The story of modern Orthodox Judaism is usually told only from the perspective of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. Ellenson’s work, a thorough examination of the life and work of one of Hirsch’s contemporaries, Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer, reveals another important contributor to the creation of a modern Jewish Orthodoxy during the late 1800s. like Hirsch, Hildesheirmer felt the need to continue certain traditions while at the same time introducing certain innovations to meet the demands of a modern society. This original study of an Orthodox rabbinic leader shows how Hildesheirmer’s flexible and pragmatic approach to these problems continues to be relevant to modern Judaism. The way in which this book draws upon response literature for its comprehension of Hildesheimer makes it a distinctive work in modern Jewish historiography and sociology.
Under the leadership of Gary M. Fink and Merl E. Reed, Georgia State University hosts the Southern Labor Studies Conferences approximately every two years. The conferences have yielded two previous volumes, published in 1977 and 1981, and this volume, which contains selected papers from the seventh conference held in 1991.
In 1950 the poet Charles Olson published his influential essay “Projective Verse” in which he proposed a poetry of “open field” composition—to replace traditional closed poetic forms with improvised forms that would reflect exactly the content of the poem.
The poets and poetry that have followed in the wake of the “projectivist” movement—the Black Mountain group, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Language poets—have since been studied at length. But more often than not they have been studied through the lens of continental theory with the effect that these highly propositional, pragmatic, and adaptable forms of verse were interpreted in very cramped, polemical ways.
Miriam Nichols highlights many of the impulses original to the thinking and methods of each poet: appeals to perceptual experience, spontaneity, renewed relationships with nature, engaging the felt world—what Nichols terms a “poetics of outside”—focusing squarely on experiences beyond the self-regarding self. As Nichols states, these poets may well “represent the last moment in recent cultural history when a serious poet could write from perception or pursue a visionary poetics without irony or quotation marks and expect serious intellectual attention.”
In this first, full-scale biography that relies on Semmes's private papers, unpublished diaries, and correspondence, Spencer has produced a well-balanced and comprehensive account of the man, as well as the naval officer.
This collection of essays examines the contributions of some of the most notable interpreters of southern history and culture, furthering our understanding of the best historical work produced on the region.
Historian Glenn Feldman gathers together a group of essays that examine the efforts of important scholars to discuss and define the South's distinctiveness. The volume includes 18 chapters on such notable historians as John Hope Franklin, Anne Firor Scott, Frank L. Owsley, W. J. Cash, and C. Vann Woodward, written by 19 different researchers, both senior historians and emerging scholars, including Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, John Shelton Reed, Bruce Clayton, and Ted Ownby. The essays examine the major work or works of each scholar under consideration as well as that scholar's overall contribution to the study of southern history.
Reading Southern History will enlighten readers on the more compelling themes currently and traditionally explored by southern historians. It will appeal greatly to professors and students as a valuable multidisciplinary introduction to the study of southern history, since several of the essays are on scholars who are working outside the discipline of history proper, in the fields of political science, sociology, journalism, and economics. Feldman's collection, therefore, sheds light on a broad spectrum of themes important in southern history, including the plight of poor whites, race, debates over race and class, the "reconstruction syndrome," continuity versus discontinuity in relation to blacks and whites, and regional culture and distinctiveness.
Reading Southern History will be valuable to students and scholars of women's studies, African American history, working-class history, and ethnic studies, as well as traditional southern history. Most important, the publication makes a significant contribution to the development and ongoing study of the historiography of the South.
Any review of 20th-century American theatre invariably leads to the term realism. Yet despite the strong tradition of theatrical realism on the American stage, the term is frequently misidentified, and the practices to which it refers are often attacked as monolithically tyrannical, restricting the potential of the American national theatre.
This book reconsiders realism on the American stage by addressing the great variety and richness of the plays that form the American theatre canon. By reconsidering the form and revisiting many of the plays that contributed to the realist tradition, the authors provide the opportunity to apprise strengths often overlooked by previous critics. The volume traces the development of American dramatic realism from James A. Herne, the "American Ibsen," to currently active contemporaries such as Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and Marsha Norman. This frank assessment, in sixteen original essays, reopens a critical dialog too long closed.
Essays include:
Reconstructing Argumentative Discourse analyzes argumentation in ordinary disputes. The analysis begins with an ideal model: a theoretical structure of discourse that might be used to resolve a dispute about the merits of two opposing cases. The ideal model does not describe actual argumentative practice. Argumentative discourse does not always seek genuine resolution and, when it does, the participants may not perform as ideal arguers.
Recounts in detail the volatile political period in Alabama following the end of the Civil War
Following the end of the Civil War, white Southerners were forced to concede equal rights to those who had been enslaved, ushering in a new and ruthless brand of politics. Suddenly, the status and place of some four million former slaves dominated the national and regional political dialogue. In Alabama, the Republican Party established itself quickly and powerfully with the participation of a newly freed constituency, firmly aligned against the Democratic Party that had long dictated the governance of the state. Well-heeled planters, merchants, and bankers, joined by yeoman farmers, staged a counterrevolution by gravitating strongly to the Democratic Party and its unabashedly white supremacist measures. The ensuing power struggle in the birthplace of the Confederacy is at the heart of Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State: Alabama, 1865–1874.
What emerges in William Warren Rogers Jr.’s comprehensive study of the era is a detailed examination of Reconstruction politics, particularly in Alabama. This book explores an explosive and unpredictable political environment that a few years earlier would have been inconceivable. A vivid picture emerges of courthouse rallies and bitter infighting in legislative circles. Rogers’s narrative ventures into darker places as well: to the Tennessee Valley and the Black Belt regions of Alabama, where Klan nightriders used violence against an enemy and ideology they could not abide.
The attempt to capture and account for the unforgiving political landscape created by the extraordinary circumstances of Reconstruction constitutes this study’s most central contribution. Rogers often quotes black and white citizens, Democrats and Republicans. Drawn from newspapers, correspondence, and various federal investigations, these firsthand voices are passionate, unvarnished, and filled with conviction. They offer a startling immediacy and illustrate the temper—or distemper—of the times. Readers are treated to a panoramic unveiling of Reconstruction Alabama politics that provides a sense of what was truly at stake: the values by which a region and the nation as a whole would chart its future for the century to come.
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Epic has often been seen as a dead genre, intrinsically patriarchal and nationalistic. Furthermore, the psychological model most frequently applied to the relations between poets has been a violent one--the Freudian masterplot of Oedipus slaying the father to possess the mother. The limited usefulness of such simplistic explanations of epic is readily apparent when confronted with the continuing production of epic poetry long after its so-called death; when confronted with the contemporary drive toward epic among women poets, people of color, and postcolonial poets; and when faced with epic's fundamentally recursive desire--obvious in oral epic, but common to the entire genre--to repeat rather than to kill or evade its precursors.
Recursive desire, rooted in more basic preoedipal negotiations of union and separation rather than in Oedipal conflict, provides an elegant and far more useful explanation. By rereading and substantially redefining epic in this way, this book recognizes and reinvests with meaning the vital recursive qualities of the genre. Examining a diverse array of texts from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Derek Walcott's Osmeros, from the Homeric epics to H.D.'s Helen in Egypt. The book develops a broadened, inclusive, and living tradition of epic poetry, demonstrating the continuities of that tradition across dramatic discontinuities in time, place, worldview, and technology.
Recursive Desire rereads epic tradition and specific epic poems in ways that challenge traditional notions of the genre and open up unexplored fields of endeavor to students of epic, of poetry, and of narrative. With its more powerful and comprehensive psychological model of poetic relations, the book provides readers with a new understanding of epic poetry and its vital, shifting, polyvocal array (and disarray) of textual forces.
Red Eagle’s Children presents the legal proceedings in an inheritance dispute that serves as an unexpected window on the intersection of two cultural and legal systems: Creek Indian and Euro-American.
Recent excavation of the Tallahassee area provided anthropological and archaeological evidence showing that the Red Hills of Florida were sought out by agricultural Indians long before European contact
The Red Hills section of northern Florida is composed of Leon County, where Tallahassee is located , and its neighboring counties of Gadsden and Jackson to the west and Jefferson and Madison to the east. The land is distinctive band of rolling red clay hills that extends for 150 miles along the border of Alabama and Georgia. This well-written narrative chronicles the history of the region from the time of first European contact in 1528 through the end of the Civil War, and provides a comprehensive study of this vital section of northern Florida.
Recent excavation of the Tallahassee area provided anthropological and archaeological evidence showing that the Red Hills of Florida were sought out by agricultural Indians long before European contact. DeSoto fed his army of more that 700 during the winter of 1539-40 from corn gathered within a few miles of the principal town of the Apalachee. The Spaniards who settled in the Apalachee area during the mission era depended on the corn for survival and used the Indians of the 14 Apalachee mission in a war of empire building with the English of South Carolina. Raids by these enemies wiped out the Indians of the Apalachee area and its mission in 1704.
Christian evangelicals among native people in Latin America.
What does it mean to be both Maya and Protestant in Guatemala? Burgeoning religious pluralism in Mesoamerica and throughout Latin America is evident as Protestantism permeates a region that had been overwhelmingly Catholic for nearly five centuries.
In considering the interplay between contemporary Protestant practice and native cultural traditions among Maya evangelicals, Samson documents the processes whereby some Maya have converted to new forms of Christianity and the ways in which the Maya are incorporating Christianity for their own purposes. At the intersection of religion and cultural pluralism, contemporary evangelicals focus on easing the tension between Maya identity and the Protestant insistence that old ways must be left behind in the conversion process.
Against the backdrop of the 36-year civil war that ended in 1996 and the rise of the indigenous Maya Movement in the late 1980s, this work provides a unique portrait of social movements, cultural and human rights, and the role that religion plays in relation to the nation-state in post-conflict political processes. Re-enchanting the World fills a niche within the anthropological literature on evangelicals in Latin America during a time of significant social change.
“In this classic, Gaus writes perceptively of the ‘ecology’ of public administration and its relationship to the rise of the administrative state. He recounts how crises and changes in people, place, physical technology, social technology, and philosophy in the first half of the 20th century led citizens repeatedly to look to government for relief. Politicians, in turn, created or expanded the powers of public agencies.” —Journal of Management History
Joel Alvis focuses on the relationships and tensions in the Presbyterian Church, U.S., whose ecclesiastical boundaries never expanded significantly beyond its original territory in the Confederacy and border South. By the time of the civil rights movement, the church was actively involved in ecumenical activities despite its regional isolation, and that involvement created unease in some quarters of the denomination. This concise institutional history traces how the church shaped and was shaped by its regional culture and explores the denomination's own cultural struggle to determine what role race issues would play in the definition of being Presbyterian.
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.
In the early 1800s, the U.S. government attempted to rid the Southeast of Indians in order to make way for trading networks, American immigration, optimal land use, economic development opportunities, and, ultimately, territorial expansion westward to the Pacific. The difficult removal of the Chickasaw Nation to Indian Territory—later to become part of the state of Oklahoma— was exacerbated by the U.S. government’s unenlightened decision to place the Chickasaws on lands it had previously provided solely for the Choctaw Nation.
This volume deals with the challenges the Chickasaw people had from attacking Texans and Plains Indians, the tribe’s ex-slaves, the influence on the tribe of intermarried white men, and the presence of illegal aliens (U.S. citizens) in their territory. By focusing on the tribal and U.S. government policy conflicts, as well as longstanding attempts of the Chickasaw people to remain culturally unique, St. Jean reveals the successes and failures of the Chickasaw in attaining and maintaining sovereignty as a separate and distinct Chickasaw Nation.
Provides a fascinating glimpse into the early history of the Mississippi-Alabama Territory and antebellum Alabama
The two sections of the Reminiscences of George Strother Gaines form one of the most important primary sources on the early history of Alabama and Mississippi. The Reminiscences cover the years 1805 to 1843, during which time Gaines served as assistant factor and then factor of the Choctaw trading house (1805-18), cashier of Tombeckbee Bank in St. Stephens (1818-22), a merchant in Demopolis (1822-32), and finally a banker and merchant in Mobile (1832-43). In addition, Gaines played a key role in Indian-white relations during the Creek War of 1813-14, served a two-year term in the Alabama Senate (1825-27), led a Choctaw exploring party to the new Choctaw lands in the West following the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek (1830-31), and served as the superintendent for Choctaw removal (1831-32).
Gaines dictated his Reminiscences in 1871 at the age of eighty-seven. Part of the Reminiscences, referred to as the "first series," was originally published in five issues of the Mobile Register in June-July 1872 as "Notes on the Early Days of South Alabama." Nearly a century later, the first series and the previously unpublished second series, "Reminiscences of Early Times in Mississippi Territory," were published in a 1964 issue of the Alabama Historical Quarterly as "Gaines' Reminiscences."
In this first book-length edition of the Reminiscences, James Pate has provided an extensive biographical introduction, notes, illustrations, maps, and appendixes to aid the general reader and the scholar. The appendixes include additional unpublished primary materials-including interviews conducted by Albert James Pickett in 1847 and 1848 that provide further information about this important early pioneer and statesman.
This portrait of one of John Steinbeck's closest friends illuminates the life and work of a figure central to the development of scientific and literary thought in the 20th century.
Marine biologist Edward F. Ricketts is perhaps best known as the inspiration for John Steinbeck's most empathic literary characters Doc in Cannery Row, Slim in Of Mice and Men, Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath, and Lee in East of Eden. The correspondence of this accomplished scientist, writer, and philosopher reveals the influential exchange of ideas he shared with such prominent thinkers and artists as Henry Miller, Joseph Campbell, Ellwood Graham, and James Fitzgerald, in addition to Steinbeck, all of whom were drawn to Ricketts's Monterey Bay laboratory, a haven of intellectual discourse and Bohemian culture in the 1930s and 1940s.
The 125 previously unpublished letters of this collection, housed at the Stanford University Library, document the broad range of Ricketts's interests and accomplishments during the last 12 and most productive years of his life. His handbook on Pacific marine life, Between Pacific Tides, is still in print, now in its fifth edition. The biologist's devotion to ecological conservation and his evolving philosophy of science as a cross-disciplinary, holistic pursuit led to the publication of The Sea of Cortez. Many of Ricketts's letters discuss his studies of the Pacific littoral and his theories of “phalanx” and transcendence. Epistles to family members, often tender and humorous, add dimension and depth to Steinbeck's mythologized depictions of Ricketts. Katharine A. Rodger has enriched the correspondence with an introductory biographical essay and a list of works cited.
Reassesses the ancient Indigenous McKeithen site in northern Florida in light of new data, analyses, and theories
Revisiting McKeithen Weeden Island further illuminates an Indigenous Late Woodland (ca. AD 200–900) mound-and-village community in northern Florida that was first excavated in the late 1970s. Since then, some artifacts received additional analyses, and the topic of prechiefdom societies has been broadly reconsidered in anthropology and archaeology. These developments allow new perspectives on McKeithen’s history and significance.
Prudence M. Rice, a Mayanist who began her career at the University of Florida, revisits what is known about McKeithen and recontextualizes the 1970s excavations. Weeden Island and McKeithen are best known through mortuary mounds and mortuary ritual, mainly involving unusual pottery bird effigies. Rice discusses current theoretical trends in studies of ritual and belief systems and their relation to mound-building at McKeithen in early stages of developing societal complexity.
Revisiting McKeithen Weeden Island serves as a masterful example of an esteemed archaeologist advancing the field through rethought and updated interpretations of the site and its significance, primarily through its pottery. Rice’s case study ultimately also fosters understanding of later Mississippian society and other civilizations around the world at this time period. Archaeologists, anthropologists, and social historians as well as students and avocational readers will welcome Rice’s insight.
A timely collection of essays by prominent scholars in the field—on the past, present, and future of rhetoric instruction.
From Isocrates and Aristotle to the present, rhetorical education has consistently been regarded as the linchpin of a participatory democracy, a tool to foster civic action and social responsibility. Yet, questions of who should receive rhetorical education, in what form, and for what purpose, continue to vex teachers and scholars.
The essays in this volume converge to explore the purposes, problems, and possibilities of rhetorical education in America on both the undergraduate and graduate levels and inside and outside the academy. William Denman examines the ancient model of the "citizen-orator" and its value to democratic life. Thomas Miller argues that English departments have embraced a literary-research paradigm and sacrificed the teaching of rhetorical skills for public participation. Susan Kates explores how rhetoric is taught at nontraditional institutions, such as Berea College in Kentucky, where Appalachian dialect is espoused. Nan Johnson looks outside the academy at the parlor movement among women in antebellum America. Michael Halloran examines the rhetorical education provided by historical landmarks, where visitors are encouraged to share a common public discourse. Laura Gurak presents the challenges posed to traditional notions of literacy by the computer, the promises and dangers of internet technology, and the necessity of a critical cyber-literacy for future rhetorical curricula.
Collectively, the essays coalesce around timely political and cross-disciplinary issues. Rhetorical Education in America serves to orient scholars and teachers in rhetoric, regardless of their disciplinary home, and help to set an agenda for future classroom practice and curriculum design.
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.
The tradition of American public libraries is closely tied to the perception that these institutions are open to all without regard to social background. Such was not the case in the segregated South, however, where public libraries barred entry to millions of African Americans and provided tacit support for a culture of white supremacy. A Right to Read is the first book to examine public library segregation from its origins in the late 19th century through its end during the tumultuous years of the 1960s civil rights movement. Graham focuses on Alabama, where African Americans, denied access to white libraries, worked to establish and maintain their own "Negro branches." These libraries-separate but never equal-were always underfunded and inadequately prepared to meet the needs of their constituencies.
By 1960, however, African Americans turned their attention toward desegregating the white public libraries their taxes helped support. They carried out "read-ins" and other protests designed to bring attention and judicial pressure upon the segregationists. Patterson Toby Graham contends that, for librarians, the civil rights movement in their institutions represented a conflict of values that pitted their professional ethics against regional mores. He details how several librarians in Alabama took the dangerous course of opposing segregationists, sometimes with unsettling results.
This groundbreaking work built on primary evidence will have wide cross-disciplinary appeal. Students and scholars of southern and African-American history, civil rights, and social science, as well as academic and public librarians, will appreciate Graham's solid research and astute analysis.
Patterson Toby Graham is Head of Special Collections at the University
of Southern Mississippi. His research on library segregation has won four
awards, including the ALISE-Eugene Garfield Dissertation Award.
Organized into four sections, the twelve chapters of Rivers of Change are concerned with prehistoric Native American societies in eastern North America and their transition from a hunting and gathering way of life to a reliance on food production. Written at different times over a decade, the chapters vary both in length and topical focus. They are joined together, however, by a number of shared “rivers of change.”
A remarkable chronicle of southern mountain life in the early 20th century
The Road to Wildcat recounts the travels in North Alabama in the mid-1920s of Eleanor Risley (suffering from diabetes), her asthmatic husband, Pierre, their dog, John, and a Chinese wheelbarrow named Sisyphus that held their travel goods. Advised to make the walking tour for improvement of their health, the group left Fairhope in south Alabama and walked hundreds of miles in the southern Appalachians for months, sleeping out under the stars at night, or in a canvas tent or an abandoned building, cooking their fresh-caught foods over campfires, and accepting the generosity and advice of the mountain people they met, some of them moonshiners and outlaws.
During their sojourn across the rural wilderness, they enjoyed fiddlin’ dances in rickety halls, joined Sacred Harp singers, learned about the grapevine telegraph, saw the dreadful effects of inbreeding, and attended “Snake Night” at Posey Holler (a religious revival that included snake handling). Published in segments in the Atlantic Monthly in 1928 and 1929 and then reorganized into book form, the travelogue is a colorful record of the culture, customs, and dialect of the southern mountaineers of that era.
Showcases the wealth of new research on sacred imagery found in twelve states and four Canadian provinces
In archaeology, rock-art—any long-lasting marking made on a natural surface—is similar to material culture (pottery and tools) because it provides a record of human activity and ideology at that site. Petroglyphs, pictographs, and dendroglyphs (tree carvings) have been discovered and recorded throughout the eastern woodlands of North America on boulders, bluffs, and trees, in caves and in rock shelters. These cultural remnants scattered on the landscape can tell us much about the belief systems of the inhabitants that left them behind.
The Rock-Art of Eastern North America brings together 20 papers from recent research at sites in eastern North America, where humidity and the actions of weather, including acid rain, can be very damaging over time. Contributors to this volume range from professional archaeologists and art historians to avocational archaeologists, including a surgeon, a lawyer, two photographers, and an aerospace engineer. They present information, drawings, and photographs of sites ranging from the Seven Sacred Stones in Iowa to the Bald Friar Petroglyphs of Maryland and from the Lincoln Rise Site in Tennessee to the Nisula Site in Quebec.
Discussions of the significance of artist gender, the relationship of rock-art to mortuary caves, and the suggestive link to the peopling of the continent are particularly notable contributions. Discussions include the history, ethnography, recording methods, dating, and analysis of the subject sites and integrate these with the known archaeological data.
A revealing portrait of law-breaking and law enforcement on the Florida frontier
The pervasive influence of the frontier is fundamental to an understanding of antebellum Florida. James M. Denham traces the growth and social development of this sparsely settled region through its experience with crime and punishment. He examines such issues as Florida's criminal code, its judicial and law enforcement officers, the accommodation of criminals in jails and courts, outlaw gangs, patterns of punishment, and the attitude of the public toward lawbreakers.
Using court records, government documents, newspapers, and personal papers, Denham explores how crime affected ordinary Floridians—whites and blacks, perpetrators, victims, and enforcers. He contends that although the frontier determined the enforcement and administration of the law, the ethic of honor dominated human relationships.
Roosevelt the Reformer sheds light on an important chapter in the biography of the flamboyant 26th president of the United States. From 1889 to 1895—before he was a Rough Rider in the Spanish–American War and before he oversaw the building of the Panama Canal and won the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize—“Teddy” Roosevelt served as one of three civil service commissioners. This was a significant period of his life because he matured politically and learned how to navigate through Washington politics. He sparred with powerful cabinet officers and congressmen and survived their attempts to destroy him. He cultivated important friendships and allegiances, flourished intellectually, and strengthened his progressive views of social justice, racial theory, and foreign relations. It was a period altogether significant to the honing of administrative talent and intellectual acuity of the future president.
Richard White Jr. situates young Roosevelt within the exciting events of the Gilded Age, the Victorian era, and the gay nineties. He describes Roosevelt's relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and adversaries. Many of these people, such as Henry Cabot Lodge, Cecil Spring-Rice, Alfred Mahan, Henry Adams, and John Hay would significantly influence Roosevelt when he later occupied the White House. White explores TR's accomplishments in civil service reform, the effect of the commission experience on his presidency a decade later, and his administrative legacy.
In addition to Harvard University’s immense collection of Roosevelt
correspondence, White drew from original sources such as the Civil Service Commission files in the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the National Park Service Roosevelt Historical Site at Sagamore Hill, and the records of the National Civil Service Reform League.
The rollicking tales of Old Southwestern humor were a distinctive contribution to American folk culture provided by the frontiersmen of the South and Southwest, a tradition brought to its highest form in the work of Mark Twain. Among the precursors of Twain was John Gorman Barr of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Like Twain, Barr grew up in a river town, worked in a printing office, and traveled widely; and again like Twain, Barr drew upon the people and places of his home region as the primary sources for his tales.
In addition to the pure entertainment Barr’s stories provide, they also furnish a comprehensive picture of Tuscaloosa and western Alabama in the 1850s—the roaring river town coexisting uneasily with the intellectual sophistication of the recently established University of Alabama.
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