A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY923 start with D start with D
Should the negotiation of the post–World War II peace treaties in Europe have been pursued separately or should they have been approached within the framework of a general European settlement? The debate on this fundamental foreign policy issue, which has left only faint tracks in the documentary record, is fully explored here for the first time.
W. W. Rostow, in his second book in the Ideas and Action Series, describes a meeting that took place on the eve of the departure of Secretary of State James Byrnes for Paris to participate in treaty negotiations. The meeting was probably the only occasion during 1946 when the peace treaty issue as a whole was explicitly addressed at a high level with lucid alternatives on the table. The plan laid before Secretary of State Byrnes by his senior subordinates, Under Secretary Dean Acheson and Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs Will Clayton, aimed to halt the movement toward the split of Europe and the emergence of hostile blocs. It outlined an all-European settlement, including economic and security institutions linked to the United Nations. Only one part of the proposal gained Byrnes's support and came to life: the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe in Geneva. But the Acheson-Clayton proposal foreshadowed the Marshall Plan.
The book's larger theme is the process by which the Cold War came about. Rostow's interpretation differs from either conventional or revisionist views, emphasizing as it does the process of incremental deterioration that occurred in 1946 and the role of uncertainty and weakness in American policy.
This second volume in the Ideas and Action Series will interest general readers as well as those with a particular interest in World War II. It should be of special value to political scientists, economists, military historians, and policy makers, and may serve as a case study in a variety of courses.
Riessman looks at the ideology of the companionate marriage: husband and wife should be each other's closest companion, and in marriage one should achieve emotial intimacy and sexual fulfillment. These beliefs imply a level of equality that rarely exists. In reality, most wives are subordinate to their husbands, most husbands want neither "deep talk" nor small talk that women want, and many husbands resent their wife's ties to kin and friends. To explain divorce, women and men construct gendered visions of what marriage should provide, and at the same time they mourn gender divisions and blame their divorces on them. Riessman examines the stories people tell about their marriages--the protagonists, inciting conditions, and culminating events--and how these narrative structures provide ways to persuade both teller and listener that divorce was justified.
Although divorce is invariably stressful, many people believe that men suffer less than women. This is an artifact of what Riessman calls the "feminization of psychological distress"--traditional ways of measuring distress reflect women's idioms, not men's. Departing from a literature that casts divorce in only negative terms, she finds paradoxically that women sense rewards, even as they report hardship. There is a shakeup in gender roles, and women more than men feel they gain a fuller idea of who they are. The author allows us to enter the points of view of her subjects, while her analytic approach makes links between the self and society.
Riessman looks at the ideology of the companionate marriage: husband and wife should be each other's closest companion, and in marriage one should achieve emotial intimacy and sexual fulfillment. These beliefs imply a level of equality that rarely exists. In reality, most wives are subordinate to their husbands, most husbands want neither "deep talk" nor small talk that women want, and many husbands resent their wife's ties to kin and friends. To explain divorce, women and men construct gendered visions of what marriage should provide, and at the same time they mourn gender divisions and blame their divorces on them. Riessman examines the stories people tell about their marriages--the protagonists, inciting conditions, and culminating events--and how these narrative structures provide ways to persuade both teller and listener that divorce was justified.
Although divorce is invariably stressful, many people believe that men suffer less than women. This is an artifact of what Riessman calls the "feminization of psychological distress"--traditional ways of measuring distress reflect women's idioms, not men's. Departing from a literature that casts divorce in only negative terms, she finds paradoxically that women sense rewards, even as they report hardship. There is a shakeup in gender roles, and women more than men feel they gain a fuller idea of who they are. The author allows us to enter the points of view of her subjects, while her analytic approach makes links between the self and society.
Drawn from some 5,000 letters, six decades of daily-diary writings, and extensive interviews, Dixie Heretic: The Civil Rights Odyssey of Renwick C. Kennedy offers a life-and-times biography of the Alabama Black Belt minister, Renwick C. Kennedy (1900–1985). Here, Tennant McWilliams gives an unvarnished account of Kennedy’s tortuous efforts to make his congregants and other southern whites “better Christians.”
Kennedy came from “upcountry” South Carolina, a place rife with Scotch-Irish Associate Reformed Presbyterians—people of biblical infallibility and individual piety and salvation. In 1927, after a life-changing theology education at Princeton, he moved to Camden, Alabama, county seat of Wilcox County. There, he came to believe that God had a mandate for him: to change the “Half Christian” conservative, and the often violent, racial behaviors around him. As a neo-orthodox Protestant, Kennedy never rejected literal approaches to the Bible. Still, out of the “Full Christian” Social Gospel, he urged changed racial behavior. Ultimately this led him to publish confrontational short stories and essays in Christian Century and New Republic—most set in fictitious “Yaupon County.”
In World War II, Kennedy served as a chaplain with the famed 102nd Evacuation Hospital. He came home hoping the Allied victory would spur Americans to fight racial segregation just as they had fought racial fascism in Europe. The 1948 Dixiecrat movement dashed these hopes, turning much of his neo-orthodox optimism to cynicism. His hope found fleeting resurgence in the civil rights movement, and saw Kennedy quietly leading desegregation of Troy University, where he was an administrator. But the era’s assassinations, combined with George Wallace and the rise of southern white Republicans, regularly returned him to the frustrated hopes of 1948 and fostered a pessimism about truly changed hearts that he took to his grave in 1985.
In Dixieball, Thomas Aiello considers the cultural function of professional basketball in the Deep South between 1947 and 1979. Making a strong case for the role of race in this process, Aiello ties the South’s initial animus toward basketball to the same complex that motivated the region to sacrifice its own economic interests to the cause of white supremacy. Fans of basketball, as compared to other team sports, were closer to the players, who showed more of their bodies; blackness, then, had more visibility in basketball than it had in other sports. By the time Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, African Americans made up 47.5 percent of professional basketball players, and despite integrating later than baseball and football, it was fast becoming known as a “black” sport. Over time, survival for southern teams grew more tenuous, fan support more fickle, and racial incidents between players and fans more hostile. Racism clashed with civic development in a fast-evolving region.
To identify the sources of this clash, Dixieball locates the main points of intersection between professional basketball and the Deep South in the two decades prior to the region’s first major franchise. Aiello then takes readers to New Orleans, where the first major Deep South professional basketball team—the New Orleans Buccaneers—was born, and on to Atlanta, Birmingham, St. Louis, and others, leading up to 1979. Scholars of sport and Southern history alike will find Dixieball a compelling contribution to the lively, interdisciplinary discussions animating the Sport and Popular Culture series.
How did World War I affect the American South? Did southerners experience the war in a particular way? How did regional considerations and, more generally, southern values and culture impact the wider war effort? Was there a distinctive southern experience of WWI?
Scholars considered these questions during “Dixie’s Great War,” a symposium held at the University of Alabama in October 2017 to commemorate the centenary of the American intervention in the war. With the explicit intent of exploring iterations of the Great War as experienced in the American South and by its people, organizers John M. Giggie and Andrew J. Huebner also sought to use historical discourse as a form of civic engagement designed to facilitate a community conversation about the meanings of the war.
Giggie and Huebner structured the panels thematically around military, social, and political approaches to the war to encourage discussion and exchanges between panelists and the public alike. Drawn from transcriptions of the day’s discussions and lightly edited to preserve the conversational tone and mix of professional and public voices, Dixie’s Great War: World War I and the American South captures the process of historians at work with the public, pushing and probing general understandings of the past, uncovering and reflecting on the deeper truths and lessons of the Great War—this time, through the lens of the South.
This volume also includes an introduction featuring a survey of recent literature dealing with regional aspects of WWI and a discussion of the centenary commemorations of the war. An afterword by noted historian Jay Winter places “Dixie’s Great War”—the symposium and this book—within the larger framework of commemoration, emphasizing the vital role such forums perform in creating space and opportunity for scholars and the public alike to assess and understand the shifting ground between cultural memory and the historical record.
This compilation is a rigorous and riveting assessment of Quinn’s legacy. In this volume, scholars examine him as a historical figure who helps us better understand modern Mormonism. They also probe his role as a historiographical titan. These essays enable us to analyze his influence on scholarship that both preceded and followed him. More than an investigation into his life and work, DNA Mormon uncovers the world in which he lived.
Methodism in the public and private lives of the politician
After more than forty contentious years in the public eye, Hillary Rodham Clinton is one of the best-known political figures in the nation. Yet the strong religious faith at the heart of her politics and personal life often remains confounding, if not mysterious, to longtime observers. Even many of her admirers would be surprised to hear Clinton state that her Methodist outlook has “been a huge part of who I am and how I have seen the world, and what I believe in, and what I have tried to do in my life.”
Gary Scott Smith’s biography of Clinton’s journey in faith begins with her Methodist upbringing in Park Ridge, Illinois, where she faithfully attended worship services, Sunday school, and youth group meetings. Like many mainline Protestants, Clinton’s spiritual commitment developed gradually throughout childhood, while her combination of missionary zeal and impressive personal talents has informed her career from the time of her pro bono work at Yale on behalf of children to the present.
Her Methodist faith has been very important to many of Clinton’s high-profile endeavors and in helping her cope with the prominent travails brought on by two presidential campaigns, never-ending conservative rancor, and her husband’s infidelity. Smith’s account examines Clinton’s faith in the context of work ranging from her 1990s pursuit of healthcare reform to a “Hillary doctrine” of foreign policy focused on her longtime goal of providing basic human rights for children and women--a project she saw as essential to United States security. The result is an enlightening reconsideration of an extraordinary political figure who has defied private doubts and public controversy to live by John Wesley’s dictum: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”
Do Babies Matter? is the first comprehensive examination of the relationship between family formation and the academic careers of men and women. The book begins with graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, moves on to early and mid-career years, and ends with retirement. Individual chapters examine graduate school, how recent PhD recipients get into the academic game, the tenure process, and life after tenure. The authors explore the family sacrifices women often have to make to get ahead in academia and consider how gender and family interact to affect promotion to full professor, salaries, and retirement. Concrete strategies are suggested for transforming the university into a family-friendly environment at every career stage.
The book draws on over a decade of research using unprecedented data resources, including the Survey of Doctorate Recipients, a nationally representative panel survey of PhDs in America, and multiple surveys of faculty and graduate students at the ten-campus University of California system..
"[An] excellent, comprehensive, and illuminating book. Its analysis, deftly integrating considerations of economics, law, politics, and philosophy, brings the issues of 'balanced budgets,' national saving, and intergenerational equity out of the area of religious crusades and into an arena of reason. . . . A magnificent, judicious, and balanced treatment. It should be read and studied not just by specialists in fiscal policy but by all those in the economic and political community."—Robert Eisner, Journal of Economic Literature
"Shaviro's history, economics, and political analysis are right on the mark. For all readers."—Library Journal
In culture and scholarship, science-fictional worlds are perceived as unrealistic and altogether imaginary. Seo-Young Chu offers a bold challenge to this perception of the genre, arguing instead that science fiction is a form of “high-intensity realism” capable of representing non-imaginary objects that elude more traditional, “realist” modes of representation. Powered by lyric forces that allow it to transcend the dichotomy between the literal and the figurative, science fiction has the capacity to accommodate objects of representation that are themselves neither entirely figurative nor entirely literal in nature.
Chu explores the globalized world, cyberspace, war trauma, the Korean concept of han, and the rights of robots, all as referents for which she locates science-fictional representations in poems, novels, music, films, visual pieces, and other works ranging within and without previous demarcations of the science fiction genre. In showing the divide between realism and science fiction to be illusory, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? sheds new light on the value of science fiction as an aesthetic and philosophical resource—one that matters more and more as our everyday realities grow increasingly resistant to straightforward representation.
For decades, Katie D’Angelo and Valerie Harrison engaged in conversations about race and racism. However, when Katie and her husband, who are white, adopted Gabriel, a biracial child, Katie’s conversations with Val, who is black, were no longer theoretical and academic. The stakes grew from the two friends trying to understand each other’s perspectives to a mother navigating, with input from her friend, how to equip a child with the tools that will best serve him as he grows up in a white family.
Through lively and intimate back-and-forth exchanges, the authors share information, research, and resources that orient parents and other community members to the ways race and racism will affect a black child’s life—and despite that, how to raise and nurture healthy and happy children. These friendly dialogues about guarding a child’s confidence and nurturing positive racial identity form the basis for Do Right by Me. Harrison and D’Angelo share information on transracial adoption, understanding racism, developing a child’s positive racial identity, racial disparities in healthcare and education, and the violence of racism.
Do Right by Me also is a story about friendship and kindness, and how both can be effective in the fight for a more just and equitable society.
William McKnight was a member of the Seventh Ohio Volunteer Cavalry from September 1862 until his death in June of 1864. During his time of service, McKnight penned dozens of emotion-filled letters, primarily to his wife, Samaria, revealing the struggles of an entire family both before and during the war.
This collection of more than one hundred letters provides in-depth accounts of several battles in Kentucky and Tennessee, such as the Cumberland Gap and Knoxville campaigns that were pivotal events in the Western Theater. The letters also vividly respond to General John Hunt Morgan’s raid through Ohio and correct claims previously published that McKnight was part of the forces chasing Morgan. By all accounts Morgan did stay for a period of time at McKnight’s home in Langsville during his raid through Ohio, much to McKnight’s horror and humiliation, but McKnight was in Kentucky at the time. Tragically, McKnight was killed in action nearly a year later during an engagement with Morgan’s men near Cynthiana, Kentucky.
Autobiography of jazz elder statesman Frank “Doc” Adams, highlighting his role in Birmingham, Alabama’s, historic jazz scene and tracing his personal adventure that parallels, in many ways, the story and spirit of jazz itself.
Doc tells the story of an accomplished jazz master, from his musical apprenticeship under John T. “Fess” Whatley and his time touring with Sun Ra and Duke Ellington to his own inspiring work as an educator and bandleader.
Central to this narrative is the often-overlooked story of Birmingham’s unique jazz tradition and community. From the very beginnings of jazz, Birmingham was home to an active network of jazz practitioners and a remarkable system of jazz apprenticeship rooted in the city’s segregated schools. Birmingham musicians spread across the country to populate the sidelines of the nation’s bestknown bands. Local musicians, like Erskine Hawkins and members of his celebrated orchestra, returned home heroes. Frank “Doc” Adams explores, through first-hand experience, the history of this community, introducing readers to a large and colorful cast of characters—including “Fess” Whatley, the legendary “maker of musicians” who trained legions of Birmingham players and made a significant mark on the larger history of jazz. Adams’s interactions with the young Sun Ra, meanwhile, reveal life-changing lessons from one of American music’s most innovative personalities.
Along the way, Adams reflects on his notable family, including his father, Oscar, editor of the Birmingham Reporter and an outspoken civic leader in the African American community, and Adams’s brother, Oscar Jr., who would become Alabama’s first black supreme court justice. Adams’s story offers a valuable window into the world of Birmingham’s black middle class in the days before the civil rights movement and integration. Throughout, Adams demonstrates the ways in which jazz professionalism became a source of pride within this community, and he offers his thoughts on the continued relevance of jazz education in the twenty-first century.
Until fairly recently, Arab women rarely received professional health care, since few women doctors had ever practiced in Arabia and their culture forbade them from consulting male doctors. Not surprisingly, Dr. Mary Bruins Allison faced an overwhelming demand when she arrived in Kuwait in 1934 as a medical missionary of the Reformed Church of America. Over the next forty years, "Dr. Mary" treated thousands of women and children, faithfully performing the duties that seemed required of her as a Christian—to heal the sick and seek converts.
These memoirs record a fascinating life. Dr. Allison briefly describes her upbringing and her professional training at Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania. She then focuses on her experiences in Kuwait, where women of all classes, including royalty, flocked to her care. In addition to describing many of her cases, Dr. Allison paints a richly detailed picture of life in Kuwait both before and after the discovery of oil transformed the country. Her recollections include invaluable details of women's lives in the Middle East during the early and mid-twentieth century. They add a valuable chapter to the story of modern medicine, to the largely unsuccessful efforts of the Christian church to win converts in the Middle East, and to the opportunities and limitations that faced American women of the period.
Dr. Allison also worked briefly in Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and India, and she includes material on each country. The introduction situates her experiences in the context of Middle Eastern and medical developments of the period.
Parents have known since time immemorial, and social scientists have agreed since the turn of the century, that adolescents are a people unto themselves--a "distinct developmental category." Yet it was not until the 1950s that a medical specialty specifically for teenagers came into being. In this book, Heather Munro Prescott shows how the mid-twentieth-century emergence of adolescent medicine resulted from a combination of social changes that reached far beyond the field of medicine--changes that placed teenagers themselves at the center of the national agenda.
The first book to trace the history of adolescent medicine, A Doctor of Their Own draws on oral histories of physicians in the field, patient records from adolescent medical facilities, medical and popular advice literature, and letters from teenagers and their parents. Prescott examines the interplay between the emergence of adolescent medicine and changes in American family relationships, youth culture, popular perceptions about young people, and the social experience of adolescence. With special attention to the role of young people themselves in the shaping of this new discipline, her book follows the development of adolescent medicine from its origins in the work of J. Roswell Gallagher at Boston Children's Hospital in the 1950s to its uncertain prospects today, when, despite heightened recognition of their specific medical needs, most teenagers still receive inadequate health care.
The Civil War was a tragic conflict that destroyed many lives, but for those trying to save lives the tragedy was often compounded. Military doctors labored through the smoke of battle where impossible conditions and fear of infection often forced them to resort to amputation, and most operations were performed without painkillers. Thomas Fanning Wood recorded his wartime experiences as a Confederate Army surgeon, and his recollections of those events allow us to hear a distinct voice of the Civil War.
As a young soldier recovering from fever at a Richmond hospital, Wood developed an interest in medicine that was encouraged by a doctor who steered him toward medical training. After only eight months of study he was made an assistant surgeon in the Third North Carolina Regiment. His narrative—drawn from his memoirs, letters from the front, and articles written for his hometown newspaper—presents a poignant and sometimes horrifying picture of what the Civil War physician had to face both under battlefield conditions and in urban hospitals.
Wood himself spent much of his time at the front, and his vivid narrative describes both a doctor’s daily activities and the campaigns he witnessed. He was present at many of the war’s major engagements: he was near Stonewall Jackson when the general fell at Chancellorsville, manned a field dressing station at the foot of Culp’s Hill at Gettysburg, and was one of the few survivors of the Union attack on the "mule shoe" at Spotsylvania when his entire division was wiped out. Wood’s account also lends new insight into Jubal Early’s 1864 campaigns in the Shenandoah Valley and against Washington.
With its observations of medical care and training not found in standard histories of the war—including a description of the examination required to become an assistant surgeon—Doctor to the Front offers a unique human perspective on the Civil War. With their additional descriptions of key figures and events, Wood’s recollections combine historical significance and human interest to show us another side of that terrible conflict.
The Author: Donald B. Koonce is the great-grandson of Thomas Fanning Wood and has served on the Board of Directors of the South Carolina Historical Society and the Historic Greenville Foundation. He is president of the Koonce Group, Inc., an award-winning communications company whose productions include Daybreak at the Cowpens, a documentary for the National Park Service.
The Doctor Who Wasn’t There traces the long arc of enthusiasm for—and skepticism of—electronic media in health and medicine. Over the past century, a series of new technologies promised to democratize access to healthcare. From the humble telephone to the connected smartphone, from FM radio to wireless wearables, from cable television to the “electronic brains” of networked mainframe computers: each new platform has promised a radical reformation of the healthcare landscape. With equal attention to the history of technology, the history of medicine, and the politics and economies of American healthcare, physician and historian Jeremy A. Greene explores the role that electronic media play, for better and for worse, in the past, present, and future of our health.
Today’s telehealth devices are far more sophisticated than the hook-and-ringer telephones of the 1920s, the radios that broadcasted health data in the 1940s, the closed-circuit televisions that enabled telemedicine in the 1950s, or the online systems that created electronic medical records in the 1960s. But the ethical, economic, and logistical concerns they raise are prefigured in the past, as are the gaps between what was promised and what was delivered. Each of these platforms also produced subtle transformations in health and healthcare that we have learned to forget, displaced by promises of ever newer forms of communication that took their place.
Illuminating the social and technical contexts in which electronic medicine has been conceived and put into practice, Greene’s history shows the urgent stakes, then and now, for those who would seek in new media the means to build a more equitable future for American healthcare.
In France, Wilsford shows, the state is strong in the health policy domain, while organized medicine is weak and divided. Consequently, physicians exercise little influence over health care policymaking. By contrast, in the United States the state is weak, the employers and insurers who pay for health care are fragmented, and organized medicine is strong and well financed. As a result, medical professionals are able to exert a greater influence on policymaking, thus making cost control more difficult.
Wilsford extends his comparison to health care systems in the United Kingdom, West Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan. Whether the private or public sector finances health care, he discovers, there is now an important trend in all of the advanced industrial countries toward controlling escalating costs by curbing both the medical profession’s clinical autonomy and physicians’ incomes.
Doctors are obviously influential in determining the costs of their services. But even more important, many believe, is the influence physicians have over the use and cost of nonphysician health-care resources and services. Doctors and Their Workshops is the first comprehensive attempt to use economic analysis to understand some of the physician effects on nonphysician aspects of health care.
Through close readings of these accounts, Poirier draws attention to the complex nature of power in medicine, the rewards and hazards of professional and interpersonal relationships in all aspects of physicians’ lives, and the benefits to and threats from the vulnerability that medical students and residents experience.
Although most students emerge from medical education as well-trained, well-prepared professionals, few of them will claim that they survived the process unscathed. The authors of these accounts document—for better or for worse—the ways in which they have been changed. Based on their stories, Poirier recommends that medical education should make room for the central importance of personal relationships, the profound sense of isolation and powerlessness that can threaten the wellbeing of patients and physicians alike, and the physical and moral vulnerability that are part of every physician’s life.
Doctors Serving People is just such a prescriptive. While a professor at Rush Medical College in Chicago, Edward J. Eckenfels helped initiate and direct a student-driven program in which student doctors worked in the poor, urban communities during medical school, voluntarily and without academic credit. In addition to their core curriculum and clinical rotations, students served the social and health needs of diverse and disadvantaged populations. Now more than ten years old, the program serves as an example for other medical schools throughout the country. Its story provides a working model of how to reform medical education in America.
By presenting African American Protestantism in the context of white Protestant fundamentalism, Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism between the Wars demonstrates that African American Protestants were acutely aware of the manner in which white Christianity operated and how they could use that knowledge to justify social change. Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews’s study scrutinizes how white fundamentalists wrote blacks out of their definition of fundamentalism and how blacks constructed a definition of Christianity that had, at its core, an intrinsic belief in racial equality. In doing so, this volume challenges the prevailing scholarly argument that fundamentalism was either a doctrinal debate or an antimodernist force. Instead, it was a constantly shifting set of priorities for different groups at different times.
A number of African American theologians and clergy identified with many of the doctrinal tenets of the fundamentalism of their white counterparts, but African Americans were excluded from full fellowship with the fundamentalists because of their race. Moreover, these scholars and pastors did not limit themselves to traditional evangelical doctrine but embraced progressive theological concepts, such as the Social Gospel, to help them achieve racial equality. Nonetheless, they identified other forward-looking theological views, such as modernism, as threats to “true” Christianity.
Mathews demonstrates that, although traditional portraits of “the black church” have provided the illusion of a singular unified organization, black evangelical leaders debated passionately among themselves as they sought to preserve select aspects of the culture around them while rejecting others. The picture that emerges from this research creates a richer, more profound understanding of African American denominations as they struggled to contend with a white American society that saw them as inferior.
Doctrine and Race melds American religious history and race studies in innovative and compelling ways, highlighting the remarkable and rich complexity that attended to the development of African American Protestant movements.
"[Scott] might be called the Aristotle of documentary. No one before him has so comprehensively surveyed the achievement of the 1930s, suggesting what should be admired, what condemned, and why; no one else has so persuasively furnished an aesthetic for judging the form."—Times Literary Supplement
Key to the successful teaching and learning of history is its personalization. In presenting documents that help Ohio’s rich history come alive in the minds of its readers, this book has purposely sought to provide eyewitness, first-person narratives that will make the reader want to turn the page and keep on reading. At the same time, mindful of the significance of guideposts basic to our understanding of the development of the state, care has been taken to include those documents such as constitutions, laws, and ordinances that have truly made a difference in the shaping of our institutions and the lives of our people.
With informative and accessible introductions to each document, editors Shriver and Wunderlin have produced a book of record that reveals the sources of Ohio’s heritage. The Documentary Heritage of Ohio is the second volume in the Ohio Bicentennial Series and a must for all libraries, schools, and the bookshelves of any who wish to appreciate the state’s historic accomplishments and rich heritage not only for the bicentennial of statehood in 2003 but for many years to come.
of public policy actions, political speeches, and judicial decisions related to the American
Civil War. Collectively, the four volumes in this series give scholars, teachers, and students
easy access to the full texts of the most important, fundamental documents as well as hardto-
find, rarely published primary sources on this critical period in U.S. history.
The first two volumes of the series, Legislative Achievements and Political Arguments,
were released last year. The final installment, Judicial Decisions, is divided into two volumes.
The first volume, spanning the years 1857 to 1866, was released last year. This second
volume of Judicial Decisions covers the years 1867 to 1896. Included here are some of
the classic judicial decisions of this time such as the 1869 decision in Texas v. White and
the first judicial interpretation of the 1868 Fourteenth Amendment, the 1873 Slaughter-
House Cases. Other decisions are well known to specialists but deserve wider readership
and discussion, such as the 1867 state and 1878 federal cases that upheld the separation of
the races in public accommodations (and thus constituted the common law of common
commerce) long before the more notorious 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson (also included).
These judicial voices constitute a lasting and often overlooked aspect of the age of Abraham
Lincoln. Mackey’s headnotes and introductory essays situate cases within their historical
context and trace their lasting significance. In contrast to decisions handed down
during the war, these judicial decisions lasted well past their immediate political and legal
moment and deserve continued scholarship and scrutiny.
This document collection presents the raw “stuff” of the Civil War era so that students,
scholars, and interested readers can measure and gauge how that generation met Lincoln’s
challenge to “think anew, and act anew.” A Documentary History of the American Civil
War Era is an essential acquisition for academic and public libraries in addition to being a
valuable resource for courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, legal history, political
history, and nineteenth-century American history.
The first volume of the series, Legislative Achievements, contains legislation passed in response to the turmoil seizing the country on the brink of, during, and in the wake of the Civil War. Forthcoming are volume 2, Political Arguments, which contains voices of politicians, political party platforms, and administrative speeches, and volume 3, Judicial Decisions, which provides judicial opinions and decisions as the Civil War raged in the courtrooms as well as on the battlefields.
Organized chronologically, each of the selections is preceded by an introductory headnote that explains the document’s historical significance and traces its lasting impact. These headnotes provide insight into not only law and public policy but also the broad sweep of issues that engaged Civil War–era America.
Legislative Achievements features some of the most momentous and enduring public policy documents from the time, beginning with the controversial September 15, 1850, Fugitive Slave Act and concluding with the June 18, 1878, Posse Comitatus Act. Both military and nonmilitary legislation constitute this part, including the April 19, 1861, proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln declaring a naval blockade on Southern ports and Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s proclamation authorizing blockade runners to attack Northern shipping, both issued on the same day. Nonmilitary legislation includes statutes affecting the postwar period, such as the 1862 Homestead Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and all four of the Reconstruction Acts. Also in this section are the three constitutional amendments, the Habeas Corpus Acts of 1863 and 1867, the Freedman’s Bureau Acts of 1865 and 1866, and the 1867 Tenure of Office Act together with President Andrew Johnson’s message vetoing the Act.
A Documentary History of the American Civil War Era is an essential acquisition for academic and public libraries in addition to being a valuable resource for students of the Civil War and Reconstruction, legal history, public policy, and nineteenth-century American history.
THOMAS C. MACKEY is a professor of history at the University of Louisville and adjunct Professor of Law at Brandeis School of Law. He is the author of Pornography on Trial (2002) and Pursuing Johns (2005).
Volume 2 in the series, Political Arguments, presents the words of politicians, political party platforms, and administrative speeches. It is divided into two sections. The first, Voices of the Politicians and Political Parties, comprises the platforms of the major (and some minor) parties from1856 to 1876. Also included are such pieces as Robert E. Lee’s letter of resignation from the U.S. Army, a few key speeches by that rising politician from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, and a letter on the “American Question” written by a European observer, Karl Marx. Other items include examples of the 1860–1861 state ordinances of secession and addresses on emancipation and Reconstruction by Jefferson Davis and by the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, Thaddeus Stevens.
Section two, Voices of the Administrations, contains records from the presidencies of James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Rutherford B. Hayes as well as a message from Confederate President Jefferson Davis telling his congress that the Southern cause was “just and holy.” Classic documents such as Lincoln’s announcement of forthcoming emancipation and the Emancipation Proclamation are here, as are lesser-known but important documents such as Francis Lieber’s 1863 revised law code for war, General Order 100, and Attorney General James Speed’s 1865 opinion supporting the Johnson administration’s decision to try the Lincoln murder conspirators by special military commission and not in the civilian courts.
Each of the selections in <i>Political Arguments<i> is preceded by editor Thomas Mackey’s introductory headnotes that explain the document’s historical significance and trace its lasting impact. These commentaries provide insight into not just law and public policy but also the broad sweep of issues important to Civil War– era Americans.
A Documentary History of the American Civil War Era is an essential acquisition for academic and public libraries in addition to being a valuable resource for courses on the War and Reconstruction, legal history, political history, and nineteenth- century American history.
The first two volumes of the series, Legislative Achievements and Political Arguments, were released last year. The final installments, Judicial Decisions, is split into two volumes, with this one, volume 3, spanning from 1857 to 1866. It contains some of the classic judicial decisions of the time such as the 1857 decision in Dred Scott and the 1861 Ex parte Merryman decision. Other decisions are well known to specialists but deserve wider readership and discussion, such as the October 1859 Jefferson County, Virginia, indictment of John Brown and the decision in the 1864 case of political and seditious activity in Ex parte Vallandigham. These judicial voices constitute a lasting and often overlooked aspect of the age of Abraham Lincoln. Mackey’s headnotes and introductory essays situate cases within their historical context and trace their lasting significance. In contrast to the war, these judicial decisions lasted well past their immediate political and legal moment and deserve continued scholarship and scrutiny.
This document collection presents the raw “stuff” of the Civil War era so that students, scholars, and interested readers can measure and gauge how that generation met Lincoln’s challenge to “think anew, and act anew.” A Documentary History of the American Civil War Era is an essential acquisition for academic and public libraries in addition to being a valuable resource for courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, legal history, political history, and nineteenth-century American history.
Thomas C. Mackey is a professor of history at the University of Louisville and adjunct Professor of Law at Brandeis School of Law. He is the author of Pornography on Trial and Pursuing Johns.
This is the first of three volumes documenting Rhode Island's public and private debates about the Constitution. This documentary series is a research tool of remarkable power, an unrivaled reference work for historical and legal scholars, librarians, and students of the Constitution. The volumes are encyclopedic, consisting of manuscript and printed documents-contemporary newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets-compiled from hundreds of sources, copiously annotated, thoroughly indexed, and often accompanied by microfiche supplements. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen has noted that The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution series "will be of enduring value centuries hence" and described it as "one of the most interesting documentary publications we have ever had." The American Bar Association Journal has stated, "Each new volume now fills another vital part of the mosaic of national history."
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen has noted that The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution series "will be of enduring value centuries hence" and described it as "one of the most interesting documentary publications we have ever had." The American Bar Association Journal has stated, "Each new volume now fills another vital part of the mosaic of national history."
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen has noted that The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution series "will be of enduring value centuries hence" and described it as "one of the most interesting documentary publications we have ever had." The American Bar Association Journal has stated, "Each new volume now fills another vital part of the mosaic of national history."
From the Chicago Conspiracy Trial and the O. J. Simpson trial to the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill congressional hearings, legal and legislative proceedings in the latter part of the twentieth-century kept Americans spellbound. Situated on the shifting border between imagination and the law, trial plays edit, arrange, and reproduce court records, media coverage, and first-person interviews, transforming these elements into a performance. In this first book-length critical study of contemporary American documentary theater, Jacqueline O’Connor examines in depth ten such plays, all written and staged since 1970, and considers the role of the genre in re-creating and revising narratives of significant conflicts in contemporary history.
Documentary theater, she shows, is a particularly appropriate and widely utilized theatrical form for engaging in debate about tensions between civil rights and institutional power, the inconsistency of justice, and challenges to gender norms. For each of the plays discussed, including The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, Unquestioned Integrity: The Hill/Thomas Hearings, and The Laramie Project, O'Connor provides historical context and a brief production history before considering the trial the play focuses on. Grouping plays historically and thematically, she demonstrates how dramatic representation advances our understanding of the law's power while revealing the complexities that hinder society's pursuit of justice.
In Documenting the American Student Abroad, Kelly Hankin explores the documentary media cultures that shape these beliefs, drawing our attention to the broad range of stakeholders and documentary modes involved in defining the core values and practices of study abroad. From study abroad video contests and a F.B.I. produced docudrama about student espionage to reality television inspired educational documentaries and docudramas about Amanda Knox, Hankin shows how the institutional values of "global citizenship," "intercultural communication," and "cultural immersion" emerge in contradictory ways through their representation.
By bringing study abroad and media studies into conversation with one another, Documenting the American Student Abroad: The Media Cultures of International Education offers a much needed humanist contribution to the field of international education, as well as a unique approach to the growing scholarship on the intersection of media and institutions. As study abroad practitioners and students increase their engagement with moving images and digital environments, the insights of media scholars are essential for helping the field understand how the mediation of study abroad rhetoric shapes rather than reflects the field's central institutional ideals
In situating these women within the emerging African-American urban communities of the free North, Doers of the Word provides an important counterweight to the vast scholarship on Southern slavery and argues that black "Civil Rights movements" cannot be seen as a purely modern phenomenon. In particular, the book examines the ways in which this Northern black population, despite its heterogeneity, came together and established social organizations that would facilitate community empowerment; yet Peterson's analysis also acknowledges, and seeks to explain, the highly complex relationship of black women to these institutions, a relationship that rendered their stance as public intellectuals all the more bold and defiant.
Peterson begins her study in the 1830s, when a substantial body of oratory and writing by black women first emerged, and traces the development of this writing through the shifting political climate up to the end of Reconstruction. She builds her analyses upon Foucault's interdisciplinary model of discourse with an explicitly feminist approach, drawing upon sermons, spiritual autobiographies, travel and slave narratives, journalism, essays, poetry, speeches, and fiction. From these, Peterson is able to answer several key questions. First, what empowered these women to act, to speak out, and to write? Why, and in what ways, were they marginalized within both the African-American and larger American communities? Where did they act, speak, and write from?
Since the introduction of the income tax in 1913, controversy has raged about how heavily to tax the rich. Opponents of high tax rates claim that heavy assessments have negative incentives on the productivity of some of our most talented citizens; supporters stress the importance of the rich shouldering their "fair share," and decry the loopholes that permit many to escape their obligations. Notably absent from this debate is hard evidence about the actual impact of taxes on the behavior of the affluent.
This book presents evidence by leading economists of the effects of taxes on the formation of businesses, the supply of labor, the form of executive compensation, the accumulation of wealth, the allocation of portfolios, and the realization of capital gains. Among its findings are that the labor supply of the rich remained unchanged in the face of large tax cuts in 1986, and that in late 1992 executives exercised billions of dollars' worth of stock options in order to beat the tax increases expected in 1993. The book also presents a history of efforts to tax the rich, a demographic snapshot of the financially affluent, and a road map to widely used tax-avoidance strategies.
Does Atlas Shrug? will be of great interest to policymakers and interested citizens who want to know how much tax revenue could really be gained by increasing tax rates on the rich, or whether low capital gains tax rates really spur economic growth.
Until recently, policy evaluation has mostly meant assessing whether government programs raise reading levels, decrease teen pregnancy rates, improve air quality levels, lower drunk-driving rates, or achieve any of the other goals that government programs are ostensibly created to do. Whether or not such programs also have consequences with respect to future demands for government action and whether government programs can heighten—or dampen—citizen involvement in civic activities are questions that are typically overlooked.
This book applies such questions to local government. Employing policy feedback theory to a series of local government programs, Elaine B. Sharp shows that these programs do have consequences with respect to citizens’ political participation. Unlike other feedback theory investigations, which tend to focus on federal government programs, Sharp’s looks at a broad range of policy at the local level, including community policing programs, economic development for businesses, and neighborhood empowerment programs.
With this clear-eyed analysis, Sharp finds that local governments’ social program activities actually dampen participation of the have-nots, while cities’ development programs reinforce the political involvement of already-privileged business interests. Meanwhile, iconic urban programs such as community policing and broader programs of neighborhood empowerment fail to enhance civic engagement or build social capital at the neighborhood level; at worst, they have the potential to deepen divisions—especially racial divisions—that undercut urban neighborhoods.
A Dog Lover’s Guide to Hiking Wisconsin’s State Parks divides Wisconsin into five regions and further details specific trails, graded for dog reactivity as well as the fitness level of human and canine alike. St. Louis also helpfully notes the availability of nearby facilities such as bathrooms, water stations, trashcans, designated dog swimming areas, and veterinarians. Truly one of a kind, this book is a must have for any Wisconsin dog lover looking to go out into nature with their pup.
A chronicle of war infused with uncommon cheer, Dog Tags Yapping: The World War II Letters of a Combat GI is a young man’s education in life and death and a narrative of war told completely in letters.
During World War II, thousands of high school graduates were drafted into the army to be trained in colleges as engineers or other technicians but instead were assigned to fighting units and joined the great assault in Europe after D-Day. One of those reprogrammed combat infantrymen was Morton Elevitch from Duluth, Minnesota. Elevitch’s cartoons, drawings, and extremely unconventional letters home—rescued from box-in-the-basement oblivion after a more than fifty-year dormancy—recover the story of one rerouted GI in a voice that is compelling and new. Embellished with a boyish flair, the quirky and playful documents collected here impart a distinctly personal and uncalculated record of war, family, and coming of age. “It’s much easier to wield a melancholy pen than to sit down and cry,” Elevitch declares to his father.
Sparkling with a patina of wit and the bittersweet allure of lost innocence, the words and letters of “Privitch Elevate” offer the immediacy of the events as they unfolded. With the ease and expertise expected of a more seasoned storyteller, the young Elevitch escorts readers through his basic training and departure for Europe, duty in Brittany with the 94th Division and departure for Germany, combat under Patton’s command, wounding by mortar fragments, convalescence in England, and his return to France with the Signal Corps to guard prisoners and await demobilization. But along with these letters are the stories of his relationships with his parents, his brother, the men of his company and even the prisoners of war. The author’s perspectives on the war radically change. Both comic and tragic in its treatment of war’s chaos and tedium, this sensitive personal history covers experiences from the adjustment to military life and the temptations of flesh to the pain of wounds and recovery and the exposure to foreign countries and cultures.
Presaging his career as a novelist and editor, Elevitch’s words and drawings sketch an audacious and highly imaginative portrait of a young man during an exceptional time in world history. Evocative of life lived and nearly lost, his jarring accounts of combat reveal a soldier who was wounded not only in body but also in soul, in a war that changed him forever—just as it changed everyone it touched. Reproduced here as they were originally written, alongside a gallery of photos and hand-drawn battle maps, Elevitch’s cartoons and letters were initially intended for only three persons. But with their unique historical value and affecting exploration of the human spirit, they resurface in Dog Tags Yapping and result in an exhilarating ride for all readers through his “wild bivouac of the mind.”
Yet no definitive history of his life has been compiled. Wilson Heefner corrects that with the first authoritative biography of this distinguished American military leader. Heefner has undertaken impressive research in primary sources—as well as interviews with family members and former associates—to shed new light on this overlooked hero. He presents Truscott as a soldier who was shaped by his upbringing, civilian and military education, family life, friendships, and evolving experiences as a commander both in and out of combat.
Heefner’s brisk narrative explores Truscott’s career through his three decades in the Army and defines his roles in key operations. It also examines Truscott’s postwar role as military governor of Bavaria, particularly in improving living conditions for Jewish displaced persons, removing Nazis from civil government, and assisting in the trials of German war criminals. And it offers the first comprehensive examination of his subsequent career in the Central Intelligence Agency, where he served as senior CIA representative in West Germany during the early days of the Cold War, and later as CIA Director Allen Dulles’s deputy director for coordination in Washington.
Dogface Soldier is a portrait of a man who earned a reputation for being honest, forthright, fearless, and aggressive, both as a military officer and in his personal life—a man who, at the dedication ceremony for the Anzio-Nettuno American cemetery in 1945, turned away from the crowd and to the thousands of crosses stretching before him to address those buried there. Heefner has written a definitive biography of a great soldier and patriot.
Stroll through any American or European city today and you probably won’t get far before seeing a dog being taken for a walk. It’s expected that these domesticated animals can easily navigate sidewalks, streets, and other foundational elements of our built environment. But what if our cities were actually shaped in response to dogs more than we ever realized?
Chris Pearson’s Dogopolis boldly and convincingly asserts that human-canine relations were a crucial factor in the formation of modern urban living. Focusing on New York, London, and Paris from the early nineteenth century into the 1930s, Pearson shows that human reactions to dogs significantly remolded them and other contemporary western cities. It’s an unalterable fact that dogs—often filthy, bellicose, and sometimes off-putting—run away, spread rabies, defecate, and breed wherever they like, so as dogs became a more and more common in nineteenth-century middle-class life, cities had to respond to people’s fear of them and revulsion at their least desirable traits. The gradual integration of dogs into city life centered on disgust at dirt, fear of crime and vagrancy, and the promotion of humanitarian sentiments. On the other hand, dogs are some people’s most beloved animal companions, and human compassion and affection for pets and strays were equally powerful forces in shaping urban modernity. Dogopolis details the complex interrelations among emotions, sentiment, and the ways we manifest our feelings toward what we love—showing that together they can actually reshape society.
Throughout the African American community, individuals and organizations ranging from churches to schools to drug treatment centers are fighting the widespread use of crack cocaine. To put that fight in a larger cultural context, Doin' Drugs explores historical patterns of alcohol and drug use from pre-slavery Africa to present-day urban America.
William Henry James and Stephen Lloyd Johnson document the role of alcohol and other drugs in traditional African cultures, among African slaves before the American Civil War, and in contemporary African American society, which has experienced the epidemics of marijuana, heroin, crack cocaine, and gangs since the beginning of this century. The authors zero in on the interplay of addiction and race to uncover the social and psychological factors that underlie addiction.
James and Johnson also highlight many culturally informed programs, particularly those sponsored by African American churches, that are successfully breaking the patterns of addiction. The authors hope that the information in this book will be used to train a new generation of counselors, ministers, social workers, nurses, and physicians to be better prepared to face the epidemic of drug addiction in African American communities.
Doing Difference Differently provides an in-depth, nuanced understanding of the multifaceted literate lives of this often-marginalized cultural group, highlighting their diverse aspirations, personas, communities, challenges, and strategies. The book reconceptualizes the linguistic and cultural differences of Chinese international students as active processes of embracing, performing, resisting, negotiating, and redefining the identities that institutions impose on them through everyday literacy practices. Wang offers an analytical heuristic for researchers and educators to better understand these students’ backgrounds and to more effectively and ethically support and advocate for them. This case study critically engages broad and interconnected concepts that are essential to educators’ collective understanding of Generation Z students brought up in cultural and educational contexts outside of the European-American sphere.
This book appeals to scholars, researchers, teachers, and administrators working in North American higher education and English-speaking countries, particularly those in the fields of writing studies, second language studies, applied linguistics, multilingual education, literacy studies, and international education. Educators across disciplines seeking to better understand the growing population of Chinese international students in North America will likewise benefit.
The rich variety of colleges and universities included provides a wide array of models that faculty can draw upon to inspire institutional change.
Doing the Right Thing examines the use of extraordinary legislative procedures in four cases in the U.S. Congress to accomplish policy objectives that many political scientists would argue are impossible to achieve. It not only shows that Congress is capable of imposing parochial costs in favor of general benefits but it argues that Congress is able to do so in a variety of policy areas through the use of very different kinds of procedural mechanisms that are underappreciated.
The book opens by developing a theory of procedural choice to explain why Congress chooses to delegate in differing degrees in dealing with similar kinds of policy problems. The theory is then applied to four narrative case studies—military base closures, the Yucca Mountain Project, NAFTA, and the Tax Reform Act of 1986—that both show the variety of factors that impact procedural choice and highlight how our national legislature was able to “do the right thing.”
The book concludes by pointing to the variety of ways in which Congress will be confronted with similar policy problems in the coming years and offering some lessons from these cases about what kinds of procedures and policy outcomes we might expect. In short, Congress is remarkably adept at “doing the right thing,” even under difficult circumstances, but only when legislators are willing to manipulate procedures in all the necessary ways.
-Katherine S. Newman
"Doing Time on the Outside brings to life in a compelling way the human drama, and tragedy, of our incarceration policies. Donald Braman documents the profound economic and social consequences of the American policy of massive imprisonment of young African American males. He shows us the link between the broad-scale policy changes of recent decades and the isolation and stigma that these bring to family members who have a loved one in prison. If we want to understand fully the impact of current criminal justice policies, this book should be required reading."
-Mark Mauer, Assistant Director, The Sentencing Project
"Through compelling stories and thoughtful analysis, this book describes how our nation's punishment policies have caused incalculable damage to the fabric of family and community life. Anyone concerned about the future of urban America should read this book."
-Jeremy Travis, The Urban Institute
In the tradition of Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street and Katherine Newman's No Shame in My Game, this startling new ethnography by Donald Braman uncovers the other side of the incarceration saga: the little-told story of the effects of imprisonment on the prisoners' families.
Since 1970 the incarceration rate in the United States has more than tripled, and in many cities-urban centers such as Washington, D.C.-it has increased over five-fold. Today, one out of every ten adult black men in the District is in prison and three out of every four can expect to spend some time behind bars. But the numbers don't reveal what it's like for the children, wives, and parents of prisoners, or the subtle and not-so-subtle effects mass incarceration is having on life in the inner city.
Author Donald Braman shows that those doing time on the inside are having a ripple effect on the outside-reaching deep into the family and community life of urban America. Braman gives us the personal stories of what happens to the families and communities that prisoners are taken from and return to. Carefully documenting the effects of incarceration on the material and emotional lives of families, this groundbreaking ethnography reveals how criminal justice policies are furthering rather than abating the problem of social disorder. Braman also delivers a number of genuinely new arguments.
Among these is the compelling assertion that incarceration is holding offenders unaccountable to victims, communities, and families. The author gives the first detailed account of incarceration's corrosive effect on social capital in the inner city and describes in poignant detail how the stigma of prison pits family and community members against one another. Drawing on a series of powerful family portraits supported by extensive empirical data, Braman shines a light on the darker side of a system that is failing the very families and communities it seeks to protect.
Doing Time, Writing Lives offers a much-needed analysis of the teaching of college writing in U.S. prisons, a racialized space that—despite housing more than 2 million people—remains nearly invisible to the general public. Through the examination of a college-in-prison program that promotes the belief that higher education in prison can reduce recidivism and improve life prospects for the incarcerated and their families, author Patrick W. Berry exposes not only incarcerated students’ hopes and dreams for their futures but also their anxieties about whether education will help them.
Combining case studies and interviews with the author’s own personal experience of teaching writing in prison, this book chronicles the attempts of incarcerated students to write themselves back into a society that has erased their lived histories. It challenges polarizing rhetoric often used to describe what literacy can and cannot deliver, suggesting more nuanced and ethical ways of understanding literacy and possibility in an age of mass incarceration.
Drawing on interviews with twenty-nine individuals, Doing What the Day Brought examines the everyday lives of women from the late nineteenth century to the present day and demonstrates the role they have played in shaping the modern Arizona community.
Focusing on "ordinary" women, the book crosses race, ethnic, religious, economic, and marital lines to include Arizona women from diverse backgrounds. Rather than simply editing each woman's words, Rothschild and Hronek have analyzed these oral histories for common themes and differences and have woven portions into a narrative that gives context to the individual lives. The resulting life-course format moves naturally from childhood to home life, community service, and participation in the work force, and concludes with reflections on changes witnessed in the lifetimes of these women.
For the women whose lives are presented here, it may have been common to gather dead saguaro cactus ribs to make outdoor fires to boil laundry water, or to give birth on a dirt floor. Their stories capture not only changes in a state where history has overlooked the role of women, but the changing roles of American women over the course of this century.
In Doing Without, Jane Henrici brings together nine contributions to tell the story of welfare reform from inside the lives of the women who live with it. Cases from Chicago and Boston are combined with a focus on San Antonio from one of the largest multi-city investigations on welfare reform ever undertaken. The contributors argue that the employment opportunities available to poorer women, particularly single mothers and ethnic minorities, are insufficient to lift their families out of poverty. Typically marked by variable hours, inadequate wages, and short-term assignments, both employment and training programs fail to provide stability or the kinds of benefits—such as health insurance, sick days, and childcare options—that are necessary to sustain both work and family life. The chapters also examine the challenges that the women who seek assistance, and those who work in public and private agencies to provide it, together must face as they navigate ever-changing requirements and regulations, decipher alterations in Medicaid, and apply for training and education. Contributors urge that the nation should repair the social safety net for women in transition and offer genuine access to jobs with wages that actually meet the cost of living.
What donors, especially business donors, expect for their money is "access" and access means a lot more than a chance to meet and talk. They count on secret behind-the-scenes deals, like a tax provision that applies only to a "corporation incorporated on June 13, 1917, which has its principal place of business in Bartlesville, Oklahoma." After a deal is worked out behind closed doors, one executive explains, "it doesn't much matter how people vote afterwards."
Ordinary contributions give access to Congress; megabuck "soft money" contributions ensure access to the President and top leaders. The striking truth revealed by these authors is that half the soft money comes from fewer than five hundred big donors, and that most contributions come, directly or indirectly, from business. Reform is possible, they argue, by turning away from the temptation of looking at specific scandals and developing a new system that removes the influence of big money campaign contributors.
Popular western writer Zane Grey was a literary celebrity during his lifetime and the center of a huge enterprise based on his writing, which included books, magazine serials, film and stage versions of his stories, even comic strips. His wife, Dolly, closely guided Grey's career almost from its beginning, editing and sometimes revising his work, negotiating with publishers and movie studios, and skillfully managing the considerable fortune derived from these activities.
Dolly maintained the facade of a conventional married life that was essential to Grey's public image and the traditional middle-class values his work reflected. This facade was constantly threatened by Grey's numerous affairs with other women. The stress of hiding these dalliances placed a huge strain on their relationship, and much of Zane and Dolly's union was sustained largely by correspondence. Their letters--thousands of them--reveal the true nature of this complex partnership. As edited by Candace Kant, the letters offer an engrossing portrait of an extremely unorthodox marriage and its times.
Selected as a Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Book of the Year for 2018 (Category: Twelve–Fourteen)
“A biography for the times … An excellent read for anyone hoping to believe one person can make a difference.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“This well-told, age-appropriate account of a vital and essential activist deserves a place in all middle grade collections.” —School Library Journal (starred review)
Today, we know Dolores Huerta as the cofounder, with Cesar Chavez, of the National Farmworkers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers of America. We know her as a tireless advocate for the rights of farmworkers, Mexican American immigrants, women, and LGBTQ populations. And we know her as the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2012.
Before all that, though, Huerta was a child in the farming community of Stockton, California, and then a teenager whose teachers underestimated her because she was Chicana. When she became a teacher herself, she witnessed her students coming to school shoeless and hungry. Many took days off from school to work in the farm fields to help feed their families. What could she do to help them? A young mother at the time, Huerta quit her teaching job to organize their parents. That began her journey to educate a nation about who produces our food and the conditions under which they work.
Dolores Huerta Stands Strong follows Huerta’s life from the mining communities of the Southwest where her father toiled, to the vineyards and fields of California, and across the country to the present day. As she worked for fair treatment for others, Dolores earned the nation’s highest honors. More important, she found her voice.
A Domestic Cook Book contains 260 recipes and household tips that draw from Malinda Russell’s twenty years of experience cooking in Southern kitchens, her boarding house, and her pastry shop, and showcase her skills as a pastry chef. Using the only known copy of the original book housed in the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan’s Clements Library, this new edition preserves an important part of Michigan and American history and makes it widely available to readers for the first time.
The issue of immigration is one of the most hotly debated topics in the national arena, with everyone from right-wing pundits like Sarah Palin to alternative rockers like Zack de la Rocha offering their opinion. The traditional immigrant narrative that gained popularity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continues to be used today in describing the process of the “Americanization” of immigrants. Yet rather than acting as an accurate representation of immigrant experiences, this common narrative of the “American Dream” attempts to ideologically contain those experiences within a story line that promotes the idea of achieving success through hard work and perseverance.
In Domestic Disturbances, Irene Mata dispels the myth of the “shining city on the hill” and reveals the central truth of hidden exploitation that underlies the great majority of Chicana/Latina immigrant stories. Influenced by the works of Latina cultural producers and the growing interdisciplinary field of scholarship on gender, immigration, and labor, Domestic Disturbances suggests a new framework for looking at these immigrant and migrant stories, not as a continuation of a literary tradition, but instead as a specific Latina genealogy of immigrant narratives that more closely engage with the contemporary conditions of immigration. Through examination of multiple genres including film, theatre, and art, as well as current civil rights movements such as the mobilization around the DREAM Act, Mata illustrates the prevalence of the immigrant narrative in popular culture and the oppositional possibilities of alternative stories.
Drawing on a broad range of sources—Ottoman, Bulgarian, Russian, French, and English—Barbara Reeves-Ellington tracks the transnational history of this little-known episode of American cultural expansion. She shows how issues of gender and race influenced the missionaries' efforts as well as the complex responses of Ottoman subjects to American intrusions into their everyday lives. Women missionaries—married and single—employed the language of Christian domesticity and female moral authority to challenge the male-dominated hierarchy of missionary society and to forge bonds of feminist internationalism. At the same time, Orthodox Christians adapted the missionaries' ideology to their own purposes in developing a new strain of nationalism that undermined Ottoman efforts to stem growing sectarianism within their empire. By the beginning of the twentieth century, as some missionaries began to promote international understanding rather than Protestantism, they also paved the way for future expansion of American political and commercial interests.
The 1970s revealed a number of infamous and sometimes illegal practices used by federal law enforcement agencies to monitor political dissent in the United States. In the aftermath of Watergate the revelation of serious abuses created distrust of virtually all domestic intelligence operations and led to vigorous efforts at reform.
Richard E. Morgan emphasizes the importance of guarding against an overreaction to the disclosures of the mid-1970s. While acknowledging the need for many of the recent reforms that seek to establish accountability, guarantee privacy, and protect dissent, he cautions against limitations on domestic intelligence gathering that could seriously hamper government's ability to prevent crime, particularly terrorism.
Domestic Intelligence has several major objectives: to trace the way in which government agencies became involved with domestic intelligence gathering; to review the controversies and abuses associated with these agencies, especially the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA; to discuss the constitutionality of domestic intelligence collection; to review intelligence reforms adopted; and to suggest additional reforms.
This volume is concerned with the tension between the need to protect privacy and political dissent and the need for the government to protect the community. Morgan concludes that intelligence operations aimed at anticipating criminal activity are necessary in a complex, highly vulnerable society, and that these operations can be conducted responsibly with proper guidelines and oversight mechanisms.
This interdisciplinary study explores how US Mexicana and Chicana authors and artists across different historical periods and regions use domestic space to actively claim their own histories. Through “negotiation”—a concept that accounts for artistic practices outside the duality of resistance/accommodation—and “self-fashioning,” Marci R. McMahon demonstrates how the very sites of domesticity are used to engage the many political and recurring debates about race, gender, and immigration affecting Mexicanas and Chicanas from the early twentieth century to today.
Domestic Negotiations covers a range of archival sources and cultural productions, including the self-fashioning of the “chili queens” of San Antonio, Texas, Jovita González’s romance novel Caballero, the home economics career and cookbooks of Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, Sandra Cisneros’s “purple house controversy” and her acclaimed text The House on Mango Street, Patssi Valdez’s self-fashioning and performance of domestic space in Asco and as a solo artist, Diane Rodríguez’s performance of domesticity in Hollywood television and direction of domestic roles in theater, and Alma López’s digital prints of domestic labor in Los Angeles. With intimate close readings, McMahon shows how Mexicanas and Chicanas shape domestic space to construct identities outside of gendered, racialized, and xenophobic rhetoric.
"An exciting and powerful collection that eloquently critiques some of the current thinking in domestic violence and raises key concerns for advocates and scholars working in the area."—Sujata Warrier, president, board of directors, Manavi: An organization for South Asian women
"Sokoloff has assembled an impressive array of authors who challenge us to ‘think outside of our contemporary domestic violence box.’"—Angela M. Moore Parmley, chief, violence and victimization research division, National Institute of Justice
This groundbreaking anthology reorients the field of domestic violence research by bringing long-overdue attention to the structural forms of oppression in communities marginalized by race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or social class.
Reprints of the most influential recent work in the field as well as more than a dozen newly commissioned essays explore theoretical issues, current research, service provision, and activism among Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish Americans, and lesbians. The volume rejects simplistic analyses of the role of culture in domestic violence by elucidating the support systems available to battered women within different cultures, while at the same time addressing the distinct problems generated by that culture. Together, the essays pose a compelling challenge to stereotypical images of battered women that are racist, homophobic, and xenophobic.
The most up-to-date and comprehensive picture of domestic violence available, this anthology is an essential text for courses in sociology, criminology, social work, and women’s studies. Beyond the classroom, it provides critical information and resources for professionals working in domestic violence services, advocacy, social work, and law enforcement.
In the era after Suffrage, white middle-class housewives abandoned moves toward paid work for themselves, embraced domestic life, and felt entitled to servants. In Domesticity and Dirt, Phyllis Palmer examines the cultural norms that led such women to take on the ornamental and emotional elements of the job while relegating the hard physical work and demeaning service tasks to servants—mainly women of color. Using novels, films, magazine articles, home economics texts, and government-funded domestic training course manuals, the author details cultural expectations about middle-class homelife.
Palmer describes how government-funded education programs encouraged the divisions of labor and identity and undercut domestic workers’ organized efforts during the 1930s to win inclusion in New Deal programs regulating labor conditions. Aided by less powerful black civil rights groups, without the assistance of trade unions or women’s clubs, domestics failed to win legal protections and the legal authority and self-respect these brought to covered workers. The author also reveals how middle- class women responded ambivalently to the call to aid women workers when labor reforms threatened their domestic arrangements.
Throughout her study, Palmer questions why white middle-class women looked to new technology and domestic help to deal with cultural demands upon "the perfect housewife" rather than expecting their husbands to help. When the supply of servants declined during the 1950s, middle-class housewives were left isolated with lots of housework. Although they rapidly followed their servants into paid work outside the home, they remain responsible for housework and child care.
In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg.
Long before the United States became a major force in global affairs, Americans believed in their superiority over others due to their inventiveness, productivity, and economic and social well-being. U.S. expansionists assumed a mandate to “civilize” non-Western peoples by demanding submission to American technological prowess and design. As an integral part of America’s national identity and sense of itself in the world, this civilizing mission provided the rationale to displace the Indians from much of our continent, to build an island empire in the Pacific and Caribbean, and to promote unilateral—at times military—interventionism throughout Asia. In our age of “smart bombs” and mobile warfare, technological aptitude remains preeminent in validating America’s global mission.
Michael Adas brilliantly pursues the history of this mission through America's foreign relations over nearly four centuries from North America to the Philippines, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf. The belief that it is our right and destiny to remake foreign societies in our image has endured from the early decades of colonization to our current crusade to implant American-style democracy in the Muslim Middle East.
Dominance by Design explores the critical ways in which technological superiority has undergirded the U.S.’s policies of unilateralism, preemption, and interventionism in foreign affairs and raised us from an impoverished frontier nation to a global power. Challenging the long-held assumptions and imperatives that sustain the civilizing mission, Adas gives us an essential guide to America’s past and present role in the world as well as cautionary lessons for the future.
Translated by Fray Angelico Chavez, Edited by Ted J. Warner
Western History
The chronicle of Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Fray Silvestre Vélez de Escalante’s most remarkable 1776 expedition through the Rocky Mountains, the eastern Great Basin, and the Colorado Plateau to inventory new lands for the Spanish crown and to find a route from Santa Fe to Monterey, California.
Escalante’s journal wonderfully describes every detail of the rugged and scenic country through which they journeyed, along the qualities and customs of its inhabitants. Working as far north as present-day Provo, Utah, the expedition finally returned south. An approaching severe winter and mishaps among the maze of the Grand Canyon forced the party to return to Santa Fe by way of the Hopi pueblos.
This journal provides a fascinating account of over a thousand miles of wilderness exploration.
These stories convey hard, sometimes brutal, often bittersweet, experiences, but throughout Agüeros writes with artistry and unyielding compassion. Richly detailed, wry, and matter-of-fact, Dominoes and Other Stories from the Puerto Rican is an important achievement by an accomplished American writer.
Klinkowitz argues that the central piece in the Barthelme canon, and the key to his artistic method, is his widely acknowledged masterpiece, The Dead Father. In turning to this pivotal work, as well as to Barthelme’s short stories and other novels, Klinkowitz explores the way in which Barthelme reinvented the tools of narration, characterization, and thematics at a time when fictive techniques were largely believed to be exhausted.
Klinkowitz, who was one of the first scholars to study Barthelme’s work and became its definitive bibliographer, situates Barthelme’s life and work within a broad spectrum of influences and affinities. A consideration of developments in painting and sculpture, for example, as well as those of contemporaneous fiction, contribute to Klinkowitz’s analysis. This astute reading will provide great insight for readers, writers, and critics of contemporary American fiction seeking explanations and justifications of Barthelme’s critical importance in the literature of our times.
Not so, reveals Halley. In order to work through the steps by which the new law was ultimately drafted, she opens with a close reading of the 1986 Supreme Court sodomy case which served as the legal and rhetorical model for the policy revisions made in 1993. Halley also describes how the Clinton administration’s attempts to offer Congress an opportunity to regulate conduct—and not status—were flatly rejected and not included in the final statute. Using cultural and critical theory seldom applied to explain the law, Halley argues that, far from providing privacy and an assurance that servicemembers' careers will be ruined only if they engage in illegal conduct, the rule activates a culture of minute surveillance in which every member must strictly avoid using any gesture in an ever-evolving lexicon of “conduct that manifests a propensity.” In other words, not only homosexuals but all military personnel are placed in danger by the new policy. After challenging previous pro-gay arguments against the policy that have failed to expose its most devious and dangerous elements, Halley ends with a persuasive discussion about how it is both unconstitutional and, politically, an act of sustained bad faith.
This knowledgeable and eye-opening analysis of one of the most important public policy debates of the 1990s will interest legal scholars, policymakers, activists, military historians and personnel, as well as citizens concerned about issues of discrimination.
For psychotherapist, painter, feminist, filmmaker, writer, and disability activist Harilyn Rousso, hearing well-intentioned people tell her, "You're so inspirational!" is patronizing, not complimentary.
In her empowering and at times confrontational memoir, Don't Call Me Inspirational, Rousso, who has cerebral palsy, describes overcoming the prejudice against disability--not overcoming disability. She addresses the often absurd and ignorant attitudes of strangers, friends, and family.Rousso also examines her own prejudice toward her disabled body, and portrays the healing effects of intimacy and creativity, as well as her involvement with the disability rights community. She intimately reveals herself with honesty and humor and measures her personal growth as she goes from "passing" to embracing and claiming her disability as a source of pride, positive identity, and rebellion.
A collage of images about her life, rather than a formal portrait, Don't Call Me Inspirational celebrates Rousso's wise, witty, productive, outrageous life, disability and all.
No longer willing to accept naval blockades, the impressment of American seamen, and seizures of American ships and cargos, the United States declared war on Great Britain. The aim was to frighten Britain into concessions and, if that failed, to bring the war to a swift conclusion with a quick strike at Canada. But the British refused to cave in to American demands, the Canadian campaign ended in disaster, and the U.S. government had to flee Washington, D.C., when it was invaded and burned by a British army.
By all objective measures, the War of 1812 was a debacle for the young republic, and yet it was celebrated as a great military triumph. The American people believed they had won the war and expelled the invader. Oliver H. Perry became a military hero, Francis Scott Key composed what became the national anthem and commenced a national reverence for the flag, and the U.S.S. Constitution, "Old Ironsides," became a symbol of American invincibility. Every aspect of the war, from its causes to its conclusion, was refashioned to heighten the successes, obscure the mistakes, and blur embarrassing distinctions, long before there were mass media or public relations officers in the Pentagon.
In this entertaining and meticulously researched book by America's leading authority on the War of 1812, Donald R. Hickey dispels the many misconcep-tions that distort our view of America's second war with Great Britain. Embracing military, naval, political, economic, and diplomatic analyses, Hickey looks carefully at how the war was fought between 1812 and 1815, and how it was remembered thereafter. Was the original declaration of war a bluff? What were the real roles of Canadian traitor Joseph Willcocks, Mohawk leader John Norton, pirate Jean Laffite, and American naval hero Lucy Baker? Who killed the Shawnee chief Tecumseh and who shot the British general Isaac Brock? Who actually won the war, and what is its lasting legacy? Hickey peels away fantasies and embellishments to explore why cer-tain myths gained currency and how they contributed to the way that the United States and Canada view themselves and each other.
Barbara bore his children and took on a crucial job as his booking agent when the agent he was using failed to obtain show dates for the group. Female booking agents were non-existent at that time but she persevered and went on to become the first female booking agent on Music Row. She also endured years of physical and emotional abuse at Martin's hands. With courage and candor, Barbara tells of the suffering and traces the hard-won personal growth she found inside motherhood and her work. Her vivid account of Martin's explosive personality and torment over his exclusion from the Grand Ole Opry fill in the missing details on a career renowned for being stormy. Barbara also shares her own journey, one of good humor and proud achievements, and filled with fond and funny recollections of the music legends and ordinary people she met, befriended, and represented along the way.
Straightforward and honest, Don't Give your Heart to a Rambler is a woman's story of the world of bluegrass and one of its most colorful, conflicted artists.
Montell organized his material according to the topics that dominated his tape-recorded conversations with residents of the area-farming, logging and rafting, steamboating, the Civil War-topics that the people themselves saw as important in their history. In reconstructing the past, the author also illuminates the relationship between geographic and economic factors in the region; the prolonged affects of a cataclysmic event, the Civil War, on the isolated area; and the impact of modernization, in the form of “hard” roads and cheap, TVA-supplied electricity, on the traditional ways of people.
First published in 1983, this book is now available in paperback for the first time. Included with this edition is a new foreword in which Montell and Mary Robbins, executive director of the Tennessee Upper Cumberland Tourism Association, describe changes in the area that have occured since the book’s initial appearance.
The Author: William Lynwood Montell, now retired, was coordinator of programs in folk and interculturual studies at Western Kentucky University. His numerous books include Ghosts along the Cumberland and The Saga of Coe Ridge.
Could you forgive the murderer of your husband? Your mother? Your son?
Families of murder victims are often ardent and very public supporters of the death penalty. But the people whose stories appear in this book have chosen instead to forgive their loved ones’ murderers, and many have developed personal relationships with the killers and have even worked to save their lives. They have formed a nationwide group, Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation (MVFR), to oppose the death penalty.
MVFR members are often treated as either saints or lunatics, but the truth is that they are neither. They are ordinary people who have responded to an extraordinary and devastating tragedy with courage and faith, choosing reconciliation over retribution, healing over hatred. Believing that the death penalty is a form of social violence that only repeats and perpetuates the violence that claimed their loved one’s lives, they hold out the hope of redemption even for those who have committed the most hideous crimes.
Weaving third-person narrative with wrenching first-hand accounts, King presents the stories of ten MVFR members. Each is a heartrending tale of grief, soul searching, and of the challenge to choose forgiveness instead of revenge. These stories, which King sets in the context of the national discussion over the death penalty debate and restorative versus retributive justice, will appeal not only to those who oppose the death penalty, but also to those who strive to understand how people can forgive the seemingly unforgivable.
A picturesque peninsula with 298 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, state parks, forests, and cozy inns, Door County is one of the Midwest’s prime tourist attractions. Magill Weber explores the many recreational opportunities available to visitors, including secret spots known only to locals and longtime seasonal residents. Wisconsin native Janet Mrazek contributes 125 detailed and easy-to-follow maps. With suggestions of more than 150 scenic hikes, biking and paddling routes, end-of-the-road beaches, lighthouses, and wildlife-watching sites, and descriptions of the local flora and fauna, Door County Outdoors is the ultimate guide for active travelers and nature enthusiasts.
With its magnificent forests, bluffs, and shoreline and its breathtaking views of Green Bay and Lake Michigan, Door County’s Peninsula State Park is one of the Midwest’s most popular attractions. Established in 1909, it was Wisconsin’s second state park and a key to pioneering efforts to build a state park system that would be the envy of the nation.
Door County’s Emerald Treasure explores the rich history of the park land, from its importance to Native Americans and early European settlers through the twentieth century. Bill Tishler engagingly relates the role of conservationists and progressives in establishing the state park, its growing popularity for tourism and recreation, and efforts to protect the park’s resources from a variety of threats. Tishler also tells a larger story of Americans’ intimate relationship with the land around them and the challenge to create accessible public spaces that preserve the natural environment.
The recorded use of deadly force against unarmed suspects and sustained protest from the Black Lives Matter movement, among others, have ignited a national debate about excessive violence in American policing. Missing from the debate, however, is any discussion of a factor that is almost certainly contributing to the violence—the use of anabolic steroids by police officers. Mounting evidence from a wide range of credible sources suggests that many cops are abusing testosterone and its synthetic derivatives. This drug use is illegal and encourages a “steroidal” policing style based on aggressive behaviors and hulking physiques that diminishes public trust in law enforcement.
Dopers in Uniform offers the first assessment of the dimensions and consequences of the felony use of anabolic steroids in major urban police departments. Marshalling an array of evidence, John Hoberman refutes the frequent claim that police steroid use is limited to a few “bad apples,” explains how the “Blue Wall of Silence” stymies the collection of data, and introduces readers to the broader marketplace for androgenic drugs. He then turns his attention to the people and organizations at the heart of police culture: the police chiefs who often see scandals involving steroid use as a distraction from dealing with more dramatic forms of misconduct and the police unions that fight against steroid testing by claiming an officer’s “right to privacy” is of greater importance. Hoberman’s findings clearly demonstrate the crucial need to analyze and expose the police steroid culture for the purpose of formulating a public policy to deal with its dysfunctional effects.
Dorothea Dix was the most politically engaged woman of her generation, which was itself a remarkable tapestry of activists. An influential lobbyist as well as a paragon of the doctrine of female benevolence, she vividly illustrated the complexities of the "separate spheres" of politics and femininity. Her greatest legislative initiative, a campaign for federal land grants to endow state mental hospitals, assumed a central role in the public land controversies that intertwined with the slavery issues in Congress following the Mexican War. The passage of this legislation in 1854, and its subsequent veto by President Pierce, touched off the most protracted effort to override a veto that had yet taken place.
An activist who disdained the women's rights and antislavery movements, Dix, an old-line Whig, sought to promote national harmony and became the only New England social reformer to work successfully in the lower South right up to the eve of secession. When war broke out, she sought to achieve as Superintendent of Women Nurses the sort of cultural authority she had seen Florence Nightingale win in the same role during the Crimean War. The disastrous failure of one of the most widely admired heroines in the nation provides a dramatic measure of the transformations of northern values during the war.
The friendship between Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane began in 1920 in the publicity office of the American Red Cross in Paris and continued until Thompson’s death in 1961. Although both women are today remembered primarily for their connections with others —Thompson as the wife of Sinclair Lewis, and Lane as the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the “Little House” books —each was remarkable in her own right.
Both women had a vital engagement with life that led them in fearless pursuit of experience. In 1939, Thompson appeared on the cover of Time, which judged her second only to Eleanor Roosevelt among influential women of the day. Typical of Lane were her travels through the mountains of Albania, the deserts of Syria, and Soviet Georgia in the 1920s and her visit as a journalist to Vietnam in 1965 at the age of seventy-eight.
The correspondence of these two talented and articulate women reveals their personal concerns, social ideas, and political/economic philosophies and how they changed over time. Their letters tell the story of the first generation of women to come of age during the twentieth century, as they tried to cope with problems that women still face today. Along with the letters themselves, Holtz has included annotations and footnotes that provide biographical information, as well as explaining personal and topical references.
In 1861 at the age of eighteen, Edward Woolsey Bacon, a Yale student and son of well-known abolitionist minister Leonard Bacon, left his home in New Haven, Connecticut, to fight for the United States. Over the next four years Bacon served in both the Union navy and army, which gave him a sweeping view of the Civil War. His postings included being a captain’s clerk on the USS Iroquois, a hospital clerk in his hometown, a captain in the 29th Connecticut Infantry (Colored), and a major in the 117th U.S. Colored Infantry, and he described these experiences in vibrant letters to his friends and family. Historian George S. Burkhardt has compiled these letters, as well as Bacon’s diary in the impressive Double Duty in the Civil War: The Letters of Sailor and Soldier Edward W. Bacon.
Bacon tells of hunting Confederate commerce raiders on the high seas, enduring the tedium of blockade duty, and taking part in riverine warfare on the Mississippi. He recalls sweating in South Carolina as an infantry officer during drill and picket duty, suffering constant danger in the battlefield trenches of Virginia, marching victoriously on fallen Richmond, and tolerating the boredom of occupation duty in Texas.
His highly entertaining letters shed new light on naval affairs and reveal a close-knit family life. The narrative of his duty with black troops is especially valuable, since few first-hand accounts from white officers of the U.S. Colored Troops exist. Furthermore, his beliefs about race, slavery, and the Union cause were unconventional for the time and stand in contrast to those held by many of his contemporaries.
Double Duty in the Civil War is filled with lively descriptions of the men Bacon met and the events he experienced. With Burkhardt’s careful editing and useful annotations, Bacon’s letters and diary excerpts give rare insight into areas of the Civil War that have been neglected because of a lack of available sources. Given the scarcity of eyewitness testimonies to navy life and life in African American regiments, this book is a rarity indeed.
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