Buy Books: Browse by Season: Spring 2024

This book examines the agriculture of the South's original staple crop in the Old Bright Belt—a diverse region named after the unique bright, or flue-cured, tobacco variety it spawned.

In Show Thyself a Man, Gregory Mixon explores the ways in which African Americans in postbellum Georgia used militia service after the Civil War to define freedom and citizenship.

Costume can reveal a wealth of information about an individual’s identity within society. Dressing the Part looks at the ways individuals in the ancient Americas used clothing, hairstyle, and personal ornaments to express status and power, gender identity, and group affiliations, even from the grave.

Focusing on the daily concerns and routine events of people in the past, Investigating the Ordinary argues for a paradigm shift in the way southeastern archaeologists operate. Instead of dividing archaeological work by time periods or artifact types, the essays in this volume unite separate areas of research through the theme of the everyday.            

This book collects previously unpublished letters written by a merchant in north Florida before the Civil War, offering a view of the region's transformation to a market economy due in part to its increased reliance on slavery.

This book is the first detailed investigation of the important archaeological site of Parchman Place in the Mississippi Delta, a defining area for understanding the Mississippian culture that spanned much of what is now the United States Southeast and Midwest before the fifteenth century.

Highlighting the strong relationship between New England’s Nipmuc people and their land from the pre-contact period to the present day, this book helps demonstrate that the history of Native Americans did not end with the arrival of Europeans. This is the rich result of a twenty-year collaboration between Indigenous and nonindigenous authors, who use their own example to argue that Native peoples need to be integral to any research project focused on Indigenous history and culture.

Although scholars have long recognized the mythic status of bears in Indigenous North American societies of the past, this is the first volume to synthesize the vast amount of archaeological and historical research on the topic. Bears charts the special relationship between the American black bear and humans in eastern Native American cultures across thousands of years.

While previous studies of dogs in human history have focused on how people have changed the species through domestication, this volume offers a rich archaeological portrait of the human-canine bond. Contributors investigate the ways people have viewed and valued dogs in different cultures around the world and across the ages.

Combining an accessible approach with innovative scholarship, Carl Phelpstead draws on historical context, contemporary theory, and close reading to deepen our understanding of Icelandic saga narratives about the island’s early history.