American South is so identified with the Civil War that people often forget that the key battles from the final years of the American Revolution were fought in Southern states. The Southern backcountry was the center of the fight for independence, but backcountry devotion to the Patriot cause was slow in coming. Decades of animosity between coastal elites and backcountry settlers who did not enjoy accurate representation in the assemblies meant a complex political and social milieu throughout this turbulent time.
The Battles of Kings Mountain and Cowpens brings to light the world of the Southern backcountry that engendered its role in the Revolutionary War. With careful attention to political, social, and military history, Walker concentrates on the communities and events not typically covered in books on the Revolutionary War. Through government documents, autobiographies, correspondence, and diaries, The Battles of Kings Mountain and Cowpens gives students of the Revolution an important new perspective on the role of the South in the resolution of the fighting.
eBook
A slave woman's ghost observes the lives of her descendants
Though it begins with an account of an interracial marriage in Africa long before slavery and ends with a survey of major events in the 20th Century, J. California Cooper's \"Family\" is primarily about the lives of slaves in the years before, during and immediately after the Civil War. Set in the plantation South, this first novel is narrated by Clora, a slave who, like her mother and grandmother, takes her own life after enduring the sexual assaults of her white master and bearing his children. Though she attempts to kill them, too, her children survive and, surprisingly, so does her consciousness. But while she observes what happens to her offspring, Clora, unlike recent literary and cinematic ghosts, cannot participate in their lives. The heroine of the novel is Clora's daughter, Always, whose white father sells her to an inept, small-scale farmer. Soon after moving to her new home, the cunning Always takes over the management of the neglected farm. She not only turns a profit for her incompetent owner but also secretly puts money aside for herself. Her enterprising ways, however, do not protect her from sexual exploitation, as she repeatedly gives birth to her master's children, only to have all but one, a son, sold into slavery.
Newspaper Article
Before the Manifesto
Mary Lois Walker Morris was a Mormon woman who challenged both American ideas about marriage and the U.S. legal system. Before the Manifesto provides a glimpse into her world as the polygamous wife of a prominent Salt Lake City businessman, during a time of great transition in Utah. This account of her life as a convert, milliner, active community member, mother, and wife begins in England, where her family joined the Mormon church, details her journey across the plains, and describes life in Utah in the 1880s. Her experiences were unusual as, following her first husband's deathbed request, she married his brother, as a plural wife, in the Old Testament tradition of levirate marriage.Mary Morris's memoir frames her 1879 to 1887 diary with both reflections on earlier years and passages that parallel entries in the day book, giving readers a better understanding of how she retrospectively saw her life. The thoroughly annotated diary offers the daily experience of a woman who kept a largely self-sufficient household, had a wide social network, ran her own business, wrote poetry, and was intellectually curious. The years of \"the Raid\" (federal prosecution of polygamists) led Mary and Elias Morris to hide their marriage on \"the underground,\" and her to perjury in court during Elias's trial for unlawful cohabitation. The book ends with Mary Lois's arrival at the Salt Lake Depot after three years in exile in Mexico with a polygamist colony.
eBook