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In this chapter the evidence for a rule of Vedic and Indo-European Phonology is examined from a fresh perspective. Lindeman’s Law proposes that monosyllabic words with an initial Cy- or Cv- cluster in Vedic could exhibit an alternative disyllabic form with Ciy- or Cuv-. This rule has also been attributed to Indo-European. Here it is shown that it is important to consider the role of formulaic composition in the distribution and preservation of archaisms in Vedic. The circumstances of preservation impose limits on what can be known about the original conditions for word initial alternation.

This chapter discusses Clyde Edgerton's early novels, whose characters define themselves and the essential nature of contemporary life in the South. If we accept Erik Bledsoe's description of the Rough South as “a world of excess—excessive alcohol, excessive sex, excessive violence,” the works of Edgerton hardly seem to qualify. Indeed, Yvonne Mason, in Reading, Learning, Teaching Clyde Edgerton, declares his work “infinitely suitable” for “young readers in the English Language Arts classroom”—an appraisal difficult to imagine for the fiction of Harry Crews or Larry Brown. Edgerton's first three novels—Raney (1985), Walking Across Egypt (1987), and The Floatplane Notebooks (1988)—offer a way to understand his South, a world that increasingly belongs to and is defined by aging and death. This chapter considers Edgerton's other works, including the novel The Night Train (2011), the memoir Solo: My Adventure in the Air (2005), and the nonfiction Papadaddy's Book for New Fathers: Advice to Dads of All Ages (2013).

Although devices such as radar figure prominently in histories of science in World War II Britain, attention has also been paid to the organisation of science and its ‘coordination’ with the war effort. The apparent importance of this subject owes much to the emphasis placed on it by a handful of prominent scientists who advocated reforms in the wartime bureaucracy. Their advocacy led to the creation of new technical coordinating committees, new scientific advisory posts, and new ‘operational research’ groups. These were important developments. However, led by physiologist and member of Parliament A. V. Hill, reformists also connected their proposals to larger narratives about Britain’s incapacity to exploit ‘science’ properly. Such narratives lent the proposals a sense of urgency, but also concealed the finer rationales that made reformists’ successful proposals appealing to figures in the military and government. The narratives also made important advisory figures, most notably Sir Henry Tizard, into icons, and created a sense that operational research was an important turning point in overarching relations between science and the state. Subsequently, as historian David Edgerton has argued, figures such as C. P. Snow seized on these narratives in developing a historiography of science-state-society relations that doubled as a platform for policy advocacy. This chapter argues that systematic empirical research will be needed to produce new pictures that capture events external to established narratives, and that place the events featured in those narratives in proper perspective.

This chapter focuses on the time Larry Brown and Clyde Edgerton decided to write a short story together. The result was the unfinished but hilarious “And How Are You,” which sat for several years until Edgerton decided to send it out for publication. Although Edgerton sent the piece to at least one journal, it was rejected. Brown’s main project during this time was a new novel, Father and Son, on which he began working in early 1994. Ravenel generally liked what she read, declaring that parts of the manuscript “may be your best ever”; however, she thought Brown had too many driving and drinking scenes reminiscent of those in Big Bad Love. By March 1995, Brown had written 233 manuscript pages and thought he was about half finished with the novel.

This chapter examines the legacy of southern frontier humor beyond the southern local color tradition by focusing on the trickster. It shows the reemergence of the trickster as con artist in contemporary southern literature, thus continuing the legacy of a Euro-American counterpart, a literary cross of the traits of both Jack and antebellum southern rogues such as Simon Suggs and Sut Lovingood. The chapter looks at tricksters in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), Mark Childress’s Crazy in Alabama (1997) and Georgia Bottoms (2011), and Clyde Edgerton’s Walking Across Egypt (1987), Killer Diller (1991), and The Bible Salesman (2008).

Chapter 2 discusses the Germanic and Vedic evidence for Sievers’ Law in considerable detail. This chapter is situated in Part One (Evidence for Sievers’ Law and the Possibility of Inheritance) the overall aim of which is evaluate the possibility that Sievers’ Law could have been inherited from Indo-European, even in principle. This chapter discusses pressing questions of relative chronology in Germanic. The possibility of a converse of Sievers’ Law in Gothic and Vedic is considered. Seebold’s Anschlußregel and Schindler’s restrictions on Sievers’ Law are discussed, in particular the moraic properties of obstruents (including laryngeals). The implications of Sievers’ Law for Indo-European syllable structure are considered. Edgerton and Lindeman’s arguments for word initial alternations and the importance of monosyllabicity as a criterion for alternation are set in the context of the formulaic language of the Rigveda and the potential skew which this could have produced in the evidence.

African Americans have long played a role in legitimizing the loyal slave and black Confederate myth. For instance, H. K. Edgerton, is a well known and outspoken neo-confederate who downplays the role of slavery in the south before, during, and after the Civil War. Some African Americans have embraced the Confederacy as a means to celebrate their ancestors who they believe fought in the war and have been forgotten or ignored. Small numbers of Black men have been recruited as Confederate soldiers in Civil War re-enactments to perpetuate the myth of positive race relations in the confederacy. Overall, support for the Confederacy is waning with the Black Lives Matter movement, the adoption of the battle flag by hate groups, and a sustained effort by various groups to accurately educate the public about the role of slavery in the Civil War. For example, the National Parks Service titled the sesquicentennial “Civil War to Civil Rights” which placed slavery and emancipation at the center of the Civil War discussion.