front cover of Chicago Heights
Chicago Heights
Little Joe College, the Outfit, and the Fall of Sam Giancana
Charles Hager
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
Winner, ISHS Best of Illinois History Award, 2019

In this riveting true story of coming of age in the Chicago Mob, Charles “Charley” Hager is plucked from his rural West Virginia home by an uncle in the 1960s and thrown into an underworld of money, cars, crime, and murder on the streets of Chicago Heights.
 
Street-smart and good with his hands, Hager is accepted into the working life of a chauffeur and “street tax” collector, earning the moniker “Little Joe College” by notorious mob boss Albert Tocco. But when his childhood friend is gunned down by a hit man, Hager finds himself a bit player in the events surrounding the mysterious, and yet unsolved, murder of mafia chief Sam Giancana.
 
Chicago Heights is part rags-to-riches story, part murder mystery, and part redemption tale. Hager, with author David T. Miller, juxtaposes his early years in West Virginia with his life in crime, intricately weaving his own experiences into the fabric of mob life, its many characters, and the murder of Giancana.
 
Fueled by vivid recollections of turf wars and chop shops, of fix-ridden harness racing and the turbulent politics of the 1960s, Chicago Heights reveals similarities between high-level organized crime in the city and the corrupt lawlessness of Appalachia. Hager candidly reveals how he got caught up in a criminal life, what it cost him, and how he rebuilt his life back in West Virginia with a prison record.
 
Based on interviews with Hager and supplemented by additional interviews and extensive research by Miller, the book also adds Hager’s unique voice to the volumes of speculation about Giancana’s murder, offering a plausible theory of what happened on that June night in 1975. 
 
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A Contextualistic Worldview
Essays by Lewis E. Hahn
Lewis E Hahn
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001

This selection of articles by Lewis E. Hahn addresses the philosophical school of contextualism and four contemporary American philosophers: John Dewey, Henry Nelson Wieman, Stephen C. Pepper, and Brand Blanshard.

            

Stressing the relatively recent contextualistic worldview, which he considers one of the best world hypotheses, Hahn seeks to achieve a broad perspective within which all things may be given their due place. After providing a brief outline, Hahn explains contextualism in relation to other philosophies. In his opening chapter, as in later chapters, he expresses contextualism as a form of pragmatic naturalism. In spite of Hahn’s high regard for contextualism, however, he does not think it would be good if we were limited to a single worldview. “The more different views we have and the more different sources of possible light we have, the better our chances that some of these cosmic maps will shed light on our world and our place in it.”

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Speech Acts and the First Amendment
Franklyn S Haiman
Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

What can a democratic society reasonably do about the perplexing problems of racial intolerance, sexual harassment, incitements to violence, and invasions of privacy? Is it possible to preserve the constitutional ideal of free expression while protecting the community from those who would trample on the rights of others?

Franklyn S. Haiman critically examines the reasoning behind recent efforts to prohibit certain forms of speech and explores the possible consequences to democracy of such moves.

Speech act theory, well known to scholars of rhetoric, communication, and language, underlies this emerging trend in judicial and legislative thinking. The idea that "words are deeds," first articulated in language philosophy by Wittgenstein and elaborated by J. L. Austin and John Searle, is being invoked by some members of the legal community to target objectionable speech. For example, speech codes on some college campuses prohibit racist, sexist, and homophobic expression, and attempts have been made through local laws to classify pornography as a form of sex discrimination. By defining certain kinds of arguably immoral symbolic behavior such as hate speech, obscenity, or portrayals of violence as acts rather than as pure speech, speech act advocates make it easier to argue that such conduct should be subject to social control through the law.

Unlike totalitarian or theocratic societies that see no difference between their concept of morality and the law, however, a democracy must make a distinction between what it regards as immoral and what it makes illegal. Haiman maintains that in the realm of symbolic behavior the line between them should be drawn as closely as possible to expression that results in the most serious, direct, immediate, and physical harm to others. Thus, he joins with former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in concluding that, absent an emergency, more speech, not enforced silence, should be the aim of a free society.

 
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A Pedagogy of Possibility
Bakhtinian Perspectives on Composition Studies
Kay Halasek
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

In a book that itself exemplifies the dialogic scholarship it proposes, Kay Halasek reconceives composition studies from a Bakhtinian perspective, focusing on both the discipline's theoretical assumptions and its pedagogies.

Framing her discussions at every level of the discipline—theoretical, historical, pedagogical—Halasek provides an overview of portions of the Bakhtinian canon relevant to composition studies, explores the implications of Mikhail Bakhtin's work in the teaching of writing and for current debates about the role of theory in composition studies, and provides a model of scholarship that strives to maintain dialogic balance between practice and theory, between composition studies and Bakhtinian thought.

Halasek's study ranges broadly across the field of composition, painting in wide strokes a new picture of the discipline, focusing on the finer details of the rhetorical situation, and teasing out the implications of Bakhtinian thought for classroom practice by examining the nature of critical reading and writing, the efficacy and ethics of academic discourse, student resistance, and critical and conflict pedagogy. The book ends by setting out a pedagogy of possibility, what Halasek terms elsewhere a "post-critical pedagogy" that redefines and redirects current discussions of home versus academic literacies and discourses.

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A Kind of Alaska
Women in the Plays of O'Neill, Pinter, and Shepard
Ann Hall
Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

In an effort to define what constitutes a feminist reading of literary works, Ann C. Hall offers an analytic technique that is both a feminist and a psychoanalytic approach, applying this technique to her study of women characters in the modern dramatic texts of Eugene O’Neill, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard.

This is the first study to treat these three writers in tandem, and while Hall uses the work of Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, and other psychoanalytic feminist critics in her close readings of specific dramatic texts, she also brings in commentaries by critics, directors, performers, and historians. Her technique thereby provides us with a new and significant method for addressing female characters as written by male playwrights, a task that she argues is not only a valid and necessary part of feminist dramatic criticism but a part of theatrical production as well.

From Pinter’s play A Kind of Alaska, Hall extracts a metaphor for the patriarchal oppression of women, contextualizing such oppression through an examination of O’Neill’s madonnas, Pinter’s whores, and Shepard’s female saviors as they are represented in O’Neill’s Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and A Moon for theMisbegotten; Pinter’s Homecoming, No Man’s Land, Betrayal, and A Kind of Alaska; and Shepard’s Buried Child, True West, and A LieoftheMind.

Since the works of O’Neill, Pinter, and Shepard continue to be performed to popular acclaim, Hall hopes that a better understanding of the female characters in these plays will influence the performances themselves.

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Dividing the Union
Jesse Burgess Thomas and the Making of the Missouri Compromise
Matthew W. Hall
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015
Winner, ISHS Superior Achievement Award for a Scholarly Publication, 2016

In 1820 the Missouri controversy erupted over the issue of slavery in the newly acquired lands of the Louisiana Purchase. It fell to Jesse Burgess Thomas (1777–1853), a junior U.S. senator from the new state of Illinois, to handle the delicate negotiations that led to the Missouri Compromise. Thomas’s maturity, good judgment, and restraint helped pull the country back from the brink of disunion and created a compromise that held for thirty-four years. In Dividing the Union, Matthew W. Hall examines the legal issues underlying the controversy and the legislative history of the Missouri Compromise while focusing on the aspects of Thomas’s life and character that gave him such influence. The first in-depth biography of Thomas, Hall’s work demonstrates how the legislative battle over the Compromise reflected the underlying nuances of the larger struggle over slavery.
 
The text of the Missouri Compromise originated from the Northwest Ordinance. Article VI of the Ordinance purported to prohibit slavery in the Northwest Territory, but paradoxically, a provision that assured property rights in another article was used to protect slavery. People in some parts of the Northwest sought to circumvent Article VI by formulating indenture laws and various state constitutional provisions addressing slavery. Pro- and antislavery activists eventually developed quite different interpretations of the relevant language in these documents, making negotiations over slavery in the new territory extremely complicated.
 
As Hall demonstrates, Thomas was perfectly situated geographically, politically, and ideologically to navigate the Missouri controversy. He was the first speaker of the Indiana Territorial General Assembly, one of the first territorial judges in the Illinois Territory, and the president of the Illinois State Constitutional Convention in 1818. Because the drive for statehood in Illinois was strong, the convention managed to skirt the divisive issue of slavery, due in large part to Thomas’s efforts. That he was never required to clearly articulate his own views on slavery allowed Thomas to maintain a degree of neutrality, and his varied political career gave him the experience necessary to craft a compromise.
 
Thomas’s final version of the Compromise included shrewdly worded ambiguities that supported opposing interests in the matter of slavery. These ambiguities secured the passage of the Compromise and its endurance until the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. By weaving Thomas’s life story into the history of the Missouri Compromise, Hall offers new insight into both a pivotal piece of legislation and an important, previously overlooked figure in nineteenth-century American politics. 
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Claiming the Bicycle
Women, Rhetoric, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America
Sarah Hallenbeck
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
Although the impact of the bicycle craze of the late nineteenth century on women’s lives has been well documented, rarely have writers considered the role of women’s rhetorical agency in the transformation of bicycle culture and the bicycle itself. In Claiming the Bicycle, Sarah Hallenbeck argues that through their collective rhetorical activities, women who were widely dispersed in space, genre, and intention negotiated what were considered socially acceptable uses of the bicycle, destabilizing cultural assumptions about femininity and gender differences.
 
Hallenbeck describes the masculine culture of the “Ordinary” bicycle of the 1880s and the ways women helped bring about changes in this culture; asserts that women contributed to bicycle design, helping to produce the more gender-neutral “Safety” bicycle in response to discourse about their needs; and analyzes women writers’ uses of the new venue of popular magazines to shape a “bicycle girl” ethos that prompted new identities for women. The author considers not only how technical documents written by women bicyclists encouraged new riders to understand their activity as transforming gender definitions but also how women used bicycling as a rhetorical resource to influence medical discourse about their bodies.
 
Making a significant contribution to studies of feminist rhetorical historiography, rhetorical agency, and technical communication, Claiming the Bicycle asserts the utility of a distributed model of rhetorical agency and accounts for the efforts of widely dispersed actors to harness technology in promoting social change. 
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Battlefield Medicine
A History of the Military Ambulance from the Napoleonic Wars through World War I
John S. Haller
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

In this first history of the military ambulance, historian John S. Haller Jr. documents the development of medical technologies for treating and transporting wounded soldiers on the battlefield. Noting that the word ambulance has been used to refer to both a mobile medical support system and a mode of transport, Haller takes readers back to the origins of the modern ambulance, covering their evolution in depth from the late eighteenth century through World War I. 

The rising nationalism, economic and imperial competition, and military alliances and arms races of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries figure prominently in this history of the military ambulance, which focuses mainly on British and American technological advancements. Beginning with changes introduced by Dominique-Jean Larrey during the Napoleonic Wars, the book traces the organizational and technological challenges faced by opposing armies in the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Philippines Insurrection, then climaxes with the trench warfare that defined World War I. The operative word is "challenges" of medical care and evacuation because while some things learned in a conflict are carried into the next, too often, the spasms of war force its participants to repeat the errors of the past before acquiring much needed insight.

More than a history of medical evacuation systems and vehicles, this exhaustively researched and richly illustrated volume tells a fascinating story, giving readers a unique perspective of the changing nature of warfare in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Farmcarts to Fords
A History of the Military Ambulance, 1790-1925
John S. Haller
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

This book is the first history of the techniques, systems, and technologies used to evacuate wounded from the battlefield. Historically, the word ambulance described those facilities that provided temporary assistance to the wounded, thus distinguishing them from stationary hospitals where military personnel received more permanent care. Americans and British, however, applied the term to the two-to four-wheeled transport conveyances that carried wounded from the battlefield to the war hospitals.

With the aid of fifty-four illustrations, John S. Haller traces the histories of both meanings of the word from the Napoleonic era through the Great War and its aftermath. He concentrates on the development of British and American evacuation procedures and technology with a focus on hand conveyances and wheeled vehicles. His intent is not to cover all aspects of medical evacuation but to accurately recount the common medical evacuation problems, incongruities, and controversies that existed for warring nations.

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Medical Protestants
The Eclectics in American Medicine, 1825-1939
John S. Haller
Southern Illinois University Press, 1994

John S. Haller,Jr., provides the first modern history of the Eclectic school of American sectarian medicine.

The Eclectic school (sometimes called the "American School") flourished in the mid-nineteenth century when the art and science of medicine was undergoing a profound crisis of faith. At the heart of the crisis was a disillusionment with the traditional therapeutics of the day and an intense questioning of the principles and philosophy upon which medicine had been built. Many American physicians and their patients felt that medicine had lost the ability to cure. The Eclectics surmounted the crisis by forging a therapeutics based on herbal remedies and an empirical approach to disease, a system independent of the influence of European practices.

Although rejected by the Regulars (adherents of mainstream medicine), the Eclectics imitated their magisterial manner, establishing two dozen colleges and more than sixty-five journals to proclaim the wisdom of their theory. Central to the story of Eclecticism is that of the Eclectic Medical Institute of Cincinnati, the "mother institute" of reform medical colleges. Organized in 1845, the school was to exist for ninety-four years before closing in 1939.

Throughout much of their history, the Eclectic medical schools provided an avenue into the medical profession for men and women who lacked the financial and educational opportunities the Regular schools required, siding with Professor Martyn Paine of the Medical Department of New York University, who, in 1846, had accused the newly formed American Medical Association of playing aristocratic politics behind a masquerade of curriculum reform. Eventually, though, they grudgingly followed the lead of the Regulars by changing their curriculum and tightening admission standards.

By the late nineteenth century, the Eclectics found themselves in the backwaters of modern medicine. Unable to break away from their botanic bias and ill-equipped to support the implications of germ theory, the financial costs of salaried faculty and staff, and the research implications of laboratory science, the Eclectics were pushed aside by the rush of modern academic medicine.

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Outcasts from Evolution
Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859 - 1900
John S. Haller
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996

In the only book to date to explore the period between the 1859 publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species and the discovery in 1900 of Gregor Mendel’s experiments in genetics, John S. Haller, Jr., shows the relationship between scientific "conviction" and public policy. He focuses on the numerous liberally educated American scientists who were caught up in the triumph of evolutionary ideas and who sought to apply those ideas to comparative morality, health, and the physiognomy of nonwhite races.

During this period, the natural and social scientists of the day not only accepted without question the genetic and cultural superiority of the Caucasian; they also asserted that the Caucasian race held a monopoly on evolutionary progress, arguing that "inferior races" were no more than evolutionary survivors doomed by their genetic legacy to remain outcasts from evolution.

Hereditarians and evolutionists believed that "less fit" human races were perishing from the rigors of civilization’s struggle and competition. Indeed, racial inferiority lay at the very foundation of the evolutionary framework and, remaining there, rose to the pinnacle of "truth" with the myth of scientific certainty.

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The Cramoisy Queen
A Life of Caresse Crosby
Linda Hamalian
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

Caresse Crosby rejected the culturally prescribed roles for women of her era and background in search of an independent, creative, and socially responsible life. Poet, memoirist, advocate of women’s rights and the peace movement, Crosby published and promoted modern writers and artists such as Hart Crane, Dorothy Parker, Salvador Dalí, and Romare Bearden. She also earned a place in the world of fashion by patenting one of the earliest versions of the brassiere.

Behind her public success was a chaotic life: three marriages, two divorces, the suicide of her husband Harry Crosby, strained relationships with her children, and legal confrontations over efforts to establish a center for world peace. As the first biographer to consider both the literary and social contexts of Crosby’s life, Linda Hamalian details Crosby’s professional accomplishments and her personal struggles. The Cramoisy Queen: A Life of Caresse Crosby also measures the impact of small presses on modernist literature and draws connections between key writers and artists of the era.

In addition to securing a place for Crosby in modern literary and cultural history, The Cramoisy Queen: A Life of Caresse Crosby contributes to the field of textual studies, specifically the complexities of integrating autobiography and correspondence into biography. Enhanced by thirty-two illustrations, the volume appeals to a wide range of readers, including literary critics, cultural historians, biographers, and gender studies specialists.

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The Last of the Market Hunters
Dale Hamm
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996

Duck hunting has changed greatly since the days of unlimited duck kills, as the limit of fifty ducks a day established in 1902 has fallen to the present three. A legitimate hunter now, Dale Hamm learned the art of market hunting—taking waterfowl out of season and selling them to restaurants—from his father during the l920s. During the l930s and l940s, he kept his family alive by market hunting. At the peak of his career, Hamm poached every private hunting club along the Illinois River from Havana to Beardstown.

After market hunting died out, Hamm became a legendary and almost respected—albeit controversial—character on the Illinois backwaters. He was eventually invited to hunt on the same clubs from which he had once been chased at the point of a shotgun. He hunted with judges, sheriffs, and the head of undercover operations for the Illinois Department of Conservation, all of whom knew of his reputation. He passed on to these hunting partners a lifetime of outdoor knowledge gained from slogging through mud, falling through ice, hunting ducks at three o’clock in the morning, dodging game wardens, and running the world’s only floating tavern.

"I always said if anyone ever cut open one of us Hamms, all they’d find was duck or fish," Hamm once said of his family. Now in his eighties, Hamm still carries a pellet from a shotgun in his chin to remind him of a shotgun blast that ricocheted off the water and into his face. Bakke notes that it is appropriate that a man who spent his life with a shotgun in his hands should carry a bit of buckshot wherever he goes.

Everyone who ever met Dale Hamm has a story about him. His own story is that of a one-of-a-kind character who, in his later years, used his considerable outdoor savvy to conserve the natural resources he once savaged. "His time and kind are gone," Bakke notes, "and there will never be another like him."

This book will be of interest to anyone who has ever been hunting—or who enjoys reading about colorful people and times that exist no more.

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The Sublime Crime
Fascination, Failure, and Form in Literature of the Enlightenment
Stephanie Barbe Hammer
Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

In this hermeneutic analysis of seven literary texts, Stephanie Barbé Hammer studies the roles of criminal protagonists in the dramas of George Lillo (The London Merchant) and Friedrich Schiller (The Robbers) and in the narratives of Abbé de Prévost (Manon Lescaut), Henry Fielding (Jonathan Wild), Marquis de Sade (Justine), William Godwin (Caleb Williams), and Heinrich von Kleist (Michael Kohlhaas).

Hammer reflects the current interest in cultural critique by utilizing the social theories of Michel Foucault and the feminist approaches of Hélène Cixous and Eve Sedgwick to redefine the Enlightenment as a movement of thought rather than as a strictly defined period synonymous with the eighteenth century. In addition, through the examination of the works of three post–World War II authors (Jean Genet, Anthony Burgess, and Peter Handke), Hammer suggests that the Enlightenment’s artistic representations of criminality are unparalleled by subsequent modern literature.

Hammer explains that the seven works she focuses on have been dismissed as failures by readers who have misunderstood the texts’ aesthetic elements. While claiming that the form of these works breaks down under the pressure of their criminal protagonists, she asserts that this formal failure actually contributes to the success of the works as art. The works "fail" because, like the criminal characters themselves, they break laws. The criminal protagonist effectively sabotages the official story that the text seeks to tell by deflecting the plot, style, and formal requirements in question, subverting its message—be it moral, sentimental, or libertine— through a kind of structural undermining, forcing the text beyond its own formal boundaries. For example, Hammer maintains that the presence of the criminal figure, Millwood, in Lillo’s bourgeois tragedy actually makes the play covertly antibourgeois.

Hammer insists that the criminal’s subversive presence in these seven works inaugurates new insight, and her analysis thereby challenges late twentieth-century readers to continue the investigation that the works themselves have begun.

This book will prove indispensable to scholars of comparative literature, especially eighteenth-century specialists, as well as to all individuals interested in cultural critique.

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Survived by One
The Life and Mind of a Family Mass Murderer
Robert E. Hanlon
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

On November 8, 1985, 18-year-old Tom Odle brutally murdered his parents and three siblings in the small southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon, sending shockwaves throughout the nation.  The murder of the Odle family remains one of the most horrific family mass murders in U.S. history. Odle was sentenced to death and, after seventeen years on death row, expected a lethal injection to end his life.  However, Illinois governor George Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty in 2000, and later commutation of all death sentences in 2003, changed Odle’s sentence to natural life.

The commutation of his death sentence was an epiphany for Odle.  Prior to the commutation of his death sentence, Odle lived in denial, repressing any feelings about his family and his horrible crime. Following the commutation and the removal of the weight of eventual execution associated with his death sentence, he was confronted with an unfamiliar reality.  A future.  As a result, he realized that he needed to understand why he murdered his family.  He reached out to Dr. Robert Hanlon, a neuropsychologist who had examined him in the past. Dr. Hanlon engaged Odle in a therapeutic process of introspection and self-reflection, which became the basis of their collaboration on this book.

Hanlon tells a gripping story of Odle’s life as an abused child, the life experiences that formed his personality, and his tragic homicidal escalation to mass murder, seamlessly weaving into the narrative Odle’s unadorned reflections of his childhood, finding a new family on death row, and his belief in the powers of redemption.

As our nation attempts to understand the continual mass murders occurring in the U.S., Survived by One sheds some light on the psychological aspects of why and how such acts of extreme carnage may occur.  However, Survived by One offers a never-been-told perspective from the mass murderer himself, as he searches for the answers concurrently being asked by the nation and the world.

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Abraham among the Yankees
Lincoln's 1848 Visit to Massachusetts
William F. Hanna
Southern Illinois University Press, 1983
Filling in a portion of Lincoln’s political career that few are aware of, this engaging travelogue details Lincoln’s twelve-day trip through Massachusetts as a young, aspiring Illinois politician campaigning for Zachary Taylor, a slaveowner and the Whig candidate for president in 1848. Moving swiftly, William F. Hanna follows Lincoln from town to town, explaining why Lincoln supported a slaveholder and describing one of Lincoln’s earliest attempts to appeal to an audience beyond his home territory.

Hanna provides excellent context on the politics of the era, particularly the question of slavery, both in Massachusetts and nationwide, and he features the people Lincoln met and the cities or towns in which he spoke. Lincoln stumped for Taylor in Worcester, New Bedford, Boston, Lowell, Dorchester, Chelsea, Dedham, Cambridge, and Taunton. He gave twelve speeches in eleven days to audiences who responded with everything from catcalls to laughter to applause. Whatever they thought of Lincoln’s arguments, those who saw him were impressed by his unusual western style and remembered his style more than the substance of his talks.

Meticulously researched, Abraham among the Yankees invites readers to take an East Coast journey with a thirty-nine-year-old Lincoln during election season in 1848 to see how Massachusetts audiences responded to the humorous, informal approach that served Lincoln well during the rest of his political career.
 
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Organizing Freedom
Black Emancipation Activism in the Civil War Midwest
Jennifer R Harbour
Southern Illinois University Press, 2020
Organizing Freedom is a riveting and significant social history of black emancipation activism in Indiana and Illinois during the Civil War era. By enlarging the definition of emancipation to include black activism, author Jennifer R. Harbour details the aggressive, tenacious defiance through which Midwestern African Americans—particularly black women—made freedom tangible for themselves.

Despite banning slavery, Illinois and Indiana share an antebellum history of severely restricting rights for free black people while protecting the rights of slaveholders. Nevertheless, as Harbour shows, black Americans settled there, and in a liminal space between legal slavery and true freedom, they focused on their main goals: creating institutions like churches, schools, and police watches; establishing citizenship rights; arguing against oppressive laws in public and in print; and, later, supporting their communities throughout the Civil War.
Harbour’s sophisticated gendered analysis features black women as being central to the seeking of emancipated freedom. Her distinct focus on what military service meant for the families of black Civil War soldiers elucidates how black women navigated life at home without a male breadwinner at the same time they began a new, public practice of emancipation activism. During the tumult of war, Midwestern black women negotiated relationships with local, state, and federal entities through the practices of philanthropy, mutual aid, religiosity, and refugee and soldier relief.

This story of free black people shows how the ideal of equality often competed against reality in an imperfect nation. As they worked through the sluggish, incremental process to achieve abolition and emancipation, Midwestern black activists created a unique regional identity.

 
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The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago
A Biography of William B. Ogden
Jack Harpster
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

William Butler Ogden was a pioneer railroad magnate, one of the earliest founders and developers of the city of Chicago, and an important influence on U.S. westward expansion. His career as a businessman stretched from the streets of Chicago to the wilds of the Wisconsin lumber forests, from the iron mines of Pennsylvania to the financial capitals in New York and beyond. Jack Harpster’s The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago: A Biography of William B. Ogden is the first chronicle of one of the most notable figures in nineteenth-century America.

Harpster traces the life of Ogden from his early experiences as a boy and young businessman in upstate New York to his migration to Chicago, where he invested in land, canal construction, and steamboat companies. He became Chicago’s first mayor, built the city’s first railway system, and suffered through the Great Chicago Fire. His diverse business interests included real estate, land development, city planning, urban transportation, manufacturing, beer brewing, mining, and banking, to name a few. Harpster, however, does not simply focus on Ogden’s role as business mogul; he delves into the heart and soul of the man himself.

The Railroad Tycoon Who Built Chicago is a meticulously researched and nuanced biography set against the backdrop of the historical and societal themes of the nineteenth century. It is a sweeping story about one man’s impact on the birth of commerce in America. Ogden’s private life proves to be as varied and interesting as his public persona, and Harpster weaves the two into a colorful tapestry of a life well and usefully lived.

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William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination
Oliver Harris
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

Unraveling the mysteries of Naked Lunch, exploring the allure of fascination  

William Burroughs is both an object of widespread cultural fascination and one of America’s great writers. In this study, Oliver Harris elucidates the complex play of secrecy and revelation that defines the allure of fascination. Unraveling the mystifications of Burroughs the writer, Harris discovers what it means to be fascinated by a figure of major cultural influence and unearths a secret history behind the received story of one of America’s great original writers.

In William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, Harris examines the major works Burroughs produced in the 1950s—Junky, Queer, The Yage Letters, and Naked Lunch—to piece together an accurate, material record of his creative history during his germinal decade as a writer. Refuting the “junk paradigm” of addiction that has been used to categorize and characterize much of Burroughs’ oeuvre, Harris instead focuses on the significance of Burroughs’ letter writing and his remarkable and unsuspected use of the epistolary for his fiction. As Burroughs said to Allen Ginsberg about Naked Lunch, “the real novel is letters to you.” Drawing on rare access to manuscripts, the book suggests new ways of comprehending Burroughs’s unique politics and aesthetics and offers the first accurate account of the writing of Naked Lunch.

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Naked Lunch @ 50
Anniversary Essays
Oliver Harris
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

Naked Lunch was banned, castigated, and recognized as a work of genius on its first publication in 1959, and fifty years later it has lost nothing of its power to astonish, shock, and inspire. A lacerating satire, an exorcism of demons, a grotesque cabinet of horrors, it is the Black Book of the Beat Generation, the forerunner of the psychedelic counterculture, and a progenitor of postmodernism and the digital age. A work of excoriating laughter, linguistic derangement, and transcendent beauty, it remains both influential and inimitable. 

This is the first book devoted in its entirety to William Burroughs’ masterpiece, bringing together an international array of scholars, artists, musicians, and academics from many fields to explore the origins, writing, reception, and complex meanings of Naked Lunch. Tracking the legendary book from Texas and Mexico to New York, Tangier, and Paris, Naked Lunch@50 significantly advances our understanding and appreciation of this most elusive and uncanny of texts.

           

Contributors:

Contributors:

Keith Albarn

Eric Andersen

Gail-Nina Anderson

Théophile Aries

Jed Birmingham

Shaun de Waal

Richard Doyle

Loren Glass

Oliver Harris

Kurt Hemmer

Allen Hibbard

Rob Holton

Andrew Hussey

Rob Johnson

Jean-Jacques Lebel

Ian MacFadyen

Polina Mackay

Jonas Mekas

Barry Miles

R. B. Morris

Timothy S. Murphy

Jurgen Ploog

Davis Schneiderman

Jennie Skerl

DJ Spooky

Philip Taaffe

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The Incorporative Consciousness of Robert Bly
Victoria Frenkel Harris
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

Victoria Frenkel Harris traces the aesthetic journey of poet Robert Bly from his early structured works of mystical imagery and lyrical landscapes to his recent explorations of intimate relationships and male socialization.

Examining the various ways Bly’s prose poems articulate his opposition to the Vietnam War and his recent writings manipulate more formal patterns in detailing the intricacies of human relationships, Harris labels this evolution in form, subject, and imagery the incorporative consciousness, incorporative because it assimilates Jungian psychological categories, international poetic traditions, and a compelling breadth of topics.

Harris relies in part on contemporary feminist theory to throw revealing new light on Bly’s recent works. Though sympathetic to Bly, Harris finds that—in spite of his affirmation of the interaction of psychic, creative, and intellectual energies in both sexes—the poet’s later, erotic poems tend to objectify women in counterproductive ways. Bly’s idealization of woman as a Jungian universal, Harris contends, can blind him toward actual women.

Harris is at her best as she delimits with balance and precision the full complexity of the poet’s work.

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Lincoln and Congress
William C. Harris
Southern Illinois University Press, 2017
Winner, ISHS Annual Award for a Scholarly Publication, 2018

In Lincoln and Congress, William C. Harris reveals that the relationship between the president and Congress, though sometimes contentious, was cooperative rather than adversarial. During his time as president, Abraham Lincoln embodied his personal conviction that the nation’s executive should not interfere with the work of the legislature, and though often critical of him privately, in public congressional leaders compromised with and assisted the president to unite the North and minimize opposition to the war.

Despite the turbulence of the era and the consequent tensions within the government, the executive and legislative branches showed restraint in their dealings with each other. In fact, except in his official messages to Congress, Lincoln rarely lobbied for congressional action, and he vetoed only one important measure during his tenure as president. Many congressmen from Lincoln’s own party, although publicly supportive, doubted his leadership and sought a larger role for Congress in setting war policies. Though they controlled Congress, Republican legislators frequently differed among themselves in shaping legislation and in their reactions to events as well as in their relationships both with each other and with the president. Harris draws intriguing sketches of nineteenth-century congressional leaders and shows that, contrary to what historians have traditionally concluded, radical Republicans such as Representative Thaddeus Stevens and Senator Charles Sumner did not dominate their party or Congress. Harris includes the minority party’s role, showing that Northern Democrats and conservative Unionists of the border states generally opposed Republican policies but worked with them on support for the troops and on nonwar issues like the Pacific Railroad Bill.

Lincoln and Congress sheds new light on the influence of members of Congress and their relationship with Lincoln on divisive issues such as military affairs, finance, slavery, constitutional rights, reconstruction, and Northern political developments. Enjoyable both for casual Civil War readers and professional historians, this book provides an engaging narrative that helps readers redefine and understand the political partnership that helped the Union survive.
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Lincoln and the Union Governors
William C. Harris
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

Over the course of the Civil War, fifty-nine men served as governors of the twenty-five Union states.  Although these state executives were occasionally obstructionist and often disagreed amongst themselves, their overall cooperation and counsel bolstered the policies put forth by Abraham Lincoln and proved essential to the Union’s ultimate victory. In this revealing volume, award-winning historian William C. Harris explores the complex relationship between Lincoln and the governors of the Union states, illuminating the contributions of these often-overlooked state leaders to the preservation of the nation.

Lincoln recognized that in securing the governors’ cooperation in the war he had to tread carefully and, as much as possible, respect their constitutional authority under the federal system of government.  Contributing to the success of the partnership, Harris shows, was the fact that almost all of the governors were members of Lincoln’s Republican or Union Party, and most had earlier associated with his Whig party.  Despite their support for the war, however, the governors reflected different regional interests, and Lincoln understood and attempted to accommodate these differences in order to maintain a unified war effort.     

Harris examines the activities of the governors, who often worked ahead of Lincoln in rallying citizens for the war, organizing state regiments for the Union army, and providing aid and encouragement to the troops in the field. The governors kept Lincoln informed about political conditions in their states and lobbied Lincoln and the War Department to take more vigorous measures to suppress the rebellion. Harris explores the governors’ concerns about many issues, including the divisions within their states over the war and Lincoln’s most controversial policies, especially emancipation and military conscription. He also provides the first modern account of the 1862 conference of governors in Altoona, Pennsylvania, which provided important backing for Lincoln’s war leadership.

By emphasizing the difficult tasks that both the governors and President Lincoln faced in dealing with the major issues of the Civil War, Harris provides fresh insight into the role this dynamic partnership played in preserving the nation’s democratic and constitutional institutions and ending the greatest blight on the republic—chattel slavery.

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The Rhetoric of Rebel Women
Civil War Diaries and Confederate Persuasion
Kimberly Harrison
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013
During the American Civil War, southern white women found themselves speaking and acting in unfamiliar and tumultuous circumstances. With the war at their doorstep, women who supported the war effort took part in defining what it meant to be, and to behave as, a Confederate through their verbal and nonverbal rhetorics. Though most did not speak from the podium, they viewed themselves as participants in the war effort, indicating that what they did or did not say could matter. Drawing on the rich evidence in women’s Civil War diaries, The Rhetoric of Rebel Women recognizes women’s persuasive activities as contributions to the creation and maintenance of Confederate identity and culture.

Informed by more than one hundred diaries, this study provides insight into how women cultivated rhetorical agency, challenging traditional gender expectations while also upholding a cultural status quo. Author Kimberly Harrison analyzes the rhetorical choices these women made and valued in wartime and postwar interactions with Union officers and soldiers, slaves and former slaves, local community members, and even their God. In their intimate accounts of everyday war, these diarists discussed rhetorical strategies that could impact their safety, their livelihoods, and those of their families. As they faced Union soldiers in attempts to protect their homes and property, diarists saw their actions as not only having local, immediate impact on their well-being but also as reflecting upon their cause and the character of the southern people as a whole. They instructed themselves through their personal writing, allowing insight into how southern women prepared themselves to speak and act in new and contested contexts.

The Rhetoric of Rebel Women highlights the contributions of privileged white southern women in the development of the Confederate national identity, presenting them not as passive observers but as active participants in the war effort.

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Fight Like a Tiger
Conway Barbour and the Challenges of the Black Middle Class in Nineteenth-Century America
Victoria L. Harrison
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
Focusing on the life of ambitious former slave Conway Barbour, Victoria L. Harrison argues that the idea of a black middle class traced its origins to the free black population of the mid-nineteenth century and developed alongside the idea of a white middle class. Although slavery and racism meant that the definition of middle class was not identical for white people and free people of color, they shared similar desires for advancement.
 
Born a slave in western Virginia about 1815, Barbour was a free man by the late 1840s. His adventurous life took him through Lexington and Louisville, Kentucky; Cleveland, Ohio; Alton, Illinois; and Little Rock and Lake Village, Arkansas. In search of upward mobility, he worked as a steamboat steward, tried his hand at several commercial ventures, and entered politics. He sought, but was denied, a Civil War military appointment that would have provided financial stability. Blessed with intelligence, competence, and energy, Barbour was quick to identify opportunities as they appeared in personal relationships—he was simultaneously married to two women—business, and politics.
 
Despite an unconventional life, Barbour found in each place he lived that he was one of many free black people who fought to better themselves alongside their white countrymen. Harrison’s argument about black class formation reframes the customary narrative of downtrodden free African Americans in the mid-nineteenth century and engages current discussions of black inclusion, the concept of “otherness,” and the breaking down of societal barriers. Demonstrating that careful research can reveal the stories of people who have been invisible to history, Fight Like a Tiger complicates our understanding of the intersection of race and class in the Civil War era.
 
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Lincoln and the Abolitionists
Stanley Harrold
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
Winner, ISHS Best of Illinois History Award, 2019

Abraham Lincoln has often been called the “Great Emancipator.” But he was not among those Americans who, decades before the Civil War, favored immediate emancipation of all slaves inside the United States. Those who did were the abolitionists—the men and women who sought freedom and equal rights for all African Americans. Stanley Harrold traces how, despite Lincoln’s political distance from abolitionists, they influenced his evolving political orientation before and during the Civil War.
 
While explaining how the abolitionist movement evolved, Harrold also clarifies Lincoln’s connections with and his separation from this often fiery group. For most of his life Lincoln regarded abolitionists as dangerous fanatics. Like many northerners during his time, Lincoln sought compromise with the white South regarding slavery, opposed abolitionist radicalism, and doubted that free black people could have a positive role in America. Yet, during the 1840s and 1850s, conservative northern Democrats as well as slaveholders branded Lincoln an abolitionist because of his sympathy toward black people and opposition to the expansion of slavery.
 
Lincoln’s election to the presidency and the onslaught of the Civil War led to a transformation of his relationship with abolitionists. Lincoln’s original priority as president had been to preserve the Union, not to destroy slavery. Nevertheless many factors—including contacts with abolitionists—led Lincoln to favor ending slavery. After Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and raised black troops, many, though not all, abolitionists came to view him more favorably.
 
Providing insight into the stressful, evolving relationship between Lincoln and the abolitionists, and also into the complexities of northern politics, society, and culture during the Civil War era, this concise volume illuminates a central concern in Lincoln’s life and presidency.
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Battleground 1948
Truman, Stevenson, Douglas, and the Most Surprising Election in Illinois History
Robert E Hartley
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

The election year of 1948 remains to this day one of the most astonishing in U.S. political history. During this first general election after World War II, Americans looked to their governments for change. As the battle for the nation’s highest office came to a head in Illinois, the state was embroiled in its own partisan showdowns—elections that would prove critical in the course of state and national history.

In Battleground 1948, Robert E. Hartley offers the first comprehensive chronicle of this historic election year and its consequences, which still resonate today. Focusing on the races that ushered Adlai Stevenson, Paul Douglas, and Harry Truman into office—the last by the slimmest of margins—Battleground 1948 details the pivotal events that played out in the state of Illinois, from the newspaper wars in Chicago to tragedy in the mine at Centralia.

In addition to in-depth revelations on the saga of the American election machine in 1948, Hartley probes the dark underbelly of Illinois politics in the 1930s and 1940s to set the stage, spotlight key party players, and expose the behind-the-scenes influences of media, money, corruption, and crime. In doing so, he draws powerful parallels between the politics of the past and those of the present. Above all, Battleground 1948 tells the story of grassroots change writ large on the American political landscape—change that helped a nation move past an era of conflict and depression, and forever transformed Illinois and the U.S. government.

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The Dealmakers of Downstate Illinois
Paul Powell, Clyde L. Choate, John H. Stelle
Robert E Hartley
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
Winner, ISHS Annual Award for a Scholarly Publication, 2017

Many people are unaware that from 1945 to 1975, downstate lawmakers dominated the Illinois political arena. In The Dealmakers of Downstate Illinois, Robert E. Hartley details the lives and contributions of three influential southern Illinois politicians, Paul Powell, Clyde Choate, and John Stelle. He describes how these “dealmakers” were able to work with Democrats and Republicans throughout the state to bring jobs and facilities to their region. Using a variety of coalitions, they maintained downstate political strength in the face of growing Chicago influence.
 
Hartley traces the personal histories of Powell, Choate, and Stelle, shows how they teamed up to advance a downstate political agenda, and reviews their challenges and successes. Beginning with an account of early experiences, including the battlefield courage that earned Choate the Medal of Honor as well as Stelle’s World War I experience and later entrepreneurship, the book continues with an exploration of the groundwork for their collaborative legislative agenda and their roles in the growth of Southern Illinois University and the passage of income tax legislation. Hartley reviews the importance of Powell’s relationship with Governor Stratton, Choate’s leadership of the 1972 Democratic National Convention and his relationships with Governor Walker and with Chicago interests. 
 
The Dealmakers of Downstate Illinois is a vivid, straightforward tale of fighting in the legislative chambers, backstabbing behind the scenes, and trading special favors for votes in pursuit of not only personal gain but also the advancement of a regional agenda.
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Paul Powell of Illinois
A Lifelong Democrat
Robert E Hartley
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

Paul Powell emerged from the hill country of southern Illinois to serve in state government from 1935 until his death in 1970. His political tenure included three terms as Speaker of the Illinois House, four terms as minority leader, and two terms as secretary of state. The sponsor of hundreds of bills, he worked tirelessly for his constituents in southern Illinois. He also worked tirelessly to promote his own interests.

In this first political biography of Powell, Robert E. Hartley follows the money. He tells how this man of humble origins and meager means amassed a world-class political and financial base. Part of that story is the disclosure of a personal fortune that boggled minds, including the unbelievable yarn of the $800,000 cash found in the hotel room following Powell's death.

Powell never earned a state salary of more than $30,000 per year, yet in the last year of his life, his federal income tax return showed an income of more than $200,000. At his death his estate totaled $3.2 million, and, when settled in 1978, was worth $4.6 million, including nearly $1 million in racetrack stock.

Following Powell's story, Hartley takes us deep into the Illinois political world of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, a time when politicians were on an "honor system" regarding their financial holdings. This was before disclosure of political contributions, before computer records, and before public meetings laws.

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Paul Simon
The Political Journey of an Illinois Original
Robert E Hartley
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

With Paul Simon: The Political Journey of an Illinois Original, author Robert E. Hartley presents the first thorough, objective volume on the journalistic and political career of one of Illinois’s most respected public figures. Hartley’s detailed account offers a fully rounded portrait of a man whose ideals and tenacity not only spurred reform on both state and national levels during his celebrated forty-year career but also established the lasting legacy of a political legend.

Simon first became a public figure at the age of nineteen, when he assumed the post of editor and publisher of a weekly newspaper in Troy, Illinois. From there, he used his paper to launch a fierce crusade against the crime and corruption plaguing Madison County. This battle sparked his entry into politics, helping to land him a seat in the state legislature in 1954. While serving, he campaigned tirelessly according to his principles, earning him the mass voter approval that would usher him into the seat of lieutenant governor in 1968—the first person elected to that position who did not share party affiliation with the governor.

As lieutenant governor, Simon initiated many changes to the position, remaking it to better serve the citizens of the state of Illinois. The cornerstone of his reform plan was an ombudsman program designed to allow the people of the state to voice problems they had with government and state agencies. The program, extremely popular with the public and the press, solved problems and helped to make Simon a household name throughout Illinois. Although he faced challenges along the way, including racial upheaval in Cairo and the student and police riots on the Carbondale campus of Southern Illinois University, Simon’s outspoken honesty and strong support of his constituents earned him the utmost esteem and popularity.

While his 1972 bid for governor of Illinois ultimately failed, this did not deter Simon from his dedication to social progress. In 1974 he began his remarkable twenty-two-year career in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, where he earned the admiration of the country for his political integrity. Despite the praise and support Simon had earned during his time in Washington, he was unable to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and returned to the Senate, winning a second term in 1990.  Simon committed time and energy to the myriad issues of interest to him, especially in the field of education, with one of his biggest successes coming with the passage of the National Literacy Act, which he sponsored. He continued to foster his ties to journalism throughout his lengthy political career, authoring numerous books, articles, and columns, all of which he used to relentlessly promote open government and social programs.

            This vivid account of the public life of Paul Simon reveals a man whose personal honor and dedication were unshakeable throughout nearly half a century in the political arena. Robert E. Hartley provides a candid perspective on Simon’s accomplishments and victories, as well as his mistakes and losses, revealing new insights into the life of this dynamic and widely respected public figure.

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Death Underground
The Centralia and West Frankfort Mine Disasters
Robert E Hartley
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

Death Underground: The Centralia and West Frankfort Mine Disasters examines two of the most devastating coal mine disasters in United States history since 1928. In two southern Illinois towns only forty miles apart, explosions killed 111 men at the Centralia No. 5 mine in 1947 and 119 men at the New Orient No. 2 mine in West Frankfort in 1951. Robert E. Hartley and David Kenney explain the causes of the accidents, identify who was to blame, and detail the emotional impact the disasters had on the survivors, their families, and their communities.

Politics at the highest level of Illinois government played a critical role in the conditions that led to the accidents. Hartley and Kenney address how safety was compromised when inspection reports were widely ignored by state mining officials and mine company supervisors. Highlighted is the role of Driscoll Scanlan, a state inspector at Centralia, who warned of an impending disaster but whose political enemies shifted the blame to him, ruining his career. Hartley and Kenney also detail the New Orient No. 2 mine explosion, the attempts at rescue, and the resulting political spin circulated by labor, management, and the state bureaucracy. They outline the investigation, the subsequent hearings, and the efforts in Congress to legislate greater mine safety.

Hartley and Kenney include interviews with the survivors, a summary of the investigative records, and an analysis of the causes of both mine accidents. They place responsibility for the disasters on individual mine owners, labor unions, and state officials, providing new interpretations not previously presented in the literature. Augmented by twenty-nine illustrations, the volume also covers the history, culture, and ethnic pluralism of coal mining in Illinois and the United States.

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The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy
John T. Harwood
Southern Illinois University Press, 1986

Makes accessible to modern readers the 17th-century rhetorics of Thomas Hob­bes (1588–1677) and Bernard Lamy (1640–1715)

Hobbes’ A Briefe of the Art of Rhet­orique, the first English translation of Aristotle’s rhetoric, reflects Hobbes’ sense of rhetoric as a central instrument of self-defense in an increasingly frac­tious Commonwealth. In its approach to rhetoric, which Hobbes defines as “that Faculty by which wee understand what will serve our turne, concerning any subject, to winne beliefe in the hearer,” the Briefe looks forward to Hobbes’ great political works De Cive and Leviathan.

Published anonymously in France as De l’art de parler, Lamy’s rhetoric was translated immediately into English as The Art of Speaking. Lamy’s long associa­tion with the Port Royalists made his works especially attractive to English readers because Port Royalists were en­gaged in a vicious quarrel with the Jesuits during the last half of the 17th century.

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Villainous Compounds
Chemical Weapons and the American Civil War
Guy R. Hasegawa
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015
Most studies of modern chemical warfare begin with World War I and the widespread use of poison gas by both sides in the conflict. However, as Guy R. Hasegawa reveals in this fascinating study, numerous chemical agents were proposed during the Civil War era. As combat commenced, Hasegawa shows, a few forward-thinking chemists recognized the advantages of weaponizing the noxious, sometimes deadly aspects of certain chemical concoctions. They and numerous ordinary citizens proposed a host of chemical weapons, from liquid chlorine in artillery shells to cayenne pepper solution sprayed from fire engines. In chilling detail, Hasegawa describes the potential weapons, the people behind the concepts, and the evolution of some chemical weapon concepts into armaments employed in future wars. As he explains, bureaucrats in the war departments of both armies either delayed or rejected outright most of these unusual weapons, viewing them as unneeded or unworkable. Nevertheless, many of the proposed armaments presaged the widespread use of chemical weapons in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Especially timely with today’s increased chemical threats from terrorists and the alleged use of chemical agents in the Syrian Civil War, Villainous Compounds: Chemical Weapons and the American Civil War expands the history of chemical warfare and exposes a disturbing new facet of the Civil War. 

In chilling detail, Hasegawa describes the weapons proposed and prepared for use during the war and introduces the people behind the concepts. Although many of the ideas for chemical weapons had a historical precedent, most of the suggested agents were used in industry or medicine, and their toxicity was common knowledge. Proponents, including a surprisingly high number of civilian physicians, suggested a wide variety of potential chemical weapons—from liquid chlorine in artillery shells to cayenne pepper solution sprayed from fire engines. Some weapons advocates expressed ethical qualms, while others were silent on the matter or justified their suggestions as necessary under current circumstances.
 
As Hasegawa explains, bureaucrats in the war departments of both armies either delayed or rejected outright most of these unusual weapons, viewing them as unneeded or unworkable. Nevertheless, many of the proposed armaments presaged the widespread use of chemical weapons in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For example, while Civil War munitions technology was not advanced enough to deliver poison gas in artillery shells as some advocates suggested, the same idea saw extensive use during World War I. Similarly, forms of an ancient incendiary weapon, Greek fire, were used sparingly during the Civil War and appeared in later conflicts as napalm bombs and flamethrowers.
 
Especially timely with today’s increased chemical threats from terrorists and the alleged use of chemical agents in the Syrian Civil War, Villainous Compounds: Chemical Weapons and the American Civil War reveals the seldom-explored chemical side of Civil War armaments and illuminates an underappreciated stage in the origins of modern chemical warfare.
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Matchless Organization
The Confederate Army Medical Department
Guy R. Hasegawa
Southern Illinois University Press, 2021
The essential reference about a surprisingly well-organized medical department
 
Despite the many obstacles it had to overcome—including a naval blockade, lack of a strong industrial base, and personnel unaccustomed to military life—the Richmond-based Confederate Army Medical Department developed into a robust organization that nimbly adapted to changing circumstances. In the first book to address the topic, Guy R. Hasegawa describes the organization and management of the Confederate army’s medical department. At its head was Surgeon General Samuel Preston Moore, a talented multitasker with the organizational know-how to put in place qualified medical personnel to care for sick and wounded Confederate soldiers.
 
Hasegawa investigates how political considerations, personalities, and, as the war progressed, the diminishing availability of human and material resources influenced decision-making in the medical department. Amazingly, the surgeon general’s office managed not only to provide care but also to offer educational opportunities to its personnel and collect medical and surgical data for future use, regardless of constant and growing difficulties.
 
During and after the war, the medical department of the Confederate army was consistently praised as being admirably organized and efficient. Although the department was unable to match its Union counterpart in manpower and supplies, Moore’s intelligent management enabled it to help maintain the fighting strength of the Confederate army.
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Mending Broken Soldiers
The Union and Confederate Programs to Supply Artificial Limbs
Guy R. Hasegawa
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012

The four years of the Civil War saw bloodshed on a scale unprecedented in the history of the United States. Thousands of soldiers and sailors from both sides who survived the horrors of the war faced hardship for the rest of their lives as amputees. Now Guy R. Hasegawa presents the first volume to explore the wartime provisions made for amputees in need of artificial limbs—programs that, while they revealed stark differences between the resources and capabilities of the North and the South, were the forebears of modern government efforts to assist in the rehabilitation of wounded service members.

Hasegawa draws upon numerous sources of archival information to offer a comprehensive look at the artificial limb industry as a whole, including accounts of the ingenious designs employed by manufacturers and the rapid advancement of medical technology during the Civil War; illustrations and photographs of period prosthetics; and in-depth examinations of the companies that manufactured limbs for soldiers and bid for contracts, including at least one still in existence today. An intriguing account of innovation, determination, humanitarianism, and the devastating toll of battle, Mending Broken Soldiers shares the never-before-told story of the artificial-limb industry of the Civil War and provides a fascinating glimpse into groundbreaking military health programs during the most tumultuous years in American history.

Univeristy Press Books for Public and Secondary Schools 2013 edition

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Nickel's Worth of Skim Milk
A Boy's View of the Great Depression
Robert J Hastings
Southern Illinois University Press, 1986

Told from the point of view of a young boy, this account shows how a family “faced the 1930s head on and lived to tell the story.” It is the story of grow­ing up in southern Illinois, specifically the Marion, area during the Great Depression. But when it was first published in 1972 the book proved to be more than one writer’s memories of depression-era southern Illinois.

“People started writing me from all over the country,” Hastings notes. “And all said much the same: ‘You were writing about my family, as much as your own. That’s how I remember the 1930s, too.’”

As he proves time and again in this book, Hast­ings is a natural storyteller who can touch upon the detail that makes the tale both poignant and univer­sal. He brings to life a period that marked every man, woman, and child who lived through it even as that national experience fades into the past.

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Penny's Worth of Minced Ham
Another Look at the Great Depression
Robert J Hastings
Southern Illinois University Press, 1986

Hastings experienced the rural and small town side of an event that touched all who weathered it—the economic crash of 1929 and its 10-year aftermath.

The author grew up in Marion, Illinois, entering the first grade in 1930, the start of the Great Depression. This book, which recalls memorable epi­sodes in the life of that boy, is a sequel to the pop­ular ANickel’s Worth of Skim Milk.

What Hastings experienced as a child was typical of depression-era life. Those who were young then can relive lost youth in Hastings’ books. And there were moments worth reliving: Hastings tells of “laughter and love and tears in the midst of hunger and cold and deprivation.” Those too young to have experienced the economic devastation can see those hard days through the eyes of a trained storyteller reporting from the point of view of a child.

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Jefferson, Lincoln, and the Unfinished Work of the Nation
Ronald L. Hatzenbuehler
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
Although the nation changed substantially between the presidential terms of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, these two leaders shared common interests and held remarkably similar opinions on many important issues. In Jefferson, Lincoln, and the Unfinished Work of the Nation, Ronald L. Hatzenbuehler describes the views of two of our nation’s greatest presidents and explains how these views provide valuable insight into modern debates.

 In this groundbreaking new study—the first extended examination of the ideas of Lincoln and Jefferson—Hatzenbuehler provides readers with a succinct guide to their opinions, comparing and contrasting their reasoned judgments on America’s republican form of government. Each chapter is devoted to one key area of common interest: race and slavery, the pros and cons of political parties, state rights versus federal authority, religion and the presidency, presidential powers under the Constitution, or the proper political economy for a republic. Relying on the pair’s own words in their letters, writings, and speeches, Hatzenbuehler explores similarities and differences between the two men on contentious issues. Both, for instance, wrote that they were antislavery, but Jefferson never acted on this belief, while Lincoln moved toward a constitutional amendment banning slavery. The book’s title, taken from the Gettysburg Address, builds on both presidents’ expectations that Americans should dedicate themselves to the unfinished work of returning the nation to its founding principles.

Jefferson and Lincoln wrestled with many of the same issues and ideas that intrigue and divide Americans today. In his thought-provoking work, Hatzenbuehler details how the two presidents addressed these issues and ideas, which are essential to understanding not only America’s history but also the continuing influence of the past on the present.
 
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American Political Plays after 9/11
Allan Havis
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010

American Political Plays after 9/11 is a diverse collection of bold, urgent, and provocative plays that respond to the highly charged, post 9/11 political landscape. Sparked by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and subsequently fueled by a series of controversial events—the Iraq war, the passing and enforcement of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, and the revelation of torture and other scandals at the Abu Ghraib prison—American political theater is currently experiencing a surge in activity. The plays in this collection include The Guys by Anne Nelson, At the Vanishing Point by Naomi Iizuka, The Venus de Milo Is Armed by Kia Corthron, Back of the Throat by Yusseff El Guindi, Three Nights in Prague by Allan Havis, and Question 27, Question 28 by Chay Yew.

The characters range from a New York City fire captain trying to respectfully memorialize eight of his lost comrades, to the citizens of a hog-killing Louisville neighborhood who poignantly exemplify the underside of the economic crisis, to an Arab American citizen being harshly (and possibly unfairly) interrogated by two officers as a “person of interest.” Though not all of the plays deal explicitly with the Al Qaeda attacks, they collectively reveal themes of sorrow and anxiety, moral indignation, alarmist self-preservation, and economic and social insecurity stemming from the United States’ fairly sudden shift from cold war superpower to vulnerable target.

The lively introduction by Allan Havis includes a brief history of political theater in the United States, an extensive discussion about how theater communities responded to 9/11, and an informative analysis of the six plays in the book.  A collection of dramatic material framed by this significant historical event, AmericanPolitical Plays after 9/11 will be indispensable for theater and cultural studies scholars and students.

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Evolutionary Rhetoric
Sex, Science, and Free Love in Nineteenth-Century Feminism
Wendy Hayden
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

In Evolutionary Rhetoric, scholar Wendy Hayden provides a comprehensive examination of the relationship between scientific and feminist rhetorics in free-love feminism, studying the movement from its inception in the 1850s to its dark turn toward eugenics in the early 1900s. Hayden organizes her provocative study by scientific discipline—evolution, physiology, bacteriology, embryology, and heredity. Each chapter explores how free-love feminists adopted the evidence of that discipline in their arguments for increased sex education, women’s sexual rights, reproductive freedom, and the abolition of a marriage system that repressed the rights and the sexuality of women.

Hayden takes our conventional understanding of the relationship between nineteenth-century feminism and science and expands it. The author provides examples of the powerful words of free-love feminists to show exactly how these exceptional women used science as a rhetorical platform to promote feminist, and often radical, social reforms.

Considering why the free-love movement has not yet been studied, Hayden also discusses how the recovery of this movement may impact larger goals in the recovery of women’s rhetoric. This important and timely study of a long-forgotten movement adds to our understanding of the complexities of the history of feminism.

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The Homesick Phone Book
Addressing Rhetorics in the Age of Perpetual Conflict
Cynthia Haynes
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
Winner, RSA Book Award, 2017

Terrorist attacks, war, and mass shootings by individuals occur on a daily basis all over the world. In The Homesick Phone Book, author Cynthia Haynes examines the relationship of rhetoric to such atrocities. Aiming to disrupt conventional modes of rhetoric, logic, argument, and the teaching of writing, Haynes illuminates rhetoric’s ties to horrific acts of violence and the state of perpetual conflict around the world, both in the Holocaust era and more recently.

Each chapter, marked by a physical address, functions as a kind of expanded phone book entry, with a discussion of violent events at a particular location giving way to explorations of larger questions related to rhetoric and violence. At the core of the work is Haynes’s call for a writing pedagogy based on abstraction that would allow students to appeal to emotional and ethical grounds in composing arguments. Written in a lyrical style, the book weaves rhetorical theories, poetics, philosophy, works of art, and personal experience into a complex, compelling, and innovative mode of writing.

Ultimately, The Homesick Phone Book demonstrates how scholars of rhetoric and writing studies can break their dependence on conventional argument and logic to discover what might be possible if we dive into and become lost within the very concepts and events that frighten and terrorize us.
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Editorializing "The Indian Problem"
The New York Times on Native Americans, 1860-1900
Robert Hays
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
Drawing on four decades of New York Times editorials, Robert Hays demonstrates the magnitude of the conflict between Native American and white European cultures as settlers and adventurers spread rapidly across the continent in the post–Civil War period.
From 1860 through 1900, the Times published nearly a thousand editorials on what was commonly called “the Indian problem.” Selecting some of the best of these editorials, Hays gives readers what current accounts cannot: contemporary writers’ perspectives on the public images of Native Americans and their place in a nation bent on expansion. Some editorials express the unbridled bitterness and raw ambition of a nation immersed in an agenda of conquest, while others resonate with the struggle to find a common ground. Still others evince an attitude of respect, which set the tone for reconciling national ambition with natural rights.
American history demonstrates time and again the price of Manifest Destiny.
Many of the issues confronting nineteenth-century Native Americans remain alive today: unemployment, infant mortality, suicide, crime, alcoholism, and poverty. In presenting the authentic and urgent voices of a national newspaper’s daily record, Hays illuminates the roots of our current challenges.
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A Race at Bay
New York Times Editorials on "the Indian Problem," 1860 - 1900
Robert Hays
Southern Illinois University Press, 1997

Robert G. Hays chronicles the "Indian problem" precisely as it was explained to Americans through the editorial columns of the New York Times between 1860 and 1900, the years when battles between white settlers and Native Americans split a nation and its spirit apart.

Covering the final forty-one years of the nineteenth century, Hays’s collection of Times editorials gives readers what current accounts cannot: perspectives by contemporary writers with unique insights into the public images of Native Americans and their place in a nation bent on expansion. The authentic voices of a national newspaper’s daily record speak with an urgency both immediate and real.

These editorials express the unbridled bitterness and raw ambition of a nation immersed in an agenda of conquest. They also resonate with the struggle to find a common ground. Some editorials are patronizing and ironic: "Yet it seems pitiful to cage so fine a savage among a herd of vulgar criminals in a penitentiary." Others include a willingness to poke fun: "Many persons on the platform were astonished to find that an ‘illiterate barbarian’ could handle the weapon of sarcasm. The truth is that the Indians spoke far better than ninety-nine out of a hundred members of congress." And yet others evince an attitude of respect, which set the tone for reconciling national ambition with natural rights.

In some instances, the Times allowed Native Americans to tell their own stories, as in this eloquent, moving account of the testimony of Satanta, the warrior chief of the Kiowas: "A certain dim foreboding of the Indians’ fate swept across his mind, and in its passage lit his eyes up with a fierce light, and his voice rose to a pitch of frenzy as he exclaimed: ‘We don’t want to settle—I love to roam over the prairie; there I am free and happy."

History demonstrates that the costs of owning one’s soil and one’s destiny remain without measure. Many of the problems blocking the progress of Native Americans continue unsolved: unemployment, infant mortality, suicide, crime, alcoholism, and poverty. Following such works as Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Hays looks back on the records of national history for the roots of our challenges today.

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The Atlanta Youth Murders and the Politics of Race
Bernard Headley
Southern Illinois University Press, 1998

At least twenty-nine black children and young adults were murdered by an Atlanta serial killer between the summer of 1979 and the spring of 1981. Drawing national media attention, the “Atlanta tragedy,” as it became known, was immediately labeled a hate crime. However, when a young black man was arrested and convicted for the killings, public attention quickly shifted. Noted criminologist Bernard Headley was in Atlanta as the tragedy unfolded and provides here a thoughtful exploration of the social and political implications of the case both locally and nationally. Focusing on a singular historical event, Headley exposes broader tensions of race and class in contemporary America.

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Strange Land
Todd Hearon
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010

Todd Hearon’s haunting debut collection chronicles the twin paths of isolation and desire in the search for meaning and union with others. On his pilgrimage through the lost worlds of earth and the soul, the speaker encounters drought in both the literal and spiritual sense as he confronts desolate landscapes, from the brown remnants of ruined cities, to the depths of the human heart and man’s capacity for utter destruction. Yet even though he frequently encounters darkness, he never ceases to seek beauty. He is a man who wears many faces, from Adam, staring down a bleak future bereft of Paradise, to the doomed poet Shelley, drowned off the coast of Italy. He speaks as a man adrift in his own life, seeking an answer to his emptiness, an estranged traveler through memory and longing. Lyrical and intense, Strange Land is a quest for understanding and human connection.

 

Strange Land 

It goes without saying

a word:  the world under cover

of midnight snow, what we have known

of pageantry and lilac, leaf and song

subsumed in starless silence.

Waking at dawn into the tremulous blue

of the room, as in earth’s afterglow,

we lie, lidless, listening, as crows

call out the ear’s horizons.

What year is it?  Into what country were we born

and now must make our way?  Outside the pane

the stillness feels ancestral but the ghosts

not yours, not mine.  My émigré,

we are cut off.  An ocean to the east

churns in chiaroscuro while unseen

ranges to the south deflect our passage,

what passage might have been.

This country seems the passing of a dream

to a moonscape’s still immitigable white,

a land’s amnesia where against the sky

three needling black birds fly

and slip like an ellipsis out of sight.

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Framing Faust
Twentieth-Century Cultural Struggles
Inez Hedges
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

In this interdisciplinary cultural history that encompasses film, literature, music, and drama, Inez Hedges follows the thread of the Faustian rebel in the major intellectual currents of the last hundred years. She presents Faust and his counterpart Mephistopheles as antagonistic—yet complementary—figures whose productive conflict was integral to such phenomena as the birth of narrative cinema, the rise of modernist avant-gardes before World War II, and feminist critiques of Western cultural traditions.

Framing Faust: Twentieth-Century Cultural Struggles pursues a dialectical approach to cultural history. Using the probing lens of cultural studies, Hedges shows how claims to the Faustian legacy permeated the struggle against Nazism in the 1930s while infusing not only the search for socialist utopias in Russia, France, and Germany, but also the quest for legitimacy on both sides of the Cold War divide after 1945.

Hedges balances new perspectives on such well-known works as Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus and Jack Kerouac’s Dr. Sax with discussions of previously overlooked twentieth-century expressions of the Faust myth, including American film noir and the Faust films of Stan Brakhage. She evaluates musical compositions—Hanns Eisler’s Faust libretto, the opera Votre Faust by Henri Pousseur and Michel Butor, and Alfred Schnittke’s Faust Cantata—as well as works of fiction and drama in French and German, many of which have heretofore never been discussed outside narrow disciplinary confines.

Enhanced by twenty-four illustrations, Framing Faust provides a fascinating and focused narrative of some of the major cultural struggles of the past century as seen through the Faustian prism, and establishes Faust as an important present-day frame of reference.

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Perfect in Their Art
Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali
Robert Hedin
Southern Illinois University Press, 2003

Two combatants, one ring, and a battle governed as much by determination and drive as by rules and referees: that’s boxing. Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali spans the millennia to present more than one hundred of the finest in pugilism poetry from both oral and written traditions, celebrating the lasting literary, historical, and cultural significance of boxing’s storied heritage.

Editors Robert Hedin and Michael Waters pulled no punches in assembling the definitive poems and poets of the sport. Works by such classical poets as Homer, Virgil, and Pindar are gathered here side-by-side for the first time with the poems of Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This provocative collection also features more recent literary heavyweights, including Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Levine, Wislawa Szymborska, Ai, Yusef Komunyakaa, James Merrill, and Norman Mailer. Equally impressive is this anthology’s rich sampling of boxing music, including ballads, blues, marches, waltzes, and pop lyrics. Irving Berlin, Memphis Minnie, Leadbelly, Paul Simon, Warren Zevon, and Bob Dylan are only a few of the songwriters in this volume compelled to honor the sweet science.

Complemented by a foreword from On the Waterfront author Budd Schulberg, Perfect in Their Art offers glimpses into the boxing ring’s literal and metaphoric place as a popular stage for brutal but artful combat. Together these poems celebrate the heroes and traditions of this most primal competition across its many eras to provide an accurate, graceful, and spirited evocation of boxing’s cultural legacy as both sport and art.

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Propaganda and Rhetoric in Democracy
History, Theory, Analysis
Gae Lyn Henderson
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
The study of propaganda’s uses in modern democracy highlights important theoretical questions about normative rhetorical practices. Is rhetoric ethically neutral? Is propaganda? How can facticity, accuracy, and truth be determined? Do any circumstances justify misrepresentation? Edited by Gae Lyn Henderson and M. J. Braun, Propaganda and Rhetoric in Democracy: History, Theory, Analysis advances our understanding of propaganda and rhetoric. Essays focus on historical figures—Edward Bernays, Jane Addams, Kenneth Burke, and Elizabeth Bowen—examining the development of the theory of propaganda during the rise of industrialism and the later changes of a mass-mediated society. Modeling a variety of approaches, case studies in the book consider contemporary propaganda and analyze the means and methods of propaganda production and distribution, including broadcast news, rumor production and globalized multimedia, political party manifestos, and university public relations.

Propaganda and Rhetoric in Democracy offers new perspectives on the history of propaganda, explores how it has evolved during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and advances a much more nuanced understanding of what it means to call discourse propaganda.
 
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Unending Conversations
New Writings by and about Kenneth Burke
Greig E Henderson
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001

Previously unpublished writings by and about Kenneth Burke plus essays by such Burkean luminaries as Wayne C. Booth, William H. Rueckert, Robert Wess, Thomas Carmichael, and Michael Feehan make the publication of Unending Conversations a significant event in the field of Burke studies and in the wider field of literary criticism and theory.

Editors Greig Henderson and David Cratis Williams have divided their material into three parts: “Dialectics of Expression, Communication, and Transcendence,” “Criticism, Symbolicity, and Tropology,” and “Transcendence and the Theological Motive.”

In the first part, Williams’s textual introduction and Rueckert’s essay analyze the genesis and composition of Burke’s A Symbolic of Motives and Poetics, Dramatistically Considered. Henderson opens part two by showing how these two essays’ concerns with literary form hearken back to Burke’s first book of criticism, Counter-Statement.

Thomas Carmichael discusses Burke’s relationship to thinkers such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Fredric Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty. Wess analyzes the relation between Burke’s dramatistic pentad of act, agent, scene, agency, and purpose and his four master tropes—metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony.

In the third part, Booth mines his unpublished correspondence with Burke to demonstrate that Burke is a coy theologian. Michael Feehan discusses Burke’s revelation in a 1983 interview that rather than rebounding from a naive kind of Marxism in Permanence and Change, he was rebounding from what he had “learned as a Christian Scientist.”

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Catalyst for Controversy
Paul Carus of Open Court
Harold Henderson
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

"I am not a common atheist; I am an atheist who loves God."—Paul Carus, "The God of Science," 1904

In the summer of 1880, while teaching at the military academy of the Royal Corps of Cadets of Saxony in Dresden, Paul Carus published a brief pamphlet denying the literal truth of scripture and describing the Bible as a great literary work comparable to the Odyssey.

This unremarkable document was Carus’s first step in a wide-ranging intellectual voyage in which he traversed philosophy, science, religion, mathematics, history, music, literature, and social and political issues. The Royal Corps, Carus later reported, found his published views "not in harmony with the Christian spirit, in accordance with which the training and education of the Corps of Cadets should be conducted." And so the corps offered the young teacher the choice of asking "most humbly for forgiveness for daring to have an opinion of my own and to express it, perhaps even promise to publish nothing more on religious matters, or to give up my post. I chose the latter. . . . There was thus no other choice for me but to emigrate and, trusting in my own powers, to establish for myself a new home." His resignation was effective on Easter Sunday, 1881.

Carus toured the Rhine, lived briefly in Belgium, and taught in a military college in England to learn English well enough to "thrive in the United States." By late 1884 or early 1885 he was on his way to the New World. Thriving in the United States proved more difficult than it had in England, but before 1885 ended he had published his first philosophical work in English, Monism and Meliorism. The book was not widely read, but it did reach Edward C. Hegeler, a La Salle, Illinois, zinc processor who became his father-in-law as well as his ideological and financial backer.

Established in La Salle, Carus began the work that would place him among the prominent American philosophers of his day and make the Open Court Publishing Company a leading publisher of philosophical, scientific, and religious books. He edited The Open Court and The Monist, offering the finest view of Oriental thought and religion then available in the West, and sought unsuccessfully to bring about a second World Parliament of Religions. He befriended physicist-philosopher Ernst Mach. For eleven years he employed D. T. Suzuki, who later became a great Zen Buddhist teacher. He published more articles by Charles S. Peirce, now viewed as one of the great world philosophers, in The Monist than appeared in any other publication.

Biographer Harold Henderson concludes his study of this remarkable man: "Whenever anyone is so fired with an idea that he or she can’t wait to write it down, there the spirit of Paul Carus remains, as he would have wished, active in the world."

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Dewey, Russell, Whitehead
Philosophers as Educators
Brian Patrick Hendley
Southern Illinois University Press, 1986

In Philosophers as Educators Brian Patrick Hendley argues that philosophers of edu­cation should reject their preoccupation with defining terms and analyzing concepts and embrace the philosophical task of con­structing general theories of education.  Hendley discusses in detail the educational philosophies of John Dewey, Bertrand Rus­sell, and Alfred North Whitehead. He sees in these men excellent role models that contem­porary philosophers might well follow. Hendley believes that, like these men­tors, philosophers should take a more ac­tive, practical role in education. Dewey and Russell ran their own schools, and Whitehead served as a university admin­istrator and as a member of many com­mittees created to study education.

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Burn
Sara Henning
Southern Illinois University Press, 2024

A lyrical meditation on time, survival, and merciful moments of joy 

Sara Henning’s Burn draws readers deep into the moments that make us, focusing on instances of crisis and renewal to explore our relation to time and lived experience. In these poems, we follow a speaker as she works through the loss of young love, the death of her parents, marriage’s hardness and beauty, sexual assault, and the devastation of a pandemic—evolutions of trauma that fracture time and alter perception. Twinned with these extremes are shimmering manifestations of joy only an imperfect world can make possible.

Burn magnifies the way time leaves us both the victim and the victor of our realities. The blaze of her late-mother’s Tiffany lamps sends the speaker back to childhood, where she unearths mica from the schoolyard dirt. The devastation of an ecological crisis, the annihilating act of rape, and the unsolved disappearance of a caretaker all level the speaker’s world and upend her place in it, forcing her to reconstitute reality from what remains. In poems which summon the spirit of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, this collection walks through the physics of temporality as refracted through love, loss, and grief, so we better understand its effect on our lives. Through this insight, Henning introduces a new way of being in the world.  

A work of advocacy and uplift, Burn shines with the vibrant possibilities of narrative lyric poetry as it forges a path from grief to hope.  

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View from True North
Sara Henning
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
Winner, High Plains Book Award Poetry, 2019

Winner, George Bogin Memorial Award, 2019

Finalist, Julie Suk Award, 2018

In these edgy poems of witness, Sara Henning’s speaker serves as both conduit and curator of the destructive legacies of alcoholism and multigenerational closeting. Considering the impact of addiction and sexual repression in the family and on its individual members, Henning explores with deft compassion the psychological ramifications of traumas across multiple generations.

With the starling as an unspoken trope for victims who later perpetuate the cycle of abuse, suffering and shame became forces dangerous enough to down airliners. The strands Henning weaves—violent relationships, the destructive effects of long-term closeting, and the pall that shame casts over entire lives—are hauntingly epiphanic. And yet these feverish lyric poems find a sharp beauty in their grieving, where Rolling Stone covers and hidden erotic photographs turn into talismans of regret and empathy. After the revelation that her deceased grandfather was a closeted homosexual “who lived two lives,” Henning considers the lasting effects of shame in regard to the silence, oppression, and erasure of sexual identity, issues that are of contemporary concern to the LGBTQIA community. Even through “the dark / earth encircling us,” Henning’s speaker wonders if there isn’t some way out of a place “where my body / is just another smoke-stung / dirge of survival,” if, in the end, love won’t be victorious.

Part eyewitness testimony, part autoethnography, this book of memory and history, constantly seeking and yearning, is full of poems “too brutal and strange to suffer / [their] way anywhere but home.”
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Writing Workplace Cultures
An Archaeology of Professional Writing
Jim Henry
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

In Writing Workplace Cultures: An Archaeology of Professional Writing, Jim Henry analyzes eighty-three workplace writing ethnographies composed over seven years in a variety of organizations. He views the findings as so many shards in an archaeology on professional writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

            

These ethnographies were composed by either practicing or aspiring writers participating in a Master’s program in professional writing and editing. Henry solicited the writers' participation in "informed intersubjective research" focused on issues and questions of their own determination. Most writers studied their own workplace, composing "auto-ethnographies" that problematize these workplaces' local cultures even as they depict writing practices within them.

            

Henry establishes links between current professional writing practices and composition instruction as both were shaped by national economic development and local postsecondary reorganization throughout the twentieth century. He insists that if we accept basic principles of social constructionism, the text demonstrates ways in which writers "write" workplace cultures to produce goods and services whose effects go far beyond the immediate needs of its clients.

            

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Always Danger
David Hernandez
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

Always Danger offers a lyrical and highly imaginative exploration into the hazards that surround people’s lives—whether it’s violence, war, mental illness, car accidents, or the fury of Mother Nature. In his second collection of poems, David Hernandez embraces the element of surprise: a soldier takes refuge inside a hollowed-out horse, a man bullies a mountain, and a giant pink donut sponsors age-old questions about beliefs. Hernandez typically eschews the politics that often surround the inner circle of contemporary literature, but in this volume he quietly sings a few bars with a political tone: one poem shadows the conflict in Iraq, another reflects our own nation’s economic and cultural divide. Always Danger parallels Hernandez’s joy of writing: unmapped, spontaneous, and imbued with nuanced revelation.

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Intellectual Property on Campus
Students' Rights and Responsibilities
TyAnna K Herrington
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010

What issues arise when students’ uses of intellectual materials are legally challenged, and how does the academic context affect them? What happens when users of intellectual property, either within or outside the academic structure, violate students’ rights to their intellectual products? In Intellectual Property on Campus, TyAnna K. Herrington addresses these concerns and more, clearing up the confusion often surrounding intellectual property law and its application in an academic setting. Filled with practical information and simple yet thorough explanations, this enlightening volume provides educators and students with a solid basis for understanding the broader impacts of legal and ethical dilemmas involving intellectual materials.

Herrington provides insight for students into how complex concepts such as patent, trademark, copyright, fair use, and plagiarism affect their work. She outlines the potential effects of the choices students make, as well as the benefits and limitations of legal protection for intellectual property, including the thorny issues of authorship and authority under the 1976 Copyright Act. Herrington also explores the topic of student collaboration—now very common on college campuses—and how it affects intellectual property issues and legal relationships, as well as the impact of new technologies, such as blogs, on student work in educational environments.
            Intellectual Property on Campus also provides useful information for administrators and educators. In particular, Herrington investigates the possible ramifications of their pedagogical and policy choices, and examines in depth the responsibility of instructors to treat students’ intellectual property legally, ethically, and conscientiously. Cautioning educators about the limitations on their control over intellectual materials in an academic setting, Herrington encourages teachers to minimize their influence over student works, instead giving pupils more freedom to control their own creations.
            The volume also investigates the rights, responsibilities, and limitations for users of intellectual property, as opposed to creators, especially as related to student or instructor use of copyrighted materials. Discussed in detail are such issues as fair use and the TEACH Act, as well as the often-intertwined areas of plagiarism, authorship, and copyright. In addition, Herrington addresses recent cultural developments regarding the use and creation of intellectual property by students and instructors.
            Written in a jargon-free style that is easy to understand, Intellectual Property on Campus gives students, instructors, and administrators the information they need to navigate the intricate landscape of law and integrity in the realm of academic creation.

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Controlling Voices
Intellectual Property, Humanistic Studies, and the Internet
TyAnna K Herrington
Southern Illinois University Press, 2001

TyAnna K. Herrington explains current intellectual property law and examines the effect of the Internet and ideological power on its interpretation. Promoting a balanced development of our national culture, she advocates educators’ informed participation in ensuring egalitarian public access to information. She discusses the control of information and the creation of knowledge in terms of the way control functions under current property law.

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John Dewey's Essays in Experimental Logic
D Micah Hester
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007

Offering a new edition of Dewey’s 1916 collection of essays

This critical edition of John Dewey’s 1916 collection of writings on logic, Essays in Experimental Logic—in which Dewey presents his concept of logic as the theory of inquiry and his unique and innovative development of the relationship of inquiry to experience—is the first scholarly reprint of the work in one volume since 1954. Essays in Experimental Logic, edited by D. Micah Hester and Robert B. Talisse, uses the authoritative texts from the Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953 (published by Southern Illinois University Press) and includes as well articles from leading journals representing various contemporary schools of philosophy that criticized Dewey’s experimentalism.

Culling materials from six volumes of the chronologically arranged Collected Works, this single-volume edition of Essays marks a crucial point in Dewey’s intellectual development: one in which Dewey critically engages idealistic and intuitionist theorists and lays the groundwork for his mature theory of inquiry. The text includes a new introduction by renowned Dewey scholar Tom Burke that places Essays in philosophical and historical context. In addition to the original essays, Essays in Experimental Logic also features five critical essays by Dewey’s contemporaries, including Bertrand Russell, Wendell T. Bush, R. F. Alfred Hoernlé, H. T. Costello, and C. S. Peirce.

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The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought
Larry A. Hickman
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007

Presenting Dewey’s new view of philosophical inquiry

This critical edition of The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought presents the results of John Dewey’s patient construction, throughout the previous sixteen years, of the radically new view of the methods and concerns of philosophical inquiry. It was a view that he continued to defend for the rest of his life.

In the 1910 The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought—the first collection of Dewey’s previously published, edited essays—John Dewey provided readers with an overview of the scope and direction of his philosophical vision in one volume. The order in which the eleven essays were presented was a reverse chronology, with more recently published essays appearing first. The collection of eleven essays offered a detailed portrait of Dewey’s proposed reconstruction of the traditional concepts of knowledge and truth. It furthermore elaborated on how his new logic and his proposal regarding knowledge and truth fit comfortably together, not only with each other but also with a pragmatically proper understanding of belief, reality, and experience.

Because material in the Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953 was published chronologically, however, the essays published together in the 1910 Darwin book have appeared in seven different volumes in the Collected Works. This new, critical edition restores a classic collection of essays authored and edited by John Dewey as they originally appeared in the volume. The edition is presented with ancillary materials, including responses by Dewey’s critics and an introduction by Douglas Browning.

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John Dewey's Educational Philosophy in International Perspective
A New Democracy for the Twenty-First Century
Larry A. Hickman
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

John Dewey’s Educational Philosophy in International Perspective brings together eleven experts from around the globe to examine the international legacy of the famous philosopher. Placing special emphasis on Dewey’s theories of education, Larry A. Hickman and Giuseppe Spadafora have gathered some of the world’s most noted scholars of educational philosophy to present a thorough exploration of Dewey’s enduring relevance and potential as a tool for change in twenty-first-century political and social institutions.

This collection offers close examinations of the global impact of Dewey’s philosophies, both in his time and our own. Included are discussions of his reception as a much-respected yet criticized philosopher among European Catholics both before and after World War I; the utilization of his pragmatic theories in Italian education and the continuing quest to reinterpret them; his emergence as a source of inspiration to new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe; and his recently renewed popularity in the Hispanic world, particularly in South America and Spain. In addition, authors delve into Dewey’s notion of democracy as a personal way of life and his views on the important ties between education and the democratic state.

Also discussed are Dewey’s philosophies regarding school and society, including the understanding of educational trends as reflections of their social context; the contrast between his methods of applying intelligence to ethical problems and the theory of orthodox utilitarianism; responses to criticisms of Dewey’s controversial belief that the sciences can be applied directly to educational practices; and incisive queries into how he would have responded to the crucial role the Internet now plays in primary and secondary education.

This well-rounded volume provides international insight into Dewey’s philosophies and contains a wealth of information never before published in English, resulting in an indispensable resource for anyone interested in John Dewey and his lasting role in education around the world.

Contributors

Viviana Burza

Franco Cambi

Giorgio Chiosso

Jim Garrison

Jaime Nubiola

Hilary Putnam

Ruth Anna Putnam

Giuseppe Spadafora

Emil Višnovský

Leonard J. Waks

Krystyna Wilkoszewska

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A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Volume 10, M'Intosh to Nash
Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800
Philip H Highfill
Southern Illinois University Press, 1984

Those featured in Volume 10 include Margaret Martyr, a singer, actress, and dancer whose “conjugal virtues were often impeached,” according to the July 1792Thespian Magazine. The Diction­ary describes this least constant of lovers as “of middling height, with a figure well-proportioned for breeches parts. [Her] black-haired, black-eyed beauty and clear soprano made her an immedi­ate popular success in merry maids and tuneful minxes, the piquant and the pert, for a quarter century.”

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A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Volume 1, Abaco to Belfille
Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800
Philip H Highfill
Southern Illinois University Press, 1973

Tobe completed in 12volumes, this monumental work here begins publica­tion with the first two volumes—Abaco to Bertie and Bertin to Byzard. When completed, it is expected that the bio­graphical dictionary will include informa­tion on more than 8,500 individuals.

Hundreds of printed sources have been searched for this project, and dozens of repositories combed, and the names of personnel listed have been filtered through parish registers whenever possible. From published and unpublished sources, from wills, archives of professional societies and guilds, from records of colleges, uni­versities, and clubs, and from the contri­butions of selfless scholars, the authors have here assembled material which il­luminates theatrical and musical activity in London in the 1660–1800 period.

The information here amassed will doubtless be augmented by other spe­cialists in Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre and drama, but it is not likely that the number of persons now known surely or conjectured finally to have been connected with theatrical en­terprise in this period will ever be in­creased considerably. Certainly, the contributions made here add immeasurably to existing knowledge, and in a number of instances correct standard histories or reference works.

The accompanying illustrations, esti­mated to be some 1,400 likenesses—at least one picture of each subject for whom a portrait exists—may prove to be a use­ful feature of the Work. The authors have gone beyond embellishment of the text, and have attempted to list all origi­nal portraits any knowledge of which is now recoverable, and have tried to ascer­tain the present location of portraits in every medium.

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A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Volume 12, Pinner to Rizzo
Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800
Philip H Highfill
Southern Illinois University Press, 1987

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A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Volume 13, Roach to H. Siddons
Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800
Philip H Highfill
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

Like the works already published, these latest volumes of the Biographical Dictionary deal with theatre people of every ilk, ranging from dressers and one-performance actors to trumpeter John Shore (inventor of the tuning fork) and the incomparable Sarah Siddons.

Also prominent is Susanna Rowson, a novelist, actress, and early female playwright. Although born into a British military family, Rowson often wrote plays that dealt with patriotic American themes and spent much of her career on the American stage.

The theatrical jewel of these volumes is the "divine Sarah" Siddons: "She raised the tragedy to the skies," wrote William Hazlitt, and "embodied to our imagination the fables of mythology, of the heroic and dignified mortals of elder time." She endured much tragedy herself, including a crippling debilitating illness and the deaths of five of her seven children. Siddons played major roles in both comedy and tragedy, not the least of which was a performance as Hamlet.

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A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Volume 14, S. Siddons to Thynne
Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800
Philip H Highfill
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

Like the works already published, these latest volumes of the Biographical Dictionary deal with theatre people of every ilk, ranging from dressers and one-performance actors to trumpeter John Shore (inventor of the tuning fork) and the incomparable Sarah Siddons.

Also prominent is Susanna Rowson, a novelist, actress, and early female playwright. Although born into a British military family, Rowson often wrote plays that dealt with patriotic American themes and spent much of her career on the American stage.

The theatrical jewel of these volumes is the "divine Sarah" Siddons: "She raised the tragedy to the skies," wrote William Hazlitt, and "embodied to our imagination the fables of mythology, of the heroic and dignified mortals of elder time." She endured much tragedy herself, including a crippling debilitating illness and the deaths of five of her seven children. Siddons played major roles in both comedy and tragedy, not the least of which was a performance as Hamlet.

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A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Volume 15, Tibbett to M. West
Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800
Philip H Highfill
Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

A major project begun in 1973 reaches its conclusion with the publication of volumes 15 and 16 of the Biographical Dictionary, a series considered "a reference work of the first order" by Theatre and Performing Arts Collections.

Among performers highlighted in these last volumes is Catherine Tofts, a gifted singer whose popular acclaim was captured in lines by Samuel Phillips: "How are we pleas’d when beauteous Tofts appears, / To steal our Souls through our attentive Ears?’ / Ravish’d we listen to th’ inchanting Song, / And catch the falling Accents from her Tongue." The first singer of English birth to master the form of Italian opera, Tofts frequently won leading roles over native Italian singers. Her salary—£400 to £500 a season—was one of the highest in the theatre. Her popularity declined, however, as her demands for payment increased—a situation captured in an epigram Alexander Pope may have penned: "So bright is thy beauty, so charming thy song, / As had drawn both the beasts and their Orpheus along; /But such is thy avarice, and such is thy pride, / That the beasts must have starved, and the poets have died."

John Vanbrugh, whose play The Relapse is ranked as one of the best comedies of the Restoration period, became a subordinate crown architect under Sir Christopher Wren in 1702. In 1703, Vanbrugh began plans for the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket, an enterprise endorsed by the Kit Cat Club (of which Vanbrugh was a member). Even though his lavish design was acoustically defective, restructuring helped correct the problem and the theatre eventually became the exclusive center for opera in London.

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A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Volume 16, W. West to Zwingman
Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800
Philip H Highfill
Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

A major project begun in 1973 reaches its conclusion with the publication of volumes 15 and 16 of the Biographical Dictionary, a series considered "a reference work of the first order" by Theatre and Performing Arts Collections.

Among performers highlighted in these last volumes is Catherine Tofts, a gifted singer whose popular acclaim was captured in lines by Samuel Phillips: "How are we pleas’d when beauteous Tofts appears, / To steal our Souls through our attentive Ears?’ / Ravish’d we listen to th’ inchanting Song, / And catch the falling Accents from her Tongue." The first singer of English birth to master the form of Italian opera, Tofts frequently won leading roles over native Italian singers. Her salary—£400 to £500 a season—was one of the highest in the theatre. Her popularity declined, however, as her demands for payment increased—a situation captured in an epigram Alexander Pope may have penned: "So bright is thy beauty, so charming thy song, / As had drawn both the beasts and their Orpheus along; /But such is thy avarice, and such is thy pride, / That the beasts must have starved, and the poets have died."

John Vanbrugh, whose play The Relapse is ranked as one of the best comedies of the Restoration period, became a subordinate crown architect under Sir Christopher Wren in 1702. In 1703, Vanbrugh began plans for the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket, an enterprise endorsed by the Kit Cat Club (of which Vanbrugh was a member). Even though his lavish design was acoustically defective, restructuring helped correct the problem and the theatre eventually became the exclusive center for opera in London.

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A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Volume 2, Belfort to Byzand
Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800
Philip H Highfill
Southern Illinois University Press, 1973

Tobe completed in 12volumes, this monumental work here begins publica­tion with the first two volumes—Abaco to Bertie and Bertin to Byzard. When completed, it is expected that the bio­graphical dictionary will include informa­tion on more than 8,500 individuals.

Hundreds of printed sources have been searched for this project, and dozens of repositories combed, and the names of personnel listed have been filtered through parish registers whenever possible. From published and unpublished sources, from wills, archives of professional societies and guilds, from records of colleges, uni­versities, and clubs, and from the contri­butions of selfless scholars, the authors have here assembled material which il­luminates theatrical and musical activity in London in the 1660–1800 period.

The information here amassed will doubtless be augmented by other spe­cialists in Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre and drama, but it is not likely that the number of persons now known surely or conjectured finally to have been connected with theatrical en­terprise in this period will ever be in­creased considerably. Certainly, the contributions made here add immeasurably to existing knowledge, and in a number of instances correct standard histories or reference works.

The accompanying illustrations, esti­mated to be some 1,400 likenesses—at least one picture of each subject for whom a portrait exists—may prove to be a use­ful feature of the Work. The authors have gone beyond embellishment of the text, and have attempted to list all origi­nal portraits any knowledge of which is now recoverable, and have tried to ascer­tain the present location of portraits in every medium.

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A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Volume 3, Cabanel to Cory
Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800
Philip H Highfill
Southern Illinois University Press, 1975

Volumes three and four of this monumen­tal work include full entries for all such illustrious names as those of the Cibbers—Colley, Theophilus, and Susanna Maria—Kitty Clive, and Charlotte Charke, George Colman, the Elder, and the Younger, William Davenant, and De Loutherboug. But here also are full entries for dozens of important secondary figures and of minor ones whose stories have never been told, as well as a census (and at least a few recoverable facts) for even the most inconsiderable performers and servants of the theatres.

As in the previous volumes in this dis­tinguished series, the accompanying illus­trations include at least one picture of each subject for whom a portrait exists.

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A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Volume 4, Corye to Dynion
Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800
Philip H Highfill
Southern Illinois University Press, 1975

Volumes three and four of this monumen­tal work include full entries for all such illustrious names as those of the Cibbers—Colley, Theophilus, and Susanna Maria—Kitty Clive, and Charlotte Charke, George Colman, the Elder, and the Younger, William Davenant, and De Loutherboug. But here also are full entries for dozens of important secondary figures and of minor ones whose stories have never been told, as well as a census (and at least a few recoverable facts) for even the most inconsiderable performers and servants of the theatres.

As in the previous volumes in this dis­tinguished series, the accompanying illus­trations include at least one picture of each subject for whom a portrait exists.

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A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Volume 5, Eagan to Garrett
Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800
Philip H Highfill
Southern Illinois University Press, 1978

In contrast to each other, Volume 5 is a sociological portrait of mostly little people in their tragic and comic efforts to achieve fame on the London stage during the Restoration and eighteenth century, whereas Volume 6 is dom­inated by the glamour of David Gar­rick, Nell Gwyn, and Joseph Grimaldi, the celebrated clown. Some 250 por­traits individualize the great and small of the theatres of London.

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A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Volume 6, Garrick to Gyngell
Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London 1660-1800
Philip H Highfill
Southern Illinois University Press, 1978

In contrast to each other, Volume 5 is a sociological portrait of mostly little people in their tragic and comic efforts to achieve fame on the London stage during the Restoration and eighteenth century, whereas Volume 6 is dom­inated by the glamour of David Gar­rick, Nell Gwyn, and Joseph Grimaldi, the celebrated clown. Some 250 por­traits individualize the great and small of the theatres of London.

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A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Volume 7, Habgood to Houbert
Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800
Philip H Highfill
Southern Illinois University Press, 1982

Volume 7 includes such notables as the composers Handel and Haydn and the alluring actress Elizabeth Hartley.

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A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Volume 8, Hough to Keyse
Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800
Philip H Highfill
Southern Illinois University Press, 1982
Volume 8 dis­cusses, among others, the careers of Charles Incledon, the “English Ballad-Singer,” boxing champion of England, “Gentleman” John Jackson, and members of the famous Kemble family— Charles, Maria Theresa, Frances, Henry, John Philip, Priscilla, Elizabeth, Roger, and Stephen.
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The Chicago River
A Natural and Unnatural History
Libby Hill
Southern Illinois University Press, 2019
In this social and ecological account of the Chicago River, Libby Hill tells the story of how a sluggish waterway emptying into Lake Michigan became central to the creation of Chicago as a major metropolis and transportation hub. 

This widely acclaimed volume weaves the perspectives of science, engineering, commerce, politics, economics, and the natural world into a chronicle of the river from its earliest geologic history through its repeated adaptations to the city that grew up around it. While explaining the river’s role in massive public works, such as drainage and straightening, designed to address the infrastructure needs of a growing population, Hill focuses on the synergy between the river and the people of greater Chicago, whether they be the tribal cultures that occupied the land after glacial retreat, the first European inhabitants, or more recent residents.

In the first edition, Hill brought together years of original research and the contributions of dozens of experts to tell the Chicago River’s story up until 2000. This revised edition features discussions of disinfection, Asian carp, green strategies, the evolution of the Chicago Riverwalk, and the river’s rejuvenation. It also explores how earlier solutions to problems challenge today’s engineers, architects, environmentalists, and public policy agencies as they address contemporary issues. 

Revealing the river to be a microcosm of the uneasy relationship between nature and civilization, The Chicago River offers the tools and knowledge for the city’s residents to be champions on the river’s behalf.
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Pornography and the Justices
The Supreme Court and the Intractable Obscenity Problem
Richard F. Hixson
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996

Discussing Supreme Court decisions regarding obscenity, Richard F. Hixson highlights the views of Justices William J. Brennan and John Paul Stevens, borrows from the pioneer decisions of Judge Learned Hand, and consults the work of contemporary First Amendment scholars; finally, though, he relies not on public debate or political machinations but on the justices’ own published opinions, which are, as he says, "the most tantalizing documents of all."

Hixson proceeds chronologically through eleven chapters, with each chapter featuring a specific aspect of the constitutional problem and the approach or solution espoused by a particular justice. Through his case-by-case analysis of the many Supreme Court obscenity rulings, Hixson relates each decision to the temper of the times.

In this investigation of the Supreme Court’s dealings with obscenity, Hixson asks—and answers in detail—a series of pertinent questions. Do Congressional politics and public opinion prejudice the Court’s ability to interpret the Constitution fairly? Must adults be treated the same as children? What are the limits, if any, of "content restriction" on obscene materials? How much "expressive activity" is, or should be, protected by the First Amendment? Does pornography discriminate against women? How protective of the individual can the Supreme Court be and, at the same time, allow as many voices as possible to be heard?

Pornography and the Justices differs from other studies of pornography in its unique focus and its fresh conclusion, which is a composite of views garnered from the Supreme Court justices. As long as there is ample protection of minors and nonconsenting adults, Hixson argues, obscenity should be up to the individual. Separating himself from others who have discussed the issue, Hixson contends that the freedom to speak is as important as the freedom to be heard: it is essential to be able to speak whether or not anyone is listening.

For Hixson, the clear trajectory of Supreme Court opinions implies that the freedom to purchase obscene pornographic matter should be restricted only by time, place, and manner considerations. If a person wants pornography, he or she should be able to get it, albeit perhaps from a higher shelf, in a secluded room, or at a theater clearly marked for adults.

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Rhetoric on the Margins of Modernity
Vico, Condillac, Monboddo
Catherine L Hobbs
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

Changes in English studies today, particularly the rise of cultural studies, have forced reexaminations of historical genealogies. Three complex figures whose places are currently being reassessed include the Neapolitan Giambattista Vico (1668 –1744), the Frenchman Etienne de Condillac (1714 –1780), and the Scotsman James Burnet(t), Lord Monboddo (1714 –1799) in our histories of communication, linguistics, English studies, and now rhetoric.

In Rhetoric on the Margins of Modernity: Vico, Condillac, Monboddo, Catherine L. Hobbs focuses primarily on these three key figures in whose work rhetoric and linguistics intertwine as they respond to emerging attitudes and values of science and philosophy in the eighteenth century. Through her examination of works of Vico, Condillac, Monboddo and other marginal figures, Hobbs presents a different and more nuanced view of the transformation of rhetoric from classical to modern.

In order to redefine each figure’s position, Hobbs brings together the histories of linguistics, literature, rhetoric, and communication, rather than leaving them isolated in separate disciplines. She examines each figure’s theory of language origin and development as it has motivated their rhetorical theories. The result is Rhetoric on the Margins of Modernity: Vico, Condillac, Monboddo, an original and significant account of the formation of modern rhetoric.

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Master Teachers of Theatre
Observations on Teaching Theatre by Nine American Masters
Burnet M. Hobgood
Southern Illinois University Press, 1988

Claribel Baird reviews the interpretation of classical texts for theatrical performance. Howard Bay interrupted his stage design career of more than 150 Broadway productions to help students. BernardBeckerman asks if there are approaches to the teaching of dramatic literature that particularly suit drama-as-theatre. Robert Benedetti offers suggestions on the teaching of acting. OscarBrockett treats the problems of the theatre teacher and the processes of learning.

AgnesHaaga shows that the essential quality in heading up child drama programs is a sense of joyous delight. Wallace Smith discusses methods for teaching secondary schooltheatre. Jewel Walker offers a rare written statement about his work as a theatre teacher. Carl Weber conveys the principles and methodology of his mentor, Bertolt Brecht, to beginning directors.

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Scarface Al and the Crime Crusaders
Chicago's Private War Against Capone
Dennis E. Hoffman
Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

According to the Eliot Ness myth, which has been widely disseminated through books, television shows, and movies, Ness and the Untouchables defeated Al Capone by marshaling superior firepower. In Scarface Al and the Crime Crusaders, Dennis Hoffman presents a fresh new perspective on the downfall of Al Capone. To debunk the Eliot Ness myth, he shows how a handful of private citizens brought Capone to justice by outsmarting him rather than by outgunning him.

Drawing on previously untapped sources, Hoffman dissects what he terms a “private war” against Capone. He traces the behind-the-scenes work of a few prominent Chicago businessmen from their successful lobbying of presidents Coolidge and Hoover on behalf of federal intervention to the trial, sentencing, and punishment of Al Capone. Hoffman also reconstructs in detail a number of privately sponsored citizen initiatives directed at stopping Capone. These private ventures included prosecuting the gangsters responsible for election crimes; establishing a crime lab to assist in gangbusting; underwriting the costs of the investigation of the Jake Lingle murder; stigmatizing Capone; and protecting the star witnesses for the prosecution in Al Capone’s income tax evasion case.

Hoffman suggests that as American society continues to be threatened by illegal drugs, gangs, and widespread violence, it is important to remember that the organized crime and political corruption of Prohibition-era Chicago were checked through the efforts of private citizens.

 

 

Dennis E. Hoffman is an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

 

 

 

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A Commentary on the Plays of Sophocles
James C. Hogan
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

James C. Hogan introduces each play by highlighting specific and interpretive problems relevant to that play before turning to a line-by-line analysis. The line analysis is comprehensive, ranging from the meanings of words and phrases that pertain to a variety of Greek ideas and institutions to metaphor and imagery specific to each play as well as plots and borrowings from earlier poetry, styles, and characterizations.

Along with his examination of the seven extant plays of Sophocles in English translations, Hogan provides a general introduction to the theatre in Sophocles’ time, discussing staging, the conventions of the Greek theatre, the text of the plays, and mythology and religion.

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Performing Prose
The Study and Practice of Style in Composition
Chris Holcomb
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010

In Performing Prose, authors Chris Holcomb and M. Jimmie Killingsworth breathe new life into traditional concepts of style. Drawing on numerous examples from a wide range of authors and genres, Holcomb and Killingsworth demonstrate the use of style as a vehicle for performance, a way for writers to project themselves onto the page while managing their engagement with the reader. By addressing style and rhetoric not as an editorial afterthought, but as a means of social interaction, they equip students with the vocabulary and tools to analyze the styles of others in fresh ways, as well as create their own.

Whereas most writing texts focus exclusively on analysis or techniques to improve writing, Holcomb and Killingsworth blend these two schools of thought to provide a singular process of thinking about writing. They discuss not only the benefits of conventional methods, but also the use of deviation from tradition; the strategies authors use to vary their style; and the use of such vehicles as images, tropes, and schemes. The goal of the authors is to provide writers with stylistic “footing”: an understanding of the ways writers use style to orchestrate their relationships with readers, subject matter, and rhetorical situations.

Packed with useful tips and insights, this comprehensive volume investigates every aspect of style and its use to present an indispensable resource for both students and scholars. Performing Prose moves beyond customary studies to provide a refreshing and informative approach to the concepts and strategies of writing.

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What's Your Road, Man?
Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac's On the Road
Hilary Holladay
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

The ten essays in this groundbreaking compilation cover a broad range of topics, employing a variety of approaches, including theoretical interpretations and textual and comparative analysis, to investigate such issues as race, class, gender, and sexuality, as well as the novel's historical and literary contexts. What's Your Road, Man? Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" illustrates the richness of the critical work currently being undertaken on this vital American narrative.

Combining essays from renowned Kerouac experts and emerging scholars, What's Your Road, Man? draws on an enormous amount of research into the literary, social, cultural, biographical, and historical contexts of Kerouac's canonical novel. Since its publication in 1957, On the Road has remained in print and has continued to be one of the most widely read twentieth-century American novels.

Several essays enhance understanding of the book by comparing it with alternative versions of the text, like the original 1951 scroll manuscript and some of Kerouac's other novels, and with works by Kerouac's contemporaries such as Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Further studies explore ethnicity, identity, and the novel's place in American literature as well as its relevance to twenty-first century readers.

On the Road has inspired readers for more than fifty years, and the new research included in What's Your Road, Man? introduces fresh perspectives on this classic work of American literature. Editors Hilary Holladay and Robert Holton have successfully woven little-known material with new understandings of familiar topics that will enlighten current and future generations of Kerouac enthusiasts and scholars for years to come.

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Liberating Voices
Writing at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers
Karyn L Hollis
Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

During the 1920s and 1930s at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, working-class women were educated in the liberal arts and instructed in writing to assume more powerful roles in the industrial workplace. In Liberating Voices: Writing at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, Karyn L. Hollis tells the remarkable story of how this multiclass, multiethnic American institution rooted in composition pedagogy, literary history, and leftist thought emerged from the broad social, economic, and ideological trends of the era. The summer school curriculum, Hollis shows, enhanced the individual and collective self-confidence of the 1,800 women who studied there between 1921 and 1938.

Drawing heavily on the women’s writings—including autobiography, poetry, labor drama, humor, and economic reporting—Liberating Voices adds significantly to the small oeuvre of published writing by working-class women, who were, in this case, mostly nontraditional students, immigrants, and minorities. Outlining a materialist pedagogy that centers on the women’s daily economic struggles as well as their family and community experiences, Hollis reveals the tensions that stemmed from differences in race, ethnicity, class, and religion. She also shows how the students exploited cultural scripts and drew strength from their diversity, eventually insisting on a democratic sharing of power with faculty and administrators at the Summer School.

Hollis provides a thorough ethnography of the Summer School with respect to its place in the social and political history of the 1920s and 1930s, and then situates the school’s pedagogy within the history of American education and composition instruction. Concepts from literary criticism and composition theory provide the framework for an analysis of the working women’s autobiographical writing, revealing how the narrative voice of their prose grew from weak and individualized to empowered and collective as the women described their families, childhood, work, unions, and education over time. The volume is complemented by sixteen illustrations.

Additional analysis of the women’s poetry points to their skill as both producers and consumers of literature. The common theme of body versus a powerful machine in the workplace bears witness to the industrial exploitation the women endured. Taking up postmodern questions of agency and voice, Hollis argues that the women used a variety of cultural texts to construct discourses that reflected their needs and desires. Liberating Voices not only provides a previously untold chapter in the history of American worker education, it also showcases a liberating pedagogy that has salient implications for contemporary classrooms.

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Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre
A Selection from His Unpublished Journal "Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer"
Joseph Holloway
Southern Illinois University Press, 1967

Until his death in 1944, Holloway attended almost every performance of the Abbey Theatre and daily recorded in his journal his reactions to plays and players and his comments about and conversations with literary and theatrical people. From the journal’s 221 bulky volumes, housed in the National Library of Ireland, Mr. Hogan and Mr. O’Neill have compiled this book of extracts from the approximately 25,000,000 words written by the Irishman. The years from 1899 to 1926 were chosen because they are generally considered to be the significant ones for the Abbey Theatre: the year of its founding to the production of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, which caused a riot in the theatre. Mr. Holloway attended every play during these years, as well as many rehearsals, and talked with nearly everybody who had anything to do with the theatre. This journal reflects the tensions, feuds, and anguish that produced one of the great theatres of modern times.


The meticulous display of minute detail makes Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre imperative reading for the student of modern theatre, particularly since its character as a daily account permits ready checking of dates listed in previous works about the Irish National Theatre.

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Revisiting Racialized Voice
African American Ethos in Language and Literature
David G Holmes
Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

Revisiting Racialized Voice:African American Ethos in Language and Literature argues that past misconceptions about black identity and voice, codified from the 1870s through the 1920s, inform contemporary assumptions about African American authorship and ethos. Tracing elements of racial consciousness in the works of Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, and others, David G. Holmes urges a revisiting of narratives from this period to strengthen and advance notions about racialized writing and to shape contemporary composition pedagogies.

Pointing to the intersection of African American identity, literature, and rhetoric, Revisiting Racialized Voice begins to construct rhetorically workable yet ideologically flexible definitions of black voice. Holmes maintains that political pressure to embrace“color blindness” endangers scholars’ ability to uncover links between racialized discourses of the past and those of the present, and he calls instead for a reassessment of the material realities and theoretical assumptions race represents and with which it has been associated.

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Looking for Lincoln in Illinois
Historic Houses of Lincoln’s Illinois
Erika Holst
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
Winner, ISHS Best of Illinois History Award, 2019

This richly illustrated compendium of twenty-two historic buildings in the Abraham Lincoln National Heritage Area includes houses, a hotel, and an art center, all of which are open to the public. Each site links today’s visitors with a place Lincoln lived, a home of a Lincoln friend or colleague, or a spot that illuminates Lincoln’s era and legacy in central Illinois. Along with dozens of modern and historical photographs, entries contain explorations of historical connections to Lincoln and detailed information about exceptional features and artifacts. Complete with maps, this showcase of Illinois heritage is a handy guide for day trips, extended tours, or armchair adventures.
 
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Dear Mr. Lincoln
Letters to the President
Harold Holzer
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

During the Civil War, Americans felt themselves to be on intimate terms with their commander in chief, sending President Abraham Lincoln between two hundred and five hundred pieces of mail every day—letters that expressed the concerns, aspirations, grievances, and obsessions of the nation. Ranging from weighty political tomes to greetings accompanying homespun gifts, the letters reflect the pulse of the country in a time of upheaval. This illuminating collection includes straightforward correspondence from ordinary Americans requesting autographs and favors as well as pleas from the influential, such as the anguished open letter from New York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley imploring Lincoln to end his “remiss” policy of caution on emancipation. This new paperback edition, featuring twenty-two illustrations, portrays a president clearly eager to review and respond to the advice, criticism, and requests of the nation’s citizens.

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The Lincoln Mailbag
America Writes to the President, 1861-1865
Harold Holzer
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

As president, Abraham Lincoln received between two hundred and five hundred letters a day—correspondence from public officials, political allies, and military leaders, as well as letters from ordinary Americans of all races who wanted to share their views with him. Here, and in his critically acclaimed volume Dear Mr. Lincoln, editor Harold Holzer has rescued these voices—sometimes eloquent, occasionally angry, at times poetic—from the obscurity of the archives of the Civil War. The Lincoln Mailbag includes letters written by African Americans, which Lincoln never saw, revealing to readers a more accurate representation of the nation’s mood than even the president knew. This first paperback edition of The Lincoln Mailbag includes a new index and fourteen illustrations, and Holzer’s introduction and annotations provide historical context for the events described and the people who wrote so passionately to their president in Lincoln's America.

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Lincoln and Freedom
Slavery, Emancipation, and the Thirteenth Amendment
Harold Holzer
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007

Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 was a pivotal moment in the history of the United States. The Emancipation Proclamation had officially gone into effect on January 1, 1863, and the proposed Thirteenth Amendment had become a campaign issue. Lincoln and Freedom: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Thirteenth Amendment captures these historic times, profiling the individuals, events, and enactments that led to slavery’s abolition. Fifteen leading Lincoln scholars contribute to this collection, covering slavery from its roots in 1619 Jamestown, through the adoption of the Constitution, to Abraham Lincoln’s presidency.

This comprehensive volume, edited by Harold Holzer and Sara Vaughn Gabbard, presents Abraham Lincoln’s response to the issue of slavery as politician, president, writer, orator, and commander-in-chief. Topics include the history of slavery in North America, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, the evolution of Lincoln’s view of presidential powers, the influence of religion on Lincoln, and the effects of the Emancipation Proclamation.

This collection effectively explores slavery as a Constitutional issue, both from the viewpoint of the original intent of the nation’s founders as they failed to deal with slavery, and as a study of the Constitutional authority of the commander-in-chief as Lincoln interpreted it. Addressed are the timing of Lincoln’s decision for emancipation and its effect on the public, the military, and the slaves themselves.

Other topics covered include the role of the U.S. Colored Troops, the election campaign of 1864, and the legislative debate over the Thirteenth Amendment. The volume concludes with a heavily illustrated essay on the role that iconography played in forming and informing public opinion about emancipation and the amendments that officially granted freedom and civil rights to African Americans.

Lincoln and Freedom provides a comprehensive political history of slavery in America and offers a rare look at how Lincoln’s views, statements, and actions played a vital role in the story of emancipation.

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Lincoln's White House Secretary
The Adventurous Life of William O.Stoddard
Harold Holzer
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
William Osborn Stoddard, Lincoln’s “third secretary” who worked alongside John G. Nicolay and John Hay in the White House from 1861 to 1865, completed his autobiography in 1907, one of more than one hundred books he wrote. An abridged version was published by his son in 1955 as “Lincoln’s Third Secretary: The Memoirs of William O. Stoddard.”  In this new, edited version, Lincoln’s White House Secretary: The Adventurous Life of William O. Stoddard, Harold Holzer provides an introduction, afterword, and annotations and includes comments by Stoddard’s granddaughter, Eleanor Stoddard. The elegantly written volume gives readers a window into the politics, life, and culture of the mid-nineteenth century.
 
Stoddard’s bracing writing, eye for detail, and ear for conversation bring a novelistic excitement to a story of childhood observations, young friendships, hardscrabble frontier farming, early hints of the slavery crisis, the workings of the Lincoln administration, and the strange course of war and reunion in the southwest. More than a clerk, Stoddard was an adventurous explorer of American life, a farmer, editor, soldier, and politician.
Enhanced by seventeen illustrations, this narrative sympathetically draws the reader into the life and times of Lincoln’s third secretary, adding to our understanding of the events and the larger-than-life figures that shaped history.
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1863
Lincoln's Pivotal Year
Harold Holzer
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013
Only hours into the new year of 1863, Abraham Lincoln performed perhaps his most famous action as president by signing the Emancipation Proclamation. Rather than remaining the highlight of the coming months, however, this monumental act marked only the beginning of the most pivotal year of Lincoln’s presidency and the most revolutionary twelve months of the entire Civil War. In recognition of the sesquicentennial of this tumultuous time, prominent Civil War scholars explore the events and personalities that dominated 1863 in this enlightening volume, providing a unique historical perspective on a critical period in American history.
 
Several defining moments of Lincoln’s presidency took place in 1863, including the most titanic battle ever to shake the American continent, which soon inspired the most famous presidential speech in American history. The ten essays in this book explore the year’s important events and developments, including the response to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation; the battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and other less-well-known confrontations; the New York City draft riots; several constitutional issues involving the war powers of President Lincoln; and the Gettysburg Address and its continued impact on American thought. Other topics include the adaptation of photography for war coverage; the critical use of images; the military role of the navy; and Lincoln’s family life during this fiery trial.
 
 With an informative introduction by noted Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer and a chronology that places the high-profile events of 1863 in context with cultural and domestic policy advances of the day, this remarkable compendium opens a window into a year that proved decisive not only for the Civil War and Lincoln’s presidency but also for the entire course of American history.
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1865
America Makes War and Peace in Lincoln’s Final Year
Harold Holzer
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015

In 1865 Americans faced some of the most important issues in the nation’s history: the final battles of the Civil War, the struggle to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, the peace process, reconstruction, the role of freed slaves, the tragedy of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, and the trials of the conspirators. In this illuminating collection, prominent historians of nineteenth-century America offer insightful overviews of the individuals, events, and issues on 1865 that shaped the future of the United States.

Following an introduction by renowned Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, nine new essays explore the end of the Civil War, Lincoln’s death, and the start of the tentative peace in 1865. Michael Vorenberg discusses how Lincoln shepherded through the House of Representatives the resolution sending the Thirteenth Amendment to the states for ratification, John F. Marszalek and Michael B. Ballard examine the partnership of Lincoln’s war management and General Ulysses S. Grant’s crucial last thrusts against Robert E. Lee, and Richard Striner recounts how Lincoln faced down Confederate emissaries who proposed immediate armistice if Lincoln were to reverse the Emancipation Proclamation. Ronald C. White Jr. offers a fresh look at Lincoln’s second inaugural address, and Richard Wightman Fox provides a vivid narrative of Lincoln’s dramatic walk through Richmond after the Confederates abandoned their capital.

Turning to Lincoln’s assassination, Edward Steers Jr. relates the story of Booth’s organizational efforts that resulted in the events of that fateful day, and Frank J. Williams explains the conspirators’ trial and whether they should have faced military or civilian tribunals. Addressing the issue of black suffrage, Edna Greene Medford focuses on the African American experience in the final year of the war. Finally, Holzer examines the use of visual arts to preserve the life and legacy of the martyred president.

Rounding out the volume are a chronology of national and international events during 1865, a close look at Lincoln’s activities and writings from January 1 through April 14, and other pertinent materials. This thoughtful collection provides an engaging evaluation of one of the most crucial years in America’s evolution.

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Rewriting Composition
Terms of Exchange
Bruce Horner
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
Bruce Horner’s Rewriting Composition: Terms of Exchange shows how dominant inflections of key terms in composition—languagelaborvalue/evaluationdiscipline, and composition itself—reinforce composition’s low institutional status and the poor working conditions of many of its instructors and tutors. Placing the circulation of these terms in multiple contemporary contexts, including globalization, world Englishes, the diminishing role of labor and the professions, the “information” economy, and the privatization of higher education, Horner demonstrates ways to challenge debilitating definitions of these terms and to rework them and their relations to one another.
 
Each chapter of Rewriting Composition focuses on one key term, discussing how limitations set by dominant definitions shape and direct what compositionists do and how they think about their work. The first chapter, “Composition,” critiques a discourse of composition as lacking and therefore as in need of being either put to an end, renamed, aligned with other fields, or supplemented with work in other disciplines or other forms of composition. Rather than seeing composition as something to be abandoned, replaced, or supplemented, Horner suggests ways of productively engaging with the ordinary work of composition whose ostensible lack is assumed in the dominant discourse. Subsequent chapters apply this reconsideration to other key terms, critiquing dominant conceptions of “language” and English as stable; examining how “labor” in composition is divorced from the productive force of social relations to which language work contributes; rethinking the terms of value by which the labor of composition teachers, administrators, and students is measured; and questioning the application of conventional definitions of professional academic disciplinarity to composition. By exposing limitations in dominant conceptions of the work of composition and by modeling and opening up space for new conceptions of key terms, Rewriting Composition offers teachers of composition and rhetoric, writing scholars, and writing program administrators the critical tools necessary for charting the future of composition studies.
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Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition
Global Interrogations, Local Interventions
Bruce Horner
Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

In Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition, editors Bruce Horner and Karen Kopelson gather leading scholars and new voices in the field of rhetoric and composition to offer a dynamic new perspective on English as it is used today. This provocative volume explores the myriad ways in which English is constantly redefined, revised, and redirected through specific, located acts of writing, rhetoric, teaching, and learning. Contributors provide insightful contributions to the study of English from both national and international perspectives, revealing the language as a fluid and constantly changing manner of expression that challenges established notions.

In part one, “Reworking Language,” writers call into question the idea of language as a static, stable entity. In part two, “Locations and Migrations: Global/Local Interrogations,” contributors explore the impact of writing and teaching English in both in the United States and abroad, from Arkansas and Oklahoma to China, Jamaica, and Lebanon. Part three, “Pedagogical/Institutional Interventions,” addresses English in institutional settings and the implications for future pedagogical work. Each essay in this revolutionary volume substantiates two key premises for the rethinking of English: first, that languages are susceptible to constant change through the very acts of writing, teaching, and learning, and second, that this reworking occurs as it moves between various temporal and spatial locations.

Throughout the volume, the variety and flexibility of English across the globe are both advocated and revealed, rejecting dominant Anglophone perspectives and instead placing language in cross-cultural contexts. Brimming with informative and thought-provoking insights, Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition breathes new life into the field and provides direction for scholars and teachers looking to the future of English.

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Cross-Language Relations in Composition
Bruce Horner
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010

Cross-Language Relations in Composition brings together the foremost scholars in the fields of composition, second language writing, education, and literacy studies to address the limitations of the tacit English-only policy prevalent in composition pedagogy and research and to suggest changes for the benefit of writing students and instructors throughout the United States. Recognizing the growing linguistic diversity of students and faculty, the ongoing changes in the English language as a result of globalization, and the increasingly blurred categories of native, foreign, and second language English speakers, editors Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda have compiled a groundbreaking anthology of essays that contest the dominance of English monolingualism in the study and teaching of composition and encourage the pursuit of approaches that embrace multilingualism and cross-language writing as the norm for teaching and research.

The nine chapters comprising part 1 of the collection focus on the origins of the “English only” bias dominating U.S. composition classes and present alternative methods of teaching and research that challenge this monolingualism. In part 2, nine composition teachers and scholars representing a variety of theoretical, institutional, and professional perspectives propose new, compelling, and concrete ways to understand and teach composition to students of a “global,” plural English, a language evolving in a multilingual world.

Drawing on recent theoretical work on genre, complexity, performance and identity, as well as postcolonialism, Cross-Language Relations in Composition offers a radically new approach to composition teaching and research, one that will prove invaluable to all who teach writing in today’s multilingual college classroom.

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Nineteenth-Century Scottish Rhetoric
The American Connection
Winifred Bryan Horner
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

Winifred Bryan Horner argues that an understanding of the changes that occurred in the content of nineteenth-century courses in logic, rhetoric, and belles lettres taught in Scottish universities provides important critical insight into the development of the twentieth-century American composition course, as well as courses in English literature and critical theory.

Because of the inaccessibility of primary materials documenting the changes in courses taught at Scottish universities, the impression remains that the nineteenth century represents a break with the traditional school curriculum rather than a logical transition to a new focus of study. Horner has discovered that the notes of students who attended these classes—meticulously transcribed records of the lectures that professors dictated in lieu of printed texts—provide reliable documentation of the content of courses taught during the period. Using these records, Horner traces the evolution of current traditional composition, developed in the United States in the first part of the twentieth century, from courses taught in nineteenth-century, northern Scottish universities. She locates the beginning of courses in English literature and belletristic composition in the southern schools, particularly Edinburgh.

Horner’s study opens new vistas for the study of the evolution of university curricula, especially the never before acknowledged influence of belletristric rhetoric on the development of the North American composition course.

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Teaching Writing as a Second Language
Alice Horning
Southern Illinois University Press, 1986

Classrooms filled with glassy-eyed students provide an experiential base for Alice S. Horning’s new com­prehensive theory about basic writers.

Horning explores the theory of writing acquisi­tion in detail. Her examination of spoken and writ­ten language and redundancy give a theoretical base to her argument that academic discourse is a sepa­rate linguistic system characterized by particular psycholinguistic features. She proposes that basic writ­ers learn to write as other learners master a second language because for them, academic written Eng­lish is a whole new language.

She explores the many connections to be found in second language acquisition research to the teaching and learning of writing and gives special attention to the interlanguage hypothesis, pidginization theory, and the Monitor theory. She also addresses the role of affective factors (feelings, attitudes, emotions, and motivation) in the success or failure of writing students.

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Inside the Klavern
The Secret History of a Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s
David A. Horowitz
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

Inside the Klavern is an annotated collection of the minutes of a thriving Ku Klux Klan in La Grande, Oregon, between 1922 and 1924. The most complete set of Klan minutes ever uncovered, these documents illustrate the inner workings of a Klan chapter of more than three hundred members at a time when the national membership reached into the millions and the Invisible Empire was at the peak of its power. Through an extensive introduction and conclusion as well as brief notes previewing each installment of the minutes, David A. Horowitz places these unique documents in historical perspective.

The La Grande minutes demonstrate Klan hostility to Roman Catholics, Jews, blacks, and "hyphenated" Americans. But they also explain how the chapter exercised requirements for admission, how officers were selected, and how Klansmen encountered difficulties enforcing the moral standards of their order. Because the Klan kligrapp (recording secretary) Harold R. Fosner recorded not only the official proceedings but also volunteered extemporaneous comments and gossip, readers get a genuine feeling for what it was like to attend the meetings. Through his own obvious excitement and commitment to the cause, Fosner re-creates the flavor, tone, and atmosphere of these meetings: "Tis beyond my power of expression to relate the harmony and fellowship which reigned supreme. . . . Suffice to say that these were the golden moments of our lives."

His evaluation of Klan propaganda, too, is telling: "The weekly newsletter from Atlanta, Georgia, contained a little book, the official message of our emperor, one Col. William Joseph Simmons, read before the most noble band of men ever assembled and for the noblest cause in the world. To my firm belief this book is the leading masterpiece of our day and age."

Horowitz concludes that "although it is tempting to judge Jazz Age Klansmen by the standards of later generations, the story provided by the minutes is a complex one—a chronicle of both compassion and complicity in cruelty, of positive social accomplishment and arbitrary and dysfunctional divisiveness."

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Southern Illinois Coal
A Portfolio
C. William Horrell
Southern Illinois University Press, 1995

The coal mining photographs of C. William Horrell, taken across the southern Illinois Coal Belt over a twenty-year period from 1966 to 1986, are extraordinary examples of documentary photography—so stark and striking that captions often seem superfluous.

Horrell’s photographs capture the varied phenomena of twentieth-century coal mining technology: the awesome scale of surface mining machines and their impact on the land; massive machines forced into narrow passageways with inches to spare as they carry coal from the face to conveyer belts; and, more significant, the advent of continuous miners, machines that can handle four previously separate processes and which have been a fixture in underground or “deep” mines since the mid-1960s.

Horrell was also intrigued by the related activities of mining, including coal’s processing, cleaning, and transportation, as well as the daily, behind-the-scenes operations that keep mines and miners working. His photographs reflect the beauty of the commonplace—the clothes of the miners, their dinner pails, and their tools—and reveal the picturesque remnants of closed mines: the weathered boards of company houses, the imposing iron beauty of an ancient tipple, and an abandoned building against the lowering sky of an approaching storm. Finally, his portraits of coal minersshow the strength, dignity, and enduring spirit of the men and women who work the southern Illinois coal mines.

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Land Between the Rivers
The Southern Illinois Country
C. William Horrell
Southern Illinois University Press, 1973
Situated between the Wabash, Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, the Southern Illinois country is rich in history, folk­lore, scenery, and natural resources. At about the latitude of southern Virginia, and extending from the flat prairie farm­land of central Illinois to the rugged Illinois Ozarks, the area is the natural terminal boundary for hundreds of plant species reaching out to all points of the compass. It is also the oldest and most sparsely populated part of Illinois, a region of small towns and independent people.
Surveying the area in words and pic­tures, the authors sensitively and appre­ciatively portray the region’s special qualities. Land Between the Rivers, a perennial classic since it was first published in 1973, provides an uncommon portrayal of American life in a distinct region, a memorable journey in both time and place.
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