Learning by Heart brings together a unique and diverse collection of poems about the experience of school as seen through the eyes of America's best contemporary poets. These poets capture the educational process not only in the classroom but as it takes place in libraries and hallways, on playing fields and at dances. Alternately joyous and defiant, they demonstrate how it is that young people come to find their place in the world.
Most of the poems in this anthology were written between 1970 and 1995, a period that encompasses both the halcyon years of poets-in-the-schools programs and the primary and secondary school years of many of the poets included. Their poems define school in that most contemporary sense — “with a multitude of voices”—reflecting perspectives from African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, and Native American as well as Anglo American backgrounds, from both public and private schools in rural and urban environments.
Learning by Heart offers a profound and timely statement about schools and learning as well as the role of art in education. Finally, these poems validate that most important lesson: even the most common of experiences is worthy of creative expression.
This book offers
Rooting her account in John Dewey’s ideas, Goddard moves from early nineteenth century supporters of the union of learning and labor to the interconnected histories of CMTS, New Jersey’s Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth, North Dakota’s Normal and Industrial School, and related programs elsewhere. Goddard analyzes the work of movement figures like abolitionist Theodore Weld, educators Calvin Woodward and Booker T. Washington, social critic W.E.B. Du Bois, Dewey himself, and his influential Chicago colleague Ella Flagg Young. The book contrasts ideas about manual training held by advocate Nicholas Murray Butler with those of opponent William Torrey Harris and considers overlooked connections between industrial education and the Arts and Crafts Movement.
An absorbing merger of history and storytelling, Learning for Work looks at the people who shaped industrial education while offering a provocative vision of realizing its potential today.
Learning French from Spanish and Spanish from French provides adult English speakers who have learned either Spanish or French as a second language with the tools to learn the other as a third language. Research in the growing fields of third-language acquisition and multilingualism documents how successful language learners intuitively build on their existing knowledge as they learn a new language. In this vein, Learning French from Spanish and Spanish from French takes advantage of the fact that learners with intermediate proficiency in a second language are used to thinking consciously about language, know themselves as language learners, and can capitalize on what they know about one language to understand the other. With chapters conveniently organized by grammatical concept and including supplementary resources such as exercises, parallel reading texts, and audio files, this book will benefit students, travelers, and budding multilinguals alike.
Once known as a “drug capital” and associated with kidnappings, violence, and excess, Bogotá, Colombia, has undergone a transformation that some have termed “the miracle of Bogotá.” Beginning in the late 1980s, the city emerged from a long period of political and social instability to become an unexpected model of urban development through the redesign and revitalization of the public realm—parks, transportation, and derelict spaces—under the leadership of two “public space mayors,” Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa (the latter reelected in 2015). In Learning from Bogotá, Rachel Berney analyzes how these mayors worked to reconfigure the troubled city into a pedagogical one whose public spaces and urban policy have helped shape a more tolerant and aware citizenry.
Berney examines the contributions of Mockus and Peñalosa through the lenses of both spatial/urban design and the city’s history. She shows how, through the careful intertwining of new public space and transportation projects, the reclamation of privatized public space, and the refurbishment of dilapidated open spaces, the mayors enacted an ambitious urban vision for Bogotá without resorting to the failed method of the top-down city master plan. Illuminating the complex interplay between formal politics, urban planning, and improvised social strategies, as well as the negative consequences that accompanied Bogotá’s metamorphosis, Learning from Bogotá offers significant lessons about the possibility for positive and lasting change in cities around the world.
The recent body of case-study work on chaplaincy care synthesizes the inherent narrative nature of chaplaincy with the structured rigors of contemporary care research. This volume is composed of contributions from both practitioners and academic researchers, joining reflections on the challenges of case studies in chaplaincy care with specific results. Drawing on reflections on methodology and professionalization in chaplaincy, the volume hopes to contribute to answering the question of how and why chaplaincy works.
In Learning from Language, Walter H. Beale seeks to bring together the disciplines of linguistics, rhetoric, and literary studies through the concept of symmetry (how words mirror thought, society, and our vision of the world).
Citing thinkers from antiquity to the present, Beale provides an in-depth study of linguistic theory, development, and practice. He views the historic division between the schools of symmetry and asymmetry (a belief that language developed as a structure independent of human experience), as built into the character of language itself, and as an impediment to literary humanism (the combined study of language, rhetoric, and literature to improve the competence and character of the individual).
In his analysis, Beale outlines and critiques traditional claims of symmetry, then offers new avenues of approach to the subject. In doing so, he examines how important issues of human culture and consciousness have parallels in processes of language; how linguistic patterns relate to pervasive human problems; how language is an active participant in the expression, performance, and construction of reality; the concepts of designating versus naming; figurative language as a process of reenvisioning reality; and the linking of style to virtue by the ancients.
Beale concludes that both asymmetrical and symmetrical elements exist in language, each with their own relevance, and that they are complementary, rather than opposing philosophies. The basic intuitions of symmetry that relate language to life are powerful and important to all of English studies. Combined with a love for the workings, sounds, and structures of language, Beale says, an understanding of symmetry can help guide the pursuit of literary humanism.
In the late fifties and early sixties, Govan Mbeki was a central figure in the African National Congress and director of the ANC campaigns from underground. Born of a chief and the daughter of a Methodist minister in the Transkei of South Africa in 1910, he worked as a teacher, journalist, and tireless labor organizer in a lifetime of protest against the government policy of apartheid. Over two decades of imprisonment on Robben Island did not consign him to obscurity. Along with Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, his name has become a symbol of resistance, not only to the oppressed people of South Africa, but also to the international community who have conferred on him many honors and awards.
How has the landscape of Wisconsin affected its history? How have people living here changed that landscape over time? What are the implications for the future? The second edition of Learning from the Land addresses these and other questions, asking elementary and middle school readers to think about land use issues throughout Wisconsin's history. This revised edition includes expanded chapters on logging and the lumber industry, land use and planning, and agriculture in the 20th century from farmers' markets to organic farming. New profiles of Gaylord Nelson, pioneer of Earth Day, and Will Allen, founder of Growing Power in Milwaukee, round out this history of land use in Wisconsin.
Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers is a timely resource for understanding and resolving some of the issues graduate students face, particularly as higher education begins to pay more critical attention to graduate student success. Offering diverse approaches for assisting this demographic, the book bridges the gap between theory and practice through structured examination of graduate students’ narratives about their development as writers, as well as researched approaches for enabling these students to cultivate their craft.
The first half of the book showcases the voices of graduate student writers themselves, who describe their experiences with graduate school literacy through various social issues like mentorship, access, writing in communities, and belonging in academic programs. Their narratives illuminate how systemic issues significantly affect graduate students from historically oppressed groups. The second half accompanies these stories with proposed solutions informed by empirical findings that provide evidence for new practices and programming for graduate student writers.
Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers values student experience as an integral part of designing approaches that promote epistemic justice. This text provides a fresh, comprehensive, and essential perspective on graduate writing and communication support that will be useful to administrators and faculty across a range of disciplines and institutional contexts.
Contributors: Noro Andriamanalina, LaKela Atkinson, Daniel V. Bommarito, Elizabeth Brown, Rachael Cayley, Amanda E. Cuellar, Kirsten T. Edwards, Wonderful Faison, Amy Fenstermaker, Jennifer Friend, Beth Godbee, Hope Jackson, Karen Keaton Jackson, Haadi Jafarian, Alexandria Lockett, Shannon Madden, Kendra L. Mitchell, Michelle M. Paquette, Shelley Rodrigo, Julia Romberger, Lisa Russell-Pinson, Jennifer Salvo-Eaton, Richard Sévère, Cecilia D. Shelton, Pamela Strong Simmons, Jasmine Kar Tang, Anna K. Willow Treviño, Maurice Wilson, Anne Zanzucchi
Identifying “lessons learned” is not new—the military has been doing it for decades. However, members of the worldwide intelligence community have been slow to extract wider lessons gathered from the past and apply them to contemporary challenges. Learning from the Secret Past is a collection of ten carefully selected cases from post-World War II British intelligence history. Some of the cases include the Malayan Emergency, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Northern Ireland, and the lead up to the Iraq War. Each case, accompanied by authentic documents, illuminates important lessons that today's intelligence officers and policymakers—in Britain and elsewhere—should heed.
Written by former and current intelligence officers, high-ranking government officials, and scholars, the case studies in this book detail intelligence successes and failures, discuss effective structuring of the intelligence community, examine the effective use of intelligence in counterinsurgency, explore the ethical dilemmas and practical gains of interrogation, and highlight the value of human intelligence and the dangers of the politicization of intelligence. The lessons learned from this book stress the value of past experience and point the way toward running effective intelligence agencies in a democratic society.
Scholars and professionals worldwide who specialize in intelligence, defense and security studies, and international relations will find this book to be extremely valuable.
How do you supervise a graduate student working in a library—and not just adequately, but well? What is a valuable and meaningful work experience? How can libraries design more equitable and ethical positions for students?
Learning in Action: Designing Successful Graduate Student Work Experiences in Academic Libraries provides practical, how-to guidance on creating and managing impactful programs as well as meaningful personal experiences for students and library staff in academic libraries. Fourteen chapters are divided into four thorough sections:
For generations, schools have aimed to introduce students to a broad range of topics through curriculum that ensure that they will at least have some acquaintance with most areas of human knowledge by the time they graduate. Yet such broad knowledge can’t help but be somewhat superficial—and, as Kieran Egan argues, it omits a crucial aspect of true education: deep knowledge.
Real education, Egan explains, consists of both general knowledge and detailed understanding, and in Learning in Depth he outlines an ambitious yet practical plan to incorporate deep knowledge into basic education. Under Egan’s program, students will follow the usual curriculum, but with one crucial addition: beginning with their first days of school and continuing until graduation, they will eachalso study one topic—such as apples, birds, sacred buildings, mollusks,circuses, or stars—in depth. Over the years, with the help and guidance of their supervising teacher, students will expand their understanding of their one topic and build portfolios of knowledge that grow and change along with them. By the time they graduate each student will know as much about his or her topic as almost anyone on earth—and in the process will have learned important, even life-changing lessons about the meaning of expertise, the value of dedication, and the delight of knowing something in depth.
Though Egan’s program may be radical in its effects, it is strikingly simple to implement—as a number of schools have already discovered—and with Learning in Depth as a blueprint, parents, educators, and administrators can instantly begin taking the first steps toward transforming our schools and fundamentally deepening their students’ minds.
Two complementary lectures approach the problems of education from both practical and imaginative viewpoints.
In The Developing Imagination, Northrup Frye argues that “the ultimate purpose of teaching literature is…the transferring of the imaginative habit…from the laboratory of literature to the life of mankind.” Frye’s sympathies are with the pupil as he defends imagination and individualism.
A. R. MacKinnon’s Insistent Tasks in Language Learning suggests that “fragmentation” between primary, secondary, and college education intensifies the divergence of humanities and sciences. He proposes a means of cooperation between all educational levels.
Entrepreneurial creativity, private investment, and competition have been among America's great strengths. Can they be harnessed to improve troubled public schools? Or is private management of public schools at best a gimmick, and at worst an undemocratic sellout?
In the 1990s, some failing school systems turned to private education management organizations to manage their schools. The EMOs promised academic improvement to families and profits to their investors. Wall Street and foundations lavished hundreds of millions of dollars on for-profit and nonprofit start-ups, and thousands of students' educations began to be directed not by school officials, but by private companies.
In Learning on the Job, industry insider Steven Wilson, the founder and CEO of Advantage Schools, looks back on the first tumultuous decade of this social experiment. Digging deep into the academic, financial, logistic, and political records of seven leading EMOs, including his own, he reveals the potential and pitfalls of their business and educational models, and their actual successes in the classrooms and the boardrooms. Have they given their students a better education? Can they succeed as businesses? Can businesses in fact run better public schools than school districts?
With remarkable honesty and fairness on an ideologically charged topic, Wilson describes the follies and wisdom, overreaching and real accomplishment, of the first education entrepreneurs. Acknowledging that they had much to learn about the real-world challenges of running schools, he passionately defends the promise of private involvement in public schooling.
Contributors. Paul A. Bové, Rey Chow, Bruce Cummings, James A. Fujii, Harry Harootunian, Masao Miyoshi, Tetsuo Najita, Richard H. Okada, Benita Parry, Moss Roberts, Bernard S. Silberman, Stefan Tanaka, Rob Wilson, Sylvia Yanagisako, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto
Hilde Bruch sets out to accomplish what has, until now, been virtually impossible—the teaching of psychotherapy by use of the written word, communicating the wisdom of a lifetime. Perhaps Dr. Bruch’s unique success at a task that has been tried and tried again, only to result in stereotyped dos and don’ts, stems from her own learning experiences with two great teachers: Harry Stack Sullivan and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann.
Dr. Bruch shares her knowledge of the essential purpose of intensive psychotherapy as it has been shaped over her many years as a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and teacher. She sets forth a theoretical frame in straightforward and unmystical language without minimizing the complexities of demand that therapy makes on both patient and therapist.
The reader accompanies the therapist from his first encounter with the stranger who comes to him with his trouble through the various steps that lead to the resolution of the problems. The patient is viewed as a participant in a multifaceted system of many experiences and people, not as an individual isolated from the world around him. In Dr. Bruch’s conception, psychotherapy is a situation where two people interact and try to come to an understanding of one another, with the specific goal of accomplishing something beneficial for the complaining person. The factors that help or hinder the attainment of this interaction are spelled out in the book, and the entire process of learning psychotherapy is thereby illuminated.
In an American society both increasingly diverse and increasingly segregated, the signals children receive about race are more confusing than ever. In this context, how do children negotiate and make meaning of multiple and conflicting messages to develop their own ideas about race? Learning Race, Learning Place engages this question using in-depth interviews with an economically diverse group of African American children and their mothers.
Through these rich narratives, Erin N. Winkler seeks to reorient the way we look at how children develop their ideas about race through the introduction of a new framework—comprehensive racial learning—that shows the importance of considering this process from children’s points of view and listening to their interpretations of their experiences, which are often quite different from what the adults around them expect or intend. At the children’s prompting, Winkler examines the roles of multiple actors and influences, including gender, skin tone, colorblind rhetoric, peers, family, media, school, and, especially, place. She brings to the fore the complex and understudied power of place, positing that while children’s racial identities and experiences are shaped by a national construction of race, they are also specific to a particular place that exerts both direct and indirect influence on their racial identities and ideas.
An avalanche of recent newspapers, weekly newsmagazines, scholarly journals, and academic books has helped to spark a heated debate by publishing warnings of a “boy crisis” in which male students at all academic levels have begun falling behind their female peers. In Learning the Hard Way, Edward W. Morris explores and analyzes detailed ethnographic data on this purported gender gap between boys and girls in educational achievement at two low-income high schools—one rural and predominantly white, the other urban and mostly African American. Crucial questions arose from his study of gender at these two schools. Why did boys tend to show less interest in and more defiance toward school? Why did girls significantly outperform boys at both schools? Why did people at the schools still describe boys as especially “smart”?
Morris examines these questions and, in the process, illuminates connections of gender to race, class, and place. This book is not simply about the educational troubles of boys, but the troubled and complex experience of gender in school. It reveals how particular race, class, and geographical experiences shape masculinity and femininity in ways that affect academic performance. His findings add a new perspective to the “gender gap” in achievement.
Learning Theory in School Situations was first published in 1949. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Contributors:
Marilou Awiakta
John Bradley
Jim Carrier
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Mary Dickson
Edward Dougherty
Ray Gonzalez
Karl Grossman
Sonya Huber
Barbara Kingsolver
Valerie Kuletz
Mary Laufer
Kay Mack
Craig McGrath
Bill Mesler
Richard H. Minear
Randy Morris
Mayumi Oda
Catherine Quigg
Richard Rawles
Kenneth Robbins
Scott Russell Sanders
David Seaborg
Terry Tempest Williams
Bill Witherup
Phil Woods
An award-winning cognitive scientist offers a counterintuitive guide to cultivating imagination.
Imagination is commonly thought to be the special province of youth—the natural companion of free play and the unrestrained vistas of childhood. Then come the deadening routines and stifling regimentation of the adult world, dulling our imaginative powers. In fact, Andrew Shtulman argues, the opposite is true. Imagination is not something we inherit at birth, nor does it diminish with age. Instead, imagination grows as we do, through education and reflection.
The science of cognitive development shows that young children are wired to be imitators. When confronted with novel challenges, they struggle to think outside the box, and their creativity is rigidly constrained by what they deem probable, typical, or normal. Of course, children love to “play pretend,” but they are far more likely to simulate real life than to invent fantasy worlds of their own. And they generally prefer the mundane and the tried-and-true to the fanciful or the whimsical.
Children’s imaginations are not yet fully formed because they necessarily lack knowledge, and it is precisely knowledge of what is real that provides a foundation for contemplating what might be possible. The more we know, the farther our imaginations can roam. As Learning to Imagine demonstrates, the key to expanding the imagination is not forgetting what you know but learning something new. By building upon the examples of creative minds across diverse fields, from mathematics to religion, we can consciously develop our capacities for innovation and imagination at any age.
Since the mid-1960s, the war on crime has reshaped public attitudes about state authority, criminal behavior, and the responsibilities of citizenship. But how have American writers grappled with these changes? What happens when a journalist approaches the workings of organized crime not through its legendary Godfathers but through a workaday, low-level figure who informs on his mob? Why is it that interrogation scenes have become so central to prime-time police dramas of late? What is behind writers’ recent fascination with “cold case” homicides, with private security, or with prisons?
In Learning to Live with Crime, Christopher P. Wilson examines this war on crime and how it has made its way into cultural representation and public consciousness. Under the sway of neoconservative approaches to criminal justice and public safety, Americans have been urged to see crime as an inevitable risk of modern living and to accept ever more aggressive approaches to policing, private security, and punishment. The idea has been not simply to fight crime but to manage its risks; to inculcate personal vigilance in citizens; and to incorporate criminals’ knowledge through informants and intelligence gathering. At its most scandalous, this study suggests, contemporary law enforcement has even come to mimic crime’s own operations.
Learning to Love offers a range of perspectives on the embodied, relational, affective, and sociopolitical project of “learning to love” at the New Life Center for Holistic Growth, a popular “mind-body-spirit” bookstore and practice space in northeast China, in the early part of the 21st century. This intimate form of self-care exists alongside the fast-moving, growing capitalist society of contemporary China and has emerged as an understandable response to the pressures of Chinese industrialized life in the early 21st century. Opening with an investigation of the complex ways newcomers to the center suffered a sense of being “off,” both in and with the world at multiple scales, Learning to Love then examines how new horizons of possibility are opened as people interact with one another as well as with a range of aesthetic objects at New Life.
Author Sonya Pritzker draws upon the core concepts of scalar intimacy—a participatory, discursive process in which people position themselves in relation to others as well as dominant ideologies, concepts, and ideals—and scalar inquiry—the process through which speakers interrogate these forms, their relationship with them, and their participation in reproducing them. In demonstrating the collaborative interrogation of culture, history, and memory, she examines how these exercises in physical, mental, and spiritual self-care allow participants to grapple with past social harms and forms of injustice, how historical systems of power—including both patriarchal and governance structures—continue in the present, and how they might be transformed in the future. By examining the interactions and relational experiences from New Life, Learning to Love offers a range of novel theoretical interventions into political subjectivity, temporality, and intergenerational trauma/healing.
In Learning to Perform Carol Simpson Stern and Bruce Henderson enliven the dialogue between theory and practice for actors and teachers alike. Beginning with an overview of the study of literary and cultural texts through performance, Stern and Henderson then translate literary and performance theory into concrete classroom experience. Learning to Perform presents a dynamic performance methodology that offers the tools students need to develop and refine performance skills, analyze texts, and think and reflect critically on performed texts. By addressing an expanded sense of text that includes cultural as well as literary artifacts, the authors bridge the gap between oral interpretation and the more inclusive field of performance studies that overarches it.
True religious faith cannot be confirmed by any external proofs. Rather, it is founded on a basic act of trust—and the common root of that trust, for Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, is a belief in the divine creation of the universe. But with Learning to Trust in Freedom, David B. Burrell asks the provocative question: How do we reach that belief, and what is it about the universe that could possibly testify to its divine origins? Even St. Augustine, he points out, could only find faith after a harrowing journey through the lures of desire—and it is that very desire that Burrell seizes on as a tool with which to explore the origin and purpose of the world. Delving deep into the intertwinings of desire and faith, and drawing on St. John of the Cross, Edith Stein, and Charles Taylor, Burrell offers a new understanding of free will, trust, and perception.
Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas is a complex, multisided rethinking of the epistemic matrix of Western modernity and coloniality from the position of border epistemology. Colonial and imperial differences are the two key concepts to understanding how the logic of coloniality creates ontological and epistemic exteriorities. Being at once an enactment of decolonial thinking and an attempt to define its main grounds, mechanisms, and concepts, the book shifts the politics of knowledge from “studying the other” (culture, society, economy, politics) toward “the thinking other” (the authors).
An open challenge to Common Core’s drive for uniformity
Nicholas Tampio watched as his kindergartner’s class shifted from one where teachers, aides, parents, and students worked hard to create a rewarding educational experience to one in which teachers delivered hours-long lectures using packaged lesson plans. Learning versus the Common Core explains how standards-based education reform is transforming nearly every aspect of public education by looking closely at the standards, the agenda of people pushing standards-based reform, and how these fit within a global pattern of education reform. With a nod to the philosophy of John Dewey, Tampio concludes with a vision of what democratic education can look like today—and how people can form rhizomatic alliances across different political and ethical backgrounds to fight the Common Core.
Forerunners: Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead
Who is the learning-disabled child? As theories multiply and research accumulates, this pressing question persists, leaving parents and educators and, particularly, students at a loss. The Learning-Disabled Child does much toward providing an answer. A broad-based account of what is currently known and done about learning disabilities, the book gets at the roots of this perplexing problem—in the law, in the school system, and in the child—and offers a new outlook for its treatment.
Since the 1970s, millions of children have been misclassified by public schools as learning-disabled, while many others with true learning disabilities go unidentified and unhelped, as case material presented here makes poignantly clear. Over the same period, research on the nature of learning disabilities, based on samples of misclassified children, has yielded a cloudy and confusing picture. Drawing on her own background in cognitive, developmental, and abnormal psychology, as well as her research into reading and dyslexia, Sylvia Farnham-Diggory cuts through the confusion surrounding learning disabilities. She describes advanced research and clinical data that elucidate handicaps in reading, writing, spelling, drawing, calculation, remembering, and problem-solving. In addition, she outlines a straightforward assessment procedure that would reduce the misclassification of learning-disabled children and, if adopted by schools and private diagnostic services, would save the nation billions of misspent dollars.
Prescriptive as well as descriptive, The Learning-Disabled Child offers invaluable advice to parents seeking the best methods of diagnostic evaluation, and to teachers in search of the most effective means of helping these children. Far-reaching in its scope and firmly practical in its orientation, the book will prove instrumental in the identification, understanding, and treatment of learning disabilities.
A growing number of archaeologists are applying Geographic Information Science (GIS) technologies to their research problems and questions. Advances in GIS and its use across disciplines allows for collaboration and enables archaeologists to ask ever more sophisticated questions and develop increasingly elaborate models on numerous aspects of past human behavior. Least cost analysis (LCA) is one such avenue of inquiry. While least cost studies are not new to the social sciences in general, LCA is relatively new to archaeology; until now, there has been no systematic exploration of its use within the field.
This edited volume presents a series of case studies illustrating the intersection of archaeology and LCA modeling at the practical, methodological, and theoretical levels. Designed to be a guidebook for archaeologists interested in using LCA in their own research, it presents a wide cross-section of practical examples for both novices and experts. The contributors to the volume showcase the richness and diversity of LCA’s application to archaeological questions, demonstrate that even simple applications can be used to explore sophisticated research questions, and highlight the challenges that come with injecting geospatial technologies into the archaeological research process.
In his third collection of poems Todd Davis advises us that "the only corruption comes / in not loving this life enough." Over the course of this masterful and heartfelt book it becomes clear that Davis not only loves the life he's been given, but also believes that the ravishing desire of this world can offer hope, and even joy, however it might be negotiated.
Drawing upon a range of stories from the Christian, Transcendental, and Asian traditions, as well as from his own deep understanding of the natural world, Davis explores the connection between the visible and invisible worlds, or what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called "the incandescent surface of matter plunged in God."
A direct poetic descendant of Walt Whitman, Davis invites us to sing "the songs we collect in the hymnals of our flesh- / impromptu, a cappella, our mouths flung open / in a great wide O."
Private Detective James Brampton's Casebook
A welcome link to the chain connecting the early masters of detective fiction.... The collection offers a window into the early days of American detective fiction and the power of deductive thinking."—Sarah Weinman, Los Angeles Times
"This story collection featuring New York City private detective James Brampton will intrigue Sherlock Holmes fans, given the number of eerie parallels between the two characters."—Publishers Weekly
"It is the observation of small things that makes a good detective, for it is often the most trivial circumstance which supplies the first link in the chain." —James Brampton
Twenty years before the Sherlock Holmes mysteries were written, a fictional New York private investigator was celebrated for his ability to solve crimes based on the principles of observation and deductive reasoning that later became Holmes' hallmark. Originally published in 1864 and never before reprinted, Leaves from the Note-Book of a New York Detective features twenty-nine cases of James Brampton, the first American detective hero to appear in fiction. The book opens with a chance meeting between a medical doctor, John Babbington Williams (the actual author of the stories), and detective James Brampton. They become acquaintances, and after Brampton has retired after twenty years of service, he sends his case notebooks to Dr. Williams to be edited and published. The result is a stunning collection of intriguing mysteries, including "The Defrauded Heir," "The Phantom Face," "A Satanic Compact," and "The Walker Street Tragedy." In case after case, using his power of observation, detective Brampton is able prove the innocence of the wrongly accused. Never before reprinted, this first modern edition of this important work now takes its place once more in the development of detective fiction between Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, the casebook of the original American detective hero.
In May 1860, Walt Whitman published a third edition of Leaves of Grass. His timing was compelling. Printed during a period of regional, ideological, and political divisions, written by a poet intimately concerned with the idea of a United States as “essentially the greatest poem,” this new edition was Whitman’s last best hope for national salvation. Now available in a facsimile edition, Leaves of Grass, 1860 faithfully reproduces Whitman’s attempt to create a “Great construction of the New Bible” to save the nation on the eve of civil war and, for the first time, frames the book in historical rather than literary terms.
In his third edition, Whitman added 146 new poems to the 32 that comprised the second edition, reorganized the book into a bible of American civic religion that could be cited chapter and verse, and included erotic poetry intended to bind the nation in organic harmony. This 150th anniversary edition includes a facsimile reproduction of the original 1860 volume, a thought-provoking introduction by antebellum historian and Whitman scholar Jason Stacy that situates Whitman in nineteenth-century America, and annotations that provide detailed historical context for Whitman’s poems.
A profoundly rich product of a period when America faced its greatest peril, this third edition finds the poet transforming himself into a prophet of spiritual democracy and the Whitman we celebrate today—boisterous, barbaric, and benevolent. Reprinting it now continues the poet’s goal of proclaiming for “the whole of America for each / individual, without exception . . . uncompromising liberty and equality.”
First settled by Stephen F. Austin's colonists in the early nineteenth century, Colorado County has deep roots in Texas history. Mainly rural and agrarian until late in the twentieth century, Colorado County was a cotton-growing region whose population was about evenly divided between blacks and whites. These life-long neighbors led separate and unequal lives, memories of which still linger today. To preserve those memories, Patsy Cravens began interviewing and photographing the older residents of Colorado County in the 1980s. In this book, she presents photographs and recollections of the last generation, black and white, who grew up in the era of Jim Crow segregation.
The folks in Colorado County have engrossing stories to tell. They recall grinding poverty and rollicking fun in the Great Depression, losing crops and livestock to floods, working for the WPA, romances gone wrong and love gone right, dirty dancing, church and faith, sharecropping, quilting, raising children, racism and bigotry, and even the horrific lynching of two African American teenagers in 1935. The Colorado County residents' stories reveal an amazing resiliency and generosity of spirit, despite the hardships that have filled most of their lives. They also capture a rural way of life that was once common across the South, but is now gone forever.
Leaving a Legacy: Lessons from the Writings of Daniel Drake is a selective collection of excerpts from the vast writings from the nineteenth-century doctor and medical pioneer Daniel Drake. From Drake’s life, documented here in his own words from excerpts of lectures, personal journal entries, presentations, speeches, books, and letters to his children, readers learn about the scope of his accomplishments in medicine, contributions to his community, and dedication to his family. Diller goes beyond biography to contextualize Drake’s life choices and what made him a role model for today’s physicians. Diller selected one hundred and eighty thematically arranged excerpts, which he paired with original reflection questions to guide the reader through thought-provoking prompts. In doing so, Diller presents the lessons from Drake’s remarkable life and work as a guide for others who wish to build an enduring legacy.
Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa examines Islamic legal responses to Muslims living under Christian rule in medieval and early modern Iberia and North Africa. The fall of al-Andalus, or reconquista, has long been considered a turning point, when the first substantial Muslim populations fell under permanent Christian rule. Yet a near-exclusive focus on conquered Iberian Muslims has led scholars to overlook a substantial body of legal opinions issued in response to Portuguese and Spanish occupation in Morocco itself, beginning in the early fifteenth century.
By moving beyond Iberia and following Christian conquerors and Muslim emigrants into North Africa, Leaving Iberia links the juristic discourses on conquered Muslims on both sides of the Mediterranean, critiques the perceived exceptionalism of the Iberian Muslim predicament, and adds a significant chapter to the story of Christian-Muslim relations in the medieval Mediterranean. The final portion of the book explains the disparate fates of these medieval legal opinions in colonial Algeria and Mauritania, where jurists granted lasting authority to some opinions and discarded others. Based on research in the Arabic manuscript libraries of five countries, Leaving Iberia offers the first fully annotated translations of the major legal texts under analysis.
Acclaimed by critics as a second F. Scott Fitzgerald, Billy Lee Brammer was once one of the most engaging young novelists in America. “Brammer’s is a new and major talent, big in scope, big in its promise of even better things to come,” wrote A. C. Spectorsky, a former staffer at the New Yorker. When he published his first and only novel, The Gay Place, in 1961, literary luminaries such as David Halberstam, Willie Morris, and Gore Vidal hailed his debut. Morris deemed it “the best novel about American politics in our time.” Halberstam called it “a classic . . . [a] stunning, original, intensely human novel inspired by Lyndon Johnson. . . . It will be read a hundred years from now.” More recently, James Fallows, Gary Fisketjon, and Christopher Lehmann have affirmed The Gay Place’s continuing relevance, with Lehmann asserting that it is “the one truly great modern American political novel.”
Leaving the Gay Place tells a sweeping story of American popular culture and politics through the life and work of a writer who tragically exemplifies the highs and lows of the country at mid-century. Tracy Daugherty follows Brammer from the halls of power in Washington, DC, where he worked for Senate majority leader Johnson, to rock-and-roll venues where he tripped out with Janis Joplin, and ultimately to back alleys of self-indulgence and self-destruction. Constantly driven to experiment with new ways of being and creating—often fueled by psychedelics—Brammer became a cult figure for an America on the cusp of monumental change, as the counterculture percolated through the Eisenhower years and burst out in the sixties. In Daugherty’s masterful recounting, Brammer’s story is a quintessential American story, and Billy Lee is our wayward American son.
In her first magical collection of poetry, Jennifer Elise Foerster weaves together a mythic and geographic exploration of a woman’s coming of age in a dislocated time. Leaving Tulsa, a book of road elegies and laments, travels from Oklahoma to the edges of the American continent through landscapes at once stark and lush, ancient and apocalyptic. The imagery that cycles through the poems—fire, shell, highway, wing—gives the collection a rich lyrical-dramatic texture. Each poem builds on a theme of searching for a lost “self”—an “other” America—that crosses biblical, tribal, and ecological mythologies.
In Leaving Tulsa, Foerster is not afraid of the strange or of estrangement. The narrator occupies a space in between and navigates the offbeat experiences of a speaker that is of both Muscogee and European heritage. With bold images and candid language, Foerster challenges the perceptions of what it means to be Native, what it means to be a woman, and what it means to be an American today. Ultimately, these brave and luminous poems engage and shatter the boundaries of time, self, and continent.
Foerster’s journey transcends both geographic space and the confines of the page to live vividly in the mind of the reader.
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