First published by Johns Hopkins in 1979, Michael. O'Brien's The Idea of the American South, 1920—1941 was deemed "a first-rate intellectual history" by the Journal of Southern History and "a brilliant study" by History magazine. O'Brien's study analyzes how the idea of a unique Southern consciousness endured into the 20th century and how it affected the lives of prominent Southern intellectuals [$34.00 cloth; $14.95 paper]. Lay My Burden Down, "a folk history of slavery," edited by B.A. Botkin was the result of a slave narrative program of the Federal Writers' Project that recorded more than 2,000 interviews in the 1930's with exslaves who ranged in age from 75 to 105. First published in 1945, Lay My Burden Down is considered one of the classic works of American folklore, containing nearly 300 of the narratives recorded by the FWP interviewers. Georgia recently came out with a new edition of this classic [$14.95 paper]. Another work dealing with black-white relationships is Bob Blauner's Black Lives, White Lives: Three Decades of Race Relations in America, which Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles called "a wonderfully strong and compelling series of narratives, whose many different voices, in their sum, provide a picture of so many of us Americans—the ironies, complexities, ambiguities which inform our lives." Blauner's work is available in a new edition from California [$10.95 paper]. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Stetson Kennedy has devoted a lifetime to writing about human rights and social justice. And two of his works about the South are again available as paperbacks from Florida Atlantic. They are respectively, Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was, a documentation of the system of legally imposed American apartheid that prevailed in the South from Reconstruction to the 1960's [$14.95 paper]; and The Klan Unmasked, Kennedy's account of his post-World War II years as an undercover agent in the Ku Klux Klan [$16.95]. Beacon Press is offering a paper edition of Melville J. Herskovits' The Myth of the Negro Past, with a new introduction by Sidney W. Mintz. Originally published in 1941, Herskovits' book debunked the racist myth that black Americans have no cultural past and recovered a rich African heritage in religious and secular life [$14.95]. Collier Books has reprinted Mortimer J. Adler's Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, in which the noted philosopher and teacher addresses the controversies about what should be taught in our elementary schools, high schools, and colleges [$8.95]. The lives of three families who ventured West in the mid-l9th and early 20th centuries are re-created in Far From Home: Families of the Westward Journey by Lillian Schlissel, Byrd Gibbens, and Elizabeth Hampsten, a work recently reprinted in paper by Schocken Books [$11.95]. Chicago has issued a paper edition of Wayne Franklin's Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers about the diligent writers of early America, such writers as Columbus, William Bradford, and Thomas Jefferson [$14.95]. Harlan Davidson has published a second edition of George T. McJimsey's The Dividing and Reuniting of America, 1848—1877, a volume in the Forum's American History Series [$14.95 paper].