Summary

2023 Ippy Awards Silver Medal Winner

This collection of fourteen essays by Charles Dodd White—praised by Silas House as “one of the best prose stylists of Appalachian literature”—explores the boundaries of family, loss, masculinity, and place. Contemplating the suicides of his father, uncle, and son, White meditates on what it means to go on when seemingly everything worth living for is lost. What he discovers is an intimate connection to the natural world, a renewed impulse to understand his troubled family history, and a devotion to following the clues that point to the possibility of a whole life.

Avoiding easy sentiment and cliché, White’s transformative language drives toward renewal. A Year without Months introduces lively and memorable characters, as the author draws on a wide range of emotions to analyze everything, including himself.

Contents

Preface

Groupings
Coaster King
The Cabin
Bethlehem Bottoms
Southern Man
Apart
Why I Don’t Hunt Anymore
What We Gain in the Hurt
Human Animals
Self-Taught on the Tuck
Those Boys
Learning a Place by Its Waters
Under Weight
A Year without Months

Acknowledgments

Author

Charles Dodd White is the recipient of the Chaffin Award and the Appalachian Book of the Year Award for his fiction. He teaches English at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Reviews

“White has had to redefine ‘southern man’ beyond guns and toughness in order to forge his own identity and in order, really, to survive. But this book is also deeply about loss, about coming to terms with our own failures, especially as parents. There’s a tremendous tenderness and grace here—for the imperfect dead who have gone on, for the flawed family that we still can love, and for the strong yet humble self, in all our many mistakes. This is such a beautiful, powerful book. Read it and be changed.”
Jim Minick, author of Fire Is Your Water

“A Year without Months achieves a lyricism and poignancy reminiscent of Norman Maclean’s great family story A River Runs Through It, but Charles Dodd White’s voice and story are his own. Many books linger forever in our minds. Only a few also linger forever in our hearts, and this is one of them.”
Ron Rash, author of In the Valley

“This book is a reckoning. As a longtime fan of Charles Dodd White’s fiction, I’m captivated by the essays in A Year without Months. Here is a writer haunted by profound loss, by fatherhood and fatherlessness, and by the changing landscape of Appalachia. In beautiful, unsparing prose, White turns a novelist’s eye inward and interrogates his own southern manhood, offering nuanced, intimate portrayals of himself and his family. A candid and deeply necessary study of backwoods masculinity, with all its tenderness and toxicity laid bare.”
Leah Hampton, author of F*ckface

“Talk about a slim book with a powerful and emotional punch. White wrestles with unfathomable loss, difficult relationships, and the loss of Appalachia, yet somehow finds beauty and truth.”
Garden & Gun

“A work of harrowing candor, insightful compassion, and hard-won beauty.”
Chapter 16

“Necessary reading for anyone interested in the changing world of the modern mountain south.”
Still: The Journal

Summary

This collection brings together nearly three decades of research on the African American experience, class, and race relations in the Appalachian coal industry. It shows how, with deep roots in the antebellum era of chattel slavery, West Virginia’s Black working class gradually picked up steam during the emancipation years following the Civil War and dramatically expanded during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

From there, African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry highlights the decline of the region’s Black industrial proletariat under the impact of rapid technological, social, and political changes following World War II. It underscores how all miners suffered unemployment and outmigration from the region as global transformations took their toll on the coal industry, but emphasizes the disproportionately painful impact of declining bituminous coal production on African American workers, their families, and their communities. Joe Trotter not only reiterates the contributions of proletarianization to our knowledge of US labor and working-class history but also draws attention to the gender limits of studies of Black life that focus on class formation, while calling for new transnational perspectives on the subject. Equally important, this volume illuminates the intellectual journey of a noted labor historian with deep family roots in the southern Appalachian coalfields.

Contents

Preface

Introduction: The Black Miner in U.S. Labor History
1. African Americans in West Virginia
2. Migration to Southern West Virginia
3. Inequality in the Workplace
4. Community Formation
5. Environmental Conditions
Epilogue: Comparative Race and Ethnic Relations

Acknowledgments
Appendix: Scholarship, Debates, and Sources
Notes
Bibliography
Sources and Permissions
Index

Author

Joe William Trotter Jr. is the Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Social Justice at Carnegie Mellon University, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and author of Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America and Pittsburgh and the Urban League Movement: A Century of Social Service and Activism.

Reviews

“Joe William Trotter Jr.’s African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry is more than a topical collection of essays by a pioneering scholar summarizing the history and historiography of Black coal miners. At a time when race, class, labor, and structural violence are coming back into sharp thematic focus due to the disproportionate effects of a major global pandemic on many communities of color, Trotter’s work is also a prescient—and deeply personal—exploration of the formation and growth of Black working-class communities, institutions, social and cultural networks, and political movements for reform and liberatory change over time.”
Clarence Lang, Susan Welch Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts and professor of African American studies, Penn State University

“Joe Trotter has had a profound impact on the way I approach African American history both as a scholar and as a teacher. A collection of his groundbreaking work is long overdue.”
Robert H. Woodrum, author of Everybody Was Black Down There: Race and Industrial Change in the Alabama Coalfields

Summary

In a book written directly for graduate students that includes graduate student voices and experiences, Aeron Haynie and Stephanie Spong establish why good teaching matters and offer a guide to helping instructors-in-training create inclusive and welcoming classrooms.

Teaching Matters is informed by recent research while being grounded in the personal perspectives of current and past graduate students in many disciplines. Graduate students can use this book independently to prepare to teach their courses, or it can be used as a guide for a teaching practicum. With a just-in-time checklist for graduate students who are assigned to teach courses right before the semester starts, step-by-step directions for writing a compelling teaching philosophy, and an emphasis on teaching well regardless of modality, Teaching Matters will remain relevant for graduate students throughout their careers.
 

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Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Why Teaching Matters
2. How Do You Design a Course?
3. How Can You Create a Welcoming Classroom Community?
4. How Do You Develop a Classroom Practice?
5. Navigating Classroom Challenges
6. Creating Assignments and Responding to Student Work
7. What Are Other Graduate Students Experiencing?
8. Cultivating Well-Being

Appendix 1: Help! What If My Course Starts Next Week?
Appendix 2: How Can My Teaching Experience Help Me Get a Job?
Appendix 3: Resources

Notes
References
Index

Authors

Aeron Haynie is executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning and associate professor of English at the University of New Mexico. She is coeditor of Exploring Signature Pedagogies and Exploring More Signature Pedagogies.

Stephanie Spong is an associate director for the Center for Teaching and Learning and affiliated faculty with the department of organization, information, and learning sciences at the University of New Mexico.

Reviews

“Empowering graduate students to savor teaching when higher education emphasizes research is no mean feat. I mentor graduate students from multiple disciplines, and this book, from its title to its student-focused chapters, resonates closely with my rallying call. Yes, indeed, teaching matters, and Haynie and Spong nicely address graduate student needs head on, warmly inviting the educators of the future to join the teaching commons and let the passion for teaching develop and shine unbridled.”
Regan A. R. Gurung, coauthor of Thriving in Academia: Building a Career at a Teaching-Focused Institution

“Indispensable.”
John Warner, Inside Higher Ed

Summary

Human minds are made of memories, and today those memories have competition. Biological memory capacities are being supplanted, or at least supplemented, by digital ones, as we rely on recording—phone cameras, digital video, speech-to-text—to capture information we’ll need in the future and then rely on those stored recordings to know what happened in the past. Search engines have taken over not only traditional reference materials but also the knowledge base that used to be encoded in our own brains. Google remembers, so we don’t have to. And when we don’t have to, we no longer can. Or can we?

Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology offers concise, nontechnical explanations of major principles of memory and attention—concepts that all teachers should know and that can inform how technology is used in their classes. Teachers will come away with a new appreciation of the importance of memory for learning, useful ideas for handling and discussing technology with their students, and an understanding of how memory is changing in our technology-saturated world.
 

Receive a 30% discount on orders of 10 or more copies of this title with code HIGHEREDBULK30 at checkout.

Contents

Introduction: Machines, Memory, and Learning
1. What Technology Does to Us (and for Us): Taking a Critical Look at Common Narrative  
2. Why We Remember, Why We Forget
3. Enhancing Memory and Why It Matters (Even though Google Exists)
4. Memory Requires Attention
5. The Devices We Can’t Put Down: Smartphones, Laptops, Memory, and Learning
Conclusion: How Memory Can Thrive in a Technology-Saturated Future

Notes
Acknowledgments
Index    

Author

Michelle D. Miller is a professor of psychological sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology.

Reviews

“This is the book we need: a clear, lively, and authoritative examination of technology, memory, and learning—perhaps the most critical subjects in all of higher education right now.”
Kevin Gannon, author of Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto

Summary

Rogues in the Postcolony is a study of Anglophone Indian picaresque novels that dramatize the impacts of extractive capitalism and colonial occupation on local communities in several Indian states. In this materialist history of development on the subcontinent, Stacey Balkan considers works by Amitav Ghosh, Indra Sinha, and Aravind Adiga that critique violent campaigns of enclosure and dispossession at the hands of corporate entities like the English East India Company and its many legatees. By foregrounding the intersections among landscape ideology, agricultural improvement, extractive capitalism, and aesthetic expression, Rogues in the Postcolony also attends to the complicity of popular aesthetic forms with political and economic policy, as well as the colonial and extractivist logics that often frame discussions around the so-called Anthropocene epoch.

Bringing together questions about settler-colonial practices and environmental injustice, Rogues in the Postcolony concludes with an investigation of new extractivist frontiers, including solar capitalism, and considers the possibility of imagining life after extraction on the Indian subcontinent and beyond.

Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction: Why Can’t a Rogue Be a Hero?
1. Revisiting the Environmental Picaresque: Plantationocene Aesthetics and the Origins of Cheap Nature in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy
2. A Memento Mori Tale: Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and the Politics of Global Toxicity
3. Slum Ecologies: Figuring (Energy) Waste in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger
Conclusion: Beyond Extraction: Imagining Solarity in India's Mineral Belt

Notes
Bibliography
Index 

Author

Stacey Balkan is assistant professor of English and environmental humanities at Florida Atlantic University. She is coeditor of Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere.

Reviews

“Rogues in the Postcolony is a marvelous study of how picaresque novels refract the violent dispossessions and rogue freedoms of extractive capitalism in India and beyond. In dialogue with cutting-edge conversations in environmental and energy humanities, Balkan argues convincingly that extraction is a pervasive dynamic within post/colonial modernity.”
Dominic Boyer, author of Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene