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In Consequential Learning, Jack Shelton speaks out about the disconnect between school systems and the communities around them. Today’s students enter their classrooms from a variety of backgrounds and communities, but their classroom education has relevance only inside school walls. Teachers can no longer view their students lives as beginning and ending with the school day. Shelton's concept of Consequential Learning recognizes that student’s learning takes place both in the classroom and in the community, and therefore suggests the development of pedagogies with ties to both students’ educations and the formation of their personal characters. By encouraging students to use classroom lessons to the benefit of their communities, the students learn critical thinking and judgement. Students become self-aware learners, a core value of Consequential Learning, developed by Shelton through work with the students, teachers, and community members of Alabama’s schools and colleges, as well as communities nation- and world-wide.

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This is the first anthology of the author’s own favorite ghost stories from the highly successful Jeffrey series of books that began in 1969 with “13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey.” Hundreds of thousands of these books have been sold. The present volume includes 13 of the best of Mrs. Windham’s stories, representing mysterious and supernatural doings from Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Most of the stories are related to historical places and sometimes to historical people.

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Raised in the Primitive Baptist Church, Beulah Buchanan at age 16 marries the much older deacon Ralph Rainey to escape from her oppressive parents, thus jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Over the next six years, Beulah works in her domineering husband’s cafe all day and cooks him dinner at home every night, dutifully attends church, and falls into an affair with the preacher. When she embarasses her husband by not cooking enough food for the ravenous visiting revival preacher, Ralph “chastises” Beulah with his belt. When he tries to beat her again on another occasion, she fights back and locks him in the cooler at his cafe, where he freezes to death. This sounds like and is a Southern Gothic tragedy, but it is told in Beulah’s voice, which is innocently hilarious. Beulah is an original, but readers who liked Clyde Eagerton’s Raney and Mark Childress’s Crazy in Alabama will hear familiar echoes of those Southern women protagonists.

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In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service recruited 623 African American men from Macon County, Alabama, for a study of “the effects of untreated syphilis in the Negro male.” For the next 40 years—even after the development of penicillin, the cure for syphilis—these men were denied medical care for this potentially fatal disease. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was exposed in 1972, and in 1975 the government settled a lawsuit but stopped short of admitting wrongdoing. In 1997, President Bill Clinton welcomed five of the Study survivors to the White House and, on behalf of the nation, officially apologized for an experiment he described as wrongful and racist. In this book, the attorney for the men describes the background of the Study, the investigation and the lawsuit, the events leading up to the Presidential apology, and the ongoing efforts to see that out of this painful and tragic episode of American history comes lasting good.

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Historian and former university president Sheldon Hackney recounts how he became an unwitting combatant in the Culture Wars when his nomination to become President Bill Clinton’s chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities came under fire from right-wing conservatives. Hackney meticulously describes the background of ideological maneuvering that was behind not only the attacks on him but also the fierce campaign to bring down Clinton. He says, “I believe my story illustrates how the Culture War and the current media environment combine to polarize discussion until the public has no chance to understand complex issues. Not only are moderates trampled underfoot, but the great gray areas where life is actually lived, the areas of ambiguity and tradeoffs between competing values, are rendered toxic to human habitation. This is not healthy for a democracy.”

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Janson Sanders, part Cherokee, part poor-but-proud white, is intent on avenging his father’s death and taking back the land stolen from him by a wealthy planter. Parentless and alone, Janson sets out, hopping a train with only a few biscuits and some cold pieces of chicken to his name. Thus begins a journey across the Souh to earn enough money to return home and reclaim his birthright. He eventually settles on rich landowner William Whitley’s land, working alongside the poverty-stricken sharecroppers during the day and bootlegging illegal liquor at night, hoarding what little money he earns towrd the redemption of his own land. Along the way, he falls in love—despite himself—with Whitley’s daughter. Separated by class and culture, the two young lovers struggle with their own differences while trying to keep their relationship secret from her temperamental, overbearing, and dangerous father. Set against the backdrop of rural life in the Souh during the twenties, Behold, This Dreamer is a story of hope and heartbreak, in which Janson Sanders is pulled one way by his love of the land and another way by his love of a woman.

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Charlotte Miller’s debut novel, Behold, This Dreamer, was a regional success story in 2000-2001. She continues now with the second installment of her trilogy exploring romance, culture, and place in the Depression-era Deep South. In the new book, Janson Sanders and his new bride, Elise, have been exiled by her wealthy father and have returned, penniless and landless, to his poor-but-proud relatives in Alabama. There, they struggle to build a life for themselves and to recover the family farm stolen from Janson by an unscrupulous local landowner.

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Waylon McPhee, middle-aged and divorced, moves back in with his widowed father in hopes of coasting through another year. But his father is dating again, and his sisters are trying to manipulate Waylon into asking their father for their inheritance before he gives it to a second wife. The sarcastic Waylon, juggling his relationships and responsibilities caustically but light-heartedly, hangs on hoping to recover something he lost in his youth: enough momentum to reach escape velocity. By turns humorous and melancholy, this novel cruises to a conclusion where all its characters satisfyingly reap what they have sown. Gerald Duff is a splendid writer of sparkling dialogue, and has perfect pitch for the ennui of contemporary life in the suburbs of the petroleum-chemical corridor that stretches along the Gulf Coast from Texas to Mississippi.

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Roger Pielke reveals how sports stars break the rules in their search for a competitive edge.Both entertaining and thought-provoking, THE EDGE not only visits the battlefields in the war against cheating and corruption, but also explores ways to ensure that “the spirit of sport” can survive in today’s high-tech, highly professional world.Drawing on controversies straight out of the headlines, Pielke looks at doping, match fixing, fake amateurism, and other ways of breaking the rules. But are those rules–and the values they reflect–hopelessly outdated?Wonderfully readable and scrupulously researched, THE EDGE blends science and journalism to produce an unforgettable account of sport in crisis.

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Susan Spano, America’s original Frugal Traveler, explores some of the most romantic, most exotic, and wildest corners of the world in this captivating collection of her best-loved pieces.French Ghosts, Russian Nights, and American Outlaws: Souvenirs of a Professional Vagabond takes the reader on magical trips, when everything conspired to make a place unforgettable, like a temple in Java at sunrise or an ice hotel in the Artic Circle at sunset. In some of the stories, Susan finds the kind of enlightenment that only travel can provide by following in the footsteps of luminaries such as Federico Fellini, Julia Child, and Chairman Mao.Other stories are about travel itself: how it became Susan’s passion and calling; how it fed her incurably restless spirit; how it inspired her philosophy of travel and life: Go forth and find meaning. Take a condemned cable car over the Yangtze River or a shared taxi over the Andes with a leaking gas tank and chain-smoking driver. Eat oysters and drink martinis wherever you can. And, as often as possible, come home with a tan.

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