A unique account of combat in World War II provides parallel day-to-day records of the same events as seen by two men in the same company, one an enlisted man, one an officer
Video and computer games in their cultural contexts.
As the popularity of computer games has exploded over the past decade, both scholars and game industry professionals have recognized the necessity of treating games less as frivolous entertainment and more as artifacts of culture worthy of political, social, economic, rhetorical, and aesthetic analysis. Ken McAllister notes in his introduction to Game Work that, even though games are essentially impractical, they are nevertheless important mediating agents for the broad exercise of socio-political power.
In considering how the languages, images, gestures, and sounds of video games influence those who play them, McAllister highlights the ways in which ideology is coded into games. Computer games, he argues, have transformative effects on the consciousness of players, like poetry, fiction, journalism, and film, but the implications of these transformations are not always clear. Games can work to maintain the status quo or celebrate liberation or tolerate enslavement, and they can conjure feelings of hope or despair, assent or dissent, clarity or confusion. Overall, by making and managing meanings, computer games—and the work they involve and the industry they spring from—are also negotiating power.
This book sets out a method for "recollecting" some of the diverse and copious influences on computer games and the industry they have spawned. Specifically written for use in computer game theory classes, advanced media studies, and communications courses, Game Work will also be welcome by computer gamers and designers.
Ken S. McAllister is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona and Co-Director of the Learning Games Initiative, a research collective that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games.
The prehistoric agricultural systems of the New World provided the foundations for a diverse set of complex social developments ranging from the puebloan societies of the American Southwest to the archaic state polities of Mesoamerica and the Andean region. From the tropical forests of Central America to the arid environments or northern New Mexico, Native American farmers made use of a distinctive set of cultigens and cropping systems that supported—with varying degrees of success—growing populations and expanding economies. Lacking most domesticated animals, so important to the mixed agricultural systems of the Old World, Precolumbian farmers developed intensive and resilient systems of agricultural production. These systems supported large societies of people who altered the landscapes they inhabited and generated a unique archaeological record of the evolution of farming in the New World.
An investigation into Wharton’s extensive use and adaptation of the Gothic in her fiction
Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton is an innovative study that provides fresh insights into Wharton’s male characters while at the same time showing how Wharton’s imagining of a fe/male self evolves throughout her career. Using feminist archetypal theory and theory of the female Gothic, Kathy A. Fedorko shows how Wharton, in sixteen short stories and six major novels written during four distinct periods of her life, adopts and adapts Gothic elements to explore the nature of feminine and masculine ways of knowing and being and to dramatize the tension between them.
Edith Wharton’s contradictory views of women and men—her attitudes toward the feminine and the masculine—reflect a complicated interweaving of family and social environment, historical time, and individual psychology. Studies of Wharton have exhibited this same kind of contradiction, with some seeing her as disparaging men and the masculine and others depicting her as disparaging women and the feminine. The use of Gothic elements in her fiction provided Wharton, who was often considered the consummate realist, with a way to dramatize the conflict between feminine and masculine selves as she experienced them and to evolve an alternative to the dualism.
Fedorko’s work is unique in its careful consideration of Wharton’s sixteen Gothic works, which are seldom discussed. Further, the revelation of how these Gothic stories are reflected in her major realistic novels. In the novels with Gothic texts, Wharton draws multiple parallels between male and female protagonists, indicating the commonalities between women and men and the potential for a female self. Eventually, in her last completed novel and her last short story, Wharton imagines human beings who are comfortable with both gender selves.
"For anyone interested in the history of American geology, knowledge of G. W. Featherstonhaugh (1780-1866) is both essential and hard to obtain. He was the force behind the first railroad in America; a pioneer in scientific agriculture; an essayist, poet, and novelist; a lobbyist; a linguist; and a daring diplomat who saved the king and queen of France from certain death. [Yet] his strongest tie was with the geology. [This] biography is interesting, well researched and well written. It is a balanced study of a complex man who did so much work and generated such controversy."
—Earth Sciences History
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
This facsimile edition of Moore's Georgia and South Carolina expeditions includes an extensive new introduction from Georgia's senior archaeologist.
This compilation of Clarence Bloomfield Moore's investigations along the rich coastal and river drainages of Georgia and South Carolina makes
available in a single volume valuable works published a century ago. By modern standards Moore's excavation techniques were crude, but his results were nothing less than spectacular. He recorded data with care, and much information can be learned from his works. In some cases his publications are the only documentation extant for sites that have since been destroyed. In one case, relic collectors had destroyed six mounds at Mason's Plantation—the largest Mississippian center in the Savannah River valley—by the time Moore visited the site in 1897.
Moore also documented prehistoric urn burials, a ritual widely practiced in eastern North America but more frequently on the Gulf Coastal Plain
of Alabama and coastal sites in Georgia and South Carolina. In the introduction, Lewis Larson discusses Moore's investigations within the framework of the current understanding of Georgia and South Carolina coastal archaeological chronology.
Almost from the time of Georgia’s settlement by Oglethorpe in 1733, both Georgians and Carolinians had made periodic unsuccessful attempts to conquer the Spanish Castillo San Marcos in St. Augustine; and during the American Revolution (in 1776, 1777, and 1778) the rebels tried without success to take the fortification, which was then a British stronghold. Each of the three expeditions was less successful than the preceding one, and between the formal campaigns vicious partisan warfare between loyalists and rebels devastated much of the area between the Altamaha and St. Johns rivers.
This book presents a detailed history of the three Georgia-Florida campaigns. Indecisive and lacking the glamour of either the contemporary campaigns in the North, or the later campaigns in the South, they appeared isolated from the mainstream of the revolutionary struggle. The rebels were handicapped by divided command, personal quarrels, difficult terrain, and miserable weather. While Searcy emphasizes the military aspects of the period, she also treats the conflict between civil and military authorities, the effects of war on the civilian populace, and the interaction of economic matters with military affairs. Her work clarifies the importance of these military activities in the subsequent British strategy in the occupation of Georgia and the Carolinas.
Analyzes the German role in Central American domestic and international relations
Using previously untapped resources including private collections, the records of cultural institutions, and federal and state government archives, Schoonover analyzes the German role in Central American domestic and international relations.Of the four countries most active in independent Central America-Britain, the United States, France, and Germany- historians know the least about the full extent of the involvement of the Germans.The first book-length biography of an influential country/soul legend whose songs have been recorded by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan.
Get a Shot of Rhythm and Blues chronicles the rise, fall, and rebirth of Arthur Alexander, an African American singer-songwriter whose music influenced many of the rock and soul musicians of the 1960s. Although his name is not well known today, Alexander's musical legacy is vast. His 1962 song "You Better Move On" was the first hit to emerge from the fledgling Muscle Shoals FAME studio in Alabama, and his fusion of country and soul and his heartfelt vocals on such songs as "Anna (Go to Him)" and "Every Day I Have to Cry" were revered by musicians including the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, all of whom recorded his songs.
Alexander's story is a tragic one, with a brief, redemptive finale. His meteoric rise after the release of "You Better Move On" gave way to lean years caused both by his drug and alcohol abuse and by the mishandling of his career by producers and managers. In 1977, he quit the music business, but his music lived on. In 1992, Alexander returned to
the studio and recorded the critically praised album Lonely Just Like Me. Just three months after the album's release in March 1993, he suffered a heart attack in the offices of his music publisher in Nashville and died three days later.
In telling Alexander's story, Richard Younger captures the burgeoning music scenes in Muscle Shoals and Nashville during the 1960s and 1970s and recovers the life of a fascinating musician whose influence was international. Younger's account is enriched by his interviews with more than 200 artists, family members, and friends--such as Rick Hall, Billy Sherrill, Charlie McCoy, Chuck Jackson, Gerry Marsden, and Kris Kristofferson--and includes an abundance of never-before-seen photographs.
This groundbreaking study finds Southern Baptists more diverse in their attitudes toward segregation than previously assumed
Focusing on the eleven states of the old Confederacy, Getting Right with God examines the evolution of Southern Baptists’ attitudes toward African Americans during a tumultuous period of change in the United States. Mark Newman not only offers an in-depth analysis of Baptist institutions from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and state conventions to colleges and churches but also probes beyond these by examining the response of pastors and lay people to changing race relations.The essays contained within the volume--by scholars from a wide range of disciplines including American studies, art history, political science, psychology, and sociology--each engage a particular instance of the practices of memory as they are complicated by globalization.
Subjects include the place of nostalgia in post-Yugoslavia Serbian national memory, Russian identity after the collapse of the Soviet Union, political remembrance in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, the role of Chilean mass media in forging national identity following the arrest of Augusto Pinochet, American debates over memorializing Japanese internment camps, and how the debate over the Iraq war is framed by memories of opposition to the Vietnam War.
Stories and songs from a childhood spent in a vanished world of revivals and road shows
Anita Faye Garner grew up in the South—just about every corner of it. She and her musical family lived in Texarkana, Bossier City, Hot Springs, Jackson, Vicksburg, Hattiesburg, Pascagoula, Bogalusa, Biloxi, Gulfport, New Orleans, and points between, picking up sticks every time her father, a Pentecostal preacher known as “Brother Ray,” took over a new congregation.
In between jump-starting churches, Brother Ray took his wife and kids out on the gospel revival circuit as the Jones Family Singers. Ray could sing and play, and “Sister Fern” (Mama) was a celebrated singer and songwriter, possessed of both talent and beauty. Rounding out the band were the young Garner (known as Nita Faye then) and her big brother Leslie Ray. At all-day singings and tent revivals across the South, the Joneses made a joyful noise for the faithful and loaded into the car for the next stage of their tour.
But growing up gospel wasn’t always joyous. The kids practically raised and fended for themselves, bonding over a shared dislike of their rootless life and strict religious upbringing. Sister Fern dreamed of crossing over from gospel to popular music and recording a hit record. An unlikely combination of preacher’s wife and glamorous performer, she had the talent and presence to make a splash, and her remarkable voice brought Saturday night rock and roll to Sunday morning music. Always singing, performing, and recording at the margins of commercial success, Sister Fern shared a backing band with Elvis Presley and wrote songs recorded by Johnny Cash and many other artists.
In her touching memoir The Glory Road, Anita Faye Garner re-creates her remarkable upbringing. The story begins with Ray’s attempts to settle down and the family’s inevitable return to the gospel circuit and concludes with Sister Fern’s brushes with stardom and the family’s journey west to California where they finally landed—with some unexpected detours along the way. The Glory Road carries readers back to the 1950s South and the intersections of faith and family at the very roots of American popular music.
For more information about the book and Anita Garner, visit www.thegloryroad.com or www.anitagarner.com
The first comprehensive history of the oldest national religious Jewish women's organization in the United States
Gone to Another Meeting charts the development of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) and its impact on both the Jewish Community in the United States and American Society in general.
Founded in 1893 by Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, NCJW provided a conduit through which Jewish women’s voices could be heard and brought a Jewish voice to America’s women’s rights movement. NCJW would come to represent both the modernization and renewal of traditional Jewish womanhood. Through its emphasis on motherhood, its adoption of domestic feminism, and its efforts to carve a distinct Jewish niche in the late 19th-century Progressive social reform movement in the largely Christian world of women’s clubs, NCJW was instrumental in defining a uniquely American version of Jewish womanhood.
To make a living here, one had to be capable, confident, clever and inventive, know a lot about survival, be able to fashion and repair tools, navigate a boat, fell a tree, treat a snakebite, make a meal from whatever was handy without asking too many questions about it, and get along with folks.
This fascinating and instructive book is the careful and unpretentious account of a man who was artful in all the skills needed to survive and raise a family in an area where most people would be lost or helpless. Smith’s story is an important record of a way of life beginning to disappear, a loss not fully yet realized. We are lucky to have a work that is both instructive and warm-hearted and that preserves so much hard-won knowledge.
Taken from the surviving contemporary documentary sources, Julian Granberry's volume describes the grammar and lexicon for the extinct 17th-century Timucua language of Central and North Florida and traces the origins of the 17th-century Timucua speakers and their language. Originally privately published in 1987, with limited circulation, this is the only available publication on the Timucuan language. It provides full grammatical analysis and complete lexical data, and it synthesizes both linguistic and archaeological data in order to provide a coherent picture of the Timucua peoples. Granberry traces the probable historical origins of Timucua speakers to a central Amazonian homeland at approximately 2,500 B.C. and proposes that Timucua speakers were responsible for introducing ceramic wares into North America.
The stormy life of one of the most colorful and complex characters in early 19th-century medicine
An engaging account of one woman’s overcoming the Depression and small town mores.
Viola Goode Liddell’s short memoir tells the story of her return to Alabama in search of a husband and a new life. Thirty years old and recently divorced, Liddell comes back to her home state—with her young son—determined to survive, during the depths of the Depression. Liddell narrates the obstacles she faces as a single mother in the 1930s Deep South with self-deprecating humor and a confessional tone that reveal both her intelligence and her unapologetic ambitions.
Unable to earn, borrow, or beg enough money to support herself and her child, Liddell uses her family connections to secure a teaching position in Camden, Alabama. Even though an older sister’s status within the community helps her land the job, Liddell is warned that she must be very careful as she navigates the tricky social terrain of small town life, particularly when it comes to men. A commentary on the plight of women of the time is woven into the narrative as Liddell recounts her experience of being refused a loan at the local bank by her own brother-in-law.
Despite all the restrictions on her behavior and the crushing reality that she has become "the biggest nuisance in the family" because of her past, Liddell cheerfully and successfully builds a new life of respectability and hope.
"The Great Gatsby" and Fitzgerald's World of Ideas
focuses on F. Scott Fitzgerald and the prevailing ideas and values
that permeated American society in the late teens and early twenties, providing
a vivid portrait of the intellectual and cultural milieu in which The
Great Gatsby was produced.
This new and original reading of Gatsby discloses
Fitzgerald's remarkable awareness of the issues of his time and his debt
to such philosophers and critics as William James, Josiah Royce, George
Santayana, John Dewey, Walter Lippman, H. L. Mencken, and Edmund Wilson.
Ronald Berman's fresh approach considers the meaning of various ideas important
to the novel: for example, those moral qualities governing both social
and individual life. Berman's reading of the text reveals extraordinary
emphases on matters that could productively be described as philosophical
-- the nature of friendship, love, and the good life. But the text of the
novel has many echoes, and the same concern with moral issues -- especially
those issues affecting democratic life - can be found in a number of other
texts of the first quarter of the century. Vigorously debated throughout
Fitzgerald's own lifetime, these texts shed a completely new light on the
idealism of The Great Gatsby and on the penetrating view it has
of life in a new form of American democracy.
A noted Fitzgerald scholar, Berman makes it clear that
accepted interpretations of The Great Gatsby and of Fitzgerald's
work in general must be changed. Berman demonstrates that Fitzgerald wrote
within a vast dialectic, relating the ideas of the twenties to those of
the "old America" described in so many of his works. Gatsby, Nick Carraway,
and the other characters of Fitzgerald's greatest novel all have to consider
not only their relationship to the present but also their distance from
what was once a highly meaningful past.
"For the general reader as well as the specialist, Morrow's history of the development and significance of airpower during WWI will be considered definitive. He compares the military, technological, and industrial aspects of the air services of the major powers--France, Germany, England, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and the United States--and reveals how, by means of superior production (particularly French engine manufacture), the Allies prevailed in the air war."--Publishers Weekly
"Morrow's encyclopedic examination of aviation's part in World War I concentrates on aircraft engine and airframe production, but the emotional content of contemporary accounts rises to the surface to put a human face on the brutal use of an infant technology. . . . a serious yet readable history of this vital part of the conflict, meant for any reader."--Library Journal
"A comprehensive study of the totality of the air war in its military, political, industrial, and cultural aspects distinguish this book from other treatments of military aviation during this period. . . . Morrow's efforts have yielded new insights into the evolution of military aviation and corrected previous oversights. The author's attention to developments in production and logistics, as well as events at the front, provide the most complete understanding of the development of air power and its role in the Great War."--American Historical Review
Documents counterimperialism in Chilean music since the 1960s
Gringos Get Rich: Anti-Americanism in Chilean Music examines anti-Americanism in Latin America as manifested in Chilean music in recent history. From a folk-based movement in the 1960s and early 1970s to underground punk rock groups during the Pinochet regime, to socially conscious hip-hop artists of postdictatorship Chile, Chilean music has followed several left-leaning transnational musical trends to grapple with Chile’s fluctuating relationship with the United States. Eunice Rojas’s innovative analysis introduces US readers to a wide swath of Chilean musicians and their powerful protest songs and provides a representative and long view of the negative influences of the United States in Latin America.
Much of the criticism of the United States in Chile’s music centers on the perception of the United States as a heavy-handed source of capitalist imperialism that is exploitative of and threatening to Chile’s poor and working-class public and to Chilean cultural independence and integrity. Rojas incorporates Antonio Gramsci’s theories about the difficulties of struggles for cultural power within elitist capitalist systems to explore anti-Americanism and anti-capitalist music. Ultimately, Rojas shows how the music from various genres, time periods, and political systems attempts to act as a counterhegemonic alternative to Chile’s political, cultural, and economic status quo.
Rojas’s insight is timely with recent political trends toward the right in the Americas. There is also increased interest in and acceptance of popular song lyrics as literary texts. The book will appeal to Latin Americanists, ethnomusicologists, scholars of popular culture and international relations, students, and general readers.
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