The 11 essays in this volume, originally presented at meetings of the Ulster-American Heritage Symposium by scholars from Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and the United States, explore the nature of Scotch-Irish culture by examining values, traditions, demographics, and language. The essays also investigate the process of migration, which transmitted that culture to the New World, and the subsequent assimilation of Celtic ways into American culture.
The themes presented are wide-ranging and complex. First is the dynamic nature of Ulster society in the 17th and 18th centuries and the rapid changes occurring there, especially those affecting Presbyterianism and community cohesiveness. Also examined is the experience of migration, asking such questions as who migrated and when, what their expectations were, and how closely colonial reality matched those expectations. A third theme is the development of economic strategies and community-building both in Ulster and North America, making important contributions to the "new rural history" and explaining the success of the Scotch-Irish on the American frontier. Finally, the volume addresses ethnic identity and cultural diffusion, advancing the ongoing debate initiated by Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney and elaborated on by David Hackett Fischer. Ulster and North America illustrates the value of transatlantic dialog and of comparative studies for the understanding of ethnicity and migration history.
Inaugural pocket guide from our new series of illustrated guidebooks
In the 13th century, Moundville was one of the largest Native American settlements north of Mexico. Spread over 325 acres were 29 earthen mounds arranged around a great plaza, a mile-long stockade, and dozens of dwellings for thousands of people. Moundville, in size and complexity second only to the Cahokia site in Illinois, was a heavily populated town, as well as a political and religious center.
Moundville was sustained by tribute of food and labor provided by the people who lived in the nearby floodplain as well as other smaller mound centers. The immediate area appears to have been thickly populated, but by about A.D. 1350, Moundville retained only ceremonial and political functions. A decline ensued, and by the 1500s the area was abandoned. By the time the first Europeans reached the Southeast in the 1540s, the precise links between Moundville's inhabitants and what became the historic Native American tribes had become a mystery.
Illustrated with 50 color photos, maps, and figures, Moundville tells the story of the ancient people who lived there, the modern struggle to save the site from destruction, and the scientific saga of the archaeologists who brought the story to life. Moundville is the book to read before, during, or after a visit to Alabama’s prehistoric metropolis.
Traces the craft of pottery making among the Catawba Indians of North Carolina from the late 18th century to the present
When Europeans encountered them, the Catawba Indians were living along the river and throughout the valley that carries their name near the present North Carolina-South Carolina border. Archaeologists later collected and identified categories of pottery types belonging to the historic Catawba and extrapolated an association with their protohistoric and prehistoric predecessors.
In this volume, Thomas Blumer traces the construction techniques of those documented ceramics to the lineage of their probable present-day master potters or, in other words, he traces the Catawba pottery traditions. By mining data from archives and the oral traditions of contemporary potters, Blumer reconstructs sales circuits regularly traveled by Catawba peddlers and thereby illuminates unresolved questions regarding trade routes in the protohistoric period. In addition, the author details particular techniques of the representative potters—factors such as clay selection, tool use, decoration, and firing techniques—which influence their styles.
This collection of provocative and timely essays addresses the ways in which religious and educational institutions have come to define one another and American culture and identity.
Education in America-public and private, from the elementary to the university level-is the subject of urgent, ongoing debates. School vouchers, home schooling, prayer in the classrooms, sex education in the schools, and evolution versus creationism are just a few of the touchstones and flashpoints that have ignited a national dialogue concerning the role of religion in U.S. educational institutions.
The ten major essays assembled here emerged from a series of conferences conducted by the Public Religion Project at the University of Chicago Divinity School, funded by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trust. Written by recognized leaders in the fields of education and religion, the essays address such issues as the role of religious studies programs in tax-supported public universities; the evolving role of the university chaplain; the impact of religious doctrine on literary scholarship and the natural sciences; the college president as a spiritual leader; the secularization of private colleges whose foundations rest in the spiritual mission of a specific church or denomination and, conversely, the obligations, if any, of colleges that have maintained distinct denominational identities toward pluralistic outreach and openness; and an examination of the home schooling movement.
A true "dialogue" designed to inspire readers to rethink, argue, act, and continually converse on the subject, Religion, Education, and the American Experience will appeal to educators, college and university administrators, and boards of trustees, as well as academic libraries and scholars of education and religious studies.
This challenging collection of essays offers a refreshing approach to the troubling--and timely--subject of religion and public policy in America, and the ways in which issues of church and state affect our national identity.
The result of a series of conferences on religion and politics conducted by the Public Religion project at the University of Chicago, funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trust, this collection brings together an extraordinarily diverse set of contributors. Represented within its pages are the ideas and opinions of scholars, politicians, and religious leaders with backgrounds in law, politics, history, and divinity, among them Senator Paul Simon of Illinois. With its wide range of critical approaches and varied perspectives, this volume makes a vibrant contribution to the national dialogue on politics and religion.Chief among the essay topics are the evangelical roots of American political life; early conflicts between Enlightenment thinking and spiritual impulses in developing a national identity; the practical problems that today's politicians face in campaigning; the impact of constitutional and legal language regarding our definitions of religion; and the way in which the media's treatment of our spiriutal life frames our perceptions of it. These thought-provoking essays will inspire readers to rethink, argue, perhaps act, but most importantly, to converse about this timely and important issue.
This volume will have wide cross-disciplinary appeal. Students and scholars of history, religious studies, and political science will find great value within its pages, as will scholars of divinity and law, and members of this general public concerned with the intersection of faith and politics in American life.
By February 1862 Confederate forces in Kentucky and Tennessee were falling back in disorder. Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River fell to combined land and naval forces under Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant and Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote. These losses necessitated the abandonment of the Rebel stronghold of Columbus, Kentucky. The entire upper Mississippi Valley lay open to Federal invasion. Toward that end, a new Union army under Major General John Pope began organizing at Commerce, Missouri.
Confederate Major General John P. McCown was sent to plug the breach by fortifying Island No. 10, a one-mile-long island positioned in a bend in the Mississippi River that straddled the boundaries of Tennessee, Missouri, and Kentucky. Pope's army had to be held in check long enough for the main Confederate force, under generals Albert Sidney Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard, to concentrate and launch a counterattack against Grant's advancing army.
The ensuing campaign at Island No. 10 created the first extensive siege of the Civil War. The ultimate capture of the garrison resulted in a new army command for Pope in Virginia. As for the Confederates, the campaign pointed to a faulty western strategy. Simply to concede the rivers and their adjoining cities to the Federal navy was politically unacceptable. Garrison after garrison was captured, however, in the attempt to defend the rivers to the last extremity. Between February 1862 and July 1863 the Confederates lost 64,400 troops, some nine divisions, in defending the rivers. This strategy was a significant contributing factor for Confederate defeat in the West.
Boeckmann links character, literary genre, and science, revealing how major literary works both contributed to and disrupted the construction of race in turn-of-the-century America.
In A Question of Character, Cathy Boeckmann establishes a strong link between racial questions and the development of literary traditions at the end of the 19th century in America. This period saw the rise of "scientific racism," which claimed that the races were distinguished not solely by exterior appearance but also by a set of inherited character traits. As Boeckmann explains, this emphasis on character meant that race was not only a thematic concern in the literature of the period but also a generic or formal one as well.
Boeckmann explores the intersections between race and literary history by tracing the language of character through both scientific and literary writing. Nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences such as phrenology and physiognomy had a vocabulary for discussing racial character that overlapped conceptually with the conventions for portraying race in literature. Through close readings of novels by Thomas Dixon, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and James Weldon Johnson—each of which deals with a black character "passing" as white—Boeckmann shows how this emphasis on character relates to the shift from romantic and sentimental fiction to realism. Because each of these genres had very specific conventions regarding the representation of character, genres often dictated how races could be depicted.
This collection captures the sense—at times the ordeal—of the 1930s literary experience in America. Fourteen essayists deal with the experience of being a writer in a time of overwhelming economic depression and political ferment, and thereby illuminate the social, political, intellectual, and aesthetic problems and pressures that characterized the experience of American writers and influenced their works.
The essays, as a group, constitute a reevaluation of the American literature of the 1930s. At the same time they support and reinforce certain assumptions about the decade of the Great Depression—that it was grim, desperate, a time when dreams died and poverty became something other than genteel—they challenge other assumptions, chief among them in the notion that 1930s literature was uniform in content, drab in style, anti-formalist, and always political or sociological in nature. They leave us with an impression that there was variety in American writing of the 1930s and a convincing argument that the decade was not a retreat from the modernism of the 1920s. Rather it was a transitional period in which literary modernism was very much an issue and a force that bore imaginative fruit.
Horace Mann Bond was an early twentieth century scholar and a college administrator who focused on higher education for African Americans. His Negro Education in Alabama won Brown University’s Susan Colver Rosenberger Book Prize in 1937 and was praised as a landmark by W. E. B. Dubois in American Historical Review and by scholars in journals such as Journal of Negro Education and the Journal of Southern History.
A seminal and wide-ranging work that encompasses not only contemporary education but a keen analysis of the African American experience of Reconstruction and the following decades, Negro Education in Alabama illuminates the social and educational conditions of its period. Observers of contemporary education can quickly perceive in Bond’s account the roots of many of today’s educational challenges.
Epistolary Responses explores the transformative nature of epistolary fiction and criticism in letter form from a largely feminist perspective. While most scholarly work to date has focused on 17th- and 18th-century manifestations of this genre, Bower's study concentrates on epistolary fiction by contemporary American writers published between 1912 and 1988. The novels discussed, all featuring women letter writers, include: Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, John Barth's LETTERS, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, John Updike's S., Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs, Upton Sinclair's Another Pamela, and Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters.
Bower explores the influence letters have on the act of writing and writing as act, their encoded desire for reply, their incompleteness as units of narrative information, their play on ideas of absence and presence, their apparently personal and private nature, and their foregrounding of the writer's agency and authority, all of which make letters a most useful genre both for novelists and for scholars. Several of the book's "fiction" chapters include a letter from the author of the text (sometimes a critic) that complements and supplements Bower's analysis. The final part of the book explores how seven scholars--men and women--have applied letters to their own critical writing, finding that this formal move allows them to question issues of public and private discourse, the authority of signature, and the "feminine" location.
A comprehensive study that rescues the Westo from obscurity.
The Westo Indians, who lived in the Savannah River region during the second half of the 17th century, are mentioned in few primary documents and only infrequently in secondary literature. There are no known Westo archaeological sites; no artifacts can be linked to the group; and no more than a single word of their language is known to us today. Yet, from the extant evidence, it is believed that the Westos, who migrated from around Lake Erie by 1656, had a profound effect on the development of the colonial South.
This volume reproduces excerpts from all 19 documents that indisputably reference the Westos, although the Europeans referred to them by a variety of names. Most of the information was written by Lords Proprietors who never met the Westos, or by a handful of Carolinians who did. But the author is able to chart a highly plausible history of this Native group who, for a period, thrived on the Southern frontier.
The narrative traces their northeastern origins and how the Erie conflicts with the Five Nations Iroquois in the Beaver Wars forced them southward, where they found new economic opportunities in the lucrative slave trade. At the height of their influence, between 1659 and 1680, it is believed the Westos captured and sold several thousand Indians from Spanish Florida, often trading them for guns. Eventually, their military advantage over the Indians of the lower South was compromised by the rise of powerful confederacies of native peoples, who could acquire equivalent firearms from the Europeans. Even though the aggressive Westos declined, they had influenced profound change in the Southeast. They furthered the demise of chiefly organization, helped to shift the emphasis from agricultural to hunting economies, and influenced the dramatic decrease in the number and diversity of native polities.
In the summer of 1862, the U.S. Army court martialed Colonel John B. Turchin, a Russian-born Union officer, for "outrages" committed by his troops in Athens, Alabama
In the summer of 1862, the U.S. Army court martialed Colonel John B. Turchin, a Russian-born Union officer, for offenses committed by his troops in Athens, Alabama, including looting, safe cracking, the vandalization of homes, and the rape of young black women. The pillage of Athens violated a government policy of conciliation; it was hoped that if Southern civilians were treated gently as citizens of the United States, they would soon return their allegiance to the federal government.
By examining the volunteers who made up Turchin’s force, the colonel's trial, his subsequent promotion, the policy debate surrounding the incident and the public reaction to the outcome, the authors further illuminate one of the most provocative questions in Civil War studies: how did the policy set forth by President Lincoln evolve from one of conciliation to one far more modern in nature, placing the burden of war on the civilian population of the South?
Owing to Yucatan’s relative isolation, many assume that the history and economy of the peninsula have evolved in a distinctive way, apart from the central government in Mexico City and insulated from world social and economic factors. The essays in this volume suggest that this has not been the case: the process of development in Yucatan has been linked firmly to national and global forces of change over the past two centuries. The essays are by U.S., Mexican, Canadian, and Belizean social scientists representing both well-established and younger scholars. The result is a perspective on Yucatan’s historical development that is at once international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational.
"Three Capitals is an in-depth study of Alabama's first three seats of government--St. Stephens, Huntsville, and Cahawba.... The University of Alabama Press has reprinted the book in a handsome new edition with a pertinent introduction by Malcolm C. McMillan. Brantley's study is a tribute to the accomplishments of an amateur historian and contains a wealth of useful information."
--Bulletin of the History of the Early American Republic
A classic work of history, ethnography, and botany, and an examination of the life and environs of the 18th-century south
William Bartram was a naturalist, artist, and author of Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the ExtensiveTerritories of the Muscogulees, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Choctaws. The book, based on his journey across the South, reflects a remarkable coming of age. In 1773, Bartram departed his family home near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as a British colonist; in 1777, he returned as a citizen of an emerging nation of the United States. The account of his journey, published in 1791, established a national benchmark for nature writing and remains a classic of American literature, scientific writing, and history. Brought up as a Quaker, Bartram portrayed nature through a poetic lens of experience as well as scientific observation, and his work provides a window on 18th-century southern landscapes. Particularly enlightening and appealing are Bartram’s detailed accounts of Seminole, Creek, and Cherokee peoples.A superb work in the social history of American industry
A Gettysburg College "Top 200 Civil War Books" selection
Mayflower Award Winner for 1970
This ground-breaking rhetorical analysis examines a 1987 Massachusetts law affecting infertility treatment and the cultural context that makes such a law possible
Elizabeth C. Britt uses a Massachusetts statute requiring insurance coverage for infertility as a lens through which the work of rhetoric in complex cultural processes can be better understood. Countering the commonsensical notion that mandatory insurance coverage functions primarily to relieve the problem of infertility, Britt argues instead that the coverage serves to expose its contours.
Britt finds that the mandate, operating as a technology of normalization, helps to identify the abnormal (the infertile) and to create procedures by which the abnormal can be subjected to reform. In its role in normalizing processes, the mandate is more successful when it sustains, rather than resolves, the distinction between the normal and the abnormal. This distinction is achieved in part by the rhetorical mechanism of the double bind. For the middle-class white women who are primarily served by the mandate, these double binds are created both by the desire for success, control, and order and by adherence to medical models that often frustrate these same desires. The resulting double binds help to create and sustain the tension between fertility and infertility, order and discontinuity, control and chaos, success and failure, tensions that are essential for the process of normalization to continue.
Britt uses extensive interviews with women undergoing fertility treatments to provide the foundation for her detailed analysis. While her study focuses on the example of infertility, it is also more broadly a commentary on the power of definition to frame experience, on the burdens and responsibilities of belonging to social collectives, and on the ability of rhetorical criticism to interrogate cultural formations.
Now remembered primarily as Franz Kafta's friend and literary executor, Max Brod was an accomplishered thinker and writer in his own right. In this volume, he considers the nature and differences between Judaism and Christianity, addressing some of the most perplexing questions at the heart of human existence.
“One of the most famous and widely discussed books of the 1920’s, Max Brod’s Paganism—Christianity—Judaism, has at last found its way into English translation to confront a new generation of readers. Max Brod is best remembered today as the literary editor and friend of Franz Kafka. In his day, however, he was the more famous of the two by far. A major novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and composer, he was also, as this book demonstrates, a serious thinker on the perennial questions that are at the heart of human existence. . . .Some of his judgments are open to question. Still, with all its limitations, this is a forthright and passionate proclamation of the uniqueness of Judaism. Paganism—Christianity—Judaism was an intellectual and spiritual event when it was first published and it remains a valuable document even now.” —Rabbi Jack Riemer, Hadassah
A poignant account of the perils and fortunes of an indomitable survivor of violence in Eastern Europe during World War II.
In 1939, to escape Nazi occupation, 14-year-old Adam Broner and his older brother Sam left their home and family in Lodz, Poland, and made their way to the Soviet Union. Adam enlisted in the Red Army to join the fight against the Nazis but was sent to work in a Siberian coal mine instead when his nationality was discovered. After a bold and daring escape from Siberia, Broner reached the Soviet Polish Kosciuszko Army, joined the struggle against the Nazis, participated in the liberation of Poland, and rode victorious into Berlin in 1945. He later learned that his parents, siblings (except Sam), and all other close relatives had perished during the war.
Broner rebuilt his life, established a family, returned to Moscow for a degree in economics, and then went back to Poland, where he accepted a job in the Polish central planning agency. Eventually fed up with the growing anti-Semitism of the Communist government there, the author emigrated to the United States in 1969. He earned a doctorate from Princeton University and served as an economic adviser to New Jersey governors and the state legislature. In retirement, Broner learned portrait painting and reproduced the likenesses of his parents and siblings from memory, which are presented along with their biographies in this book.
In recounting his struggle for survival during some of the most dramatic upheavals of the 20th century— the Great Depression, Nazism, World War II, and the spread of Communism in Central Europe— Broner reveals a life dedicated to the ultimate goal of freedom, which he achieved through a combination of arduous effort and fortunate circumstance.
In this landmark book, experienced scholars take a retrospective look at the developing routes that have brought American archaeologists into the 21st century.
In 1996, the Society for American Archaeology's Committee on the History of Archaeology established a biennial symposium
named after Gordon R. Willey, one of the fathers of American archaeology, to focus on the history of the discipline. This volume grew out of the
second symposium, presented at the 1998 meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
Interest in the intellectual history of the field is certainly nothing new—the first such volume appeared in 1856—but previously, focus has been on individuals and their theories and methods, or on various government agencies that supported, developed, or mandated
excavations in North America. This volume, however, focuses on the roots of Americanist archaeology, including its pre-1915 European connections, and on some of the earliest work by women archaeologists, which has been largely overlooked.
Full of valuable insights for archaeologists and anthropologists—both professional and amateur—into the history and
development of Americanist archaeology, New Perspectives will also inspire and serve as a model for future research.
David Browman is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Interdisciplinary Program in Archaeology at Washington University. Stephen Williams is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Harvard University.
The first scholarly collection of ghostlore from throughout the state of Alabama
Both enlightening and entertaining, The Face in the Window and Other Alabama Ghostlore is the first scholarly collection of ghostlore from throughout the state of Alabama. Alan Brown has traveled the state collecting sotries and photographs illustrating the places that gave rise to the eerie tales.
Brown recreates the experience of actually hearing the tales by reproducing each story as it was told. Additionally, he includes an analysis of the folk motifs and themes that run through the ghostlore commonly found in Alabama and examines their contributions to folk traditions, especially in those stories told by young people.
The oldest town in interior south Florida, Fort Meade lies about 50 miles east of Tampa and 10 miles south of Polk County's seat of Bartow. In this volume, Polk County native Canter Brown recounts the intriguing story of the founding and evolution of Fort Meade during the last half of the 19th century, when it was first established as a military outpost to separate Seminoles from white pioneer families desirous of cattle-grazing lands. A civilian community coalesced at Fort Meade under the pressures of the Billy Bowlegs War of 1855-58. Quickly the village developed as a cattle-industry center, which was important to the Confederacy until its destruction in 1864 by home-grown Union forces.
In the postwar era the cattle industry revived, and the community prospered. The railroads arrived in the 1880s, bringing new settlers, and the village grew into a town. Opportunities expanded as well with the growth of citrus, phosphate mining, truck farming, and tobacco industries. A boom-and-bust economy alternately bolstered and rocked the town, and the disastrous freezes of 1894Ð95 almost delivered a fatal blow.
Little has been written about town development on the Florida frontier. This book portrays the extremely complicated and often exciting processes and influences at play in interior south Florida, and the very precarious hold that town life possessed on that frontier.Local history the way it should be written. Canter Brown has managed to score several significant accomplishments in Fort Meade, 1849-1900. The book contributes to the growing body of good, solid monographs dealing with Florida state and local history and represents the building blocks necessary for a state and regional synthesis. The cumulative research compiled for this volume is impressive and daunting. Canter Brown proves that good local history requires considerable detective work and far-ranging inquiries.
This history of Alabama's coal miners documents the struggle not
only between labor and management but also between interracial unionism
and white supremacy.
Much of Alabama's labor history is written in its coal
fields. This book records the critical contribution that District 20 of
the United Mine Workers of America played in the state's labor movement
through its strong stands on such issues as child labor, public education,
and inter-racial unions.
Standing at the cutting edge of social and political
history, these essays cover five periods over a century of union activity:
the emergence of a militant labor force during mining's formative years;
the World War I era, when mine operators tried to divide black and white
labor; the increasing role of the state in labor relations during the interwar
years; rapid changes in the union between 1942 and 1975; and the 1977-79
strike, the largest in the United Mine Workers' history.
Through historic
photographs and depictions of living and working conditions, contributors
Edwin L. Brown, Colin J. Davis, Daniel Letwin, Brian M. Kelly, Peter Alexander,
Glenn Feldman, and Robert H. Woodrum portray the world that miners, both
black and white, made. In a state where racial segregation was the norm,
even the earliest District 20 contract proposals demanded equal pay for
equal work regardless of color. It Is Union and Liberty shows that the
UMW in Alabama stands apart from perceptions of southern trade unionism
as exclusionary and racially fragmented. It sheds light on an important
segment of the state's labor history and is a testament to District 20
on its centennial celebration.
Edwin Brown is Associate
Professor in the Center for Labor Education and Research and Colin Davis is Associate Professor in the Department of History, both at
the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
The first comprehensive study and analysis of the most important Mississippian mound site on the north-central Gulf coast
Consisting of 18 earthen mounds and numerous additional habitation areas dating to A.D. 1250-1550, the Bottle Creek site was first professionally investigated in 1932 when David L. DeJarnette of the Alabama Museum of Natural History began work there to determine if the site had a cultural relationship with Moundville, connected to the north by a river system. Although partially mapped in the 1880s, Bottle Creek's location in the vast Mobile-Tensaw Delta of Baldwin County completely surrounded by swamp made it inaccessible and protected it from most of the plunder experienced by similar sites in the Southeast.
This volume builds on earlier investigations to present extensive recent data from major excavations conducted from 1991 to 1994 and supported in part by an NEH grant. Ten anthropologists examine various aspects of the site, including mound architecture, prehistoric diet, pottery classification, vessel forms, textiles used to make pottery impressions, a microlithic stone tool industry, water travel, the persistence of mound use into historic times, and the position of Bottle Creek in the protohistoric world.
The site is concluded to be the best remaining example of Pensacola culture, an archaeological variant of the widespread Mississippian tradition identified by a shell-tempered pottery complex and by its geographic association with the north-central coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Occupied for three centuries by a thriving native culture, Bottle Creek is an important remnant of North American peoples and as such is designated a National Historic Landmark. This published compilation of the research data should establish a base for future scholarly investigation and interpretation.
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
A Vietnam War combat memoir from the perspective of an artilleryman
Impact Zone documents Marine First Lieutenant James S. Brown's intense battle experiences, including those at Khe Sanh and Con Thien, throughout his thirteen months of service on the DMZ during 1967-68. This high-action account also reflects Brown's growing belief that the Vietnam War was mis-fought due to the unproductive political leadership of President Johnson and his administration. Brown's naiveté developed into hardening skepticism and cynicism as he faced the harsh realities of war, though he still managed to retain a sense of honor, pride, and patriotism for his country.
Impact Zone is a distinctive book on the Vietnam War because it is told from the perspective of an artilleryman, and the increasingly dangerous events gain momentum as they progress from one adventure to the next. Impact Zone is not only an important historical document of the Vietnam conflict, but also a moving record of the personal and emotional costs of war.
These beautifully crafted stories depict the changing relationships between black and white southerners, the impact of the civil rights movement, and the emergence of the New South.
Mary Ward Brown is a storyteller in the tradition of such powerful 20th-century writers as William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty-writers who have explored and dramatized the tension between the inherited social structure of the South and its contemporary dissolution. With Tongues of Flame, her first collection of short stories, Brown bares the awkward, sometimes hopeful, and often tragic suffering of people caught in changing times within a timeless setting.
Here we meet such memorable characters as a dying black woman who seeks the advice of a now-alcoholic white doctor whom she knew in better years; a young woman, jilted at the altar, driven crazy by an illuminated cross erected by the church opposite her house; and a 95-year-old woman buying a tombstone for her long-deceased husband only to discover that he had been adulterous throughout their marriage. Brown constructs her characters in a disarmingly plain style while breathing life into them with compassion and honesty as they confront the large moments of their lives.
First published by E. P. Dutton in 1986 to immediate critical acclaim, Tongues of Flame won the 1987 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award. The judges commended Brown for "seeing life whole, without prejudice, without sentimentality, without histrionics. Her voice may be quiet-sometimes she speaks in a whisper-but her words are, nevertheless, always forceful, clear, and ultimately lasting." With this new publication of Tongues of Flame and its inclusion in the University of Alabama Press's Deep South Books series, a whole new generation of readers may once more discover Mary Ward Brown's profound stories of pain, loss, and hope.
"An outstanding and innovative study on hunting, gardening, and love magic among the Aguaruna. . . . [It is] both highly useful ethnographically and an important contribution to the understanding of how a primitive culture conceptualizes its transactions with nature. The book touches on cosmology and religion as well as the ethnoecology of hunting and agriculture--with an interlude on sex."
--American Ethnologist
The first scholarly treatment of the strategies employed by the New Christian Right in litigating cases regarding religion
Trumping Religion provides a detailed analysis of the five major public-interest law firms that have litigated religion cases in the federal courts between 1980 and 2000. Allied with several highly vocal, evangelical ministries, such as those of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson, these legal organizations argue that religious expression is a form of protected speech and thereby gain a greater latitude of interpretation in the courts. The long-term agenda of the New Christian Right as illuminated by this study is to shape church-state jurisprudence in a way that permits free course for the Christian gospel.
Steven P. Brown presents his research and conclusions from a balanced viewpoint. In filling a distinct void in the literature, this book will be of considerable interest to political scientists, legal scholars, law schools and seminaries, and anyone concerned with the intersection of religion and judicial politics.
“You recall the expression ‘toting the lead row’, don’t you? In chopping cotton or corn there is always a leader, one who can chop the fastest of them all. When he finishes his row, he goes back and helps the other choppers finish theirs. The one who totes the lead row takes the lead place in the next row.”—Ruby Pickens Tartt
“A retired major general of the Marine Corps offers here an interpretive history of the campaign culminating in the battle of New Orleans, based on a meticulous review of the sources and employing the perceptive of modern military doctrine. Written with a military regard for precision . . . [the book] nevertheless gathers force and even suspense though its emphasis on the importance f the events at hand . . [T]his is now probably the best book on the topic.”—Choice
Understanding our environment
American philosopher John Dewey considered all human endeavors to be continuous with the natural world. In his writings, particularly Art as Experience (1934), Dewey insists on the primacy of the environment in aesthetic experience. Dewey's conception of environment includes both the natural and the man-made. Neil Browne highlights this notion in order to define what he terms "pragmatist ecology," a practice rooted in the interface of the cultural and the natural, which he finds to be a significant feature of some of the most important ecological writing of the last century.
To fully understand human involvement in the natural world, Browne argues, disciplinary boundaries must be opened up. This is primarily important between the arts and science, with profound implications for the practice of democracy. The degradation of the physical environment and democratic decay, for Browne, are rooted in the same problem: our persistent belief that humans are somehow separate from their physical environment.
Browne probes the work of a number of major American writers through the lens of Dewey's philosophy. Among other texts, he examines John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra (1911); Sea of Cortez (1941) by John Steinbeck and Edward Ricketts; Rachel Carson's three books about the sea, Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1955); John Haines's The Stars, the Snow, the Fire (1989); Tarry Lopez's Arctic Dreams (1986); and Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge (1991). Together, these texts—with their combinations of scientific observation and personal meditation—challenge the dichotomies to which we've become accustomed and affirm the values of a pragmatist ecology, one in which ecological and democratic
values go hand in hand.
"A major accomplishment in the study of Burke." —Choice
More than 200 years after his death, Edmund Burke remains among the most influential conservative writers in the Anglophone world. Burke’s relevance has only grown as the nature of what it means to be a conservative has become hotly contested.
And yet Burke is often discussed more than he is read. Worse, his rhetoric is often pressed into the service of other ideologies. In Edmund Burke and the Discourse of Virtue, Stephen Browne of Pennsylvania State University subjects Burke’s work to the close textual analysis it has never received.
The result of Browne's study is to present Burke and his work in a light that was clearly essential to Burke himself, one that illuminates the link between rhetoric and action that is key to understanding Burke, his career, his work, and his influence on contemporary conservatism.
Readers interested in the development of conversative philosophy, politics, and writing from its earliest roots will value this rare and illuminating work.
Examines naval logistics, tactics, and strategy employed by the Union blockade off the Atlantic coast of the Confederacy.
A highly developed study of the relationships between rhetoric and public culture.
One of the most widely used ideas in scholarship of the humanities and social sciences is that of homology: a formal pattern structuring different kinds of texts, ideas, and experiences. Rhetorical Homologies explores the central meaning of this form in a variety of discourses and also examines the kind of homologies that shape audience responses to personal, public, and political issues. Barry Brummett is most interested in homologies among very different orders of experience and texts: experiences on the battlefield that are homologous to those at a dining room table, for instance. What the common patterns that underlie such cases mean, why they are interesting, and why homology is rhetorical are the subjects of this study.
Brummett focuses on a wide range of topics, from the homologies between rhetoric and weapons throughout history to the homology of ritual injuries as manifested in representations of Christian martyrs, Laurel and Hardy films, the African-American practice of playing the dozens, and televised professional wrestling. Brummett also explores the homology of the Wise Woman, using rhetorical representations of Sojourner Truth and Oprah Winfrey. In a concluding chapter, Brummett argues that the idea of homology is important in understanding how social life is organized in general and that the centrality of discourse in organizing experience makes rhetorical homologies an important perspective for general knowledge beyond the boundaries of this study.
Conflict in the Great Outdoors addresses the different orientations and behaviors within sportsmen categories. A major problem of outdoor recreation management addressed in Hobson Bryan’s work is the difficulty in identifying sportsmen subgroups having distinctive preferences and expectations as to the composition of the “quality” outdoor experience. Land-use managers and planners are faced with the problem of matching resources with more users having increasingly specific motivations. Bryan applies his theory of variations within a leisure activity by addressing what sportsmen do and why they do it in various activities such as mountain climbing, hunting, canoeing, skiing, and backpacking.
As the author of some of the most compelling short stories ever written, two of the central novels in American literature, and some of the most beautiful prose ever penned, F. Scott Fitzgerald is read and studied all over the world. Sixty-two years after his death, his works—protean, provocative, multilayered, and rich—continue to elicit spirited responses. This collection grew out of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference that convened in Princeton at the centennial of this author's birth. Bringing together dozens of the world's leading scholars and commentators, the conference and the book celebrate the ever-growing legacy of Fitzgerald's art.
The official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference
Mosquitoes of the Southeastern United States is a full-color, highly-illustrated guide to the 64 known species of mosquitoes in 11 genera that populate the South's main geographical area--from the Gulf Coastal states to the Carolinas.
Traces 400 years of Osage culture from prehistoric times to the group's current status as an officially recognized tribe.
Osage traditional lands are located in mid-continental America encompassed by the present-day states of Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Major waterways through these lands and the defensible terrain of the Ozark range provided the tribe a distinct advantage in prehistoric and early historic times. A warlike people, the Osage long encroached on neighboring tribal lands, especially those of the Caddo to the southwest. Yet good natural boundaries and centuries of success in warfare afforded the tribe little advantage in attempts to forestall Euro-American westward expansion. Three major routes to the West—the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers and the Continental Trail—crossed Osage land, so conflict with the newcomers was inevitable.
Louis Burns draws on ancestral oral traditions and research in a broad body of literature to tell the story of the Osage people. He writes clearly and concisely, from the Osage perspective. First published in 1989 and for many years out of print, this revised edition is augmented by a new preface and maps. Because of its masterful compilation and synthesis of the known data, A History of the Osage People continues to be the best reference for information on an important American Indian people.
Louis F. Burns, of Osage-French-Scottish heritage, is a member of the Mottled Eagle Clan and author of six books, including Symbolic and Decorative Art of the Osage People.
Siouan peoples who migrated from the Atlantic coastal region and settled in the central portion of the North American continent long before the arrival of Europeans are now known as Osage. Because the Osage did not possess a written language, their myths and cultural traditions were handed down orally through many generations. With time, only those elements deemed vital were preserved in the stories, and many of these became highly stylized. The resulting verbal recitations of the proper life of an Osage—from genesis myths to body decoration, from star songs to child-naming rituals, from war party strategies to medicinal herbs—constitute this comprehensive volume.
Osage myths differ greatly from the myths of Western Civilization, most obviously in the absence of individual names. Instead, “younger brother,” “the messenger,” “Little Old Men,” or a clan name may serve as the allegorical embodiment of the central player. Individual heroic feats are also missing because group life took precedence over individual experience in Osage culture.
Supplementing the work of noted ethnographer Francis La Flesche who devoted most of his professional life to recording detailed descriptions of Osage rituals, Louis Burns’s unique position as a modern Osage—aware of the white culture’s expectations but steeped in the traditions himself is able to write from an insider’s perspective.
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