Old South

Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes listeners to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. From the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields, Twitty tells his family story.

The hospital has seen it all. New life coming into the world, welcomed with tears of joy. Lives that have run their course now leaving it, causing tears of sorrow and grief. The pain of physical and emotional trauma. Wounds that may never be healed. Dedicated medical professionals, doing their best to put broken people back together again. When the hospital closed its doors for the final time…when the last patient had moved on...when the lights went out and darkness fell…something remained. Join Richard Estep as he investigates the haunting of the infamous South Pittsburg Hospital.

Brought up amid the luxury of plantation life, Marianne Johnston never questions her sheltered life until, driven by her conscience, she joins the Underground Railroad. Soon Marianne is living a dangerous double life, helping slaves flee by night and acting the belle by day. And nothing is riskier than her attraction to wild, heartless young Southerner Yves Chamard - while being courted by his noble older brother.

John Snyder's memoir of growing up the the Depression era south evokes a time gone by. It is written with affection and non-judgmental understanding of people dealing with hard times, sometimes with cruelty, sometimes with violence, including an unsolved case of arson that changed the author's life. In three parts, it is about early childhood among North Carolina mountaineers, living for a time with two eccentric aunts, and growing up on a sharecropper farm before the author went away to the University of Chicago.

These unforgettable characters are depicted so clearly and accurately as to leave the listener guessing which stories are fact and which are imagined. And whether the teachers in these tales are smudged with the dust of chalk or caked with the mud of the field, their lives and lessons are faithfully recorded here in straightforward prose that evokes a special time and place.

In this thrilling story of intellectual and archaeological discovery, David Roberts recounts his last 20 years of far-flung exploits in search of spectacular prehistoric ruins and rock art panels known to very few modern travelers. His adventures range across Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado, and illuminate the mysteries of the Ancestral Puebloans and their contemporary neighbors the Mogollon and Fremont, as well as of the more recent Navajo and Comanche.