Chartered in 1780, Transylvania University played a significant role as an educational pioneer in the developing trans-Allegheny West and served as its first institution of higher education. Strategically located in the growing city of Lexington, Kentucky, the university established schools of law and medicine at a time when there were few such educational offerings in the country. Noted alumni include emancipationist Cassius M. Clay and Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Two centuries later, Transylvania University maintains its commitment to the highest standards of the liberal arts education. Now passing its 225th anniversary, it remains an educational beacon for Kentucky and the South.

On an early morning in the fall of 1942, Kemp McLaughlin's group set out for a raid on a French target. Immediately after dropping its bombs, McLaughlin's plane was hit. A huge fire burned a four-foot hole in his wing, his waist gunner bailed out, his radio operator was wounded, the plane lost all oxygen, and his pilot put on a parachute and sat on the escape hatch, waiting for the plane to explode. And this was only McLaughlin's first sortie. McLaughlin went on to pilot the mission command plane on the second raid against Schweinfurt, the largest air raid in history, which resulted in the destruction of 70 percent of German ball bearing production capability. McLaughlin also participated in the bombing of heavy water installations in Norway. The Mighty Eighth in WWII also includes the stories of downed pilots in France and Holland who traveled under the cover of night through the countryside, evading the Nazis who had seen their planes go down. As a group leader, McLaughlin was responsible for the planning and execution of air raids, forced to follow the directives of senior (and sometimes less informed) officers. His position as one of the managers of the massive sky trains allows him to provide unique insight into the work of maintenance and armament crews, preflight briefings, and off-duty activities of the airmen. No other memoir of World War II reveals so much about both the actual bombing runs against Nazi Germany and the management of personnel and material that made those airborne armadas possible.

Langston Hughes was one of the most important American writers of his generation, and one of the most versatile, producing poetry, fiction, drama, and autobiography. In this innovative study, R. Baxter Miller explores Hughes's life and art to enlarge our appreciation of his contribution to American letters. Arguing that readers often miss the complexity of Hughes's work because of its seeming accessibility, Miller begins with a discussion of the writer's auto-biography, an important yet hitherto neglected key to his imagination. Moving on to consider the subtle resonances of his life in the varied genres over which his imagination "wandered," Miller finds a constant symbiotic bond between the historical and the lyrical. The range of Hughes's artistic vision is revealed in his depiction of Black women, his political stance, his lyric and tragi-comic modes.This is one of the first studies to apply recent methods of literary analysis, including formalist, structuralist, and semiotic criticism, to the work of a Black American writer. Miller not only affirms in Hughes's work the peculiar qualities of Black American culture but provides a unifying conception of his art and identifies the primary metaphors lying at its heart.Here is a fresh and coherent reading of the work of one of the twentieth century's greatest voices, a reinterpretation that renews our appreciation not only of Black American text and heritage but of the literary imagination itself.

" With a foreword by Stephen Ambrose and a preface by Franklin D. Anderson Forrest Pogue (1912-1996) was undoubtedly one of the greatest World War II combat historians. Born and educated in Kentucky, he is perhaps best known for his definitive four-volume biography of General George C. Marshall. But, as Pogue's War makes clear, he was also a pioneer in the development of oral history in the twentieth century, as well as an impressive interviewer with an ability to relate to people at all levels, from the private in the trenches to the general carrying four stars. Pogue's War is drawn from Forrest Pogue's handwritten pocket notebooks, carried with him throughout the war, long regarded as unreadable because of his often atrocious handwriting. Pogue himself began expanding the diaries a few short years after the war, with the intent of eventual publication. At last this work is being published. Supplemented with carefully deciphered and transcribed selections from his diaries, the heart of the book is straight from the field. Much of the material has never before seen print. From D-Day to VE-Day, Pogue experienced and documented combat on the front lines, describing action on Omaha Beach, in the Huertgen Forest, and on other infamous fields of conflict. He not only graphically -- yet also often poetically­­ -- recounts the extreme circumstances of battle, but he also notes his fellow soldiers' innermost thoughts, feelings, opinions, and attitudes about the cruelty of war. As a trained historian, Pogue describes how he went about his work and how the Army's history program functioned in the European Theater of Operations. His entries from his time at the history headquarters in Paris show the city in the early days after the liberation in a unique light. Pogue's War has an immediacy that much official history lacks, and is a remarkable addition to any World War II bookshelf. Franklin D. Anderson, Forrest Pogue's nephew by marriage, is a longtime educator. He lives in Princeton, Kentucky.

Cora Wilson Stewart (1875--1958) was an elementary school teacher and county school superintendent in eastern Kentucky who, in the fall of 1911, decided to open the classrooms in her district to adult pupils. Convinced that education could eliminate the poverty that plagued the region, she founded the Moonlight School movement, ultimately designed to combat illiteracy. The movement's motto, "Each one teach one," characterized education as the responsibility of every literate citizen. Stewart's Moonlight Schools caught on quickly, and when the state legislature created the Kentucky Illiteracy Commission in 1914, they were operating throughout Kentucky as well as in other states. Cora Wilson Stewart and Kentucky's Moonlight Schools examines these institutions and analyzes Stewart's role in shaping education at both the state and national level. Yvonne Honeycutt Baldwin offers a discourse on the problem of illiteracy, which, despite the efforts of Stewart and many who followed in her footsteps, continues to afflict the nation.

Berea College's spiritual motto, "God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth," has shaped the institution's unique culture and programs since its founding in 1855. Founder John G. Fee, an ardent abolitionist, held fast to the radical vision of a college and a community committed to interracial education, to the Appalachian region, and to the equality of women and men hailing from all "nations and climes. " A significant distinction in the Berea mission is that rather than following the typical tuition-based model, the college developed a tuition-free work program so that its students could take advantage of a private liberal arts education otherwise unaffordable to them. Using primary sources, recent scholarship, and powerful photographs, Shannon H. Wilson charts the fascinating history and development of one of Kentucky's most distinguished institutions of higher learning.

In his sixth novel, The Cave (1959), Robert Penn Warren tells the story of a young man trapped in a cave in fictional Johntown, Tennessee. His predicament becomes the center of national attention as television cameras, promoters, and newscasters converge on the small town to exploit the rescue attempts and the thousands of spectators gathered at the mouth of the cave.

According to Robin Higham and Stephen J. Harris, "Flight has been part of the human dream for aeons, and its military application has likely been the dark side of that dream for almost as long." In the twentieth century, this dream and its dark side unfolded as the air forces of the world went to war, bringing destruction and reassessment with each failure. Why Air Forces Fail examines the complex, often deep-seated, reasons for the catastrophic failures of the air forces of various nations. Higham and Harris divide the air forces into three categories of defeat: forces that never had a chance to win, such as Poland and France; forces that started out victorious but were ultimately defeated, such as Germany and Japan; and finally, those that were defeated in their early efforts yet rose to victory, such as the air forces of Britain and the United States.The contributing authors examine the complex causes of defeats of the Russian, Polish, French, British, Italian, German, Argentine, and American air services. In all cases, the failures stemmed from deep, usually prewar factors that were shaped by the political, economic, military, and social circumstances in the countries. Defeat also stemmed from the anticipation of future wars, early wartime actions, and the precarious relationship between the doctrine of the military leadership and its execution in the field.Anthony Christopher Cain's chapter on France's air force, l'Armée de l'Air, attributes France's loss to Germany in June 1940 to a lack of preparation and investment in the air force. One major problem was the failure to centralize planning or coordinate a strategy between land and air forces, which was compounded by aborted alliances between France and countries in eastern Europe, especially Poland and Czechoslovakia. In addition, the lack of incentives for design innovation in air technologies led to clashes between airplane manufacturers, laborers, and the government, a struggle that resulted in France's airplanes' being outnumbered by Germany's more than three to one by 1940.Complemented by reading lists and suggestions for further research, Why Air Forces Fail provides groundbreaking studies of the causes of air force defeats.

When Evelyn Waugh wrote The Loved One (1948) as a satire of the elaborate preparations and memorialization of the dead taking place in his time, he had no way of knowing how extraordinarily creative and technical human funerary practices would become. Jacqueline S. Thursby explores how modern American funerals and their accompanying rituals seem meant to benefit the living rather than the dead. Funeral Festivals in America suggests that there is an irony in the festivities surrounding death and that the American response to death often develops into an event celebrating the ties between family members and friends. Thursby cites rituals for loved ones separated at the time of death, the frivolities surrounding death, funeral foods and feasts, post-funeral rites and ongoing commemorations, and many other facets of the American way of dealing with death.

Over the past thirty years, Steven F. Lawson has established himself as one of the nation's leading historians of the black struggle for equality. Civil Rights Crossroads is an important collection of Lawson's writings about the civil rights movement that is essential reading for anyone concerned about the past, present, and future of race relations in America. Lawson examines the movement from a variety of perspectives -- local and national, political and social -- to offer penetrating insights into the civil rights movement and its influence on contemporary society.Civil Rights Crossroads also illuminates the role of a broad array of civil rights activists, familiar and unfamiliar. Lawson describes the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson to shape the direction of the struggle, as well as the extraordinary contributions of ordinary people like Fannie Lou Hamer, Harry T. Moore, Ruth Perry, Theodore Gibson, and many other unsung heroes of the most important social movement of the twentieth century. Lawson also examines the decades-long battle to achieve and expand the right of African Americans to vote and to implement the ballot as the cornerstone of attempts at political liberation.

"The evil that men do" has been chronicled for thousands of years on the European stage, and perhaps nowhere else is human fear of our own evil more detailed than in its personifications in theater. In Stages of Evil, Robert Lima explores the sociohistorical implications of Christian and pagan representations of evil and the theatrical creativity that occultism has engendered. By examining examples of alchemy, astronomy, demonology, exorcism, fairies, vampires, witchcraft, hauntings, and voodoo in prominent plays, Stages of Evil explores American and European perceptions of occultism from medieval times to the modern age.

The author of over eighty novels, plays, and volumes of poetry, Eliza Haywood is one of the most prolific and high-profile female authors of the eighteenth century. Her last novel, The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, is original for its unsentimental realism in its depiction of marriage and courtship among the leisure classes of the mid-eighteenth century. In his new introduction, editor John Richetti examines how Haywood's amusing and engaging prose explores the subtleties of eighteenth-century courtship. Out of print since the early nineteenth century, The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy is now available in an edited and fully annotated modern edition.

Humor is sometimes a serious business, especially the humor of Benjamin Franklin, a master at revealing the human condition through comedy. For the country's bicentennial, Reader's Digest named Franklin "Man of the Year" for embodying the characteristics we admire most about ourselves as Americans -- humor, irony, energy, and fresh insight. Recreating Franklin's words in the way that his contemporaries would have read and understood them, Paul M. Zall chronicles Franklin's use (and abuse) of humor for commercial, diplomatic, and political purposes. Dedicated to the uniquely appealing and enduring humor of Benjamin Franklin, Zall lovingly samples Franklin's apologues on the necessity of living reasonably even when life's circumstances may seem absurd.

This comprehensive history examines communities on the northern and southern shores of the Ohio River that developed as a consequence of the Civil War. Darrel E. Bigham describes how these communities were shaped by the presence or absence of slavery and how the abolition of slavery and the rise of free labor became the rule of law on both banks. Focusing on this critical period of vast social, economic, and political change, Bigham demonstrates that African Americans on both sides of the river made remarkable advances in spite of being offered little with which to make a meaningful new start. Emancipation brought about the formation of numerous communities that provided shelter and fueled the African American struggle for equality.

More Civil War battles were fought on Virginian soil than on that of any other Confederate state. No state suffered more from invasion and occupation than the Old Dominion, and none witnessed as much of the war. Virginia's story of the Civil War stands unique among the Confederate States. Virginia at War, 1861 looks at Virginia on the eve of secession, detailing the activities of the convention that finally took the state out of the Union and explaining how Richmond became the capital of the new Confederate nation. Chapters in the book examine Virginia's private state army and its little-known state navy, as well as the impact that secession and the first year of the war had on Virginia's black community, both slave and free. Virginia was the only Confederate state to suffer an internal secession, and the story of that "other Virginia" that broke away and became West Virginia is explored in all its bizarre complexity. Virginia at War, 1861 is the first in a new five-volume series, edited by William C. Davis and James I. Robertson Jr. for the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech. Each volume will bring together leading Civil War historians to study one year of the Civil War in Virginia.

Perspectives on Irish Nationalism examines the cultural, political, religious, economic, linguistic, folklore, and historical dimensions of the phenomenon of Irish nationalism. Its essayists are among the most distinguished Irish studies scholars. Their essays include a comprehensive analysis of the tapestry of Irish nationalism and focused studies that often challenge myths, pieties, and the scholarly consensus. Thomas E. Hachey is Professor of Irish, Irish-American, and British history and Chair of the department at Marquette University. He wrote Britain and Irish Separatism: From the Fenians to the Free State 1807-1922 (1977), coauthored and edited The Problem of Partition: Peril to World Peace (1972); coedited Voices of Revolution: Rebels and Rhetoric (1972), and edited Anglo-Vatican Relations, 1919-1937: Confidential Annual Reports of the British Ministers to the Holy See and Confidential Dispatches: Analyses of American by the British Ambassador, 1939-45 (1974). Lawrence J. McCaffrey is Professor of Irish and Irish-American History at Loyola University of Chicago. He has published a number of articles and books, including Daniel O'Connell and the Repeal Year (1966), The Irish Question, 1800-1922 (1968), The Irish Diaspora in America (1976) and coauthored The Irish in Chicago (1987). "