The Transparent Feather

BJ Appelgren

Nelson Glueck

Jonathan M. Brown

& Laurence Kutler

The Planting of New Virginia

Warren Hofstra

An aspiring writer scribes memoirs in exchange for writing lessons from a dying prize-winning novelist.  They both receive something more than either had imagined.

BJ Appelgren has been an artist, teacher, potter, executive director of a non-profit agency, counselor, and writer of an alternative health newsletter-but it is in writing “literature” that she has rediscovered art as revelation. She lives in the Shenandoah Valley of West Virginia.

Nelson Glueck was a pioneer in the field of biblical archaeology.  He was a personal friend of David Ben-Gurion, Abba Eban, Golda Meir, and Judah Magnes.  As president of the Hebrew Union college, he oversaw the merger of HUC with the Jewish Institute of Religion and expanded the Cincinnati-based institution to include schools in New York, Los Angeles, and Jerusalem.

Jonathan Brown received his rabbinical ordination from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and currently serves the Beth El Congregation in Winchester.

In the eighteenth century, Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley became a key corridor for America’s westward expansion through the Cumberland Gap.  Known as “New Virginia,” the region west of the Blue Ridge Mountains set off the world of the farmer from that of the planter, grain and livestock production from tobacco culture, and a free labor society from a slave labor society.  By examining the early landscape history of the Shenandoah Valley in its regional and global context, Hofstra sheds new light on social, economic, political, and intellectual developments that affected both the region and the entire North American Atlantic world. 

Warren Hofstra is Stewart Bell Professor of History at Shenandoah University. In addition to teaching in the fields of American social and cultural history, he directs the Community History Project of Shenandoah University.