front cover of A Voice in Their Own Destiny
A Voice in Their Own Destiny
Reagan, Thatcher, and Public Diplomacy in the Nuclear 1980s
Anthony M Eames
University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

On June 8, 1982, Ronald Reagan delivered a historic address to the British Parliament, promising that the United States would give people around the world “a voice in their own destiny” in the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism. While British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher celebrated Reagan’s visit and thanked him for putting “freedom on the offensive,” over 100,000 Britons marched from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square to protest his arrival and call for nuclear disarmament. Reagan’s homecoming was equally eventful, with 1,000,000 protesters marking his return with a rally for nuclear disarmament in Central Park—the largest protest in American history up to that point.

Employing a wide range of previously unexamined primary sources, Anthony M. Eames demonstrates how the Reagan and Thatcher administrations used innovations in public diplomacy to build back support for their foreign policy agendas at a moment of widespread popular dissent. A Voice in Their Own Destiny traces how competition between the governments of Reagan and Thatcher, the Anglo-American antinuclear movement, and the Soviet peace offensive sparked a revolution in public diplomacy.

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front cover of To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice
To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice
The Life and Writings of Hosea Easton
Hosea Easton
University of Massachusetts Press, 1999
How did racial prejudice originate and why has it been so deeply rooted in American culture? What have been the long-term effects of prejudice on the intellectual, communal, and psychological resources of African Americans? How might the nightmare of racial domination be truly brought to an end? Still pertinent today, these were among the key questions addressed more than a century and a half ago by Hosea Easton (1799–1837), an important yet long neglected activist and intellectual. A black minister from New England, Easton rose to prominence during the 1820s and 1830s by joining in the struggle of free African Americans to resist southern slavery and secure racial equality. From this experience he developed a deep understanding of the problem of "race" in the United States and became a trenchant critic of white supremacy and its devastating consequences. This volume brings back into print the only extended writings of Easton that have survived into our time: his insightful, almost prescient A Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and the Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States, first published in 1837; and his passionate 1828 Thanksgiving Day "Address." The book also provides a biographical portrait of Easton and his family, drawn from primary documents as well as secondary sources in the areas of biography, genealogy, and social history.
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The Guy We Didn't Invite to the Orgy
and other stories
David Ebenbach
University of Massachusetts Press, 2017
EXCERPT
There was one guy we didn't invite to the orgy. We invited everyone else: Solaire because she's crazy and John and Walt because they're both so good-­looking and they're dating anyway, and we invited Amy because everybody just loves Amy. We even invited Miranda just because she's the jealous type, and since her sister was in town we threw the door open to her sister, too. But there was this one guy we didn't invite.

The stories in The Guy We Didn't Invite to the Orgy—funny, surprising, compassionate, true to life—are about people navigating the trickiest of landscapes: a world full of other people. Each of these characters wants to know, in her or his own way, given the crazy ups and downs and ins and outs of relationships, is it better to go it alone, or is it better to try to carve out a place for yourself, whatever it takes?
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Reading Emily Dickinson's Letters
Critical Essays
Jane Donahue Eberwein
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
Emily Dickinson, who regarded a letter as "a joy of Earth," was herself a gifted epistolary artist—cryptic and allusive in style, dazzling in verbal effects, and sensitively attuned to the recipients of her many letters. In this volume, distinguished literary scholars focus intensively on Dickinson's letter-writing and what her letters reveal about her poetics, her personal associations, and her self-awareness as a writer.

Although Dickinson's letters have provided invaluable perspective for biographers and lovers of poetry since Mabel Loomis Todd published the first selection in 1894, today's scholarly climate opens potential for fresh insights drawn from new theoretical approaches, informed cultural contextualizations, and rigorous examination of manuscript evidence. Essays in this collection explore ways that Emily Dickinson adapted nineteenth-century epistolary conventions of women's culture, as well as how she directed her writing to particular readers, providing subtly tactful guidance to ways of approaching her poetics.

Close examination of her letters reveals the conscious artistry of Dickinson's writing, from her auditory effects to her experiments with form and tone. Her well-known correspondences with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Susan Dickinson, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Otis Phillips Lord are examined here, but so too are previously neglected family communications with her aunt Kate Sweetser and cousin Eugenia Montague. Contributors find in these various letters evidence of Dickinson's enthusiastic participation in a sort of epistolary book club involving multiple friends, as well as her loving attentiveness to individuals in times of both suffering and joy. These inquiries highlight her thoughts on love, marriage, gender roles, art, and death, while unraveling mysteries ranging from legal discourse to Etruscan smiles.

In addition to a foreword by Marietta Messmer, the volume includes essays by Paul Crumbley, Karen Dandurand, Jane Donahue Eberwein, Judith Farr, James Guthrie, Ellen Louise Hart, Eleanor Heginbotham, Cindy MacKenzie, Martha Nell Smith, and Stephanie Tingley.
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In Sullivan's Shadow
The Use and Abuse of Libel Law during the Long Civil Rights Struggle
Aimee Edmondson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
For many years, the far right has sown public distrust in the media as a political strategy, weaponizing libel law in an effort to stifle free speech and silence African American dissent. In Sullivan's Shadow demonstrates that this strategy was pursued throughout the civil rights era and beyond, as southern officials continued to bring lawsuits in their attempts to intimidate journalists who published accounts of police brutality against protestors. Taking the Supreme Court's famous 1964 case New York Times v. Sullivan as her starting point, Aimee Edmondson illuminates a series of fascinating and often astounding cases that preceded and followed this historic ruling.

Drawing on archival research and scholarship in journalism, legal history, and African American studies, Edmondson offers a new narrative of brave activists, bold journalists and publishers, and hard­headed southern officials. These little-known courtroom dramas at the intersection of race, libel, and journalism go beyond the activism of the 1960s and span much of the country's history, beginning with lawsuits filed against abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and concluding with a suit spawned by the 1988 film Mississippi Burning.
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Haywire
Discord in Maine's Logging Woods and the Unraveling of an Industry
Andrew Egan
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

Logging in the northern forest has been romanticized, with images of log drives, plaid shirts, and bunkhouses in wide circulation. Increasingly dismissed as a quaint, rural pastime, logging remains one of the most dangerous jobs in the United States, with loggers occupying a precarious position amid unstable markets, expanding global competition, and growing labor discord. Examining a time of transition and decline in Maine’s forest economy, Andrew Egan traces pathways for understanding the challenges that have faced Maine’s logging community and, by extension, the state’s forestry sector, from the postwar period through today.

Seeking greater profits, logging companies turned their crews loose at midcentury, creating a workforce of independent contractors who were forced to purchase expensive equipment and compete for contracts with the mills. Drawing on his own experience with the region’s forest products industry, interviews with Maine loggers, media coverage, and court documents, Egan follows the troubled recent history of the industry and its battle for survival.

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How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It
Lara Egger
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
Winner of Ploughshares’ 2022 John C. Zacharis First Book Award
Wrestling with desire, shame, and the complications of attempting to resist one's own nature, How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It offers a tragicomic tour of a heart in midlife crisis. Populated by unruly angels, earthbound astronauts, xylophones, wordplay, and glitter glue, these wildly associative poems transform the world line by line, image by image. Part confessional, part kitsch, and often self-deprecating, this debut collection offers an honest and tender exploration of love's necessary absurdity. Lara Egger asks: Who put the end in crescendo, the over in lover? Are metaphors always reliable witnesses? Why does the past sleep with us when we hope the person beside us is the future?
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Vietnam-Perkasie
W. Ehrhart
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995
In 1982, John Newman, curator of the Vietnam War Literature Collection at Colorado State University, said of W.D. Ehrhart: "As a poet and editor, Bill Ehrhart is clearly one of the major figures in Vietnam War literature." This autobiographical account of the war, the author's first extended prose work, demonstrates Ehrhart's abilities as a writer of prose as well. Vietnam–Perkasie is grim, comical, disturbing, and accurate. The presentation is novelistic—truly, a "page-turner"—but the events are all real, the atmosphere intensely evocative.
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Children and Play in the Holocaust
Games among the Shadows
George Eisen
University of Massachusetts Press, 1990
Occasionally an accident of research produces a book more engaging than the one the historian originally intended. While sifting through material for his Ph.D. dissertation, which dealt with an entirely different topic, Eisen came across a diary from the Vilna ghetto written by Zelig Kalmanovitch. His tone was sober, but not entirely so. The passage that caught Eisen's eye concerned a playground erected around 1942 and the author's inner conflict surrounded the coexistence of games and sports and mass murder in the ghetto.
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Speaking to the People
The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective
Richard Ellis
University of Massachusetts Press, 1998
Americans today expect their president to speak directly to them on the issues of the day—to address their concerns, to ask for their support, even to feel their pain. Yet, as the essays in this volume make clear, this was not always the case. During the early years of the republic, such behavior would have been deemed beneath the president's office, undignified at best, demagogic at worst. How, then, did the practice of "speaking to the people" evolve from the icy reserve of George Washington to the effusive empathy of Bill Clinton? This book explores how the "rhetorical presidency" became a central feature of American politics. Beginning with a fresh look at the framing of the Constitution, the essays examine the role of rhetoric in a variety of nineteenth-century presidencies, as well as in the crucial turn-of-the-century presidencies of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. Viewed against this historical backdrop, the "modern" presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and his successors appear less a break with the past than a culmination of developments in popular leadership and rhetorical practice that began more than a century before.
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Piety and Dissent
Race, Gender, and Biblical Rhetoric in Early American Autobiography
Eileen R. Elrod
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
For pious converts to Christianity in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New England, all reality was shaped by religious devotion and biblical text. It is therefore not surprising that earnest believers who found themselves marginalized by their race or sex relied on their faith to reconcile the tension between the spiritual experience of rebirth and the social ordeal of exclusion and injustice. In Piety and Dissent, Eileen Razzari Elrod examines the religious autobiographies of six early Americans who represented various sorts of marginality: John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, and Jarena Lee, all of African or African American heritage; Samson Occom (Mohegan) and William Apess (Pequot); and Abigail Abbott Bailey, a white woman who was subjected to extreme domestic violence. Through close readings of these personal narratives, Elrod uncovers the complex rhetorical strategies employed by pious outsiders to challenge the particular kinds of oppression each experienced. She identifies recurrent ideals and images drawn from Scripture and Protestant tradition—parables of liberation, rage, justice, and opposition to authority—that allowed them to see resistance as a religious act and, more than that, imbued them with a sense of agency. What the life stories of these six individuals reveal, according to Elrod, is that conventional Christianity in early America was not the hegemonic force that church leaders at the time imagined, and that many people since have believed it to be. Nor was there a clear distinction between personal piety and religious, social, and political resistance. To understand fully the role of religion in the early period of American letters, we must rethink some of our most fundamental assumptions about the function of Christian faith in the context of individual lives.
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Letters from Red Farm
The Untold Story of the Friendship between Helen Keller and Journalist Joseph Edgar Chamberlin
Elizabeth Emerson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
In 1888, young Helen Keller traveled to Boston with her teacher, Annie Sullivan, where they met a man who would change her life: Boston Transcript columnist and editor Joseph Edgar Chamberlin. Throughout her childhood and young adult years, Keller spent weekends and holidays at Red Farm, the Chamberlins' home in Wrentham, Massachusetts, a bustling environment where avant-garde writers, intellectuals, and social reformers of the day congregated. Keller eventually called Red Farm home for a year when she was sixteen.

Informed by previously unpublished letters and extensive research, Letters from Red Farm explores for the first time Keller's deep and enduring friendship with the man who became her literary mentor and friend for over forty years. Written by Chamberlin's great-great granddaughter, this engaging story imparts new insights into Keller's life and personality, introduces the irresistible Chamberlin to a modern public, and follows Keller's burgeoning interest in social activism, as she took up the causes of disability rights, women's issues, and pacifism.
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Cultivating Environmental Justice
A Literary History of U.S. Garden Writing
Robert S. Emmett
University of Massachusetts Press, 2016
While Michael Pollan and others have popularized ideas about how growing one's own food can help lead to environmental sustainability, environmental justice activists have pushed for more access to gardens and fresh food in impoverished communities. Now, Robert S. Emmett argues that mid-twentieth-century American garden writing included many ideas that became formative for these contemporary environmental writers and activists.

Drawing on ecocriticism, environmental history, landscape architecture, and recent work in environmental justice and food studies, Emmett explores how the language of environmental justice emerged in descriptions of gardening across a variety of literary forms. He reveals early egalitarian associations found in garden writing, despite a popular focus on elite sites such as suburban lawns and formal southern gardens. Cultivating Environmental Justice emphasizes the intergenerational work of gardeners and garden writers who, from the 1930s on, asserted increasingly radical socioeconomic and ecological claims to justice. Emmett considers a wide range of texts by authors including Bernard M'Mahon, Scott and Helen Nearing, Katharine S. White, Elizabeth Lawrence, Alice Walker, and Novella Carpenter.
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The Last Days of Publishing
A Novel
Thomas M. Engelhardt
University of Massachusetts Press, 2005
Pompeii never had it so bad. Rick Koppes knows a world is ending. The only question is, will he end with it? An editor at Byzantium Press for the last quarter century, he has watched his small, classy publishing house get gobbled up, first by an American publishing giant and then by Multimedia Entertainment, the Hollywood wing of Bruno Hindemann's German media empire. His editing colleagues are being downsized, his authors axed, and in a world where the cultural wallpaper is screaming, he himself hangs on by a fingernail—the latest work of his sole best-selling author, pop psychologist Walter Groth, is racing off bookstore shelves. And that's just where his problems begin—after all, Multimedia is about to make his ex-wife, a publishing executive at another house, his boss, his assistant wants his authors, and a woman who claims her father dropped the bomb on Nagasaki insists he publish her woeful memoir.

Koppes, who came of age in the sixties, is an editor slowly running off the rails. In the six episodes of The Last Days of Publishing, he refights the Vietnam War in a Chinese restaurant, discovers that the paleontological is political in a natural history museum, mixes it up with a flamboyant literary agent who went underground decades earlier, and encounters a hippie cultural oligarch on the forty-fifth floor of Multimedia's transnational entertainment headquarters.

Tom Engelhardt, himself a publishing veteran, has produced a tumultuous vision of the new world in which the word finds itself hustling for a living. By turns hilarious, sardonic, and poignant, his novel deftly captures the ways in which publishing, which has long put our world between covers but has seldom been memorialized in fiction, is being transformed.
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front cover of The End of Victory Culture
The End of Victory Culture
Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation
Tom Engelhardt
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007
In a substantial new afterword to his classic account of the collapse of American triumphalism in the wake of World War II, Tom Engelhardt carries that story into the twenty-first century. He explores how, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the younger George Bush headed for the Wild West (Osama bin Laden, "Wanted, Dead or Alive"); how his administration brought "victory culture" roaring back as part of its Global War on Terror and its rush to invade Saddam Husseins's Iraq; and how, from its "Mission Accomplished" moment on, its various stories of triumph crashed and burned in that land.
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front cover of Staging Growth
Staging Growth
Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War
David C. Engerman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2003
Beginning in the 1950s, the theory of modernization emerged as the dominant paradigm of economic, social, and political development within the American foreign policy establishment. Purporting to explain the stages through which all nations pass on the road to industrial modernity, it provided a rationale for a broad range of cultural and political projects aimed at fostering Third World growth while simultaneously combating communism.

But modernization theory was more than simply an expression of Cold War ideology. As the essays in this volume show, the ideal of modernization proliferated throughout the postcolonial world and across ideological lines in places as diverse as East Asia, Southern Africa, and South Asia. Indeed, it was embraced by all who shared the American enthusiasm for the increased production and higher standards of living promised by industrialization -enemies and allies alike.

Situating modernization theory historically, Staging Growth avoids conventional chronologies and categories of analysis, particularly the traditional focus on conflicts between major powers. The contributors employ a variety of approaches-from economic and intellectual history to cultural criticism and biography-to shed fresh light on the global forces that shaped the Cold War and its legacies. Most of the pieces are comparative, exploring how different countries and cultures have grappled with the implications of modern development. At the same time, all of the essays address similar fundamental questions. Is modernization the same thing as Westernization? Is the idea of modernization universally valid? Do countries follow similar trajectories as they undertake development? Does modernization bring about globalization?

In addition to the editors and Akira Iriye, contributors include Michael Adas, Laura Belmonte, Gregg Andrew Brazinsky, Christina Klein, J. Victor Koschmann, and Michael R. Mahoney.
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front cover of In Pursuit of Justice
In Pursuit of Justice
The Life of John Albion Andrew
Stephen D Engle
University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

Widely known as the “poor man’s lawyer” in antebellum Boston, John Albion Andrew (1818–1867) was involved in nearly every cause and case that advanced social and racial justice in Boston in the years preceding the Civil War. Inspired by the legacies of John Quincy Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and mentored by Charles Sumner, Andrew devoted himself to the battle for equality. By day, he fought to protect those condemned to the death penalty, women seeking divorce, and fugitives ensnared by the Fugitive Slave Law. By night, he coordinated logistics and funding for the Underground Railroad as it ferried enslaved African Americans northward.

In this revealing and accessible biography, Stephen D. Engle traces Andrew’s life and legacy, giving this important, but largely forgotten, figure his due. Rising to national prominence during the Civil War years as the governor of Massachusetts, Andrew raised the African American regiment known as the Glorious 54th and rallied thousands of soldiers to the Union cause. Upon his sudden death in 1867, a correspondent for Harper’s Weekly wrote, “Not since the news came of Abraham Lincoln’s death were so many hearts truly smitten.”

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Green World
A Tragicomic Memoir of Love & Shakespeare
Michelle Ephraim
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

At twenty-three, Michelle Ephraim was failing at everything. The only child of reclusive Holocaust-survivor parents who were dismayed by her literary studies, she found herself dumped by her boyfriend and bombing out of graduate school. Then, one night, she crashed a Shakespeare recitation party. Loopy from vodka and never having read a single line of Shakespeare, she was transfixed. Shakespeare, she decided, was the lifeline she needed.

Green World is the hilarious and heartbreaking story of Ephraim’s quest to become a Shakespeare scholar and to find community and home. As she studies Shakespeare, Ephraim’s world uncannily begins to mirror the story of the Jewish daughter in The Merchant of Venice, and she finds herself in a Green World, an idyllic place where Shakespeare’s heroines escape their family trauma. Green World reckons with global, historical, and personal tragedy and shows how literature—comic and tragic—can help us brave every kind of anguish.

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After the Future
The Paradoxes of Postmodernism & Contemporary Russian Culture
Mikhail N. Epstein
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995
This book brings together for the first time in English the major writings of Mikhail Epstein, one of post-Soviet Russia's most prominent theoreticians of cultural studies and postmodernism. Written from a non-Western point of view yet informed by a familiarity with Western literary theory, it offers a fresh, lucid perspective on the post-communist literary scene as well as a practical and theoretical introduction to the new discipline of Russian "culturology."
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Everybody's History
Indiana's Lincoln Inquiry and the Quest to Reclaim a President's Past
Keith A. Erekson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
Revered by the public, respected by scholars, and imitated by politicians, Abraham Lincoln remains influential more than two hundred years after his birth. His memory has inspired books, monuments, and museums and also sparked controversies, rivalries, and forgeries. That so many people have been interested in Lincoln for so long makes him an ideal subject for exploring why history matters to ordinary Americans as well as to academic specialists.

In Everybody's History, Keith A. Erekson focuses on the Southwestern Indiana Historical Society—an organization composed of lawyers, historians, collectors, genealogists, teachers, college presidents, and newspaper editors—who joined together during the 1920s and 1930s to recover a part of Lincoln's life his biographers had long ignored: the years from age seven to twenty-one when he lived on the Indiana frontier. Participants in the "Lincoln Inquiry," as it was commonly known, researched old records, interviewed aging witnesses, hosted pageants, built a historical village, and presented their findings in public and in print. Along the way they defended their methods and findings against competitors in the fields of public history and civic commemoration, and rescued some of Indiana's own history by correcting a forgotten chapter of Lincoln's.

Everybody's History traces the development of popular interest in Lincoln to uncover the story of an extensive network of nonprofessional historians who contested old authorities and advanced new interpretations. In so doing, the book invites all who are interested in the past to see history as both vital to public life and meaningful to everybody.
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The Jay Treaty Debate, Public Opinion, and the Evolution of Early American Political Culture
Todd Estes
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
During the mid-1790s, citizens of the newly formed United States became embroiled in a divisive debate over a proposed commercial treaty with Great Britain. Long regarded as a pivotal event in the history of the early republic, the controversy pitted pro-treaty Federalists against anti-treaty Jeffersonian Republicans. Yet as Todd Estes argues in this perceptive study, the year-long debate over the ratification of the Jay Treaty represented more than a clash over foreign policy between two nascent political parties. It also marked a significant milestone in the role played by public opinion in the young nation's political culture.

Drawing evidence from a broad range of sources—petitions and newspaper polemics, crowd gatherings, as well as rhetorical exchanges on the floor of Congress—Estes shows how both sides in the Jay Treaty debate mounted extensive and unprecedented campaigns to marshal popular support for their positions. Although many Americans initially opposed the treaty, the Federalists proved particularly skillful at courting the public and eventually prevailed over their opponents, just as they had won earlier battles over neutrality, democratic societies, and the Whiskey Rebellion. But the Republicans, Estes points out, learned from the experience, and in the long run they would become even more adept than the Federalists at shaping public opinion.

Even at the time, amid the fierce political rhetoric and colorful street demonstrations that characterized the Jay Treaty debate, participants recognized that important changes were taking place. Not only did the dispute solidify party allegiances, it also legitimized and advanced popular involvement in the political process. While some welcomed the emergence of this new, more democratic political culture, Estes concludes, others were much more ambivalent.
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Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism
Yaron Ezrahi
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995
This collection of essays from international scholars from various disciplines addresses the theme of technological pessimism; the conviction that technology has given us the means not only to achieve unlimited progress, but to destroy ourselves and our most cherished values.
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