Bean Blossom


Book Description

Bean Blossom, Indiana is home to the annual Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival, founded in 1967 by Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass. Here, Adler discusses the development of bluegrass music, the many personalities involved in the bluegrass music scene, the interplay of local, regional, and national interests, and more.




If You Don't Outdie Me


Book Description

In the 1920s, drawn by spectacular vistas and colorful fall foliage, photojournalist Frank Hohenberger (1876-1962) traveled to the hills of Brown County. Once there, he found more to photograph than just a picturesque landscape and he set out to record the lives of the people who lived among the hills. If You Don't Outdie Me is a brilliantly revealing volume about Hohenberger's encounter with the people of Brown County. Rather than a society of amusing and peaceful rustics, Hohenberger discovered that there were "tragedies in the valleys" and rancorous complexities that belied sentimental notions about small town life. Reproduced here are Hohenberger's incomparable photographs, not only the carefully crafted "art prints," but also the casual snapshots that show him to have been one of the pioneers of ethnographic photography. The book includes Hohenberger's previously unpublished diary notes, which record the humor, gossip, legends, oral history, figures of speech, and proverbs of the Brown County folk, as well as his astute and unguarded observations.




Swimming with Frogs


Book Description

A delightful memoir of life in the hills of Brown County, Indiana.




Brown County


Book Description

Nine years before Abraham Lincoln was elected president, Story came into being. In 1851, Pres. Millard Fillmore granted a land patent to Dr. George Story for the creation of this little town. Tucked into a scenic spot near the Hoosier National Forest, 13 miles southeast of Nashville, Indiana, Story lies deep in the heart of historic Brown County. And Story is just one reason to visit Brown County, also known as "the Art Colony of the Midwest." Amid forests, rolling hills, and winding country roads, charming Nashville is home to more than 120 shops, art galleries, and artists' studios and neighbors two villages quaintly named Gnawbone and Bean Blossom. The beauty of Brown County has always attracted artists and history buffs. Wander back roads across covered bridges that have spanned sparkling streams for more than a century to retrace the paths taken by artists seeking to capture the county's beauty.




Looking Back to See


Book Description

Revealing, entertaining window on the music of the ’50s and ’60s










Finding Charity’s Folk


Book Description

Finding Charity’s Folk highlights the experiences of enslaved Maryland women who negotiated for their own freedom, many of whom have been largely lost to historical records. Based on more than fifteen hundred manumission records and numerous manuscript documents from a diversity of archives, Jessica Millward skillfully brings together African American social and gender history to provide a new means of using biography as a historical genre. Millward opens with a striking discussion about how researching the life of a single enslaved woman, Charity Folks, transforms our understanding of slavery and freedom in Revolutionary America. For African American women such as Folks, freedom, like enslavement, was tied to a bondwoman’s reproductive capacities. Their offspring were used to perpetuate the slave economy. Finding loopholes in the law meant that enslaved women could give birth to and raise free children. For Millward, Folks demonstrates the fluidity of the boundaries between slavery and freedom, which was due largely to the gendered space occupied by enslaved women. The gendering of freedom influenced notions of liberty, equality, and race in what became the new nation and had profound implications for African American women’s future interactions with the state.




I Thought It Was Just Me (but it Isn't)


Book Description

First published in 2007 with the title: I thought it was just me: women reclaiming power and courage in a culture of shame.




Oddball Indiana


Book Description

Indiana often calls itself the Crossroads of the Nation. It's not also perhaps the very nexus of US weirdness. Armed with Oddball Indiana, you'll soon discover the strange underbelly of the Hoosier State, from brain sandwiches to square donuts. Indiana has monuments to Michael Jackson, the comic strip character Joe Palooka, and the World's Largest Egg. It's where Alka-Seltzer and Wonder Bread were invented, where A Christmas Story actually took place, and where the good but angry citizens of Plainfield conspired to dump President Martin Van Buren in a mud puddle. Along with humorous histories and offbeat observations, Oddball Indiana provides addresses, websites, hours, fees, and driving directions for each of its 350+ entries.