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Soloveitchik's Children
Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America
Daniel Ross Goodman
University of Alabama Press, 2023

A revealing account of the three main disciples of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, an essential figure in Orthodox Judaism in America

Orthodox Judaism is one of the fastest-growing religious communities in contemporary American life. Anyone who wishes to understand more about Judaism in America will need to consider the tenets and practices of Orthodox Judaism: who its adherents are, what they believe in, what motivates them, and to whom they turn for moral, intellectual, and spiritual guidance.

Among those spiritual leaders none looms larger than Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, heir to the legendary Talmudic dynasty of Brisk and a teacher and ordainer of thousands of rabbis during his time as a Talmud teacher at Yeshiva University from the Second World War until the 1980s. Soloveitchik was not only a Talmudic authority but a scholar of Western philosophy. While many books and articles have been written about Soloveitchik’s legacy and his influence on American Orthodoxy, few have looked carefully at his disciples in Torah and Talmud study, and even fewer at his disciples in Jewish thought and philosophy.

Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America is the first book to study closely three of Soloveitchik’s major disciples in Jewish thought and philosophy: Rabbis Irving (“Yitz”) Greenberg, David Hartman, and Jonathan Sacks. Daniel Ross Goodman narrates how each of these three major modern Jewish thinkers learned from and adapted Soloveitchik’s teachings in their own ways, even while advancing his philosophical and theological legacy.

The story of religious life and Judaism in contemporary America is incomplete without an understanding of how three of the most consequential Jewish thinkers of this generation adapted the teachings of one of the most consequential Jewish thinkers of the previous generation. Soloveitchik’s Children tells this gripping intellectual and religious story in a learned and engaging manner, shining a light on where Jewish religious thought in the United States currently stands—and where it may be heading in future generations.

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Some Degree of Power
From Hired Hand to Union Craftsman in the Preindustrial American Printing Trades 1778-1815
Mark Lause
University of Arkansas Press, 1991
Louse argues that the printers, who organized to combat their immediate concerns, were also part of a larger network connecting other skilled workers into associations that not only supported their societies but also helped to shape their ideology.
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Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing
Living in the Future
By Charles Bowden
University of Texas Press, 2018

The third book in Charles Bowden’s “accidental trilogy” that began with Blood Orchid and Blues for Cannibals, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing attempts to resolve the overarching question: “How can a person live a moral life in a culture of death?” As humanity moves further into the twenty-first century, Bowden continues to interrogate our roles in creating the ravaged landscapes and accumulated death that still surround us, as well as his own childhood isolation, his lust for alcohol and women, and his waning hope for a future. We witness post-Katrina New Orleans and terrorist-bombed Bali; we encounter our shared actions with the animal world and the desirous need for consumption; we see the clash and erosion of our physical and figurative borders, the savagery of our own civilization. A man of his time and out of time, Bowden seeks acceptance and a will to endure what may lie ahead.

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Some Other Blues
New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka
Jean-Philippe Marcoux
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
This collection of original essays brings together some of the most important critics and scholars of Amiri Baraka’s oeuvre. Some Other Blues consists of career-spanning conversations on the many trajectories, bifurcations, and intersections in and of Baraka’s black art. Every chapter is grounded in the desire to illuminate Baraka’s multilayered creative output—whether through critical analyses, literary historiographies, or musicological and biographical reassessments of his work. Every contributor attempts, in their own unique ways, to delineate how the contours of poems, short stories, essays, and editorials reveal the poetics and politics of Amiri Baraka. At the same time, every chapter looks outward at what Baraka saw as the fractures and fissures of our society—moments in the history of African America that have needed repair and relief. For the first time in one book, two generations of scholars and friends of the Baraka family converge to assess the legacy and the imprint of the writer, activist, and cultural worker who has reshaped and redefined what is means to be a black public intellectual and poet.
 
(Include contributors if space allows) Contributors: Tony Bolden, Jeremy Glick, William J. Harris, Benjamin Lee, Aidan Levy, John Lowney, Jean-Philippe Marcoux, Kim McMillon, Fred Moten, Michael New, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Amy Abugo Ongiri, Gregory Pierrot, Howard Rambsy II, Emily Ruth Rutter, Anthony Reed, Lauri Scheyer, Kathy Lou Schultz, Michael Simanga, James Smethurst, Laura Vrana, Tyrone Williams, Kalamu ya Salaam.
 
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Some Strange Corners of Our Country
Charles F. Lummis; Foreword by Lawrence Clark Powell
University of Arizona Press, 1989
Lummis's prose portraits of the Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, Montezuma Castle, and other sites reflect the author's knowledge of Southwest anthropology and history.
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Some White Folks
The Interracial Politics of Sympathy, Suffering, and Solidarity
Jennifer Chudy
University of Chicago Press, 2024

A pioneering exploration of the unexamined roots and effect of racial sympathy within American politics.

There is racial inequality in America, and some people are distressed over it while others are not. This is a book about white people who feel that distress. For decades, political scientists have studied the effects of white racial prejudice, but Jennifer Chudy shows that white racial sympathy for Black Americans’ suffering is also a potent force in modern American politics. Grounded in the history of Black-white relations in America, racial sympathy is unique. It is not equivalent to a low level of racial prejudice or sympathy for other marginalized groups. Some White Folks reveals how racial sympathy shapes a significant number of white Americans’ opinions on policy areas ranging from the social welfare state to the criminal justice system. Under certain circumstances, it can also spur action—although effects on political behavior are weaker and less consistent, for reasons Chudy examines.

Drawing on diverse quantitative and qualitative evidence and integrating insights from multiple disciplines, Chudy explores the origins, importance, and complexity of racial sympathy, as well as the practical implications for political and movement leaders. A companion to the rich literature on prejudice, Some White Folks demonstrates the multifaceted role of race in American politics and public opinion.

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Somebody Told Me
The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg
Rick Bragg
University of Alabama Press, 2000
One of the South’s most loved authors
 
Over the past twenty years, writer Rick Bragg has earned legions of fans with his award-winning newspaper stories and with his critically aclaimed memoir All Over but the Shoutin'. His unique storytelling talent and his sympathy for the day-to-day struggles of everyday people set him apart from journalists who focus on political intrigue and the foibles of the rich and famous.
 
This collection showcases Bragg's talent for turning seemingly ordinary situations into extraordinary stories by bringing together more than sixty of his most recent feature articles, most of them written for the New York Times. Bragg explores such questions as: What happens to someone released from prison for a crime he didn't commit? Who takes care of the graves of poor people? What keeps an elderly woman from selling her land for a tidy profit? Bragg's curiosity often leads him to society's margins, where he wins the confidence of those who have good reason to mistrust others.
 
Bragg has reported on some of the most newsworthy tragedies in the nation, and his unfolding coverage of events such as the Oklahoma City bombing and the Susan Smith child murders is included here. Once again, though, his special ability to connect with people allows him accesss and perspectives that many other reporters do not achieve.
 
Whether he's profiling the sheriff who broke the Smith case or relating the efforts of Alabama churchgoers to understand a Sunday morning tornado strike, Bragg writes with genuine compassion and sentiment but without being sensationalist. He looks where others don’t and gets behind the headlines to the people standing there stunned and often, until he finds them, voiceless. When asked how he came up with his remarkable stories, Bragg has his answer down pat: “Somebody told me.”
 
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Somebody's Children
The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption
Laura Briggs
Duke University Press, 2012
In Somebody's Children, Laura Briggs examines the social and cultural forces—poverty, racism, economic inequality, and political violence—that have shaped transracial and transnational adoption in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. Focusing particularly on the experiences of those who have lost their children to adoption, Briggs analyzes the circumstances under which African American and Native mothers in the United States and indigenous and poor women in Latin America have felt pressed to give up their children for adoption or have lost them involuntarily.

The dramatic expansion of transracial and transnational adoption since the 1950s, Briggs argues, was the result of specific and profound political and social changes, including the large-scale removal of Native children from their parents, the condemnation of single African American mothers in the context of the civil rights struggle, and the largely invented "crack babies" scare that inaugurated the dramatic withdrawal of benefits to poor mothers in the United States. In Guatemala, El Salvador, and Argentina, governments disappeared children during the Cold War and then imposed neoliberal economic regimes with U.S. support, making the circulation of children across national borders easy and often profitable. Concluding with an assessment of present-day controversies surrounding gay and lesbian adoptions and the struggles of immigrants fearful of losing their children to foster care, Briggs challenges celebratory or otherwise simplistic accounts of transracial and transnational adoption by revealing some of their unacknowledged causes and costs.

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Someday All This Will Be Yours
A History of Inheritance and Old Age
Hendrik Hartog
Harvard University Press, 2011

We all hope that we will be cared for as we age. But the details of that care, for caretaker and recipient alike, raise some of life’s most vexing questions. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, as an explosive economy and shifting social opportunities drew the young away from home, the elderly used promises of inheritance to keep children at their side. Hendrik Hartog tells the riveting, heartbreaking stories of how families fought over the work of care and its compensation.

Someday All This Will Be Yours narrates the legal and emotional strategies mobilized by older people, and explores the ambivalences of family members as they struggled with expectations of love and duty. Court cases offer an extraordinary glimpse of the mundane, painful, and intimate predicaments of family life. They reveal what it meant to be old without the pensions, Social Security, and nursing homes that now do much of the work of serving the elderly. From demented grandparents to fickle fathers, from litigious sons to grateful daughters, Hartog guides us into a world of disputed promises and broken hearts, and helps us feel the terrible tangle of love and commitments and money.

From one of the bedrocks of the human condition—the tension between the infirmities of the elderly and the longings of the young—emerges a pioneering work of exploration into the darker recesses of family life. Ultimately, Hartog forces us to reflect on what we owe and are owed as members of a family.

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Someone Has to Fail
The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling
David F. Labaree
Harvard University Press, 2012

What do we really want from schools? Only everything, in all its contradictions. Most of all, we want access and opportunity for all children—but all possible advantages for our own. So argues historian David Labaree in this provocative look at the way “this archetype of dysfunction works so well at what we want it to do even as it evades what we explicitly ask it to do.”

Ever since the common school movement of the nineteenth century, mass schooling has been seen as an essential solution to great social problems. Yet as wave after wave of reform movements have shown, schools are extremely difficult to change. Labaree shows how the very organization of the locally controlled, administratively limited school system makes reform difficult.

At the same time, he argues, the choices of educational consumers have always overwhelmed top-down efforts at school reform. Individual families seek to use schools for their own purposes—to pursue social opportunity, if they need it, and to preserve social advantage, if they have it. In principle, we want the best for all children. In practice, we want the best for our own.

Provocative, unflinching, wry, Someone Has to Fail looks at the way that unintended consequences of consumer choices have created an extraordinarily resilient educational system, perpetually expanding, perpetually unequal, constantly being reformed, and never changing much.

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Someone to Watch Over Me
The Life and Music of Ben Webster
Frank Büchmann-Møller
University of Michigan Press, 2010
For a half century, Ben Webster, one of the "big three" of swing tenors-along with Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young-was one of the best-known and most popular saxophonists.

Early in his career, Webster worked with many of the greatest orchestras of the time, including those led by Willie Bryant, Cab Calloway, Benny Carter, Fletcher Henderson, Andy Kirk, Bennie Moten, and Teddy Wilson. In 1940 Webster became Duke Ellington's first major tenor soloist, and during the next three years he played on many famous recordings, including "Cotton Tail."

Someone to Watch Over Me tells, for the first time, the complete story of Ben Webster's brilliant and troubled career. For this comprehensive study of Webster, author Frank Büchmann-Møller interviewed more than fifty people in the United States and Europe, and he includes numerous translated excerpts from European periodicals and newspapers, none previously available in English. In addition, the author studies every known Webster recording and film, including many private recordings from Webster's home collection not available to the public.

Exhaustively researched, this is a much needed and long overdue study of the life and music of one of jazz's most important artists.
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Something Ain't Kosher Here
The Rise of the 'Jewish' Sitcom
Brook, Vincent
Rutgers University Press, 2003

From 1989 through 2002 there was an unprecedented surge in American sitcoms featuring explicitly Jewish lead characters, thirty-two compared to seven in the previous forty years.  Several of these—Mad About You, The Nanny, and Friends—were among the most popular and influential of all shows over this period; one program—Seinfeld—has been singled out as the “defining” series of the nineties.  In addition, scriptwriters have increasingly created “Jewish” characters, although they may not be perceived to be by the show’s audience, Rachel Green on Friends being only one example.

In Something Ain’t Kosher Here, Vincent Brook asks two key questions: Why has this trend appeared at this particular historical moment and what is the significance of this phenomenon for Jews and non-Jews alike?  He takes readers through three key phases of the Jewish sitcom trend: The early years of television before and after the first Jewish sitcom, The Goldbergs’, appeared; the second phase in which America found itself “Under the Sign of Seinfeld”; and the current era of what Brook calls “Post- Jewishness.”

Interviews with key writers, producers, and “showrunners” such as David Kohan, (Will and Grace), Marta Kauffman (Friends and Dream On), Bill Prady (Dharma and Greg), Peter Mehlman and Carol Leifer (Seinfeld), and close readings of individual episodes and series provoke the inescapable conclusion that we have entered uncharted “post-Jewish” territory.  Brook reveals that the acceptance of Jews in mainstream white America at the very time when identity politics have put a premium on celebrating difference reinforces and threatens the historically unique insider/outsider status of Jews in American society. This paradox upsets a delicate balance that has been a defining component of American Jewish identity.

The rise of the Jewish sitcom represents a broader struggle in which American Jews and the TV industry, if not American society as a whole, are increasingly operating at cross-purposes—  torn between the desire to celebrate unique ethnic identities, yet to assimilate: to assert independence, yet also to build a consensus to appeal to the widest possible audience.   No reader of this book will ever be able to watch these television programs in quite the same way again.

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Something All Our Own
The Grant Hill Collection of African American Art
Grant Hill
Duke University Press, 2003
Since 1990, Grant Hill has thrilled sports fans with his artistry on the basketball court, first as an All-American player at Duke University and then as a six-time NBA All-Star for the Detroit Pistons and the Orlando Magic. During these years, Hill has amassed a collection of art by African Americans that he now shares with the public through this book, which accompanies a traveling exhibition.
The forty-six pieces documented here include thirteen works that span the career of the great Romare Bearden, from his 1941 gouache painting Serenade to the important collages of the 1980s. Hill’s fascination with artists’ depiction of women is represented in Elizabeth Catlett’s lithographs, many of them from the 1992 series “For My People,” and her sculptures in stone, bronze, and onyx. In addition to these two giants of twentieth-century art, the Hill Collection features pieces by Phoebe Beasley, Arthello Beck Jr., John Biggers, Malcolm Brown, John Coleman, Edward Jackson, and Hughie Lee Smith.
Hill began collecting art in the early 1990s after learning from his parents to appreciate artworks not only as objects of beauty but as expressions of heritage and culture. According to the internationally known curator Alvia J. Wardlaw, he is part of an emerging group of young African American collectors who have “raised the bar for others.” Hill writes, “Getting to know yourself means understanding your background and appreciating those who have come before you. My father has a saying he uses in speeches: ‘To be ignorant of your past is to remain a boy. ‘The interest in my heritage as an African American is reflected in this collection.”
Something All Our Own features Wardlaw’s essay on the history of African American collecting. It also features articles about Bearden and Catlett by the scholars Elizabeth Alexander and Beverly Guy-Sheftall and reflections about Hill by the historian John Hope Franklin, Duke’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, and the sportswriter William C. Rhoden. Hill and his father, the NFL great Calvin Hill, contribute a dialogue that explores their motivations for collecting art.
At the heart of the book are the exquisite color photographs of the forty-six artworks included in the exhibition, with commentary by Wardlaw and by Hill himself.
As a star athlete, Grant Hill is well aware that African Americans who excel in sports and entertainment are more broadly recognized than their counterparts in artistic fields. He strives to inspire young people to explore their heritage and broaden their concept of excellence by learning more about African American art. By sharing his artworks with collectors and fans, Hill reminds us that while the jump shot is ephemeral, art is enduring.
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Something Completely Different
British Television And American Culture
Jeffrey S. Miller
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

The first comprehensive study of the influence British programming had on American television.

The first comprehensive study of the influence British programming had on American television.

Between Emma Peel and the Ministry of Silly Walks, British television had a significant impact on American popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s. In Something Completely Different, Jeffrey Miller offers the first comprehensive study of British programming on American television, discussing why the American networks imported such series as The Avengers and Monty Python’s Flying Circus; how American audiences received these uniquely British shows; and how the shows’ success reshaped American television.Miller’s lively analysis covers three genres: spy shows, costume dramas, and sketch comedies. In addition to providing his close readings of the series themselves, Miller considers the networks’ packaging of the programs for American viewers and the influences that led to their acceptance, including the American television industry’s search for new advertising revenue and the creation of PBS.Something Completely Different concludes with a discussion of the American programs and genres that owed their existence to British progenitors. Miller convincingly argues that much of what came to define American television by 1980 was in fact British in origin, a contention that casts a new light on traditional discussions of American cultural imperialism.ISBN 0-8166-3240-5 Cloth £31.00 $44.95xxISBN 0-8166-3241-3 Paper £12.50 $17.95x208 Pages 17 black-and-white photos 5 7/8 x 9 JanuaryTranslation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
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Something for Everyone
Memories of Lauerman Brothers Department Store
Michael Leanah
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2013
In 1890 the Lauerman brothers opened a general store in the lumber-boom town of Marinette, Wisconsin. The business prospered, and soon the brothers abandoned their small quarters on Main Street for a magnificent department store on Dunlap Square in the heart of Marinette. Thanks to the Lauermans’ devotion to offering diverse merchandise, superior customer service, and loyalty to their employees, the store would remain a lively, vital part of the Marinette fabric for one hundred years.

This book traces the history of the Lauerman enterprise and its importance to the community of Marinette and dozens of counties in northern Wisconsin and the UP. The author takes readers on a tour of the store’s most memorable and delightful features, from the plethora of merchandise offered to the record-listening booths to the famous frosted malt cones. Along the way we hear the recollections of dozens of former customers and employees whose memories form a unique tapestry of family, business, and community story. As it brings to life the people who worked and shopped at Lauermans, Something for Everyone will have readers fondly recalling their own favorite shopping destinations during the golden age of department stores.
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Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens
Frank Oppenheimer and His Astonishing Exploratorium
K. C. Cole
University of Chicago Press, 2012
How do we reclaim our innate enchantment with the world? And how can we turn our natural curiosity into a deep, abiding love for knowledge? Frank Oppenheimer, the younger brother of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, was captivated by these questions, and used his own intellectual inquisitiveness to found the Exploratorium, a powerfully influential museum of human awareness in San Francisco, that encourages play, creativity, and discovery—all in the name of understanding.
 
In this elegant biography, K. C. Cole investigates the man behind the museum with sharp insight and deep sympathy. The Oppenheimers were a family with great wealth and education, and Frank, like his older brother, pursued a career in physics. But while Robert was unceasingly ambitious, and eventually came to be known for his work on the atomic bomb, Frank’s path as a scientist was much less conventional. His brief fling with the Communist Party cost him his position at the University of Minnesota, and he subsequently spent a decade ranching in Colorado before returning to teaching. Once back in the lab, however, Frank found himself moved to create something to make the world meaningful after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was inspired by European science museums, and he developed a dream of teaching Americans about science through participatory museums. Thus was born the magical world of the Exploratorium, forever revolutionizing not only the way we experience museums, but also science education for years to come.
 
Cole has brought this charismatic and dynamic figure to life with vibrant prose and rich insight into Oppenheimer as both a scientist and an individual.
 
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Something Old, Something Bold
Bridal Showers and Bachelorette Parties
Montemurro, Beth
Rutgers University Press, 2006

Weddings in the United States are often extravagant, highly ritualized, and costly affairs.  In this book, Beth Montemurro takes a fresh look at the wedding process, offering a perspective not likely to be found in the many planning books and magazines readily available to the modern bride.  Montemurro draws upon years of ethnographic research to explore what prenuptial events mean to women participants and what they tell us about the complexity and ambiguity of gender roles. Through the bachelorette party and the bridal shower, the bride-to-be is initiated into the role of wife by her friends and family, who present elaborate scenarios that demonstrate both what she is sacrificing and what she is gaining.

            Montemurro argues that American society at the turn of the twenty-first century is still married to traditional conceptions of masculinity and femininity and that prenuptial rituals contribute to the stabilization of gender inequalities
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Something We Have That They Don't
British and American Poetic Relations since 1925
Steve & Mark Clark & Ford
University of Iowa Press, 2004
There is some connexion
(I like the way the English spell it
They’re so clever about some things
Probably smarter generally than we are
Although there is supposed to be something
We have that they don’'t—'don’t ask me
What it is. . . .)
—John Ashbery, “Tenth Symphony”

Something We Have That They Don’t presents a variety of essays on the relationship between British and American poetry since 1925. The essays collected here all explore some aspect of the rich and complex history of Anglo-American poetic relations of the last seventy years. Since the dawn of Modernism poets either side of the Atlantic have frequently inspired each other’s developments, from Frost’s galvanizing advice to Edward Thomas to rearrange his prose as verse, to Eliot’s and Auden’s enormous influence on the poetry of their adopted nations (“whichever Auden is,” Eliot once replied when asked if he were a British or an American poet, “I suppose, I must be the other”); from the impact of Charles Olson and other Black Mountain poets on J. H. Prynne and the Cambridge School, to the widespread influence of Frank O'Hara and Robert Lowell on a diverse range of contemporary British poets. Clark and Ford’s study aims to chart some of the currents of these ever-shifting relations. Poets discussed in these essays include John Ashbery, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, T. S. Eliot, Mark Ford, Robert Graves, Thom Gunn, Lee Harwood, Geoffrey Hill, Michael Hofmann, Susan Howe, Robert Lowell, and W. B. Yeats.

“Poetry and sovereignty,” Philip Larkin remarked in an interview of 1982, “are very primitive things”: these essays consider the ways in which even seemingly very “unprimitive” poetries can be seen as reflecting and engaging with issues of national sovereignty and self-interest, and in the process they pose a series of fascinating questions about the national narratives that currently dominate definitions of the British and American poetic traditions.

This innovative and exciting new collection will be of great interest to students and scholars of British and American poetry and comparative literature.
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Somos Latinas
Voices of Wisconsin Latina Activists
Andrea-Teresa Arenas
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018
Twenty-five Latina agents of change share their inspirational stories.

Celebrated Latina civil rights activist Dolores Huerta once said, “Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.” These are the stories of some of the Latina activists from Wisconsin who have lived Huerta’s words. Somos Latinas shares the powerful narratives of 25 activists—from outspoken demonstrators to collaborative community-builders to determined individuals working for change behind the scenes—providing proof of the long-standing legacy of Latina activism throughout Wisconsin. 

Somos Latinas draws on activist interviews conducted as part of the Somos Latinas Digital History Project, housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society, and looks deep into the life and passion of each woman. Though Latinas have a rich history of community activism in the state and throughout the country, their stories often go uncelebrated. Somos Latinas is essential reading for scholars, historians, activists, and anyone curious about how everyday citizens can effect change in their communities.  
 
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Son of Southern Illinois
Glenn Poshard’s Life in Politics and Education
Carl Walworth with Glenn Poshard
Southern Illinois University Press, 2023

A life of principles, service, and faith  

This first biography of Glenn Poshard traces the life of a young man who rose from rural poverty in Southern Illinois to become a United States congressman and president of the Southern Illinois University system. This profound portrait unveils a life and career dedicated to making higher education affordable and improving the quality of life for the community of Southern Illinois.  

Beginning with his childhood in a two-room home near Herald, Illinois and the early, tragic loss of his sister, this biography navigates Poshard’s service in the military, his time as a state senator and United States congressman, his run for governor, his years at Southern Illinois University, and the establishment of the Poshard Foundation for Abused Children. Intimacies of his personal life are disclosed, such as his struggles with and treatment for depression, his passion for education, and the lasting bonds he formed with his teachers. His unpopular decision to refuse PAC donations is also highlighted, along with the work that went into sponsoring the Illinois Wilderness Act, and his relationship with civil rights activist John Lewis. Glenn Poshard’s efforts for the Wilderness Act designated Southern Illinois’s famous Garden of the Gods as a National Wilderness Preservation System, which continues to attract visitors from around the world. 

Poshard’s path from poverty was riddled with hardship, but his perseverance and family values ultimately allowed for longstanding personal and civic growth. From an admirable work ethic to a steadfast commitment to problem-solving, this biography illuminates the life and accomplishments of an impressive and generous leader.

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"A Son of the Forest" and Other Writings
William Apess
University of Massachusetts Press, 1997
Designed especially for classroom use, this book brings together the best-known works of the nineteenth-century Indian writer William Apess, including the first extended autobiography by a Native American. The text is drawn from On Our Own Ground, which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book. Barry O'Connell has written a new introduction for this abbreviated edition.
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Song of Ourselves
Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy
Mark Edmundson
Harvard University Press, 2021

In the midst of a crisis of democracy, we have much to learn from Walt Whitman’s journey toward egalitarian selfhood.

Walt Whitman knew a great deal about democracy that we don’t. Most of that knowledge is concentrated in one stunning poem, Song of Myself.

Esteemed cultural and literary thinker Mark Edmundson offers a bold reading of the 1855 poem, included here in its entirety. He finds in the poem the genesis and development of a democratic spirit, for the individual and the nation. Whitman broke from past literature that he saw as “feudal”: obsessed with the noble and great. He wanted instead to celebrate the common and everyday. Song of Myself does this, setting the terms for democratic identity and culture in America. The work captures the drama of becoming an egalitarian individual, as the poet ascends to knowledge and happiness by confronting and overcoming the major obstacles to democratic selfhood. In the course of his journey, the poet addresses God and Jesus, body and soul, the love of kings, the fear of the poor, and the fear of death. The poet’s consciousness enlarges; he can see more, comprehend more, and he has more to teach.

In Edmundson’s account, Whitman’s great poem does not end with its last line. Seven years after the poem was published, Whitman went to work in hospitals, where he attended to the Civil War’s wounded, sick, and dying. He thus became in life the democratic individual he had prophesied in art. Even now, that prophecy gives us words, thoughts, and feelings to feed the democratic spirit of self and nation.

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The Song of the Hammer and Drill
The Colorado San Juans, 1860-1914
Duane A. Smith
University Press of Colorado, 2000
As one of the great mining regions of Colorado and the United States, the San Juan Mountains provide insight into the development of both the industry and the state. First published in 1982, Song of the Hammer and Drill, with the help of more than 100 historical photographs, traces the mining and urban history of the San Juans from 1860-1914 through the lives of the people who opened, settled, and developed the beautiful but rugged mineral-rich peaks of southwestern Colorado.
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The Song of the Hawk
The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins
John Chilton
University of Michigan Press, 1993
The first full-length biography of Coleman Hawkins
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A Song to My City
Washington, DC
Carol Lancaster
Georgetown University Press, 2018

This deeply felt memoir is a love letter to Washington, DC. Carol Lancaster, a third-generation Washingtonian who knew the city like few others, takes readers on a tour of the nation’s capital from its swamp-infested beginnings to the present day, with an insider’s view of the gritty politics, environment, society, culture, and larger-than-life heroes that characterize her beloved hometown. The former dean of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, a friend of presidents and dignitaries all over the globe, Lancaster colorfully describes the city’s three near-death experiences and the many triumphs and tribulations that emerged as the city took shape. Along the way she provides brief biographies of three of the most influential figures in the city’s history: urban designer Pierre Charles L’Enfant, whose vision for the city was realized only after his death; civic leader “Boss” Shepherd, whose strong-arm tactics cleaned up the downtown area and helped create the walking mall we know today; and controversial mayor Marion Barry, whose rise and fall and resurrection underscored the contemporary challenges of home rule.

Teeming with informative anecdotes and two dozen illustrations of landmarks and key characters, Lancaster’s memoir is a personal and passionate paean to the most powerful city in the world—from one of its most illustrious native daughters.

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Songbooks
The Literature of American Popular Music
Eric Weisbard
Duke University Press, 2021
In Songbooks, critic and scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to books on American popular music from William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded. Drawing on his background editing the Village Voice music section, coediting the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and organizing the Pop Conference, Weisbard connects American music writing from memoirs, biographies, and song compilations to blues novels, magazine essays, and academic studies. The authors of these works are as diverse as the music itself: women, people of color, queer writers, self-educated scholars, poets, musicians, and elites discarding their social norms. Whether analyzing books on Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, and Madonna; the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Gayl Jones, and Jennifer Egan; or varying takes on blackface minstrelsy, Weisbard charts an alternative history of American music as told through its writing. As Weisbard demonstrates, the most enduring work pursues questions that linger across time period and genre—cultural studies in the form of notes on the fly, on sounds that never cease to change meaning.
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Songs in Black and Lavender
Race, Sexual Politics, and Women's Music
Eileen M. Hayes, Foreword by Linda Tillery
University of Illinois Press, 2010
Drawing on fieldwork conducted at eight women's music festivals, Eileen M. Hayes shows how studying these festivals--attended by predominately white lesbians--provides critical insight into the role of music and lesbian community formation. She argues that the women's music festival is a significant institutional site for the emergence of black feminist consciousness in the contemporary period. Hayes also offers sage perspectives on black women's involvement in the women's music festival scene, the ramifications of their performances as drag kings in those environments, and the challenges and joys of a black lesbian retreat based on the feminist festival model. With acuity and candor, longtime feminist activist Hayes elucidates why this music scene matters. Veteran vocalist, percussionist, producer, and cultural historian Linda Tillery provides a foreword.
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Songs of Ourselves
The Uses of Poetry in America
Joan Shelley Rubin
Harvard University Press, 2007

Listen to a short interview with Joan Shelley RubinHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane

In the years between 1880 and 1950, Americans recited poetry at family gatherings, school assemblies, church services, camp outings, and civic affairs. As they did so, they invested poems--and the figure of the poet--with the beliefs, values, and emotions that they experienced in those settings.

Reciting a poem together with others joined the individual to the community in a special and memorable way. In a strikingly original and rich portrait of the uses of verse in America, Joan Shelley Rubin shows how the sites and practices of reciting poetry influenced readers' lives and helped them to find meaning in a poet's words.

Emphasizing the cultural circumstances that influenced the production and reception of poets and poetry in this country, Rubin recovers the experiences of ordinary people reading poems in public places. We see the recent immigrant seeking acceptance, the schoolchild eager to be integrated into the class, the mourner sharing grief at a funeral, the grandparent trying to bridge the generation gap--all instances of readers remaking texts to meet social and personal needs. Preserving the moral, romantic, and sentimental legacies of the nineteenth century, the act of reading poems offered cultural continuity, spiritual comfort, and pleasure.

Songs of Ourselves is a unique history of literary texts as lived experience. By blurring the boundaries between "high" and "popular" poetry as well as between modern and traditional, it creates a fuller, more democratic way of studying our poetic language and ourselves.

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Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free
Music and the Vietnamese Refugee Experience
Adelaida Reyes
Temple University Press, 1999
Sad songs and love songs. For Vietnamese refugees who fled Vietnam after the 1975 takeover by the Viet Cong, the predominant music of choice falls into these two general categories rather than any particular musical genre. In fact, Adelaida Reyes discovers, music that exiles call "Vietnamese music" -- that is, music sung in Vietnamese and almost exclusively written before 1975 -- includes such varied influences as Western rock, French-derived valse, Latin chacha, tango, bolero, an d paso doble.

The Vietnamese refugee experience calls attention to issues commonly raised by migration: the redefinition of group relations, the reformulation of identity, and the reconstruction of social and musical life in resettlement. Fifteen years ago, Adelaida Reyes began doing fieldwork on the musical activities of Vietnamese refugees. She entered the emotion-driven world of forced migrants through expressive culture; learned to see the lives of refugee-resettlers through the music they made and enjoyed; and, in turn, gained a deeper understanding of their music through knowledge of their lives.

In Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free, Reyes brings history, politics, and decades of research to her study of four resettlement communities, including refugee centers in Palawan and Bataan; the early refugee community in New Jersey; and the largest of all Vietnamese communities -- Little Saigon, in southern California's Orange County.

Looking closely at diasporic Vietnamese in each location, Reyes demonstrates that expressive culture provides a valuable window into the refugee experience. Showing that Vietnamese immigrants deal with more than simply a new country and culture in these communities, Reyes considers such issues as ethnicity, socio-economic class, and differing generations. She considers in her study music of all kinds -- performed and recorded, public and private -- and looks at music as listened to and performed by all age groups, including church music, club music, and music used in cultural festivals. Moving from traditional folk music to elite and modern music and from the recording industry to pirated tapes. Reyes looks at how Vietnamese in exile struggled, in different ways, to hold onto a part of their home culture and to assimilate into their  new, most frequently American, culture.

Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free will attract the attention of readers in Asian American studies, Asian studies, music, and ethnomusicology.
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Songs of the Unsung
The Musical and Social Journey of Horace Tapscott
Horace Tapscott
Duke University Press, 2001
Despite his importance and influence, jazz musician, educator, and community leader Horace Tapscott remains relatively unknown to most Americans. In Songs of the Unsung Tapscott shares his life story, recalling his childhood in Houston, moving with his family to Los Angeles in 1943, learning music, and his early professional career. He describes forming the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra in 1961 and later the Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension to preserve African American music and serve the community. Tapscott also recounts his interactions with the Black Panthers and law enforcement, the Watts riots, his work in Hollywood movie studios, and stories about his famous musician-activist friends. Songs of the Unsung is the captivating story of one of America’s most unassuming heroes as well as the story of L.A.'s cultural and political evolution over the last half of the twentieth century.
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Sonic Persuasion
Reading Sound in the Recorded Age
Greg Goodale
University of Illinois Press, 2011
Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age critically analyzes a range of sounds on vocal and musical recordings, on the radio, in film, and in cartoons to show how sounds are used to persuade in subtle ways. Greg Goodale explains how and to what effect sounds can be "read" like an aural text, demonstrating this method by examining important audio cues such as dialect, pausing, and accent in presidential recordings at the turn of the twentieth century. Goodale also shows how clocks, locomotives, and machinery are utilized in film and literature to represent frustration and anxiety about modernity, and how race and other forms of identity came to be represented by sound during the interwar period. In highlighting common sounds of industry and war in popular media, Sonic Persuasion also demonstrates how programming producers and governmental agencies employed sound to evoke a sense of fear in listeners. Goodale provides important links to other senses, especially the visual, to give fuller meaning to interpretations of identity, culture, and history in sound.
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Sonora
A Description of the Province
Ignaz Pfefferkorn; Foreword by Bernard L. Fontana; Translated and Annotated by Theodore E. Treutlein
University of Arizona Press, 1989
"The bloodsucking bat, construction of bows and arrows, the punishment for adultery among the Apaches... all was grist that dropped into the industrious mill of Father Pfefferkorn's eyes, ears, and brain."—Saturday Review

"To be read for enjoyment; nevertheless, the historian will find in it a wealth of information that has been shrewdly appraised, carefully sifted, and creditably related."—Catholic Historical Review

"Of interest not only to the historian but to the geographer and anthropologist."—Pacific Historical Review
 
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The Sonoran Desert
Its Geography, Economy, and People
Roger Dunbier
University of Arizona Press, 1968
Although possessing a common physical heritage, the Sonoran Desert has taken on highly contrasting forms in its American and Mexican portions. This work does not, therefore, attempt a regional study in the usual sense of the term, but is rather an examination of disparate economic development, much influenced by contrasting technological achievements as well as the accidents of history.

Although the significance of geographic regionalism is implicit throughout this study, no attempt is made to show any overriding unity at work, geographical or otherwise, welding together a "desert region." Instead the desert acts as a stage for social drama in which drought and extreme heat provide the essential backcloth. The scarcity of water and man's inability to grow crops without irrigation have not, indeed, changed with time, and only constant reference to this immutable factor can give meaning to the evolution of human activities within the desert.
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Sonoran Desert Journeys
Ecology and Evolution of Its Iconic Species
Theodore H. Fleming
University of Arizona Press, 2022
Lizards dashing rapidly between plants. Songbirds and woodpeckers flying to and from their nests. Hawks perched on saguaros. What kinds of journeys have these and many other animals and plants and their ancestors taken in space and time to arrive in the Sonoran Desert? How long have these species been living together here?

In Sonoran Desert Journeys ecologist Theodore H. Fleming discusses two remarkable journeys. First, Fleming offers a brief history of our intellectual and technical journey over the past three centuries to understand the evolution of life on Earth. Next, he applies those techniques on a journey of discovery about the evolution and natural history of some of the Sonoran Desert’s most iconic animals and plants. Fleming details the daily lives of a variety of reptiles, birds, mammals, and plants, describing their basic natural and evolutionary histories and addressing intriguing issues associated with their lifestyles and how they cope with a changing climate. Finally, Fleming discusses the complexity of Sonoran Desert conservation.

This book explores the evolution and natural history of iconic animals and plants of the northern Sonoran Desert through the eyes of a curious naturalist and provides a model of how we can coexist with the unique species that call this area home.
 
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The Sons of Westwood
John Wooden, UCLA, and the Dynasty That Changed College Basketball
John Matthew Smith
University of Illinois Press, 2013
For more than a decade, the UCLA dynasty defined college basketball. In twelve seasons from 1964 to 1975, John Wooden's teams won ten national titles, including seven consecutive championships. The Bruins made history by breaking numerous records, but they also rose to prominence during a turbulent age of political unrest and youthful liberation. When Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton--the most famous college basketball players of their generation--spoke out against racism, poverty, and the Vietnam War, they carved out a new role for athletes, casting their actions on and off the court in a political light.

The Sons of Westwood tells the story of the most significant college basketball program at a pivotal period in American cultural history. It weaves together a story of sports and politics in an era of social and cultural upheaval, a time when college students and college athletes joined the civil rights movement, demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and rejected the dominant Cold War culture. This is the story of America's culture wars played out on the basketball court by some of college basketball's most famous players and its most memorable coach.

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Sophia Peabody Hawthorne
A Life, Volume 2, 1848-1871
Patricia Dunlavy Valenti
University of Missouri Press, 2015
As is often the case with spouses of celebrities, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne was overshadowed by her husband. While Nathaniel Hawthorne is renowned for numerous publications, including The Scarlet Letter, that staple in high school English curricula, Sophia’s remarkable life and career did not receive the recognition they deserve. She was, however, a source for many of Nathaniel’s stories and responsible for much that he accomplished. Sophia was an artist, one of the first in America to earn income from her painting and decorative arts; she was also a writer and traveler to foreign countries at a time when women typically confined their activities to the home. Patricia Dunlavy Valenti began to tell this story in Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume 1, 1809-1847 (2004). This biography concludes now in a second volume, which details the less examined and more surprising second half of Sophia’s life.
Valenti’s thorough research culminates in a compelling, revealing account of Sophia’s travels to Britain and Europe and her intense personal relationships outside her marriage with men and women, among them notable figures in American history and literature. As an impoverished widow, Sophia dealt resourcefully with the consequences of her husband’s financial carelessness; as a mother, her liberal practices resulted in unintended, sometimes unfortunate consequences. Throughout every vicissitude, her relentless optimism prevailed.
With the publication of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume 2, 1848-1871, Sophia emerges forever from the shadow cast by her husband. Historians and general readers alike will be drawn to this riveting account of an interesting, important woman and what her life reveals about American history and culture at a moment of national conflict, emerging class divisions, and evolving gender roles.
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Sophia Peabody Hawthorne
A Life, Volume I, 1809-1847
Patricia Dunlavy Valenti
University of Missouri Press, 2004
Sophia Peabody Hawthorne is known almost exclusively in her role as the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who portrayed her as the fragile, ethereal, infirm “Dove.” That image, invented by Nathaniel to serve his needs and affirm his manhood, was passed on by his biographers, who accepted their subject’s perception without question. In fact, the real Sophia was very different from Nathaniel’s construction of her.
 
An independent, sensuous, daring woman, Sophia was an accomplished artist before her marriage to Nathaniel. Moreover, what she brought to their union inspired Nathaniel’s imagination beyond the limits of his previously confined existence. In Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Patricia Dunlavy Valenti situates the story of Sophia’s life within its own historical, philosophical, and cultural background, as well as within the context of her marriage. Valenti begins with parallel biographies that present Sophia, and then Nathaniel, at comparable periods in their lives.

Sophia was born into an expansive, somewhat chaotic home in which women provided financial as well as emotional sustenance. She was a precocious, eager student whose rigorous education, in her mother’s and her sisters’ schools, began her association with the children of New England’s elite. Sophia aspired to become a professional, self-supporting painter, exhibiting her art and seeking criticism from established mentors. She relished an eighteen-month sojourn in Cuba. Nathaniel’s reclusive family, his reluctant early education, his anonymous pursuit of a career, and his relatively circumscribed life contrast markedly with the experience of the woman who became his wife and the mother of his children. Those differences resulted in a creative abrasion that ignited his fiction during the first years of their marriage.
 
Volume 1 of this biography concludes with Sophia’s negotiation of the Hawthornes’ departure from the Old Manse and the birth of their second child. This period also coincides with the conclusion of Nathaniel’s major phase of short story writing.
 
Sophia Peabody Hawthorne is an engrossing story of a nineteenth-century American life. It analyzes influences upon authorship and questions the boundaries of intellectual property in the domestic sphere. The book also offers fresh interpretations of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction, examining it through the lens of Sophia’s vibrant personality and diverse interests. Students and scholars of American literature, literary theory, feminism, and cultural history will find much to enrich their understanding of this woman and this era.
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Sophonisba Breckinridge
Championing Women's Activism in Modern America
Anya Jabour
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Sophonisba Breckinridge's remarkable career stretched from the Civil War to the Cold War. She took part in virtually every reform campaign of the Progressive and New Deal eras and became a nationally and internationally renowned figure. Her work informed women’s activism for decades and continues to shape progressive politics today. Anya Jabour's biography rediscovers this groundbreaking American figure. After earning advanced degrees in politics, economics, and law, Breckinridge established the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration, which became a feminist think tank that promoted public welfare policy and propelled women into leadership positions. In 1935, Breckinridge’s unremitting efforts to provide government aid to the dispossessed culminated in her appointment as an advisor on programs for the new Social Security Act. A longtime activist in international movements for peace and justice, Breckinridge also influenced the formation of the United Nations and advanced the idea that "women’s rights are human rights." Her lifelong commitment to social justice created a lasting legacy for generations of progressive activists.
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Sorting Sexualities
Expertise and the Politics of Legal Classification
Stefan Vogler
University of Chicago Press, 2021
In Sorting Sexualities, Stefan Vogler deftly unpacks the politics of the techno-legal classification of sexuality in the United States. His study focuses specifically on state classification practices around LGBTQ people seeking asylum in the United States and sexual offenders being evaluated for carceral placement—two situations where state actors must determine individuals’ sexualities. Though these legal settings are diametrically opposed—one a punitive assessment, the other a protective one—they present the same question: how do we know someone’s sexuality?

In this rich ethnographic study, Vogler reveals how different legal arenas take dramatically different approaches to classifying sexuality and use those classifications to legitimate different forms of social control. By delving into the histories behind these diverging classification practices and analyzing their contemporary reverberations, Vogler shows how the science of sexuality is far more central to state power than we realize. 
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SOS—Calling All Black People
A Black Arts Movement Reader
John H. Bracey
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
This volume brings together a broad range of key writings from the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, among the most significant cultural movements in American history. The aesthetic counterpart of the Black Power movement, it burst onto the scene in the form of artists' circles, writers' workshops, drama groups, dance troupes, new publishing ventures, bookstores, and cultural centers and had a presence in practically every community and college campus with an appreciable African American population. Black Arts activists extended its reach even further through magazines such as Ebony and Jet, on television shows such as Soul! and Like It Is, and on radio programs.

Many of the movement's leading artists, including Ed Bullins, Nikki Giovanni, Woodie King, Haki Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Touré, and Val Gray Ward remain artistically productive today. Its influence can also be seen in the work of later artists, from the writers Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, and August Wilson to actors Avery Brooks, Danny Glover, and Samuel L. Jackson, to hip hop artists Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Chuck D.

SOS—Calling All Black People includes works of fiction, poetry, and drama in addition to critical writings on issues of politics, aesthetics, and gender. It covers topics ranging from the legacy of Malcolm X and the impact of John Coltrane's jazz to the tenets of the Black Panther Party and the music of Motown. The editors have provided a substantial introduction outlining the nature, history, and legacy of the Black Arts Movement as well as the principles by which the anthology was assembled.
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SOS-Calling All Black People
A Black Arts Movement Reader
Bracey John H.
University of Massachusetts Press

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Soul by Soul
Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
Walter Johnson
Harvard University Press, 2001

Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award
Winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize
Winner of the Avery O. Craven Award


Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved.

Using recently discovered court records, slaveholders’ letters, nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, and the financial documentation of the trade itself, Johnson reveals the tenuous shifts of power that occurred in the market’s slave coffles and showrooms. Traders packaged their slaves by “feeding them up,” dressing them well, and oiling their bodies, but they ultimately relied on the slaves to play their part as valuable commodities. Slave buyers stripped the slaves and questioned their pasts, seeking more honest answers than they could get from the traders. In turn, these examinations provided information that the slaves could utilize, sometimes even shaping a sale to their own advantage.

Johnson depicts the subtle interrelation of capitalism, paternalism, class consciousness, racism, and resistance in the slave market, to help us understand the centrality of the “peculiar institution” in the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike. His pioneering history is in no small measure the story of antebellum slavery.

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The Soul of Abraham Lincoln
William E. Barton. Introduction by Michael Nelson
University of Illinois Press, 2005

Modern secularists have been reluctant to recognize Abraham Lincoln's deep spirituality, in spite of the fact that he was often known as "Father Abraham" and has been described as one of the most deeply religious presidents the country has ever seen.  Yet for all of his familiarity with the Bible, his invocation of Providence, and of the Almighty, he did not actively participate in a church or lend his name and authority to a denomination.

After more than fifty years of hagiographic and contradictory accounts of Abraham Lincoln's life, William Barton stepped boldly into the bedlam of claims and counterclaims about Lincoln's religion. Armed with an enormous collection of Lincoln materials and his own strict evidentiary rules, Barton worked to avoid partisan politicking over Lincoln's legacy and instead to simply "lay bare the facts."  

To enable a better examination of the vexed questions surrounding Lincoln's faith and religious principles, Barton gathered Lincoln's most important writing and speeches about religion, and topically and chronologically assembled testimonies by his friends, family, and associates, about the most important and most debated issues.  This volume, Barton's first and most important work on Lincoln, is introduced by Michael Nelson who provides a history of the literature on Lincoln's religion, the historical context of Barton's writing, and the details of the method that made Barton's approach to this American icon such a distinctive success.

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The Soul of the Stranger
Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective
Joy Ladin
Brandeis University Press, 2018
Reading some of the best-known Torah stories through the lens of transgender experience, Joy Ladin explores fundamental questions about how religious texts, traditions, and the understanding of God can be enriched by transgender perspectives, and how the Torah and trans lives can illuminate one another. Drawing on her own experience and lifelong reading practice, Ladin shows how the Torah, a collection of ancient texts that assume human beings are either male or female, speaks both to practical transgender concerns, such as marginalization, and to the challenges of living without a body or social role that renders one intelligible to others—challenges that can help us understand a God who defies all human categories. These creative, evocative readings transform our understanding of the Torah’s portrayals of God, humanity, and relationships between them.
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Soul on Soul
The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams
Tammy L. Kernodle
University of Illinois Press, 2020
First time in paperback and e-book!

The jazz musician-composer-arranger Mary Lou Williams spent her sixty-year career working in—and stretching beyond—a dizzying range of musical styles. Her integration of classical music into her works helped expand jazz's compositional language. Her generosity made her a valued friend and mentor to the likes of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. Her late-in-life flowering of faith saw her embrace a spiritual jazz oriented toward advancing the civil rights struggle and helping wounded souls.

Tammy L. Kernodle details Williams's life in music against the backdrop of controversies over women's place in jazz and bitter arguments over the music's evolution. Williams repeatedly asserted her artistic and personal independence to carve out a place despite widespread bafflement that a woman exhibited such genius. Embracing Williams's contradictions and complexities, Kernodle also explores a personal life troubled by lukewarm professional acceptance, loneliness, relentless poverty, bad business deals, and difficult marriages.

In-depth and epic in scope, Soul on Soul restores a pioneering African American woman to her rightful place in jazz history.

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Soul Power
Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left
Cynthia A. Young
Duke University Press, 2006
Soul Power is a cultural history of those whom Cynthia A. Young calls “U.S. Third World Leftists,” activists of color who appropriated theories and strategies from Third World anticolonial struggles in their fight for social and economic justice in the United States during the “long 1960s.” Nearly thirty countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America declared formal independence in the 1960s alone. Arguing that the significance of this wave of decolonization to U.S. activists has been vastly underestimated, Young describes how literature, films, ideologies, and political movements that originated in the Third World were absorbed by U.S. activists of color. She shows how these transnational influences were then used to forge alliances, create new vocabularies and aesthetic forms, and describe race, class, and gender oppression in the United States in compelling terms.

Young analyzes a range of U.S. figures and organizations, examining how each deployed Third World discourse toward various cultural and political ends. She considers a trip that LeRoi Jones, Harold Cruse, and Robert F. Williams made to Cuba in 1960; traces key intellectual influences on Angela Y. Davis’s writing; and reveals the early history of the hospital workers’ 1199 union as a model of U.S. Third World activism. She investigates Newsreel, a late 1960s activist documentary film movement, and its successor, Third World Newsreel, which produced a seminal 1972 film on the Attica prison rebellion. She also considers the L.A. Rebellion, a group of African and African American artists who made films about conditions in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. By demonstrating the breadth, vitality, and legacy of the work of U.S. Third World Leftists, Soul Power firmly establishes their crucial place in the history of twentieth-century American struggles for social change.

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Soul Serenade
King Curtis and His Immortal Saxophone
Timothy R. Hoover
University of North Texas Press, 2022

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The Souls of Black Folk
One Hundred Years Later
Edited & Intro by Dolan Hubbard
University of Missouri Press, 2003

Published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois was a landmark achievement, moving American philosophy beyond the structures of pragmatism and positivism as it addressed new questions about American social and political history. One hundred years later, Du Bois's classic has clearly resonated through twentieth-century thought, offering a critical perspective on the political, social, and economic barriers imposed upon blacks in America.

This important new book is the first collection of essays to examine sustainedly The Souls of Black Folk from a variety of disciplines: aesthetics, art history, classics, communications, history, literature, music, political science, and psychology. The authors establish a call-and-response rhythm as they examine the critical depth of a text that has had a profound influence on African American intellectual history. Implicitly, the essays show how The Souls of Black Folk has influenced teaching practices and suggested alternative ways of teaching that create a pedagogy of inclusion.

The Souls of Black Folk remains a text pivotal in the American understanding of the black experience, and this important collection investigates this masterpiece from fresh directions. Scholars, teachers, and students of American studies and African American studies will find this remarkable work an essential overview of a book that changed the course of American intellectual history.

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The Souls of Cyberfolk
Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory
Thomas Foster
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
In The Souls of Cyberfolk, Thomas Foster traces the transformation of cyberpunk from a literary movement into a multimedia cultural phenomenon. He examines how cyberpunk defined a framework for thinking about the cultural implications of new technologies - a framework flexible enough to incorporate issues of gender, queer sexualities, and ethnic and racial differences as well as developments in nationalist models of citizenship and global economic flows. Beginning with William Gibson's paradigmatic text Neuromancer, and continuing through the works of Maureen McHugh, Melissa Scott, Neal Stephenson, Greg Egan, and Ken MacLeod, Foster measures cyberpunk's reach into social and philosophical movements (the Extropy Institute), commercial art (Hajime Sorayama's gynoids or sexy robot illustrations), comic books (Deathlok), film (Robocop), and music video (from Billy Idol's Cyberpunk album). The central challenge that cyberpunk poses for cultural critics, Foster argues, is to understand what happens when the technological denaturalization of physical embodiment becomes the norm. This question acquires urgency as the focus of his book moves beyond the typical technocultural concerns with gender and sexuality to consider race and models of citizenship - a shift that constitutes one of the book's most original contributions to scholarship on the topic.
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Sound Diplomacy
Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850-1920
Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht
University of Chicago Press, 2009
The German-American relationship was special long before the Cold War; it was rooted not simply in political actions, but also long-term traditions of cultural exchange that date back to the nineteenth century. Between 1850 and 1910, the United States was a rising star in the international arena, and several European nations sought to strengthen their ties to the republic by championing their own cultures in America. While France capitalized on its art and Britain on its social ties and literature, Germany promoted its particular breed of classical music.
Delving into a treasure trove of archives that document cross-cultural interactions between America and Germany, Jessica Gienow-Hecht retraces these efforts to export culture as an instrument of nongovernmental diplomacy, paying particular attention to the role of conductors, and uncovers the remarkable history of the musician as a cultural symbol of German cosmopolitanism. Considered sexually attractive and emotionally expressive, German players and conductors acted as an army of informal ambassadors for their home country, and Gienow-Hecht argues that their popularity in the United States paved the way for an emotional elective affinity that survived broken treaties and several wars and continues to the present.
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Sound Experiments
The Music of the AACM
Paul Steinbeck
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A groundbreaking study of the trailblazing music of Chicago’s AACM, a leader in the world of jazz and experimental music.
 
Founded on Chicago’s South Side in 1965 and still thriving today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is the most influential collective organization in jazz and experimental music. In Sound Experiments, Paul Steinbeck offers an in-depth historical and musical investigation of the collective, analyzing individual performances and formal innovations in captivating detail. He pays particular attention to compositions by Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell, the Association’s leading figures, as well as Anthony Braxton, George Lewis (and his famous computer-music experiment, Voyager), Wadada Leo Smith, and Henry Threadgill, along with younger AACM members such as Mike Reed, Tomeka Reid, and Nicole Mitchell.
 
Sound Experiments represents a sonic history, spanning six decades, that affords insight not only into the individuals who created this music but also into an astonishing collective aesthetic. This aesthetic was uniquely grounded in nurturing communal ties across generations, as well as a commitment to experimentalism. The AACM’s compositions broke down the barriers between jazz and experimental music and made essential contributions to African American expression more broadly. Steinbeck shows how the creators of these extraordinary pieces pioneered novel approaches to instrumentation, notation, conducting, musical form, and technology, creating new soundscapes in contemporary music.
 
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A Sound History
Lawrence Gellert, Black Musical Protest, and White Denial
Steven P. Garabedian
University of Massachusetts Press, 2020
Lawrence Gellert has long been a mysterious figure in American folk and blues studies, gaining prominence in the left-wing folk revival of the 1930s for his fieldwork in the U.S. South. A "lean, straggly-haired New Yorker," as Time magazine called him, Gellert was an independent music collector, without formal training, credentials, or affiliation. At a time of institutionalized suppression, he worked to introduce white audiences to a tradition of black musical protest that had been denied and overlooked by prior white collectors.

By the folk and blues revival of the 1960s, however, when his work would again seem apt in the context of the civil rights movement, Gellert and his collection of Negro Songs of Protest were a conspicuous absence. A few leading figures in the revival defamed Gellert as a fraud, dismissing his archive of black vernacular protest as a fabrication—an example of left-wing propaganda and white interference. A Sound History is the story of an individual life, an excavation of African American musical resistance and dominant white historiography, and a cultural history of radical possibility and reversal in the defining middle decades of the U.S. twentieth century.
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The Sound of Leadership
Presidential Communication in the Modern Age
Roderick P. Hart
University of Chicago Press, 1987
Why did Gerald Ford speak in public once every six hours during 1976? Why did no president spreak in Massachusetts during one ten-year period? Why did Jimmy Carter conduct public ceremonies four times more often than Harry Truman? Why are television viewers two-and-a-half times more likely to see a president speak on the nightly news than to hear him speak?

The Sound of Leadership answers these questions and many more. Based on analysis of nearly 10,000 presidential speeches delivered between 1945 and 1985, this book is the first comprehensive examination of the ways in which presidents Truman through Reagan have used the powers of communication to advance their political goals. This communication revolution has produced, Roderick P. Hart argues, a new form of governance, one in which public speech has come to be taken as political action. Using a rhetorical appraoch, Hart details the features of this new American presidency by carefully examining when and where presidents spoke in public during the last four decades and what they said. Even though presidents have been speaking more and more, Hart reveals, they have been saying less and less. Rather than leading the nation, the modern president usually offers only the hollow "sound" of leadership. Written with great flair and acuteness, The Sound of Leadership will become a standard guide to the voices of modern presidential politics.
[more]

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The Sound of Light
A History of Gospel Music
Don Cusic
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990
Don Cusic presents gospel music as part of the history of contemporary Christianity. From the psalms of the early Puritans through the hymns of Isaac Watts and the social activism of the Wesleys, gospel music was established in eighteenth-century America. With the camp meetings songs of the Kentucky Revival and the spirituals and hymns that stemmed from the Civil War and beyond, gospel music grew through the nineteenth century and expanded through new technologies in the twentieth century.
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The Sound of Memory
Themes from a Violinist’s Life
Rebecca Fischer
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
In The Sound of Memory, concert violinist Rebecca Fischer wrestles with the life of a performing artist in the twenty-first century, the physical and material components of memory, the nature of musical inheritance, and the gifts and pressures of a calling that runs generations deep. From memories of breastfeeding on concert tours, to the surprising ways her body remembers music she heard in the womb, to witnessing her children’s own evolving musicianship, Fischer shares her perspective as the first violinist of the renowned Chiara String Quartet and parent to young people exploring their gender identities amidst social upheaval and a pandemic. As she revisits geographies that have left marks on her life and creative practice over the years, she examines what we owe to our families, our communities, our art, and ourselves—ultimately exhorting us to consider both the individual and communal resonances of artistic expression and the meaning it brings to our shared lives.
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Sounding for Cool
Donald Morrill
Michigan State University Press, 2002

Sounding for Cool is about self-transformation, about growing up on one’s own as a product of contemporary America, and about how to become not just a man, but a contributing adult in society. Donald Morrill presents the day-to-day lives of seven young men (white, black, Hispanic, immigrant, middle-class, thick-headed, poor, and smart), who for various reasons have become homeless. Placed in a Transitional Living Program facility (TLP) by the courts, these men must learn to navigate in the world of “normal” values and reasonable rules. Streetwise and callow, trained to seek shortcuts or to make excuses, they struggle with the structures and assumptions inherent in living a law-abiding, bill-paying life. While sorting out their souls, they learn how to connect with others.
     In turn, Sounding for Cool scrutinizes the staff of the TLP, one woman and three men, who variously come to terms with their lives by settling accounts from the past. As a TLP volunteer, Donald Morrill often finds himself bridging the gap between staff and client. In the process of telling their stories, he chronicles his own journey to understand the past. Ultimately, Sounding for Cool asks the enduring questions, “Who am I in the world and what can I become?”

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Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas
Jairo Moreno
University of Chicago Press, 2023
How is Latin American music heard, by whom, and why?

Many in the United States believe Latin American musicians make “Latin music”—which carries with it a whole host of assumptions, definitions, and contradictions. In their own countries, these expatriate musicians might generate immense national pride or trigger suspicions of “national betrayals.” The making, sounding, and hearing of “Latin music” brings into being the complex array of concepts that constitute “Latin Americanism”—its fissures and paradoxes, but also its universal aspirations. Taking as its center musicians from or with declared roots in Latin America, Jairo Moreno presents us with an innovative analysis of how and why music emerges as a necessary but insufficient shorthand for defining and understanding Latin American, Latinx, and American experiences of modernity.
 
This close look at the growth of music-making by Latin American and Spanish-speaking musicians in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century reveals diverging understandings of music’s social and political possibilities for participation and belonging. Through the stories of musicians—Rubén Blades, Shakira, Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, and Miguel Zenón—Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas traces how artists use music to produce worlds and senses of the world at the ever-transforming conjunction of Latin America and the United States.
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The Sounding of the Whale
Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century
D. Graham Burnett
University of Chicago Press, 2011

From the Bible’s “Canst thou raise leviathan with a hook?” to Captain Ahab’s “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee!,” from the trials of Job to the legends of Sinbad, whales have breached in the human imagination as looming figures of terror, power, confusion, and mystery.

In the twentieth century, however, our understanding of and relationship to these superlatives of creation underwent some astonishing changes, and with The Sounding of the Whale, D. Graham Burnett tells the fascinating story of the transformation of cetaceans from grotesque monsters, useful only as wallowing kegs of fat and fertilizer, to playful friends of humanity, bellwethers of environmental devastation, and, finally, totems of the counterculture in the Age of Aquarius. When Burnett opens his story, ignorance reigns: even Nature was misclassifying whales at the turn of the century, and the only biological study of the species was happening in gruesome Arctic slaughterhouses. But in the aftermath of World War I, an international effort to bring rational regulations to the whaling industry led to an explosion of global research—and regulations that, while well-meaning, were quashed, or widely flouted, by whaling nations, the first shot in a battle that continues to this day. The book closes with a look at the remarkable shift in public attitudes toward whales that began in the 1960s, as environmental concerns and new discoveries about whale behavior combined to make whales an object of sentimental concern and public adulation.

A sweeping history, grounded in nearly a decade of research, The Sounding of the Whale tells a remarkable story of how science, politics, and simple human wonder intertwined to transform the way we see these behemoths from below.

[more]

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Sounding Real
Musicality and American Fiction at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Cristina L. Ruotolo
University of Alabama Press, 13
Examining American realist fiction as it was informed and shaped by the music of the period, Sounding Real sheds new light on the profound musical and cultural change at the turn of the twentieth century.
 
Sounding Real by Cristina L. Ruotolo examines landmark changes in American musical standards and tastes in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and the way they are reflected in American literature of the period. Whereas other interdisciplinary approaches to music and literature often focus on more recent popular music and black music that began with blues and jazz, Ruotolo addresses the literary response to the music that occurred in the decades before the Jazz Age.
 
By bringing together canonical and lesser-known works by authors like Theodore Dreiser, Kate Chopin, Harold Fredric, James Weldon Johnson, Willa Cather, and Gertrude Atherton, Ruotolo argues that new, emerging musical forms were breaking free from nineteenth-century constraints, and that the elemental authenticity or real-ness that this new music articulated sparked both interest and anxiety in literature: What are the effects of an emancipated musicality on self and society? How can literature dramatize musical encounters between people otherwise segregated by class, race, ethnicity, or gender?
 
By examining the influence of an increasingly aggressive and progressive musical marketplace on the realm of literature, Sounding Real depicts a dynamic dialogue between two art forms that itself leads to a broader discussion of how art speaks to society.
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Sounding Together
Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21st Century
Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Carol J. Oja, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the Twenty-21st Century is a multi-authored, collaboratively conceived book of essays that tackles key challenges facing scholars studying music of the United States in the early twenty-first century. This book encourages scholars in music circles and beyond to explore the intersections between social responsibility, community engagement, and academic practices through the simple act of working together. The book’s essays—written by a diverse and cross-generational group of scholars, performers, and practitioners—demonstrate how collaboration can harness complementary skills and nourish comparative boundary-crossing through interdisciplinary research. The chapters of the volume address issues of race, nationalism, mobility, cultural domination, and identity; as well as the crisis of the Trump era and the political power of music. Each contribution to the volume is written collaboratively by two scholars, bringing together contributors who represent a mix of career stages and positions. Through the practice of and reflection on collaboration, Sounding Together breaks out of long-established paradigms of solitude in humanities scholarship and works toward social justice in the study of music.

[more]

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Soundless Roar
Stories, Poems, and Drawings
Ava Kadishson Schieber
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Soundless Roar introduces a distinctive new voice to Holocaust literature. Ava Kadishson Schieber, author, poet, and artist, spent her teenage years hiding from the Nazis on a Serbian farm. Her cultured speech and city-bred body language could have betrayed her, so she was forced into near isolation. Schieber began drawing while in hiding, and she continues to express herself today with the same urgency. The drawings and writings in Soundless Roar are the culmination of many years of artistry. In her work, she shares her memories of loved ones killed in the Holocaust: they are "friendly ghosts" that will always be a part of her.

Schieber's drawings, paintings, poetry, and prose are all intimate reflections of one another. Her experience forged the unusual sense of time that shapes Schieber's stories. In her preface, Phyllis Lassner writes: "The timetable of Ava's stories often consists of circles within circles, of patterns of an intertwined past, the past present of hiding, and the present looking back at those distinctly separate but inseparable pasts."
[more]

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Sounds from the Other Side
Afro–South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music
Elliott H. Powell
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

A sixty-year history of Afro–South Asian musical collaborations

From Beyoncé’s South Asian music–inspired Super Bowl Halftime performance, to jazz artists like John and Alice Coltrane’s use of Indian song structures and spirituality in their work, to Jay-Z and Missy Elliott’s high-profile collaborations with diasporic South Asian artists such as the Panjabi MC and MIA, African American musicians have frequently engaged South Asian cultural productions in the development of Black music culture. Sounds from the Other Side traces such engagements through an interdisciplinary analysis of the political implications of African American musicians’ South Asian influence since the 1960s.

Elliott H. Powell asks, what happens when we consider Black musicians’ South Asian sonic explorations as distinct from those of their white counterparts? He looks to Black musical genres of jazz, funk, and hip hop and examines the work of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Rick James, OutKast, Timbaland, Beyoncé, and others, showing how Afro–South Asian music in the United States is a dynamic, complex, and contradictory cultural site where comparative racialization, transformative gender and queer politics, and coalition politics intertwine. Powell situates this cultural history within larger global and domestic sociohistorical junctures that link African American and South Asian diasporic communities in the United States.

The long historical arc of Afro–South Asian music in Sounds from the Other Side interprets such music-making activities as highly political endeavors, offering an essential conversation about cross-cultural musical exchanges between racially marginalized musicians.

[more]

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The Sounds of Capitalism
Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture
Timothy D. Taylor
University of Chicago Press, 2012
From the early days of radio through the rise of television after World War II to the present, music has been used more and more to sell goods and establish brand identities. And since the 1920s, songs originally written for commercials have become popular songs, and songs written for a popular audience have become irrevocably associated with specific brands and products. Today, musicians move flexibly between the music and advertising worlds, while the line between commercial messages and popular music has become increasingly blurred.

Timothy D. Taylor tracks the use of music in American advertising for nearly a century, from variety shows like The Clicquot Club Eskimos to the rise of the jingle, the postwar upsurge in consumerism, and the more complete fusion of popular music and consumption in the 1980s and after. The Sounds of Capitalism is the first book to tell truly the history of music used in advertising in the United States and is an original contribution to this little-studied part of our cultural history.  

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Sounds of Crossing
Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño
Alex E. Chávez
Duke University Press, 2017
In Sounds of Crossing Alex E. Chávez explores the contemporary politics of Mexican migrant cultural expression manifest in the sounds and poetics of huapango arribeño, a musical genre originating from north-central Mexico. Following the resonance of huapango's improvisational performance within the lives of audiences, musicians, and himself—from New Year's festivities in the highlands of Guanajuato, Mexico, to backyard get-togethers along the back roads of central Texas—Chávez shows how Mexicans living on both sides of the border use expressive culture to construct meaningful communities amid the United States’ often vitriolic immigration politics. Through Chávez's writing, we gain an intimate look at the experience of migration and how huapango carries the voices of those in Mexico, those undertaking the dangerous trek across the border, and those living in the United States. Illuminating how huapango arribeño’s performance refigures the sociopolitical and economic terms of migration through aesthetic means, Chávez adds fresh and compelling insights into the ways transnational music-making is at the center of everyday Mexican migrant life.
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The Sounds of Place
Music and the American Cultural Landscape
Denise Von Glahn
University of Illinois Press, 2021
Composers like Charles Ives, Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich created works that indelibly commemorated American places. Denise Von Glahn analyzes the soundscapes of fourteen figures whose "place pieces" tell us much about the nation's search for its own voice and about its ever-changing sense of self. She connects each composer's feelings about the United States and their reasons for creating a piece to the music, while analyzing their compositional techniques, tunes, and styles. Approaching the compositions in chronological order, Von Glahn reveals how works that celebrated the wilderness gave way to music engaged with humanity's influence--benign and otherwise--on the landscape, before environmentalism inspired a return to nature themes in the late twentieth century.

Wide-ranging and astute, The Sounds of Place explores high art music's role in the making of national myth and memory.

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Sounds of the New Deal
The Federal Music Project in the West
Peter Gough
University of Illinois Press, 2015
At its peak the Federal Music Project (FMP) employed nearly 16,000 people who reached millions of Americans through performances, composing, teaching, and folksong collection and transcription. In Sounds of the New Deal, Peter Gough explores how the FMP's activities in the West shaped a new national appreciation for the diversity of American musical expression.
 
From the onset, administrators and artists debated whether to represent highbrow, popular, or folk music in FMP activities. Though the administration privileged using "good" music to educate the public, in the West local preferences regularly trumped national priorities and allowed diverse vernacular musics to be heard. African American and Hispanic music found unprecedented popularity while the cultural mosaic illuminated by American folksong exemplified the spirit of the Popular Front movement. These new musical expressions combined the radical sensibilities of an invigorated Left with nationalistic impulses. At the same time, they blended traditional patriotic themes with an awareness of the country's varied ethnic musical heritage and vast--but endangered--store of grassroots music.
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Sounds of the New Deal
The Federal Music Project in the West
Peter Gough
University of Illinois Press, 2015
At its peak, the Federal Music Project (FMP) employed nearly 16,000 people who reached millions of Americans through performances, composing, teaching, and folksong collection and transcription. In Sounds of the New Deal , Peter Gough explores how the FMP's activities in the West shaped a new national appreciation for the diversity of American musical expression. From the onset, administrators and artists debated whether to represent highbrow, popular, or folk music in FMP activities. Though the administration privileged using "good" music to educate the public, in the West local preferences regularly trumped national priorities and allowed diverse vernacular musics to be heard. African American and Hispanic music found unprecedented popularity while the cultural mosaic illuminated by American folksong exemplified the spirit of the Popular Front movement. These new musical expressions combined the radical sensibilities of an invigorated Left with nationalistic impulses. At the same time, they blended traditional patriotic themes with an awareness of the country's varied ethnic musical heritage and vast--but endangered--store of grassroots music.
[more]

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Soundtracks of Asian America
Navigating Race through Musical Performance
Grace Wang
Duke University Press, 2015
In Soundtracks of Asian America, Grace Wang explores how Asian Americans use music to construct narratives of self, race, class, and belonging in national and transnational spaces. She highlights how they navigate racialization in different genres by considering the experiences of Asians and Asian Americans in Western classical music, U.S. popular music, and Mandopop (Mandarin-language popular music). Her study encompasses the perceptions and motivations of middle-class Chinese and Korean immigrant parents intensely involved in their children's classical music training, and of Asian and Asian American classical musicians whose prominence in their chosen profession is celebrated by some and undermined by others. Wang interviews young Asian American singer-songwriters who use YouTube to contest the limitations of a racialized U.S. media landscape, and she investigates the transnational modes of belonging forged by Asian American pop stars pursuing recording contracts and fame in East Asia. Foregrounding musical spaces where Asian Americans are particularly visible, Wang examines how race matters and operates in the practices and institutions of music making.
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Soundworks
Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production
Anthony Reed
Duke University Press, 2021
In Soundworks Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially. Soundwork is Reed’s term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes’s collaboration with Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka’s work with the New York Art Quartet, Jayne Cortez’s albums with the Firespitters, and the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the product of material, technical, sensual, and ideological processes. 
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The South As It Is
1865–1866
John Richard Dennett, with a new introduction by Caroline E. Janney
University of Alabama Press, 2010

This classic report originally appeared as a series of articles in the Nation between July 8, 1865, and April 11, 1866. Dennett traveled in seven states—Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi—at the very beginning of Reconstruction. His remarkably prophetic account of the recently defeated South is a major source for the history of this transition.

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South Carolina Provincials
Loyalists in British Service During the American Revolution
Jim Piecuch
Westholme Publishing, 2023
The Loyalists who supported the British during the American Revolution have frequently been neglected in accounts of that conflict. Nevertheless, Loyalists made significant efforts to assist British forces in restoring royal control of the thirteen colonies. This was especially true in South Carolina, where backcountry Loyalists under almost-forgotten leaders such as Joseph Robinson and Euan McLaurin challenged the Revolutionary movement in 1775. Although their initial efforts were unsuccessful, Robinson, McLaurin, and hundreds of their followers eventually made their way to British East Florida, where they organized into a provincial regiment called the South Carolina Royalists. Operating in concert with British efforts, the Royalists were part of many notable actions from 1778 to 1781, including the defenses of East Florida and Savannah, Georgia, and the battles of Briar Creek, Stono Ferry, Musgrove’s Mill, and Hobkirk’s Hill. A second provincial regiment created in 1780, Major John Harrison’s South Carolina Rangers, saw considerably action in operations against partisans under Francis Marion. When the British were forced to evacuate their backcountry posts in 1781, the Royalists, Rangers, and three troops of Provincial Light Dragoons raised earlier in the year withdrew first to Charleston and then East Florida. From there, many went to Canada at the war’s end, with others dispersing to different British colonies to begin new lives after their strenuous but unsuccessful effort on behalf of king and country.
            In South Carolina Provincials: Loyalists in British Service During the American Revolution, historian Jim Piecuch provide the first comprehensive history of those South Carolinians who took up arms to assist the British during their attempt to quell the rebellion in the South. Based on primary source research including records rarely consulted, the result provides a much clearer picture of the American Revolution at the local level in Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas.
 
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The South in Modern America
A Region at Odds
Dewey W. Grantham
University of Arkansas Press, 2001
The South in Modern America is a lively and illuminating account of the Southern experience since the end of Reconstruction. In the twentieth century, as in the nineteenth, the South has been the region most sharply at odds with the rest of the nation. No other part of the country has as clear-cut a sectional image. The interplay between the South, the North, and the rest of the nation represents a rich and instructive part of the United States history, illustrating much of the nation's conflict and tension, the way it has tried to reconcile divergent issues, and its struggles to realize its historical ideals. In this new treatment of modern Southern history, Dewey W. Grantham illuminates the features that make the South a distinctive region while clarifying how it has converged socially and politically with the rest of the country during this century.
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South Jersey Towns
History and Legends
McMahon, William
Rutgers University Press, 1973
No region in the nation has a richer heritage than the right counties of South Jersey--Cape May, Salem, Cumberland, Atlantic, Gloucester, Camden, Burlington, and Ocean. In this book William McMahon has collected an assortment of little-known information and historical anecdotes about the people and places of this area. 
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South of Pico
African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s
Kellie Jones
Duke University Press, 2017
Named a Best Art Book of 2017 by the New York Times and Artforum

In South of Pico Kellie Jones explores how the artists in Los Angeles's black communities during the 1960s and 1970s created a vibrant, productive, and engaged activist arts scene in the face of structural racism. Emphasizing the importance of African American migration, as well as L.A.'s housing and employment politics, Jones shows how the work of black Angeleno artists such as Betye Saar, Charles White, Noah Purifoy, and Senga Nengudi spoke to the dislocation of migration, L.A.'s urban renewal, and restrictions on black mobility. Jones characterizes their works as modern migration narratives that look to the past to consider real and imagined futures. She also attends to these artists' relationships with gallery and museum culture and the establishment of black-owned arts spaces. With South of Pico, Jones expands the understanding of the histories of black arts and creativity in Los Angeles and beyond. 
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South Side Girls
Growing Up in the Great Migration
Marcia Chatelain
Duke University Press, 2015
In South Side Girls Marcia Chatelain recasts Chicago's Great Migration through the lens of black girls. Focusing on the years between 1910 and 1940, when Chicago's black population quintupled, Chatelain describes how Chicago's black social scientists, urban reformers, journalists and activists formulated a vulnerable image of urban black girlhood that needed protecting. She argues that the construction and meaning of black girlhood shifted in response to major economic, social, and cultural changes and crises, and that it reflected parents' and community leaders' anxieties about urbanization and its meaning for racial progress. Girls shouldered much of the burden of black aspiration, as adults often scrutinized their choices and behavior, and their well-being symbolized the community's moral health. Yet these adults were not alone in thinking about the Great Migration, as girls expressed their views as well. Referencing girls' letters and interviews, Chatelain uses their powerful stories of hope, anticipation and disappointment to highlight their feelings and thoughts, and in so doing, she helps restore the experiences of an understudied population to the Great Migration's complex narrative.
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South Side Impresarios
How Race Women Transformed Chicago's Classical Music Scene
Samantha Ege
University of Illinois Press, 2024
Between the world wars, Chicago Race women nurtured a local yet widely resonant Black classical music community entwined with Black civic life. Samantha Ege tells the stories of the Black women whose acumen and energy transformed Chicago’s South Side into a wellspring of music making.

Ege focuses on composers like Florence Price, Nora Holt, and Margaret Bonds not as anomalies but as artists within an expansive cultural flowering. Overcoming racism and sexism, Black women practitioners instilled others with the skill and passion to make classical music while Race women like Maude Roberts George, Estella Bonds, Neota McCurdy Dyett, and Beulah Mitchell Hill built and fostered institutions central to the community. Ege takes readers inside the backgrounds, social lives, and female-led networks of the participants while shining a light on the scene’s audiences, supporters, and training grounds. What emerges is a history of Black women and classical music in Chicago and the still-vital influence of the world they created.

A riveting counter to a history of silence, South Side Impresarios gives voice to an overlooked facet of the Black Chicago Renaissance.

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South Slavs in Michigan
Daniel Cetinich
Michigan State University Press, 2003

The South Slavs of Michigan—Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Macedonians, and Bosnian Muslims—are a microcosm of the immigration waves of southern and eastern Europeans who came to the United States between 1880 and 1924. History has almost forgotten these immigrants, who were instrumental in developing the large urban centers of Michigan and the United States, and who specifically contributed to development of the auto industry and struck in 1913–1914 for better working conditions in the copper mines of the Upper Peninsula. While labor problems were the primary obstacles confronting Michigan’s South Slavs, the painful process of acculturation has since dimmed their very real accomplishments. As Daniel Cetinich shows, South Slavs helped shape both a regional and national civilization in North America with their hands, backs, feet, and the labor organizations they helped create.

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The Southern and Central Alabama Expeditions of Clarence Bloomfield Moore
Clarence Bloomfield Moore, edited and introduced by Craig T. Sheldon Jr.
University of Alabama Press, 2001

Covering 19 years of excavations, this volume provides an invaluable collection of Moore's pioneering archaeological investigations along Alabama's waterways.

In 1996, The University of Alabama Press published The Moundville Expeditions of Clarence Bloomfield Moore, which covered a large part of Moore's early archaeological expeditions to the state of Alabama. This volume collects the balance of Moore's Alabama expeditions, with the exception of those Moore made along the Tennessee River, which will be collected in another, forthcoming volume focusing on the Tennessee basin.

This volume includes:

Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Alabama River (1899);

Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Tombigbee River(1901);

a portion of Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Northwest Florida Coast (1901);

The So-Called "Hoe-Shaped Implement" (1903);

Aboriginal Urn-Burial in the United States (1904);

A Form of Urn-Burial on Mobile Bay (1905);

Certain Aboriginal Remains of the Lower Tombigbee River (1905);

Certain Aboriginal Remains on Mobile Bay and on Mississippi Sound (1905);

a portion of Mounds of the Lower Chattahoochee and Lower Flint Rivers (1907);

a portion of The Northwest Florida Coast Revisited(1918).

Craig Sheldon's comprehensive introduction focuses both on the Moore expeditions and on subsequent archaeological excavations at
sites investigated by Moore. Sheldon places Moore's archaeological work in the context of his times and against the backdrop of similar investigations in the Southeast. Sheldon discusses practical matters, such as the various assistants Moore employed and their roles in these historic expeditions. He provides brief vignettes of daily life on the Gopher and describes Moore's work habits, revealing professional and personal biographical details previously unknown about this enigmatic archaeologist.

 

[more]

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Southern Baptists Re-Observed
Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Politics
Keith Harper
University of Tennessee Press, 2022
In 1993, sociologist Nancy Ammerman published an edited collection, Southern Baptists Observed, that assayed the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) as the conservative takeover of the denomination was triumphant and expanding. This volume examines the state of the SBC now that it has been under conservative control for a generation. Rather than asking where that change in leadership came from, the question here is what has happened since.
 
The sweeping success of the conservative takeover—based on enforcing doctrinal fidelity, especially on issues like biblical inerrancy and so-called complementarianism, a rejection of modern, secular values, and advanced international missionary work—veiled a weakness at its very heart. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the conservative resurgence failed to attract new members and, even worse, the younger generation who had grown up in the SBC were fleeing the denomination—nearly half of them are leaving the church as adults and never coming back. The contributors to this volume all offer insights into the question of why. While conservatives dominate the SBC’s governance, they have failed to resolve issues that preoccupy its members and the larger society, including those related to gender, homosexuality, race, and abuse.
 
The essays are grouped under four broad categories: Truth and Freedom: Baptist Institutions and Contentious Issues; Defining and Defending Biblical Truth: Staking the Boundaries; Apologies, Reconciliation, and Continuing Reality; and the View from Outside. With an introduction by editor Keith Harper contextualizing the history of the movement and the issues it faces today, this collection is sure to add new insight into this influential denomination.
 
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Southern Boy in Blue
Memoir if Marcus Woodcock
Kenneth W. Noe
University of Tennessee Press, 1996
Of the one hundred thousand Southerners who donned Federal uniforms during the Civil War, more than forty thousand were Tennesseeans. Not surprisingly, most came from the Appalachian counties of East Tennessee—but not all. A Middle Tennessean named Marcus Woodcock, not yet nineteen when the war began, was among the exceptions.

A Southern Boy in Blue is Woodcock's own account of his experiences during the war. After joining the 9th Kentucky Infantry, Woodcock barely missed the battle of Shiloh—a bout of measles kept him from the front lines—but he went on to see action at Stones River, Chickamauga, and Missionary Ridge. He also participated in the Atlanta campaign and the siege of Corinth and was among the reserves at the battle of Perryville. In three years he rose from the rank of private to that of first lieutenant. Since Woodcock wrote his memoir in 1865 (instead of much later as many veterans did), his descriptions of battles, camp life, and period politics have a special vividness. Woodcock's account is also significant in showing how his views and opinions of the war changed over time. Initially opposed to the use of black troops and to Lincoln's re-election, he eventually converted to both positions and describes the process by which he transformed his thinking.

Woodcock's memoir has been meticulously annotated by Kenneth Noe, who also provides an introduction that places Woodcock's experiences in historical context and describes his postwar career as a prominent Tennessee legislator, attorney, business administrator, and Baptist layman. The book is not only a compelling personal account but an important addition to the literature on Southern Unionism.

The Editor: Kenneth W. Noe is associate professor of history at West Georgia College. He is the author of Southwest Virginia's Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis.

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Southern Capitalism
The Political Economy of North Carolina, 1880–1980
Philip J. Wood
Duke University Press, 1986
Southern Capitalism challenges prevailing views of Southern development by arguing that the persisting peculiarities of the Southern economy—such as low wages and high poverty rates—have not resulted from barriers to capitalist development, nor from the lingering influence of planter values. Wood argues that these peculiarities can instead be best understood as the consequence of a strategy of capitalist development, based on the creation and preservation of social conditions and relations conducive to the above-average exploitation of labor by capital. focusing on the evolving relationship between capital and labor as the core of this strategy, Wood follows the process of capitalist industrialization in North Carolina from its beginnings in the aftermath of the Civil War to the 1980s.
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Southern Churches in Crisis Revisited
Samuel S. Hill
University of Alabama Press, 1999

Hill’s landmark work in southern religious history returns to print updated and expanded—and compellingly relevant.

In 1966, Samuel S. Hill’s Southern Churches in Crisis argued that southern Protestantism, a cornerstone of white southern society and culture, was shirking its moral duty by refusing to join in the fight for racial justice. Hill predicted that the church was risking its standing in southern society and that it would ultimately decline in influence and power. A groundbreaking study at the time, Hill’s book helped establish southern religious history as a field of scholarly inquiry. Three decades later, Southern Churches in Crisis continues to be widely read, quoted, and cited.

In Southern Churches in Crisis Revisited, which reprints the 1966 text in full, Hill reexamines his earlier predictions in an introductory essay that also describes how the study of religion in the South has become a major field of scholarly inquiry. Hill skillfully engages his critics by integrating new perspectives and recent scholarship. He suggests new areas for exploration and provides a selected bibliography of key studies in southern religious history published in the three decades subsequent to the original appearance of this groundbreaking work.
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Southern Colonial Backcountry
Interdisciplinary Perspectives
David Colin Crass
University of Tennessee Press, 1998
This book brings a variety of fresh perspectives to bear on the diverse people and settlements of the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century southern backcountry. Reflecting the growth of interdisciplinary studies in addressing the backcountry, the volume specifically points to the use of history, archaeology, geography, and material culture studies in examining communities on the southern frontier. Through a series of case studies and overviews, the contributors use cross-disciplinary analysis to look at community formation and maintenance in the backcountry areas of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

These essays demonstrate how various combinations of research strategies, conceptual frameworks, and data can afford a new look at a geographical area and its settlement. The contributors offer views on the evolution of backcountry communities by addressing such topics as migration, kinship, public institutions, transportation and communications networks, land markets and real estate claims, and the role of agricultural development in the emergence of a regional economy. In their discussions of individuals in the backcountry, they also explore the multiracial and multiethnic character of southern frontier society.

Yielding new insights unlikely to emerge under a single disciplinary analysis, The Southern Colonial Backcountry  is a unique volume that highlights the need for interdisciplinary approaches to the backcountry while identifying common research problems in the field.

The Editors: David Colin Crass is the archaeological services unit manager at the Historic Preservation Division, Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

Steven D. Smith is the head of the Cultural Resources Consulting Division of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Antrhopology.

Martha A. Zierden is curator of historical archaeology at The Charleston Museum.

Richard D. Brooks is the administrative manager of the Savannah River Archeological Research Program, South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Antrhopology.

The Contributors: Monica L. Beck, Edward Cashin, Charles H. Faulkner, Elizabeth Arnett Fields, Warren R. Hofstra, David C. Hsiung, Kenneth E. Lewis, Donald W. Linebaugh, Turk McCleskey, Robert D. Mitchell, Michael J. Puglisi, Daniel B. Thorp.
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Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross
Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Old South
Andrew Henry Stern
University of Alabama Press, 2012
Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross examines the complex and often overlooked relationships between Catholics and Protestants in the antebellum South.

In sharp contrast to many long-standing presumptions about mistrust or animosity between these two groups, this study proposes that Catholic and Protestant interactions in the South were characterized more by cooperation than by conflict.
 
Andrew H. M. Stern argues that Catholics worked to integrate themselves into southern society without compromising their religious beliefs and that many Protestants accepted and supported them. Catholic leaders demonstrated the compatibility of Catholicism with American ideals and institutions, and Protestants recognized Catholics as useful citizens, true Americans, and loyal southerners, in particular citing their support for slavery and their hatred of abolitionism.
 
Mutual assistance between the two groups proved most clear in shared public spaces, with Catholics and Protestants participating in each other’s institutions and funding each other’s enterprises. Catholics and Protestants worshipped in each other’s churches, studied in each other’s schools, and recovered or died in each other’s hospitals.
 
In many histories of southern religion, typically thought of as Protestant, Catholicism tends to be absent. Likewise, in studies of American Catholicism, Catholic relationships with Protestants, including southern Protestants, are rarely discussed. Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross is the first book to demonstrate in detail the ways in which many Protestants actively fostered the growth of American Catholicism. Stern complicates the dominant historical view of interreligious animosity and offers an unexpected model of religious pluralism that helped to shape southern culture as we know it today.
 
 
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The Southern Debate over Slavery
Volume 1: Petitions to Southern Legislatures, 1778-1864
Edited by Loren Schweninger
University of Illinois Press, 2001
An incomparably rich source of period information, The Southern Debate over Slavery offers a representative sampling of the thousands of petitions about issues of race and slavery that southerners submitted to their state legislatures between the American Revolution and the Civil War.
 
These petitions, filed by slaveholders and nonslaveholders, slaves and free blacks, women and men, abolitionists and staunch defenders of slavery, constitute a uniquely important primary source. Petitioners were compelled to present the most accurate and fully documented case they could, since their claims would be subject to public scrutiny and legal verification. Unlike the many reminiscences and autobiographies of the period, these petitions record with great immediacy and minute detail the dynamics, common understandings, and legal restrictions and parameters that shaped southern society during this period.
 
Arranged chronologically, with their original spelling and idiosyncratic phraseology intact, these documents reveal the grim and brutal nature of human bondage, the fears of whites who lived among large concentrations of blacks, and the workings of the complicated legal system designed to control blacks. They tell about the yearning of bondspeople to gain their freedom, the attitudes of freed blacks who were forced to leave the South, and the efforts of African Americans to overcome harsh and restrictive laws. They also underscore the unique situation of free women of color and the reliance of manumitted (formally freed) blacks on their former owners for protection, travel passes, guardianship papers, and reference letters.
 
Astonishingly intimate and frank,The Southern Debate over Slavery illuminates how slavery penetrated nearly every aspect of southern life and how various groups of southerners responded to the difficulties they confronted as a result of living in a slave society.
 
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The Southern Debate over Slavery
Volume 2: Petitions to Southern County Courts, 1775-1867
Edited by Loren Schweninger
University of Illinois Press, 2007

An incomparably rich source of period information, the second volume of The Southern Debate over Slavery offers a representative and extraordinary sampling of the thousands of petitions about issues of race and slavery that southerners submitted to county courts between the American Revolution and Civil War. These petitions, filed by slaveholders and nonslaveholders, slaves and free blacks, women and men, abolitionists and staunch defenders of slavery, constitute a uniquely important primary source. The collection records with great immediacy and minute detail the dynamics and legal restrictions that shaped southern society.

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The Southern Elite and Social Change
Essays in Honor of Willard B. Gatewood, Jr.
Randy Finley
University of Arkansas Press, 2002
Elites have shaped southern life and communities, argues the distinguished historian Willard Gatewood. These essays—written by Gatewood's colleagues and former students in his honor—explore the influence of particular elites in the South from the American Revolution to the Little Rock integration crisis. They discuss not only the power of elites to shape the experiences of the ordinary people, but the tensions and negotiations between elites in a particular locale, whether those elites were white or black, urban or rural, or male or female. Subjects include the particular kinds of power available to black elites in Savannah, Georgia, during the American Revolution; the transformation of a southern secessionist into an anti-slavery activist during the Civil War; a Tenessee "aristocrat of color" active in politics from Reconstruction to World War II; middle-class Southern women, both black and white, in the New Deal and the Little Rock integration crisis; and the different brands of paternalism in Arkansas plantations during the Jacksonian and Jim Crow eras and in the postwar Georgia carpet industry.
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Southern Exposure
Making the South Safe for Democracy
Stetson Kennedy
University of Alabama Press, 2011

Using thorough and stark statistics, Kennedy describes a South emerging from World War II, coming to grips with the racism and feudalism that had held it back for generations. He includes an all-out Who’s Who, based on his own undercover investigations, of the "hate-mongers, race-racketeers, and terrorists who swore that apartheid must go on forever." The first paperback edition brings to a new generation of readers Kennedy’s searing profile of Dixie before the civil rights movement.

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Southern Exposure
The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago's South Side
Lee Bey; Foreword by Amanda Willliams
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side is the first book devoted to the South Side’s rich and unfairly ignored architectural heritage. With lively, insightful text and gallery-quality color photographs by noted Chicago architecture expert Lee Bey, Southern Exposure documents the remarkable and largely unsung architecture of the South Side. The book features an array of landmarks—from a Space Age dry cleaner to a nineteenth-century lagoon that meanders down the middle of a working-class neighborhood street—that are largely absent from arts discourse, in no small part because they sit in a predominantly African American and Latino section of town better known as a place of disinvestment, abandonment, and violence. 

Inspired by Bey’s 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial exhibition, Southern Exposure visits sixty sites, including lesser-known but important work by luminaries such as Jeanne Gang, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Eero Saarinen, as well as buildings by pioneering black architects such as Walter T. Bailey, John Moutoussamy, and Roger Margerum. 

Pushing against the popular  narrative that depicts Chicago’s South Side as an architectural wasteland, Bey shows beautiful and intact buildings and neighborhoods  that reflect the value—and potential—of the area. Southern Exposure offers much to delight architecture aficionados and writers, native Chicagoans and guests to the city alike.
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Southern Fried
Going Whole Hog in a State of Wonder
Rex Nelson
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2016

For decades, Rex Nelson has been traveling Arkansas. He learned to love the back roads, small towns, and people of the state while going on trips with his father, who sold athletic supplies to high schools. They sat in old Depression-era gyms built by the Works Progress Administration, ate in small-town cafes, and waded in streams on warm spring days.

Throughout his career as a sportswriter, political writer, senior staff member in the governor’s office, presidential appointee to the Delta Regional Authority, and now corporate communications director for Simmons Bank, Nelson has written millions of words about Arkansas and its people.

In this collection of columns from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Nelson brings to life the personalities, communities, festivals, and tourist attractions that make Arkansas unique. As he says, “Arkansas is a hard place to explain to outsiders. We’re mostly Southern but also a bit Midwestern and a tad Southwestern. The Ozarks are different from the pine woods of the Gulf Coastal Plain, and the Delta is different from the Ouachitas. Invariably, though, those who take the time to get off the main roads and get to know the real Arkansas are entranced by the place.”

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The Southern Frontier 1670-1732
Verner Crane, with a new introduction by Steven C. Hahn
University of Alabama Press, 2004

A classic resource on the struggle for dominance in southern North America during the colonial period

This volume recounts the clashes and intrigues that played out over the landscape of the Old Southwest and across six decades as the Spanish, French, British, and ultimately Americans vied for control. Rivalry began soon after initial discovery, mapping, and exploration as the world powers, particularly England and France, competed for control of the lucrative fur trade in the Mississippi valley. The French attempted to establish trade networks stretching from the Atlantic Ocean inland to the Mississippi River and northward from ports on the Gulf of Mexico to the Ohio River. But they found the British already entrenched there.

Verner Crane guides us through this multinational struggle and navigates the border wars and diplomatic intrigues that played crucial roles in the settlement of the South by Euro-Americans. In his new introduction, Steven Hahn places the work in the context of its time, sketches its publication history, and provides biographical information on Crane.

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Southern Heritage on Display
Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism
Edited by Celeste Ray
University of Alabama Press, 2002
How ritualized public ceremonies affirm or challenge cultural identities associated with the American South

W. J. Cash's 1941 observation that “there are many Souths and many cultural traditions among them” is certainly validated by this book. Although the Civil War and its “lost cause” tradition continues to serve as a cultural root paradigm in celebrations, both uniting and dividing loyalties, southerners also embrace a panoply of public rituals—parades, cook-offs, kinship homecomings, church assemblies, music spectacles, and material culture exhibitions—that affirm other identities. From the Appalachian uplands to the Mississippi Delta, from Kentucky bluegrass to Carolina piedmont, southerners celebrate in festivals that showcase their diverse cultural backgrounds and their mythic beliefs about themselves.
 
The ten essays of this cohesive, interdisciplinary collection present event-centered research from various fields of study—anthropology, geography, history, and literature—to establish a rich, complex picture of the stereotypically “Solid South.” Topics include the Mardi Gras Indian song cycle as a means of expressing African-American identity in New Orleans; powwow performances and Native American traditions in southeast North Carolina; religious healings in southern Appalachian communities; Mexican Independence Day festivals in central Florida; and, in eastern Tennessee, bonding ceremonies of melungeons who share Indian, Scots Irish, Mediterranean, and African ancestry. Seen together, these public heritage displays reveal a rich “creole” of cultures that have always been a part of southern life and that continue to affirm a flourishing regionalism.
This book will be valuable to students and scholars of cultural anthropology, American studies, and southern history; academic and public libraries; and general readers interested in the American South. It contributes a vibrant, colorful layer of understanding to the continuously emerging picture of complexity in this region historically depicted by simple stereotypes.
 
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Southern Horrors
Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching
Crystal N. Feimster
Harvard University Press, 2011

Between 1880 and 1930, close to 200 women were murdered by lynch mobs in the American South. Many more were tarred and feathered, burned, whipped, or raped. In this brutal world of white supremacist politics and patriarchy, a world violently divided by race, gender, and class, black and white women defended themselves and challenged the male power brokers. Crystal Feimster breaks new ground in her story of the racial politics of the postbellum South by focusing on the volatile issue of sexual violence.

Pairing the lives of two Southern women—Ida B. Wells, who fearlessly branded lynching a white tool of political terror against southern blacks, and Rebecca Latimer Felton, who urged white men to prove their manhood by lynching black men accused of raping white women—Feimster makes visible the ways in which black and white women sought protection and political power in the New South. While Wells was black and Felton was white, both were journalists, temperance women, suffragists, and anti-rape activists. By placing their concerns at the center of southern politics, Feimster illuminates a critical and novel aspect of southern racial and sexual dynamics. Despite being on opposite sides of the lynching question, both Wells and Felton sought protection from sexual violence and political empowerment for women.

Southern Horrors provides a startling view into the Jim Crow South where the precarious and subordinate position of women linked black and white anti-rape activists together in fragile political alliances. It is a story that reveals how the complex drama of political power, race, and sex played out in the lives of Southern women.

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Southern Illinois University at 150 Years
Growth, Accomplishments, and Challenges
Edited by John S. Jackson with a Foreword by Carlo Montemagno and Contributions by Steve Buhman and Vanessa A. Sneed
Southern Illinois University Press, 2019
Chartered in 1869, Southern Illinois University has been a stalwart presence on the southern Illinois landscape for a century and a half. This book celebrates the 150th anniversary of the university’s founding by exploring in depth its history since 1969, when the last book to celebrate a major anniversary was published.

Chapters reflect on SIU’s successful athletics program, the various colleges and departments within the university, the diverse holdings and collections of the library, the unique innovative research enterprises, and special programs such as the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute and Touch of Nature Environmental Center.

Although SIU may be a typical large public university in many ways, its unique location, history, and culture have made it a distinct institution of higher education. Located close to the Shawnee National Forest and Giant City State Park, the landscape is an indelible part of SIU, contributing to both the beauty of the university grounds and the campus culture.

The university’s sesquicentennial provides a wonderful opportunity to revisit all that makes SIU amazing. Illustrated with 306 photographs of theater and music performances, art, sports, past and present students, faculty, staff, administration, politicians, community members, successful alums, distinguished visitors, and patrons of the university buildings, and landscapes, Southern Illinois University at 150 Years captures the university’s story in all its vivid color.
 
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The Southern Journey of a Civil War Marine
The Illustrated Note-Book of Henry O. Gusley
Edited and annotated by Edward T. Cotham, Jr.
University of Texas Press, 2006

On September 28, 1863, the Galveston Tri-Weekly News caught its readers' attention with an item headlined "A Yankee Note-Book." It was the first installment of a diary confiscated from U.S. Marine Henry O. Gusley, who had been captured at the Battle of Sabine Pass. Gusley's diary proved so popular with readers that they clamored for more, causing the newspaper to run each excerpt twice until the whole diary was published. For many in Gusley's Confederate readership, his diary provided a rare glimpse into the opinions and feelings of an ordinary Yankee—an enemy whom, they quickly discovered, it would be easy to regard as a friend.

This book contains the complete text of Henry Gusley's Civil War diary, expertly annotated and introduced by Edward Cotham. One of the few journals that have survived from U.S. Marines who served along the Gulf Coast, it records some of the most important naval campaigns of the Civil War, including the spectacular Union success at New Orleans and the embarrassing defeats at Galveston and Sabine Pass. It also offers an unmatched portrait of daily life aboard ship. Accompanying the diary entries are previously unpublished drawings by Daniel Nestell, a doctor who served in the same flotilla and eventually on the same ship as Gusley, which depict many of the locales and events that Gusley describes.

Together, Gusley's diary and Nestell's drawings are like picture postcards from the Civil War—vivid, literary, often moving dispatches from one of "Uncle Sam's nephews in the Gulf."

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Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights
Organizing Memphis Workers
Michael K. Honey
University of Illinois Press, 1993
Widely praised upon publication and now considered a classic study, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights chronicles the southern industrial union movement from the Great Depression to the Cold War, a history that created the context for the sanitation workers' strike that brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis in April 1968. Michael K. Honey documents the dramatic labor battles and sometimes heroic activities of workers and organizers that helped to set the stage for segregation's demise.

Winner of the Charles S. Sydnor Award, given by the Southern Historical Association, 1994.  Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize given by the Organization of American Historians, 1994.  Winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Award for an outstanding book in American social history.
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Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles
Chad Berry
University of Illinois Press, 2000
One of the largest internal migrations in U.S. history, the great white migration left its mark on virtually every family in every southern upland and flatland town. In this extraordinary record of ordinary lives, dozens of white southern migrants describe their experiences in the northern "wilderness" and their irradicable attachments to family and community in the South.

Southern out-migration drew millions of southern workers to the steel mills, automobile factories, and even agricultural fields and orchards of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois. Through vivid oral histories, Chad Berry explores the conflict between migrants' economic success and their "spiritual exile" in the North. He documents the tension between factory owners who welcomed cheap, naive southern laborers and local "native" workers who greeted migrants with suspicion and hostility. He examines the phenomenon of "shuttle migration," in which migrants came north to work during the winter and returned home to plant spring crops on their southern farms. He also explores the impact of southern traditions--especially the southern evangelical church and "hillbilly" music--brought north by migrants.

Berry argues that in spite of being scorned by midwesterners for violence, fecundity, intoxication, laziness, and squalor, the vast majority of southern whites who moved to the Midwest found the economic prosperity they were seeking. By allowing southern migrants to assess their own experiences and tell their own stories, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles refutes persistent stereotypes about migrants' clannishness, life-style, work ethic, and success in the North.

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Southern Paiute
A Portrait
Logan Hebner
Utah State University Press, 2010

Now little recognized by their neighbors, Southern Paiutes once had homelands that included much of the vast Colorado Plateau, Great Basin, and Mojave Desert. From the Four Corners’ San Juan River to California’s lower Colorado, from Death Valley to Canyonlands, from Capitol Reef to the Grand Canyon, Paiutes lived in many small, widespread communities. They still do, but the communities are fewer, smaller, and mostly deprived of the lands and resources that sustained traditional lives.

To portray a people and the individuals who comprise it, William Logan Hebner and Michael L. Plyler relay Paiute voices and reveal Paiute faces, creating a space for them to tell their stories and stake claim to who they once were and now are.

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The Southern Past
A Clash of Race and Memory
W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Harvard University Press, 2008

Since the Civil War whites and blacks have struggled over the meanings and uses of the Southern past. Indeed, today’s controversies over flying the Confederate flag, renaming schools and streets, and commemorating the Civil War and the civil rights movement are only the latest examples of this ongoing divisive contest over issues of regional identity and heritage. The Southern Past argues that these battles are ultimately about who has the power to determine what we remember of the past, and whether that remembrance will honor all Southerners or only select groups.

For more than a century after the Civil War, elite white Southerners systematically refined a version of the past that sanctioned their racial privilege and power. In the process, they filled public spaces with museums and monuments that made their version of the past sacrosanct. Yet, even as segregation and racial discrimination worsened, blacks contested the white version of Southern history and demanded inclusion. Streets became sites for elaborate commemorations of emancipation and schools became centers for the study of black history. This counter-memory surged forth, and became a potent inspiration for the civil rights movement and the black struggle to share a common Southern past rather than a divided one.

W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s searing exploration of how those who have the political power to represent the past simultaneously shape the present and determine the future is a valuable lesson as we confront our national past to meet the challenge of current realities.

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Southern Progressivism
The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition
Dewey Grantham
University of Tennessee Press, 1983
This is the most comprehensive synthesis of the political history of the American South during the Progressive Era. Originally published in 1983, this work represented the master work of a gifted historian's career of reflecting on this period of the region's history. This new printing is accompanied by an insightful foreword by William  A. Link, addressing the work's continuing relevance for today's students.
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