front cover of Transcendental Heresies
Transcendental Heresies
Harvard and the Modern American Practice of Unbelief
David Faflik
University of Massachusetts Press, 2020
At a moment when the requirements of belief and unbelief were being negotiated in unexpected ways, transcendentalism allowed for a more creative approach to spiritual questions. Interrogating the movement's alleged atheistic underpinnings, David Faflik contends that transcendentalism reconstituted the religious sensibilities of 1830s and 1840s New England, producing a dynamic and complex array of beliefs and behaviors that cannot be categorized as either religious or nonreligious. Rather than "the latest form of infidelity," as one contemporary described it, adherents viewed their unconventional and distinct spiritual practices as a modern religion.

Transcendental Heresies draws on an expansive antebellum archive of period commentary and writings by transcendentalism's practitioners, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, and the women of transcendentalism's second and third waves. From Boston to Concord to the heady environs of Harvard, the species of unbelief they practiced multiplied the religious possibilities of the era, expressing misgivings about traditional notions of divinity, flouting religion's customary forms, and ultimately encouraging spiritual questioning.
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The Rebel's Silhouette
Selected Poems
Faiz Ahmed Faiz
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995
Born in India and considered the leading poet on the South Asian subcontinent, Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984) was a two-time Nobel nominee and winner of the 1962 Lenin Peace Prize. His evening readings in Hindi/Urdu-speaking regions drew thousands of listeners. Associated with the Communist party in his youth, Faiz became an outspoken poet in opposition to the Pakistani government. This volume offers a selection of Faiz's poetry in a bilingual Urdu/English edition with a new introduction by poet and translator Agha Shahid Ali.
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Upstaging the Cold War
American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy, 1940-1960
Andrew J. Falk
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
Traditional interpretations of the 1950s have emphasized how American anti-communists deployed censorship and the blacklist to silence dissent, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. Yet those efforts at repression did not always succeed. Throughout the early years of the Cold War, a significant number of writers and performers continued to express controversial views about international relations in Hollywood films, through the new medium of television, on the Broadway stage, and from behind the scenes.

By promoting superpower cooperation, decolonization, nuclear disarmament, and other taboo causes, dissident artists such as Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Rod Serling, Dalton Trumbo, Reginald Rose, and Paddy Chayefsky managed both to stretch the boundaries of Cold War ideology and to undermine some of its basic assumptions. Working at times under assumed names and in some cases outside the United States, they took on the role of informal diplomats who competed with Washington in representing America to the world.

Ironically, the dissidents' international appeal eventually persuaded the U.S. foreign policy establishment that their unconventional views could be an asset in the Cold War contest for "hearts and minds," and their artistic work an effective means to sell American values and culture abroad. By the end of the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration not only appropriated the work of these talented artists but enlisted some of them to serve as official voices of Cold War cultural diplomacy.
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Mapping Norwood
An Irish-American Memoir
Charles Fanning
University of Massachusetts Press, 2010
As the title indicates, this memoir is an act of map making, of plotting out overlapping territories—topographical, temporal, and psychological. Centered on family life in a Massachusetts town from the 1920s to the 1960s, the author's investigation extends outward to include the Boston area from colonial times to the recent past, encounters with Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and with Harvard College, the American Civil War, and Ireland and Germany in the nineteenth century.Charles Fanning re-creates the landscape of childhood and adolescence in a place and time both ordinary and rich with possibility. An expert on Irish immigration, he was born and raised in Norwood, Massachusetts, twelve miles outside of Boston, where Yankee and Irish cultures bumped against each other. The narrative traces his personal growth, shaped by family, school, baseball, radio drama, and art. He was the first in his family to attend college, and the book ends with his undergraduate experience at Harvard, class of 1964.Along with this coming-of-age story, Mapping Norwood features forays back in time, including chapters on each of Fanning's parents and historical excavations and meditations on three ancestors. Guided by his own experience as a scholar, the pressure of these chapters is epistemological—the thrill of the hunt toward knowing. Fanning's great-grandfather, John Fanning, disappeared from the family in the late 1880s, and a chapter chronicles the discovery of "Walking John's" fifty years of hidden later life in East St. Louis, Illinois, where he died alone in 1946. Fanning's great-great-grandfather, Winslow Radcliffe, was a veteran of the 35th Massachusetts Infantry in the Civil War, and the author traces this regiment through the horrors of Antietam and Fredericksburg, by means of diaries and letters by four men from Winslow's company. The evidence gleaned helps explain Winslow's suicide after the war. An Irish immigrant ancestor, Phillip Fanning, came to Boston from County Monaghan just after the Great Famine of the late 1840s. Relying on historical research, Fanning imagines vividly the lives led by Phillip's family and thousands like them in the wake of Ireland's nineteenth-century catastrophe.
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Artful Lives
The Francis Watts Lee Family and Their Times
Patricia J. Fanning
University of Massachusetts Press, 2016
Francis Watts Lee and his family hold a special place in the history of American photography. F. Holland Day completed a series of remarkable photographs of Lee's daughter Peggy, and the striking portrait of the child and her mother titled Blessed Art Thou among Women is one of Gertrude Käsebier's most iconic compositions. In Artful Lives, Patricia J. Fanning uses these and other significant images as guideposts to explore the Lee family and the art and culture of their age.

A social reform advocate, Francis Watts Lee was an artistic photographer and a talented printer, part of the circle of avant-garde artists and intellectuals who formed Boston's bohemia. He married twice, first Agnes Rand, an award-winning poet and children's book author, and later, after their divorce, Marion Lewis Chamberlain, a librarian and MIT-trained architect. Francis and Agnes's eldest daughter, Peggy, who was so integral to the work of pioneer Pictorialists, died at age seven of juvenile diabetes. Her sister, Alice, who lost her hearing in infancy, became a wood carver and sculptor.

Utilizing previously unknown family archives and institutional sources, Fanning traces the Lee family's story in the context of major artistic, political, social, and religious trends, including the Arts and Crafts movement, Christian Socialism, and Aestheticism, while also showing how their experiences reflected the national culture's evolving conceptions of family, gender, childhood, medicine, deaf education, and mourning. This richly drawn and gracefully written account of one family informs our understanding of this vibrant era, in Boston and well beyond.
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Influenza and Inequality
One Town's Tragic Response to the Great Epidemic of 1918
Patricia J. Fanning
University of Massachusetts Press, 2010
The influenza epidemic of 1918 was one of the worst medical disasters in human history, taking close to thirty million lives worldwide in less than a year, including more than 500,000 in the United States. What made this pandemic even more frightening was the fact that it occurred when death rates for most common infectious diseases were diminishing. Still, an epidemic is not merely a medical crisis; it has sociological, psychological, and political dimensions as well. In Influenza and Inequality, Patricia J. Fanning examines these other dimensions and brings to life this terrible episode of epidemic disease by tracing its path through the town of Norwood, Massachusetts.

By 1918, Norwood was a small, ethnically diverse, industrialized, and stratified community. Ink, printing, and tanning factories were owned by wealthy families who lived privileged lives. These industries attracted immigrant laborers who made their homes in several ethnic neighborhoods and endured prejudice and discrimination at the hands of native residents. When the epidemic struck, the immigrant neighborhoods were most affected; a fact that played a significant role in the town's response—with tragic results.

This close analysis of one town's struggle illuminates how even well-intentioned elite groups may adopt and implement strategies that can exacerbate rather than relieve a medical crisis. It is a cautionary tale that demonstrates how social behavior can be a fundamental predictor of the epidemic curve, a community's response to crisis, and the consequences of those actions.
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Through an Uncommon Lens
The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day
Patricia J. Fanning
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
Based in the Boston area, F. Holland Day (1864–1933) was a central figure in artistic circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Publisher of Oscar Wilde and Stephen Crane, mentor to a young Kahlil Gibran, adviser and friend to photographers Alvin Langdon Coburn and Edward Steichen, Day lived a life devoted to art and beauty. At the turn of the twentieth century, his reputation rivaled that of Alfred Stieglitz. A pioneer in the field of pictorial photography, Day was also an influential book publisher in the Arts and Crafts tradition. He cofounded the publishing company of Copeland and Day, which issued more than a hundred titles between 1893 and 1899. In addition, he embraced a unique sense of social responsibility and a commitment to historic preservation. Colorful and sometimes eccentric, Day was best known for his stunningly original, brilliantly executed, and sometimes controversial photographic images of blacks, children, and allegorical subjects. His determination to promote photography as a fine art led him to create photographic representations of the crucifixion of Christ, studies for which he was his own model. Although he continued to mentor young artists until his death, ill health caused Day to spend the last fourteen years of his life inside his home in Norwood, Massachusetts. By the time he died in 1933, he was virtually unknown, but in recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in his art. Responding to this renewed interest, Patricia Fanning has written an impressive biography—one that draws on previously unavailable archival material and is attuned to the historical and cultural contexts in which Day lived and worked. The book is illustrated with more than a hundred photographs, including 32 duotone illustrations of the artist's work.
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Lillie Devereux Blake
Retracing a Life Erased
Grace Farrell
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
Fiction writer, journalist, and essayist, Lillie Devereux Blake (1833–1913) published seven novels, two collections of stories and essays, and hundreds of other pieces during her lifetime. She also played a major role in the struggle for women's rights, eventually becoming Elizabeth Cady Stanton's candidate to succeed Susan B. Anthony as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Yet for all her remarkable accomplishments, Lillie Blake's story has been all but forgotten. As Grace Farrell reveals in this richly textured biography, Blake's creative writings did not survive the canonical purges of women authors at the turn of the twentieth century, and her contributions to the suffrage movement were simply ignored in the official histories sanctioned by Susan B. Anthony. From the traces that remain, Farrell reconstructs an extraordinary life of passion and purpose. She chronicles Blake's literary career from Civil War correspondent to novelist and provides an inside view of suffrage politics, correcting some long held misconceptions perpetuated by Anthony and her supporters.

At the same time, Farrell expands the generic boundaries of biography by recounting not only a life and the causes of its erasure but also her own process of recovering that life. She brings the reader along with her as she follows Blake's path in the world, touches her diary, reads her letters, and campaigns to prevent Yale University from demolishing Blake's childhood home in New Haven.
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The Many Woods of Grief
Poems
Lucas Farrell
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
In this striking debut volume, Lucas Farrell offers a lyrical and illuminating field guide to the flora and fauna of "worlds just out of reach." With the precision and detail of an Audubon sketch, he turns his naturalist's eye to the vast landscape of human emotion—all the while affirming "how real this world we live in / must be to live in."

Journeying ever outward, from the achingly ordinary to the mysterious "land where there is no land," the narrator of this collection, equal parts pastoralist and surrealist, explores the vivid in-betweens—between love and loss, hilarity and despair, wild and domestic, real and imagined. Hungry, expressive, and original, these poems glean light from even the darkest of fields.From "Further Along Now"Further along the curves of gesture, the delicateapostrophe, in the tongues of muted suns, we'll findourselves in a clearing, in a meadow of ancient grass,picking apart what has long been picked apart. Furtheralong, the compliments, the tweezers and logic, thelaboratory of hard hats and felt pens and hard headsand clipboards hanging from sky's bloody fender, birddroppings steaming calligraphic so long as the cloudsbecome clouds become clouds and amazed we see insuch preventable warfare our own substancesunchanging. Fountains of ash too diffuse to interpret,too complex to diagnose, I quote the many woods ofgrief, too far alone, too deep.
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Buying the Farm
Peace and War on a Sixties Commune
Tom Fels
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
This book tells the story of Montague Farm, an early back-to-the land communal experiment in western Massachusetts, from its beginning in 1968 through the following thirty-five years of its surprisingly long life. Drawing on his own experience as a resident of the farm from 1969 to 1973 and decades of contact with the farm's extended family, Tom Fels provides an insightful account of the history of this iconic alternative community. He follows its trajectory from its heady early days as a pioneering outpost of the counterculture through many years of change, including a period of renewed political activism and, later, increasing episodes of conflict between opposing factions to determine what the farm represented and who would control its destiny.

With deft individual portraits, Fels reveals the social dynamics of the group and explores the ongoing difficulties faced by a commune that was founded in idealism and sought to operate on the model of a leaderless democracy. He draws on a large body of farm-family and 1960s-related writing and the notes of community members to present a variety of points of view. The result is an absorbing narrative that chronicles the positive aspects of Montague Farm while documenting the many challenges and disruptions that marked its history.
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What Middletown Read
Print Culture in an American Small City
Frank Felsenstein
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
The discovery of a large cache of circulation records from the Muncie, Indiana, Public Library in 2003 offers unprecedented detail about American reading behavior at the turn of the twentieth century. Frank Felsenstein and James J. Connolly have mined these records to produce an in-depth account of print culture in Muncie, the city featured in the famed "Middletown" studies conducted by Robert and Helen Lynd almost a century ago. Using the data assembled and made public through the What Middletown Read Database (www.bsu.edu/libraries/wmr), a celebrated new resource the authors helped launch, Felsenstein and Connolly analyze the borrowing choices and reading culture of social groups and individuals.

What Middletown Read is much more than a statistical study. Felsenstein and Connolly dig into diaries, meeting minutes, newspaper reports, and local histories to trace the library's development in relation to the city's cosmopolitan aspirations, to profile individual readers, and to explore such topics as the relationship between children's reading and their schooling and what books were discussed by local women's clubs. The authors situate borrowing patterns and reading behavior within the contexts of a rapidly growing, culturally ambitious small city, an evolving public library, an expanding market for print, and the broad social changes that accompanied industrialization in the United States. The result is a rich, revealing portrait of the place of reading in an emblematic American community.
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Bad News Travels Fast
The Telegraph, Libel, and Press Freedom in the Progressive Era
Patrick C. File
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
At the turn of the twentieth century, American journalists transmitted news across the country by telegraph. But what happened when these stories weren't true? In Bad News Travels Fast, Patrick C. File examines a series of libel cases by a handful of plaintiffs—including socialites, businessmen, and Annie Oakley—who sued newspapers across the country for republishing false newswire reports. Through these cases, File demonstrates how law and technology intertwined to influence debates about reputation, privacy, and the acceptable limits of journalism.

This largely forgotten era in the development of American libel law provides crucial historical context for contemporary debates about the news media, public discourse, and the role of a free press. File argues that the legal thinking surrounding these cases laid the groundwork for the more friendly libel standards the press now enjoys and helped to establish today's regulations of press freedom amid the promise and peril of high-speed communication technology.
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Boston's Cycling Craze, 1880-1900
A Story of Race, Sport, and Society
Lorenz J. Finison
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
From 1877 to 1896, the popularity of bicycles increased exponentially, and Boston was in on it from the start. The Boston Bicycle Club was the first in the nation, and the city's cyclists formed the nucleus of a new national organization, the League of American Wheelmen. The sport was becoming a craze, and Massachusetts had the largest per capita membership in the league in the 1890s and the largest percentage of women members. Several prominent cycling magazines were published in Boston, making cycling a topic of press coverage and a growing cultural influence as well as a form of recreation.

Lorenz J. Finison explores the remarkable rise of Boston cycling through the lives of several participants, including Kittie Knox, a biracial twenty-year-old seamstress who challenged the color line; Mary Sargent Hopkins, a self-proclaimed expert on women's cycling and publisher of The Wheelwoman; and Abbot Bassett, a longtime secretary of the League of American Wheelman and a vocal cycling advocate for forty years. Finison shows how these riders and others interacted on the road and in their cycling clubhouses, often constrained by issues of race, class, religion, and gender. He reveals the challenges facing these riders, whether cycling for recreation or racing, in a time of segregation, increased immigration, and debates about the rights of women.
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front cover of Boston's Twentieth-Century Bicycling Renaissance
Boston's Twentieth-Century Bicycling Renaissance
Cultural Change on Two Wheels
Lorenz J. Finison
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
At the end of the nineteenth century, cycling's popularity surged in the Boston area, but by 1900, the trend faded. Within the next few decades, automobiles became commonplace and roads were refashioned to serve them. Lorenz J. Finison argues that bicycling witnessed a renaissance in the 1970s as concerns over physical and environmental health coalesced. Whether cyclists hit the roads on their way to work or to work out, went off-road in the mountains or to race via cyclocross and BMX, or took part in charity rides, biking was back in a major way.

Finison traces the city's cycling history, chronicling the activities of environmental and social justice activists, stories of women breaking into male-dominated professions by becoming bike messengers and mechanics, and challenges faced by African American cyclists. Making use of newspaper archives, newly discovered records of local biking organizations, and interviews with Boston-area bicyclists and bike builders, Boston's Twentieth­-Century Bicycling Renaissance brings these voices and battles back to life.
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A History of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Intersection of Art, Science, and Bureaucracy
Lois Marie Fink
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007
Dedicated to the art of the United States, the Smithsonian American Art Museum contains works by more than 7,000 artists and is widely regarded as an invaluable resource for the study and preservation of the nation's cultural heritage. But as Lois Marie Fink shows in this probing narrative, the history of the museum is hardly one of steady progress. Instead, it reads like a nineteenth-century melodrama, replete with villains and heroes, destruction by fire, dashed hopes, and periods of subsistence survival—all leading eventually to a happy ending. Originating as the art gallery stipulated in the 1846 founding legislation of the Smithsonian, the museum developed within an institution that was essentially controlled by scientists. In its early years, the museum's holdings included a diverse selection of art and artifacts, mostly donated from private collections. Government support varied in response to shifting attitudes of officials and the public toward American art, ranging from avid admiration at the turn of the twentieth century to a tepid response and an almost total withdrawal of funding a generation later in favor of European masterworks. For decades the museum followed scientific organizational principles in exhibitions and collection strategies. Far into the twentieth century, accessions remained tied to nineteenth-century figurative art, reflecting the strength and influence of anthropology and biological sciences at the Smithsonian. A key breakthrough for modern art came in 1964 with the appointment of Smithsonian secretary Dillon Ripley, a scientist who strongly promoted the art side of the institution. With renewed support for expanding the collection and programs, the museum moved in 1968 to its present location in the Patent Office Building. In recounting the history of the museum from 1846 to 1980, Fink unravels the various levels of institutional authority, power, governance, and bureaucracy and shows how people at each level influenced the fortunes of the collection. She also places changing concepts of art and museum practice in the context of national ideals and Washington realities.
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Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare
Paraic Finnerty
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
One of the messages that Emily Dickinson wanted to communicate to the world was her great love of William Shakespeare—her letters abound with references to him and his works. This book explores the many implications of her admiration for the Bard.

Páraic Finnerty clarifies the essential role that Shakespeare had in Dickinson's life by locating her allusions to his writings within a nineteenth-century American context and by treating reading as a practice that is shaped, to a large extent, by culture. In the process, he throws new light on Shakespeare's multifaceted presence in Dickinson's world: in education, theater, newspapers, public lectures, reading clubs, and literary periodicals.

Through analysis of letters, journals, diaries, records, periodicals, newspapers, and marginalia, Finnerty juxtaposes Dickinson's engagement with Shakespeare with the responses of her contemporaries. Her Shakespeare emerges as an immoral dramatist and highly moral poet; a highbrow symbol of class and cultivation and a lowbrow popular entertainer; an impetus behind the emerging American theater criticism and an English author threatening American creativity; a writer culturally approved for women and yet one whose authority women often appropriated to critique their culture. Such a context allows the explication of Dickinson's specific references to Shakespeare and further conjecture about how she most likely read him.

Finnerty also examines those of Dickinson's responses to Shakespeare that deviated from what might have been expected and approved of by her culture. Imaginatively departing from the commonplace, Dickinson chose to admire three of Shakespeare's most powerful and transgressive female characters—Cleopatra, Queen Margaret, and Lady Macbeth—instead of his more worthy and virtuous heroines. More startling, although the poet found resonance for her own life in Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth, she chose, in the racially charged atmosphere of nineteenth-century America, to identify with Shakespeare's most controversial character, Othello, thereby defying expectations once again.
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Writing Themselves into the Movement
Child Authors of the Black Arts Era
Amy Fish
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

Between 1967 and 1972, a previously obscure group of authors entered the US cultural spotlight. During this five-year period, at least thirty anthologies of poetry and prose by African American, Latinx, Asian American, and Native American children came out of adult-led workshops, classrooms, and sites of juvenile incarceration. Mass-market publishers, independent imprinters, and local mimeograph machines produced volumes with titles such as I Am Somebody! and The Me Nobody Knows: Children’s Voices from the Ghetto. These young writers actively participated in the Black Arts Movement, and some collaborated with well-known adult authors, most prominently June Jordan. Their anthologies gained national media coverage, occasionally became bestsellers, were quoted by James Baldwin, and even inspired a hit Broadway musical. While writings by children had long attracted adult attention, this flurry of youth writing and publishing was distinguished by the widespread belief that children of color from poor and working-class neighborhoods were uniquely able to speak truth about American racism and inequality.

Focusing on Black and Latinx youth authorship within New York City, and using deep archival research and elegant close readings, Amy Fish examines child-authored texts of this era within the context of their literary production and reception. These young writers were often supervised and edited by white adults, raising concerns about the authenticity and agency of their voices. Fish contends that young authors themselves shared these concerns and that they employed savvy rhetorical strategies of address, temporality, and trope to self-consciously interrogate the perils and possibilities of their adult-influenced work. Young writers thus contributed to the era’s important debates about the nature of authorship and readership within a racist society, while also using their writing as an intimate occasion of self-discovery.

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Dr. America
The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-1961
James T. Fisher
University of Massachusetts Press, 1998
This book chronicles the life of Tom Dooley, the American doctor whose much-publicized exploits in Vietnam and Laos during the 1950s helped lay the ideological groundwork for the U.S. military intervention a decade later. The scion of an upper-middle-class St. Louis family, Dooley was an enormously complex and fascinating individual. He was a devoutly religious Roman Catholic as well as a self-styled playboy socialite, a devoted physician to the poor and a tireless propagandist for the "Vietnam Lobby," a shameless self-promoter and a closeted homosexual, a victim of Navy persecution and a beneficiary of CIA support. Dooley first gained notoriety as a young Navy doctor charged with overseeing the evacuation of Catholic refugees from North Vietnam in the wake of the 1954 Geneva Accords. His celebrity grew after his book Deliver Us from Evil, a fervently anticommunist account of his experiences, was serialized in Reader's Digest. By the end of the decade, as his name became associated (albeit mistakenly) with a ballad popularized by the Kingston Trio, he had achieved the status of "America's first pop star saint." In addition to exposing the roots of the Vietnam War, Dooley's story illuminates a broad range of developments in post-World War II United States culture—from the "Americanization" of Catholicism to the rise of the mass media.
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How the News Feels
The Empathic Power of Literary Journalists
Jonathan D. Fitzgerald
University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

Literary journalism’s origins can be traced to the nineteenth century, when it developed alongside the era’s sentimental literature. Combining fact-based reporting with the sentimentality of popular fiction, literary journalism encouraged readers to empathize with subjects by presenting more nuanced and engaging stories than typical news coverage. While women writers were central to the formation and ongoing significance of the genre, literary journalism scholarship has largely ignored their contributions.

How the News Feels re-centers the work of a range of writers who were active from the nineteenth century until today, including Catharine Williams, Margaret Fuller, Nellie Bly, Winifred Black, Zora Neale Hurston, Joan Didion, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and Alexis Okeowo. Offering intimate access to their subjects’ thoughts, motivations, and yearnings, these journalists encouraged readers to empathize with society’s outcasts, from asylum inmates and murder suspects to “fallen women” and the working poor. As this carefully researched study shows, these writers succeeded in defining and developing the genre of literary journalism, with stories that inspire action, engender empathy, and narrow the gap between writer, subject, and audience.

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Literary Journalism on Trial
Masson v. New Yorker and the First Amendment
Kathy Roberts Forde
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
In November 1984, Jeffrey Masson filed a libel suit against writer Janet Malcolm and the New Yorker, claiming that Malcolm had intentionally misquoted him in a profile she wrote for the magazine about his former career as a Freud scholar and administrator of the Freud archives. Over the next twelve years the case moved up and down the federal judicial ladder, at one point reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, as lawyers and judges wrestled with questions about the representation of "truth" in journalism and, by extension, the limits of First Amendment protections of free speech. Had a successful Freudian scholar actually called himself an "intellectual gigolo" and "the greatest analyst who ever lived"? Or had a respected writer for the New Yorker knowingly placed false, self-damning words in her subject's mouth? In Literary Journalism on Trial, Kathy Roberts Forde explores the implications of Masson v. New Yorker in the context of the history of American journalism. She shows how the case represents a watershed moment in a long debate between the advocates of traditional and literary journalism and explains how it reflects a significant intellectual project of the period: the postmodern critique of objectivity, with its insistence on the instability of language and rejection of unitary truth in human affairs. The case, Forde argues, helped widen the perceived divide between ideas of literary and traditional journalism and forced the resolution of these conflicting conceptions of truth in the constitutional arena of libel law. By embracing traditional journalism's emphasis on fact and objectivity and rejecting a broader understanding of truth, the Supreme Court turned away from the First Amendment theory articulated in previous rulings, opting to value less the free, uninhibited interchange of ideas necessary to democracy and more the "trustworthiness" of public expression. The Court's decision in this case thus had implications that reached beyond the legal realm to the values and norms expressed in the triangular relationship between American democracy, First Amendment principles, and the press.
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Captain Paul Cuffe, Yeoman
A Biography
Jeffrey A. Fortin
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

Paul Cuffe is best understood as a member of the Black founding fathers—a group of pre-eminent African Americans who built institutions and movements during the first decades of the United States. While he is known amongst scholars, his astounding life story deserves a much wider audience. Jeffrey A. Fortin has crafted a beautiful, moving portrait of this important maritime figure that will appeal to anyone interested in early American history and who loves great story telling.

Born on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts in 1759 to a formerly enslaved African father and a Wampanoag Indian mother, Cuffe emerged from anonymity to become the most celebrated African-American sea captain during the Age of Sail. An abolitionist, veteran, and community activist, celebrity followed Cuffe as he built a shipping empire that traded both in American coastal waters and across the wider Atlantic Ocean. Cuffe and his Black crews shook the foundations of systemic racism, challenging norms by sailing into Charleston and other ports where slavery was legal, and thus demonstrating that business and profits were more powerful than social limitations. He founded America’s first racially integrated school in Westport, Massachusetts, and is considered the leader of the nation’s first back-to-Africa movement. Newspapers in England, the United States, and the Caribbean reported his whereabouts and adventures, and abolitionists hailed him for his Quaker beliefs, sobriety, and commitment to advancing opportunities for persons of African descent.

Drawing on pamphlets, letters, and other documents, and painstakingly reconstructing his genealogy, Fortin vividly describes Cuffe’s experiences and places them within the broader history of the Early Republic to help reveal the central role of African Americans in the founding of the United States. Unlike previous biographies, Fortin situates Cuffe within an Atlantic world where race and identity were fluid, and Africans and African Americans sought to build and govern a free Black nation in West Africa. 

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Capturing COVID
Media and the Pandemic in the Digital Era
Katherine A. Foss
University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

When health authorities quarantined guests aboard the Diamond Princess on February 5, 2020, the cruise ship abruptly shifted from a dream vacation vessel to a public health nightmare. Over the next three weeks, 712 passengers tested positive for coronavirus, with fourteen deaths, and the ship outbreak quickly became the largest cluster of cases outside of China. Guests began to routinely share quarantine updates on social media, ranging from the quality of the ship’s food to their sense of imprisonment. These Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok accounts became a key source of information for news outlets like the Associated Press, and they helped to set the tone for how the media would cover and frame the pandemic for the next several years.

Unlike past outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics, COVID-19 emerged in a 21st-century digital landscape of instant communication and abundant online platforms, with older models of news and entertainment media mingling with new types of citizen-produced content. In Capturing COVID, Katherine A. Foss makes sense of how this contemporary media landscape shaped the public’s knowledge and perceptions of the new pandemic. The book focuses on crucial media moments, including the initial reporting from Wuhan; news and social media content on the Diamond Princess quarantine; stories of inequality, stigma, and injustice; narratives of the vaccine rollout; and representations of pandemic life in popular culture. Drawing on press releases, interviews, websites, blogs, social media posts, and other publicly available materials, and guided by critical media analysis, Foss illuminates how this new digital era profoundly shaped the progression of the pandemic. This media landscape kept people informed and connected, but also led to the politicization of the virus, rampant mis/disinformation, and stigmatizing messaging that contributed to public distrust and division. Capturing COVID deftly helps make sense of the entire affair.

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Constructing the Outbreak
Epidemics in Media and Collective Memory
Katherine A. Foss
University of Massachusetts Press, 2020
When an epidemic strikes, media outlets are central to how an outbreak is framed and understood. While reporters construct stories intended to inform the public and convey essential information from doctors and politicians, news narratives also serve as historical records, capturing sentiments, responses, and fears throughout the course of the epidemic.

Constructing the Outbreak demonstrates how news reporting on epidemics communicates more than just information about pathogens; rather, prejudices, political agendas, religious beliefs, and theories of disease also shape the message. Analyzing seven epidemics spanning more than two hundred years—from Boston's smallpox epidemic and Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic in the eighteenth century to outbreaks of diphtheria, influenza, and typhoid in the early twentieth century—Katherine A. Foss discusses how shifts in journalism and medicine influenced the coverage, preservation, and fictionalization of different disease outbreaks. Each case study highlights facets of this interplay, delving into topics such as colonization, tourism, war, and politics. Through this investigation into what has been preserved and forgotten in the collective memory of disease, Foss sheds light on current health care debates, like vaccine hesitancy.
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Remembering Elizabeth Bishop
An Oral Biography
Gary Fountain
University of Massachusetts Press, 1996
This book interweaves more than 120 interviews with relatives, friends, colleagues, and students of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), one of America's finest poets. Among the interviewees are numerous intellectual and artistic figures, including John Ashbery, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Giroux, Clement Grenberg, Thom Gunn, John Hollander, Mary McCarthy, James Merrill, Katha Pollitt, Ned Rorem, Lloyd Schwartz, Anne Stevenson, Rosalyn Turek, Helen Vendler, and Richard Wilber.
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Living with Agent Orange
Conversations in Postwar Viet Nam
Diane Niblack Fox
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

For over half a century, the Vietnamese people have endured the harmful legacies of Agent Orange, the toxic herbicide used by the American military as a type of chemical warfare. While scientists and politicians continue to debate how to best address its human and environmental consequences, the nearly three million Vietnamese whose lives have been shaped by its lingering effects have been largely left out of the conversation.

To understand how Agent Orange has impacted the lives and livelihoods of everyday Vietnamese people, Diane Niblack Fox interviewed families and individuals living with its aftereffects across the northern, central, and southern regions of the country. In powerfully written prose, Fox shares the personal accounts of villagers, as they describe caring for loved ones with chronic illnesses and disabilities and their attempts to secure medical and financial assistance. Living with Agent Orange also chronicles the moving stories of rebuilt lives, of family and community support, and of the overriding power of the human spirit.

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Libraries amid Protest
Books, Organizing, and Global Activism
Sherrin Frances
University of Massachusetts Press, 2020
In September 2011, Occupy Wall Street activists took over New York's Zuccotti Park. Within a matter of weeks, the encampment had become a tiny model of a robust city, with its own kitchen, first aid station, childcare services—and a library of several thousand physical books. Since that time, social movements around the world, from Nuit Debout in Paris to Gezi Park in Istanbul, have built temporary libraries alongside their protests. While these libraries typically last only a few weeks at a time and all have ultimately been dismantled or destroyed, each has managed to collect, catalog, and circulate books, serving a need not being met elsewhere.

Libraries amid Protest unpacks how these protest libraries—labor-intensive, temporary installations in parks and city squares, poorly protected from the weather, at odds with security forces—continue to arise. In telling the stories of these surprising and inspiring spaces through interviews and other research, Sherrin Frances confronts the complex history of American public libraries. She argues that protest libraries function as the spaces of opportunity and resistance promised, but not delivered, by American public libraries.
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Collected Poems, 1936-1796
Robert Francis
University of Massachusetts Press, 1985
Gathered here in their entirety are the seven previous volumes of Robert Francis poetry — Stand with Me Here, Valhalla and Other Poems, The Sound I Listened For, The Face against the Glass, The Orb Weaver, Come Out into the Sun, and Like Ghosts of Eagles — together with a group of recent poems, many not previously published but "saved" to end this volume on a note of newness.

Because the original seven volumes are kept in chronological order, the reader can follow the author's journey from his quiet early work to poetry of greater color, warmth, vitality, vivacity, and sportiveness; and can note just when and where Francis' style becomes more and more diversified, with word-count, fragmented surface, and the celebration of words themselves.

The book is graced with eight wood engravings by Wang Hui-Ming.
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Late Fire, Late Snow
New and Uncollected Poems
Robert Francis
University of Massachusetts Press, 1992
The poems offered here were gathered from what Robert Francis wrote in the last decade of his life and from earlier work not available either in his seven previous books or his Collected Poems, 1936-1976. While aging is a recurring theme, the later poems converse with the earlier ones in an engaging mixture of subject and tone, mingling the pastoral with the political, the contemplative with the Chaplinesque. Recipient of the Shelly Memorial Award, Prix de Rome, and Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Francis lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, until his death in 1987 at age eighty-five.
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All the News I Need
a novel
Joan Frank
University of Massachusetts Press, 2017
EXCERPT
Because of course she feels what he feels. . . . People their age natter along not copping to it but the awareness is billboarded all over their faces—a wavering, a hesitation, even those who used to crow and jab the air. The tablecloth of certainty, with all its sparkly settings, has been yanked, and not artfully. It's why people drink.

All The News I Need probes the modern American response to inevitable, ancient riddles—of love and sex and mortality.

Frances Ferguson is a lonely, sharp-tongued widow who lives in the wine country. Oliver Gaffney is a painfully shy gay man who guards a secret and lives out equally lonely days in San Francisco. Friends by default, Fran and Ollie nurse the deep anomie of loss and the creeping, animal betrayal of aging. Each loves routine but is anxious that life might be passing by. To crack open this stalemate, Fran insists the two travel together to Paris. The aftermath of their funny, bittersweet journey suggests those small changes, within our reach, that may help us save ourselves—somewhere toward the end.
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War Stars
The Superweapon and the American Imagination
H. Bruce Franklin
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
In this new and expanded edition of an already classic work, H. Bruce Franklin brings the epic story of the superweapon and the American imagination into the ominous twenty-first century, demonstrating its continuing importance both to comprehending our current predicament and to finding ways to escape from it.

Sweeping through two centuries of American culture and military history, Franklin traces the evolution of superweapons from Robert Fulton's eighteenth-century submarine through the strategic bomber, atomic bomb, and Star Wars to a twenty-first century dominated by "weapons of mass destruction," real and imagined. Interweaving culture, science, technology, and history, he shows how and why the American pursuit of the ultimate defensive weapon—guaranteed to end all war and bring universal triumph to American ideals—has led our nation and the world into an epoch of terror and endless war.
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Time, the Familiar Stranger
J. Fraser
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
We are currently updating our website and have not yet posted complete information for this title. Many of our books are in the Google preview program, which allows readers to view up to 20% of the book. If this title is active in the program, you will find the Google Preview button in the sidebar below.
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More Than Blue, More Than Yankee
Complexity and Change in New England Politics
Amy Fried
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

New England politics can, at first blush, appear monochromatic. After all, only one member of the entire region’s delegation to the US Congress is a Republican, and citizens have elected few Republicans to the US House or Senate in the last decade. But this has not always been the case. In 1948, only two states in the region–Rhode Island and Connecticut–had Democratic senators. Yet a closer examination of the region today reveals fascinating political variation. Liberal policies, greater diversity, and engaged political movements are reshaping stereotypical Yankee tendencies of close-fisted government, whiteness, and laconic discourse.

This collection of new essays captures both the political history and contemporary moment in this region and exposes the surprisingly varied political landscape. It examines historical shifts, regional developments, and the politics of its states to argue that New England has been and continues to be an important part of the national political puzzle, from demonstrating democratic principles in early America to producing major contemporary figures such as Elizabeth Warren, Ayanna Pressley, and Susan Collins. The political shifts at work in New England mirror the South’s transformation, but have received much less attention. This volume corrects that omission by profiling political movements and candidates, political rhetoric from activists to pundits, and demographics and voting in each state as well as the region as a whole.

In addition to material by the editors, this important collection includes contributions from Rachael V. Cobb, Jerold Duquette, Christopher J. Galdieri, Jane JaKyung Han, Douglas B. Harris, Luis Jiménez, Scott McLean, James Melcher, Maureen Moakley, Paul Petterson, and Dante J. Scala.

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Citizenship in Cold War America
The National Security State and the Possibilities of Dissent
Andrea Friedman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
In the wake of 9/11, many Americans have deplored the dangers to liberty posed by a growing surveillance state. In this book, Andrea Friedman moves beyond the standard security/liberty dichotomy, weaving together often forgotten episodes of early Cold War history to reveal how the obsession with national security enabled dissent and fostered new imaginings of democracy.

The stories told here capture a wide-ranging debate about the workings of the national security state and the meaning of American citizenship. Some of the participants in this debate—women like war bride Ellen Knauff and Pentagon employee Annie Lee Moss—were able to make their own experiences compelling examples of the threats posed by the national security regime. Others, such as Ruth Reynolds and Lolita Lebrón, who advocated an end to American empire in Puerto Rico, or the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who sought to change the very definition of national security, were less successful. Together, however, they exposed the gap between democratic ideals and government policies.

Friedman traverses immigration law and loyalty boards, popular culture and theoretical treatises, U.S. court-rooms and Puerto Rican jails, to demonstrate how Cold War repression made visible in new ways the unevenness and limitations of American citizenship. Highlighting the ways that race and gender shaped critiques and defenses of the national security regime, she offers new insight into the contradictions of Cold War political culture.
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No Man Is An Island
Community and Commemoration on Norway's Utøya
Jørgen Watne Frydnes
University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

On July 22, 2011, a white supremacist killed eight people at Oslo’s Government Center in Norway and then terrorized the idyllic island of Utøya, where he executed sixty-nine more people, mostly teenagers. The country had never suffered such a massacre, and in the aftermath, the entire population was reeling.

Utøya, the Norwegian Labor Party’s summer camp for youth, a beloved place where many Norwegians learned about democratic values and processes, made lifelong friendships, and developed a vision for a just society, became mired in grief and discord. When Jørgen Watne Frydnes took on the daunting task of rebuilding the island and charting its future, he had to figure out a compassionate and just way forward. He made a radical decision: he set out to talk with each family of a murdered person, seeking to understand their needs and their hopes so that the future of the island could include their wishes and concerns. This emotionally grueling work, which was never considered in the scholarly literature on commemoration, led to a true renewal of Utøya, resulting in a meaningful memorial to those who were lost as well as beautiful surroundings for campers who come there to study democracy and peace.

Frydnes’s narrative, originally published in Norwegian, is structured around the seasons of the year and the landscape of the island, and tracks one person’s account of learning how to remember, commemorate, and honor the dead, and acknowledge a mass tragedy, and yet also create a nurturing, aspirational space for hope.

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Historical Milton
Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England
Thomas Fulton
University of Massachusetts Press, 2010
John Milton's Commonplace Book is the only known political notebook of a radical polemicist writing during the English civil war, and the most extensive manuscript record of reading we have from any major English poet from this period. In this rethinking of a surprisingly neglected body of evidence, Thomas Fulton explores Milton's reading practices and the ways he used this reading in his writing. Fulton's close study of the Commonplace Book suggests that this reading record is far from the haphazard collection of notes that it first appears but is instead a program of research which had its own ideology that responded to the reading habits and practices of Milton's contemporaries. Created mostly in the late 1630s and during the overthrow of the Stuart government in the 1640s, Milton's reading notes yield a number of surprises, the most fundamental being a highly structured commitment to political history. Fulton explores the relationship between the manuscript author and his polemical persona, placing the Commonplace Book, the manuscript "Digression" to the History of Britain, and some wartime poems in revealing contrast to the printed political texts of this period.
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