"A great read about some great ladies, Pat Majher's Ladies of the Lights pays long overdue homage to an overlooked part of Great Lakes maritime history in which a select group of stalwart women beat the odds to succeed in a field historically reserved for men."
---Terry Pepper, Great Lakes Lighthouse Keepers Association
Michigan once led the country in the number of lighthouses, and they're still a central part of the mystique of the state. What even the region's lighthouse enthusiasts might not know is the rich history of female lighthouse keepers in the area.
Fifty women served the sailing communities on Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior, as well as on the Detroit River, for more than 100 years. From Catherine Shook, who raised eight children while maintaining the Pointe Aux Barques light at the entrance to Saginaw Bay; to Eliza Truckey, who assumed responsibility for the lighthouse in Marquette while her husband fought for four years in the Civil War; to Elizabeth Whitney, whose combined service on Beaver Island and in Harbor Springs totaled forty-one years---the stories of Michigan's "ladies of the lights" are inspiring.
This is no technical tome documenting the minutiae of Michigan's lighthouse specifications. Rather, it's a detailed, human portrait of the women who kept those lighthouses running, defying the gender expectations of their time.
Patricia Majher is Editor of Michigan History magazine, published by the Historical Society of Michigan. Prior, she was Assistant Director of the Michigan Women's Historical Center and Hall of Fame in Lansing, Michigan. In addition, she has been writing both advertising and editorial copy for almost thirty years and has been a frequent contributor to Michigan newspapers and magazines.
“Lighthouses are a reflection of the human spirit and a mirror to our past.”—from the Introduction
No symbol is more synonymous with Wisconsin’s rich maritime traditions than the lighthouse. These historic beacons conjure myriad notions of a bygone era: romance, loneliness, and dependability; dedicated keepers manning the lights; eerie tales of haunted structures and ghosts of past keepers; mariners of yesteryear anxiously hoping to make safe haven around rocky shorelines. If these sentinels could talk, imagine the tales they would tell of ferocious Great Lakes storms taking their toll on vessels and people alike.
In this fully updated edition of Wisconsin Lighthouses, Ken and Barb Wardius tell those tales, taking readers on an intimate tour of lighthouses on Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, and Lake Winnebago. Both delightful storytellers and accomplished photographers, the couple complement their engaging text with more than 100 stunning color photographs, along with dozens of archival photos, maps, documents, and artifacts. Detailed “how to get there” directions, up-to-the-minute status reports on each light, and sidebars on everything from lighthouse vocabulary to the often lonely lives of lightkeepers make this the definitive book on Wisconsin’s lighthouses.
First published in 1958, The Salvager is both a narrative history of Great Lakes shipping disasters of 1880–1950 and the life story of Captain Thomas Reid, who operated one of the region’s largest salvaging companies during that era.
The treacherous shoals, unpredictable storms, and sub-zero temperatures of the Great Lakes have always posed special hazards to mariners—particularly before the advent of modern navigational technologies—and offered ample opportunity for an enterprising sailor to build a salvage business up from nothing. Designing much of his equipment himself and honing a keen eye for the risks and rewards of various catastrophes, Captain Reid rose from humble beginnings and developed salvaging into a science. Using the actual records of the Reid Wrecking and Towing Company as well as Reid’s personal logs and letters, Mary Frances Doner deftly tells the stories not only of the maritime disasters and the wrecking adventures that followed, but also of those waiting back on shore for their loved ones to return.
The performance of the British economy in the critical decades before 1914 is the subject of much scholarly debate. This first modern history of the British shipbuilding industry between 1870 and 1914 examines activities and attitudes of the shipbuilders in the context of this controversy over the quality of British entrepreneurship.
The authors consider the effectiveness of marketing practices, the rate of technological change, the degree to which ever-scarcer natural resources impose a constraint on growth, the general economic rationality of entrepreneurs, and, above all, the consequences of management decisions. After carefully weighing all evidence, the authors conclude that the general level of managerial performance was high, and in contrast to other sectors of heavy industry, British shipbuilders were able to maintain their dominant position.
Wisconsin entrepreneur Ole Evinrude will inspire children in this addition to the Badger Biographies series for young readers, where the story of Ole's invention, from drawing board to factory floor, is told in a reader-friendly format that includes historic images, a glossary of terms, and sidebars explaining how an outboard motor works.
Ole Evinrude was born in Norway in 1877 and immigrated to the United States when he was five years old. The Evinrude family settled in Wisconsin and began farming, but it was clear from a very young age that Ole would not follow the family tradition. Ole Evinrude was meant to work with boats.
Building an outboard motor was not easy, though - Ole suffered numerous mechanical and financial setbacks along the way. After years of hard work and persistence, the Evinrude motor company was founded and Ole's outboard motors were an instant hit around the world. Ole continued to improve the design of his motor and attracted other entrepreneurs to the area, making Wisconsin the center of the outboard motor industry for decades.
With original contributions from a diverse range of teachers, scholars, and practitioners in literary studies, history, book arts, library science, language studies, and archives, Teaching the History of the Book is the first collection of its kind dedicated to book history pedagogy. Presenting a variety of methods for teaching book history both as its own subject and as an approach to other material, each chapter describes lessons, courses, and programs centered on the latest and best ways of teaching undergraduate and graduate students.
Expansive and instructive, this volume introduces ways of helping students consider how texts were produced, circulated, and received, with chapters that cover effective ways to organize courses devoted to book history, classroom activities that draw on this subject in other courses, and an overview of selected print and digital tools. Contributors, many of whom are leading figures in the field, utilize their own classroom experiences to bring to life some of the rich possibilities for teaching book history in the twenty-first century.
In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Ryan Cordell, Brigitte Fielder, Barbara Hochman, Leslie Howsam, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Clare Mullaney, Kate Ozment, Leah Price, Jonathan Rose, Jonathan Senchyne, Sarah Wadsworth, and others.
The little-known story of the sophisticated and vibrant Arabic book culture that flourished during the Middle Ages.
During the thirteenth century, Europe’s largest library owned fewer than 2,000 volumes. Libraries in the Arab world at the time had exponentially larger collections. Five libraries in Baghdad alone held between 200,000 and 1,000,000 books each, including multiple copies of standard works so that their many patrons could enjoy simultaneous access.
How did the Arabic codex become so popular during the Middle Ages, even as the well-established form languished in Europe? Beatrice Gruendler’s The Rise of the Arabic Book answers this question through in-depth stories of bookmakers and book collectors, stationers and librarians, scholars and poets of the ninth century.
The history of the book has been written with an outsize focus on Europe. The role books played in shaping the great literary cultures of the world beyond the West has been less known—until now. An internationally renowned expert in classical Arabic literature, Gruendler corrects this oversight and takes us into the rich literary milieu of early Arabic letters.
As digital communication has become dominant, commentators have declared that handwriting is a thing of the past, a relic of an earlier age. This volume of original essays makes it clear that anxiety around handwriting has existed for centuries and explores writing practices from a variety of interdisciplinary fields, including manuscript studies, Native American studies, media history, African American studies, book history, bibliography, textual studies, and archive theory.
By examining how a culturally diverse set of people grappled with handwriting in their own time and weathered shifting relationships to it, Handwriting in Early America uncovers perspectives that are multiethnic and multiracial, transatlantic and hemispheric, colonial and Indigenous, multilingual and illiterate. Essays describe a future of handwriting as envisioned by practitioners, teachers, and even government officials of this time, revealing the tension between the anxiety of loss and the need to allow for variations going forward.
Contributors include James Berkey, Blake Bronson-Bartlett, John J. Garcia, Christopher Hager, Desirée Henderson, Frank Kelderman, Michelle Levy, Lisa Maruca, Christen Mucher, Alan Niles, Seth Perlow, Carla L. Peterson, Sarah Robbins, Patricia Jane Roylance, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, and Danielle Skeehan.
The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained rags that littered the floor of Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot molten lead of the Linotype machine. During the period of the pivotal growth and widespread adoption of word processing as a writing technology, some authors embraced it as a marvel while others decried it as the death of literature. The product of years of archival research and numerous interviews conducted by the author, Track Changes is the first literary history of word processing.
Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how the interests and ideals of creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the first adopters? What kind of anxieties did they share? Was word processing perceived as just a better typewriter or something more? How did it change our understanding of writing?
Track Changes balances the stories of individual writers with a consideration of how the seemingly ineffable act of writing is always grounded in particular instruments and media, from quills to keyboards. Along the way, we discover the candidates for the first novel written on a word processor, explore the surprisingly varied reasons why writers of both popular and serious literature adopted the technology, trace the spread of new metaphors and ideas from word processing in fiction and poetry, and consider the fate of literary scholarship and memory in an era when the final remnants of authorship may consist of folders on a hard drive or documents in the cloud.
In Western thought, the modern period signals a break with stagnant social formations, the advent of a new rationalism, and the emergence of a truly secular order, all in the context of an overarching globalization. In The Twilight of the Literary, Terry Cochran links these developments with the rise of the book as the dominant medium for recording, preserving, and disseminating thought. Consequently, his book explores the role that language plays in elaborating modern self-understanding. It delves into what Cochran calls the "figures of thought" that have been an essential component of modern consciousness in the age of print technology--and questions the relevance of this "print-bound" thinking in a world where print no longer dominates.
Cochran begins by examining major efforts of the eighteenth century that proved decisive for modern conceptions of history, knowledge, and print. After tracing late medieval formulations of vernacular language that proved crucial to print, he analyzes the figures of thought in print culture as they proceed from the idea of the collective spirit (the "people"), an elaboration of modern history. Cochran reconsiders basic texts that, in his analysis, reveal the underpinnings of modernity's formation--from Dante and Machiavelli to Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin. Moving from premodern models for collective language to competing theories of history, his work offers unprecedented insight into the means by which modern consciousness has come to know itself.
An Open Letters Review Best Book of the Year
“Grafton presents largely unfamiliar material…in a clear, even breezy style…Erudite.”
—Michael Dirda, Washington Post
In this celebration of bookmaking in all its messy and intricate detail, Anthony Grafton captures both the physical and mental labors that went into the golden age of the book—compiling notebooks, copying and correcting proofs, preparing copy—and shows us how scribes and scholars shaped influential treatises and forgeries.
Inky Fingers ranges widely, from the theological polemics of the early days of printing to the pathbreaking works of Jean Mabillon and Baruch Spinoza. Grafton draws new connections between humanistic traditions and intellectual innovations, textual learning and the delicate, arduous, error-riddled craft of making books. Through it all, he reminds us that the life of the mind depends on the work of the hands, and the nitty gritty labor of printmakers has had a profound impact on the history of ideas.
“Describes magnificent achievements, storms of controversy, and sometimes the pure devilment of scholars and printers…Captivating and often amusing.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Ideas, in this vivid telling, emerge not just from minds but from hands, not to mention the biceps that crank a press or heft a ream of paper.”
—New York Review of Books
“Grafton upends idealized understandings of early modern scholarship and blurs distinctions between the physical and mental labor that made the remarkable works of this period possible.”
—Christine Jacobson, Book Post
“Scholarship is a kind of heroism in Grafton’s account, his nine protagonists’ aching backs and tired eyes evidence of their valiant dedication to the pursuit of knowledge.”
—London Review of Books
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press