Shelf Life

COLLEGES ON THE BRINK: THE CASE FOR FINANCIAL EXIGENCY

BY CHARLES M. AMBROSE ’09 AND MICHAEL T. NIETZEL

(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.)

“Colleges on the Brink” is about the financial crises many colleges are facing in the post- pandemic era and how they can be resolved. The tools described require changing how colleges spend money while still maintaining core academic values. Chuck Ambrose ’83 and Michael Nietzel discuss the conditions involving financial exigency and other major budget overhauls, and they outline how to maximize the likelihood institutions can regain financial health. The challenge these colleges face is to come back from the brink and become leaner, financially stable institutions, ready to provide the education students need. Ambrose, a member of the Furman Board of Trustees, is senior consultant for higher education strategy with Husch Blackwell and served as a university president, chancellor and CEO at Pfeiffer University, University of Central Missouri, the KnowledgeWorks Foundation and Henderson State University. Nietzel is the former president of Missouri State University, former dean of the Graduate School and provost at the University of Kentucky.

FRANKIE WELCH’S AMERICANA: FASHION, SCARVES, AND POLITICS

BY ASHLEY CALLAHAN

(The University of Georgia Press)

Frankie Welch ’48 was a leading American textile, accessories and fashion designer in a career that spanned the 1960s through the 1990s. This lavishly illustrated book provides a lively account of her life and career, tracing her rise from the small town of Rome, Georgia, to her role as a doyenne of fashion in the Washington, D.C., area. Featuring her scarf and fashion designs for the 1968 presidential campaigns, the history of her influential dress shop in Alexandria, Virginia, her connections to first ladies and other D.C. tastemakers, and her exuberant embrace of Americana during the U.S. Bicentennial, this history weaves Welch’s personal biography into the literal fabric of our country.

Welch designed thousands of scarves for clients, including Betty Ford, Furman University, McDonald’s, the National Press Club, the Hubert Humphrey presidential campaign, the Smithsonian Institution and the Garden Club of Georgia. “Frankie Welch’s Americana” is the first book to document the ambition and accomplishments of one of the South’s most prominent fashion authorities of the second half of the 20th century. Welch died in 2021 and was preceded in death by her husband, William C. Welch ’50.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HANNAH CRAFTS: THE TRUE STORY OF THE BONDWOMAN’S NARRATIVE

BY GREGG HECIMOVICH

(Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers)

In 1857, a woman escaped enslavement on a North Carolina plantation and fled to a farm in New York. In hiding, she worked on a manuscript that would make her famous long after her death. The novel, “The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” was first published in 2002 to great acclaim, but the author’s identity remained unknown. Over a decade later, Furman University Professor of English Gregg Hecimovich unraveled the mystery of the author’s name and, in “The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts,” he tells her story. In this remarkable biography, Hecimovich identifies the novelist as Hannah Bond “Crafts.” She was not only the first known Black woman to compose a novel but also an extraordinarily gifted artist who honed her literary skills in direct opposition to a system designed to deny her every measure of humanity. After escaping to New York, the author forged a new identity as Hannah Crafts to make sense of a life fractured by slavery.

Hecimovich establishes the case for authorship of “The Bondwoman’s Narrative” by examining the lives of Hannah Crafts’s friends and contemporaries, including the five enslaved women whose experiences form part of her narrative. By drawing on the lives of those she knew in slavery, Crafts summoned into her fiction people otherwise stolen from history.

At once a detective story, a literary chase and a cultural history, “The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts” discovers a tale of love, friendship, betrayal and violence set against the backdrop of America’s descent into Civil War. The book is a groundbreaking study of the first Black female novelist and her life as an enslaved woman, from the biographer who solved the mystery of her identity, with a preface by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

A SHORT HISTORY OF GREENVILLE

BY JUDITH T. BAINBRIDGE

(University of South Carolina Press)

In this lively historical account illustrated with over 60 images, author Judy Bainbridge invites readers to explore the full expanse of Greenville’s history, from its earliest days as Cherokee hunting grounds, to its development as a frontier settlement, and later a 19th-century summer resort; from the economic boom brought by the textile industry, to the bust of the Great Depression, and finally to the revitalization of downtown as a haven for business and tourism in the 21st century.

Key leaders and colorful figures populate the story and help bring Greenville’s history to life. Vardry McBee, the “father of Greenville”; James C. Furman, the first president of Furman University; baseball legend “Shoeless” Joe Jackson; activist Viola Neblett; and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, among many others, called Greenville home, and all helped to shape it into the leading city it is today.

Bainbridge, a historic preservationist, retired from Furman in 2007 as professor emerita of English.