The Virginia Military Institute launched an educational revolution when it became the first school in the American South to combine classical and practical courses under an effective system of military discipline. It pioneered free schooling for the poor and exemption from tuition and board in exchange for two years of teaching. It has furnished fully qualified citizen-soldiers for both civilian and military life since before the Civil War.  Who first conceived of VMI has been the subject of multiple claims since the school's founding in 1839. Attempting to answer that problem, this biography of Col. J.T.L. Preston unfolds the life of a teacher and soldier, husband and father, who defined the school as it exists today, served Stonewall Jackson as his first adjutant general, married the Poetess of the Confederacy and sired a family whose members bore the stamp of their father's character. Preston is revealed as a man of faith who suffered "anguish beyond remedy" under "the bloody, remorseless hand of war," which "tore from his heart what, to him, was more precious than liberty, home, or anything but heaven."

The Father of Virginia Military Institute: A Biography of Colonel J.T.L. Preston, CSA

Biographies & Memoirs

Shaffner, Randolph P.

Historical

McFarland Company

The idea that a young person can become adept in the art of life by passing through definite stages, until at last he becomes a master, lives at the core of the apprenticeship novel. Recognized among German critics as the «Bildungsroman», this type of novel has yet to be adequately defined on a grand scale for the English reader despite nearly two centuries of its development. In an attempt to describe the apprenticeship novel as a modifiable type in Western literature, Mr. Shaffner combines a theoretical stance with analyses of three concrete examples drawn from over a hundred potential candidates.

The Apprenticeship Novel: A Study of the «Bildungsroman» as a Regulative Type in Western Literature with a Focus on Three Classic Representatives by ... Maugham, and Mann (German Studies in America)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

This is a history of the Hudson Library of Highlands, North Carolina.

Good Reading Material, Mostly Bound and New: The Hudson Library, 1884-1994

History

Americas

Hudson Library of Highlands Nc

<p>Recipient of the NorthCarolina Society of Historians History Book Award, 2002, and the American Association of State and Local History Award, 2005.</p>

Heart of the Blue Ridge: Highlands, North Carolina

Faraway Publishing

On March 6, 1875, Sam Kelsey and C.C. Hutchinson paid $2.00 an acre for just over a square mile of the Sugartown Highlands in the Blue Ridge Mountains and began building a town 4,000 fett above the the clouds. This is a history of the origin and growth of a town with a Northern climate set high in the South, including the ever-continueing struggle between those who would preserve and those who would exploit its unique appeal to year-round residents and summer visitors. In its attempt to be all-inclusive, this book contains much detail, but it also embodies a collection of matchless characters and personalities and their stories that have given the town and its history remarkable color and enduring interest. In short, the big world is here mirrored in the small world where little things that happen are not less important but more so.

Heart of the Blue Ridge Highlands, North Carolina