A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY372 start with W start with W
Sex can be an oppressive force, a tool to shame, divide, and control a population. But it can also be a force for change, for the legal and physical challenge of inequity and injustice. In West of Sex, Pablo Mitchell uses court transcripts and criminal cases to provide the first coherent picture of Mexican-American sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century, and a truly revelatory look at sexual identity in the borderlands.
As Mexicans faced a rising tide of racial intolerance in the American West, some found cracks in the legal system that enabled them to assert their rights as full citizens, despite institutional hostility. In these chapters, Mitchell offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of ethnicity and power in the United States, placing ordinary Mexican women and men at the center of the story of American sex, colonialism, and belonging.
Other chapters discuss topics like prostitution, same-sex intimacy, sexual violence, interracial romance, and marriage with an impressive level of detail and complexity. Written in vivid and accessible prose, West of Sex offers readers a new vision of sex and race in American history.
In early 1947 residents of the west side of Carbondale, Pennsylvania began noticing a peculiar steam escaping from the ground. An investigation into this phenomenon revealed that Carbondale was slowly but steadily being destroyed by a burning inferno deep below its surface—a fire raging through the deserted anthracite coal mine shafts that twisted and turned beneath that part of the city. After several years of attempting to contain the fire by flushing, municipal leaders decided that the only sure way of eliminating the threat to the community was by digging it out. To eradicate the burning menace, hundreds of homes and buildings were purchased and destroyed, and what was once a vibrant neighborhood became an abandoned wasteland.
Historian Kathleen Purcell Munley narrates here the story of this great fire, identifying its source, tracing its history, and, through personal interviews with former Carbondale residents, reveals its physical and psychological toll. The mine fire destroyed the West Side as it was, but this volume will keep its memory alive and preserve an important chapter in the history of Carbondale and Pennsylvania.
In contrast to nature poets of the past who tended more toward the bucolic and pastoral, many contemporary nature poets are taking up radical environmental and ecological themes. In the last few years, interesting and evocative work that examines this poetry has begun to lay the foundation for studies in ecopoetics.
Informed in general by current thinking in environmental theory and specifically by the work of cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, The West Side of Any Mountain participates in and furthers this scholarly attention by offering an overarching theoretical framework with which to approach the field.
One area that contemporary theorists have found problematic is the dualistic civilization/wilderness binary that focuses on the divisions between culture and nature, thereby increasing the modern sense of alienation. Tuan’s place-space framework offers a succinct vocabulary for describing the attitudes of ecological poets and other nature writers in a way that avoids setting up an adversarial relationship between place and space. Scott Bryson describes the Tuanian framework and employs it to offer fresh readings of the work of four major ecopoets: Wendell Berry, Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, and W. S. Merwin.
The West Side of Any Mountain will be of great interest to scholars and teachers working in the field of contemporary nature poetry. It is recommended for nature-writing courses as well as classes dealing with 20th-century poetry, contemporary literary criticism, and environmental theory.
"Elegantly written. . . . provocative . . . characterized by [Mitchell's] own tendency to shoot from the hip."—J. Hoberman, London Review of Books
"[Mitchell's] book would be worth reading just for the way he relates Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child to the postwar Western."—The Observer
"Integrating a careful handling of historical context with a keen eye for textual nuances, Mitchell reconstructs the Western's aesthetic tradition of the 19th century."—Aaron M. Wehner, San Francisco Review
Filled with an intense desire for education, he joined the United States Air Force and later graduated from Southern University—studying political science and the law at a time of great upheaval in the racial status quo. As part of a group of courageous men, Neal joined a Department of Justice effort to register the first black voters in Madison Parish.
When Neal moved to southern Nevada in 1963 he found the Silver State to be every bit as discriminatory as his former Louisiana home. As Neal climbed through the political ranks, he used his position in the state senate to speak on behalf of the powerless for more than thirty years. He took on an array of powerful opponents ranging from the Clark County sheriff to the governor of the state, as well as Nevada’s political kingmakers and casino titans. He didn’t always succeed—he lost two runs for governor—but he never stopped fighting. His successes included improved rights for convicted felons and greater services for public education, mental health, and the state’s libraries. He also played an integral role in improving hotel fire safety in the wake of the deadly MGM Grand fire and preserving the pristine waters of Lake Tahoe, which brought him national attention.
Neal lived a life that personified what is right, just, and fair. Pushing through racial and civil rights hurdles and becoming a lifelong advocate for social justice, his dedication and determination are powerful reminders to always fight the good fight and never stop swinging.
During this period, authors wrestled with how to make still-developing scientific information available to a reader also in the process of maturing. What would convince a young person to avoid acting on desire? What norms should be employed in these arguments, when social and legal precedents warned against committing ideas about sex to print? How, in other words, could information about sex be made both decent and compelling? Health reformers struggled with these challenges as doctors' ability to diagnose diseases such as syphilis outpaced the production of medicines that could restore health. In this context, information represented the best and truest prophylactic. When publications were successful, from the perspective of information dissemination, they were translated and distributed worldwide.
What Adolescents Ought to Know explores the evolution of these printed materials—from a single tract, written by a medical researcher and given free to anyone, to a thriving commercial enterprise. It tells the story of how sex education moved from private conversation to purchased text in early twentieth-century America.
That, says Harpham, was the midcentury promise of American education, the deep current of commitment and aspiration that undergirded the educational system that was built in the postwar years, and is under extended assault today. The United States was founded, he argues, on the idea that interpreting its foundational documents was the highest calling of opinion, and for a brief moment at midcentury, the country turned to English teachers as the people best positioned to train students to thrive as interpreters—which is to say as citizens of a democracy. Tracing the roots of that belief in the humanities through American history, Harpham builds a strong case that, even in very different contemporary circumstances, the emphasis on social and cultural knowledge that animated the midcentury university is a resource that we can, and should, draw on today.
Descending into a dark emotional space that compromises their mental and physical health, the brothers eventually find hope in aiding each other. This is an honest and revealing window into the complexities of Latino masculinity, the private lives of men, and the ways they build strength under the weight of grief, loss, and despair.
The contributors include Walter Laqueur, David Sabean, Johann Sommerville, Emilio Gentile, Roger Griffin, Saul Friedländer, Jay Winter, Rudy Koshar, Robert Nye, Janna Bourke, Shulamit Volkov, and Steven E. Aschheim.
The elder poets in this collection, such as Nathaniel Mackey, C. S. Giscombe, Will Alexander, and Ron Allen, came of age during and were powerfully influenced by the Black Arts Movement, and What I Say grounds the collection in its black modernist roots. In tracing the fascinating and unexpected paths of experimentation these poets explored, however, Nielsen and Ramey reveal the tight delineations of African American poetry that omitted noncanonical forms. This invigorating panoply of work, when restored, brings into focus the creatively elastic frontiers and multifaceted expressions of contemporary black poetry.
Several of the poets discussed in What I Say forged relationships with members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement and participated in the broader community of innovative poetry that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s and continues to exert a powerful influence today.
Each volume can stand on its own, and reading them in tandem will provide a clear vision of how innovative African American poetries have evolved across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. What I Say is infinitely teachable, compelling, and rewarding. It will appeal to a broad readership of poets, poetics teachers, poetics scholars, students of African American literature in nonnarrative forms, Afro-futurism, and what lies between the modern and the contemporary in global and localized writing practices.
This book discusses the extent of distrust and the extent of the misunderstandings that exist in the poetry world.
What Is Africa to Me? traces the late 1950s to 1968, chronicling Condé’s life in Sékou Touré’s Guinea to her time in Kwame N’Krumah’s Ghana, where she rubbed shoulders with Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Julius Nyerere, and Maya Angelou. Accusations of subversive activity resulted in Condé’s deportation from Ghana. Settling down in Sénégal, Condé ended her African years with close friends in Dakar, including filmmakers, activists, and Haitian exiles, before putting down more permanent roots in Paris.
Condé’s story is more than one of political upheaval, however; it is also the story of a mother raising four children as she battles steep obstacles, of a Guadeloupean seeking her identity in Africa, and of a young woman searching for her freedom and vocation as a writer. What Is Africa to Me? is a searing portrait of a literary genius—it should not be missed.
What Middletown Read is much more than a statistical study. Felsenstein and Connolly dig into diaries, meeting minutes, newspaper reports, and local histories to trace the library's development in relation to the city's cosmopolitan aspirations, to profile individual readers, and to explore such topics as the relationship between children's reading and their schooling and what books were discussed by local women's clubs. The authors situate borrowing patterns and reading behavior within the contexts of a rapidly growing, culturally ambitious small city, an evolving public library, an expanding market for print, and the broad social changes that accompanied industrialization in the United States. The result is a rich, revealing portrait of the place of reading in an emblematic American community.
That’s not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we’ve been given, but it’s the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating effect in What Soldiers Do. Drawing on an incredible range of sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials, official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread—and then exploited—the myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting chaos—ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease—horrified the war-weary and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused serious friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty.
While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us that history is always more useful—and more interesting—when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who lived it.
“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is every-thing.” So wrote Joseph Conrad in the best-known account of literary impressionism, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement featuring narratives that paint pictures in readers’ minds. If literary impressionism is anything, it is the project to turn prose into vision.
But vision of what? Michael Fried demonstrates that the impressionists sought to compel readers not only to see what was described and narrated but also to see writing itself. Fried reads Conrad, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, W. H. Hudson, Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Erskine Childers, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, and Edgar Rice Burroughs as avatars of the scene of writing. The upward-facing page, pen and ink, the look of written script, and the act of inscription are central to their work. These authors confront us with the sheer materiality of writing, albeit disguised and displaced so as to allow their narratives to proceed to their ostensible ends.
What Was Literary Impressionism? radically reframes a large body of important writing. One of the major art historians and art critics of his generation, Fried turns to the novel and produces a rare work of insight and erudition that transforms our understanding of some of the most challenging fiction in the English language.
Winner, WILLA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, 2008
How do women experience the vast, arid, rugged land of the American Southwest? The Story Circle Network, a national organization dedicated to helping women write about their lives, posed this question, and nearly three hundred women responded with original pieces of writing that told true and meaningful stories of their personal experiences of the land. From this deep reservoir of writing—as well as from previously published work by writers including Joy Harjo, Denise Chávez, Diane Ackerman, Naomi Shihab Nye, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria Anzaldua, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barbara Kingsolver—the editors of this book have drawn nearly a hundred pieces that witness both to the ever-changing, ever-mysterious life of the natural world and to the vivid, creative, evolving lives of women interacting with it.
Through prose, poetry, creative nonfiction, and memoir, the women in this anthology explore both the outer landscape of the Southwest and their own inner landscapes as women living on the land—the congruence of where they are and who they are. The editors have grouped the writings around eight evocative themes:
- The way we live on the land
- Our journeys through the land
- Nature in cities
- Nature at risk
- Nature that sustains us
- Our memories of the land
- Our kinship with the animal world
- What we leave on the land when we are gone
From the Gulf Coast of Texas to the Pacific Coast of California, and from the southern borderlands to the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, these intimate portraits of women's lives on the land powerfully demonstrate that nature writing is no longer the exclusive domain of men, that women bring unique and transformative perspectives to this genre.
“The book itself as a production is spectacular.”—David Dunster, Architectural Review
This book focuses on the Colombian Violencia, the undeclared civil war between the Liberal and Conservative parties that raged from the late 1940s to early 1960s. It presents the information as a narrative history.
There is also an array of appendixes, maps, and photographs.
Following the end of World War II in Asia, the Allied powers repatriated over six million Japanese nationals from colonies and battlefields throughout Asia and deported more than a million colonial subjects from Japan to their countries of origin.
Depicted at the time as a postwar measure related to the demobilization of defeated Japanese soldiers, this population transfer was a central element in the human dismantling of the Japanese empire that resonates with other post-colonial and post-imperial migrations in the twentieth century.
Lori Watt analyzes how the human remnants of empire, those who were moved and those who were left behind, served as sites of negotiation in the process of the jettisoning of the colonial project and in the creation of new national identities in Japan. Through an exploration of the creation and uses of the figure of the repatriate, in political, social, and cultural realms, this study addresses the question of what happens when empire comes home.
Winner of the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award
Shocked by the fall of France in 1940, panicked US leaders rushed to back the Vichy government—a fateful decision that nearly destroyed the Anglo–American alliance.
According to US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the “most shocking single event” of World War II was not the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but rather the fall of France in spring 1940. Michael Neiberg offers a dramatic history of the American response—a policy marked by panic and moral ineptitude, which placed the United States in league with fascism and nearly ruined the alliance with Britain.
The successful Nazi invasion of France destabilized American planners’ strategic assumptions. At home, the result was huge increases in defense spending, the advent of peacetime military conscription, and domestic spying to weed out potential fifth columnists. Abroad, the United States decided to work with Vichy France despite its pro-Nazi tendencies. The US–Vichy partnership, intended to buy time and temper the flames of war in Europe, severely strained Anglo–American relations. American leaders naively believed that they could woo men like Philippe Pétain, preventing France from becoming a formal German ally. The British, however, understood that Vichy was subservient to Nazi Germany and instead supported resistance figures such as Charles de Gaulle. After the war, the choice to back Vichy tainted US–French relations for decades.
Our collective memory of World War II as a period of American strength overlooks the desperation and faulty decision making that drove US policy from 1940 to 1943. Tracing the key diplomatic and strategic moves of these formative years, When France Fell gives us a more nuanced and complete understanding of the war and of the global position the United States would occupy afterward.
A provocative telling of "The Phenix City Story."
On June 18, 1954, former state senator Albert Patterson, the Democratic Party's nominee for state attorney general, was shot to death as he left his law office in Phenix City, Alabama, infamous for its prostitution, gambling, bootlegging, and political corruption. Patterson had made cleanup of Phenix City his primary campaign promise. With millions of dollars in illegal income and hundreds of political and professional careers at stake, the question surrounding Patterson's murder was not why the trigger was pulled, but who pulled it.
When Good Men Do Nothing is the definitive study of the Albert Patterson murder case. Alan Grady has mined the state's original murder case files; the papers of John Patterson, Albert's son; records from the Office of Alabama Attorney General (who directed the murder investigation); the case files of the Alabama Department of Toxicology and Criminal Investigation; National Guard reports; and more than 30 interviews with eyewitnesses and interested parties.
Grady takes a complex story of multiple dimensions—a large cast of judicial, criminal, and political players; a web of alliances and allegiances; and a knotted sequence of investigative revelations and dead ends—and transforms it into a readable, incisive analysis of the powers and loyalties that governed, and corrupted to the core, the body politic of the state. Readers will be enthralled and educated by this authoritative account of the most compelling crime drama in Alabama during the 20th century.
An alluring blend of remembering and reflection, When Grandpa Delivered Babies and Other Ozarks Vignettes provides a vivid portrait of a fading time.
When “I” Was Born: Women’s Autobiography in Modern China reclaims the voices of these particular writers, voices that have been misinterpreted and overlooked for decades. Tracing women writers as they move from autobiographical fiction, often self-revelatory and personal, to explicit autobiographies that focused on women’s roles in public life, Jing M. Wang reveals the factors that propelled this literary movement, the roles that liberal translators and their renditions of Western life stories played, and the way in which these women writers redefined writing and gender in the stories they told. But Wang reveals another story as well: the evolving history and identity of women in modern Chinese society. When “I” Was Born adds to a growing body of important work in Chinese history and culture, women’s studies, and autobiography in a global context.
Writers discussed include Xie Bingying, Zhang Ailing, Yu Yinzi, Fei Pu, Lu Meiyen, Feng Heyi, Ye Qian, Bai Wei, Shi Wen, Fan Xiulin, Su Xuelin, and Lu Yin.
As industrial and scientific developments in early-twentieth-century Japan transformed the meaning of “objective observation,” modern writers and poets struggled to capture what they had come to see as an evolving network of invisible relations joining people to the larger material universe. For these artists, literary modernism was a crisis of perception before it was a crisis of representation. When Our Eyes No Longer See portrays an extraordinary moment in the history of this perceptual crisis and in Japanese literature during the 1920s and 1930s.
The displacement in science of “positivist” notions of observation by a “realist” model of knowledge provided endless inspiration for Japanese writers. Gregory Golley turns a critical eye to the ideological and ecological incarnations of scientific realism in several modernist works: the photographic obsessions of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s Naomi, the disjunctive portraits of the imperial economy in Yokomitsu Riichi’s Shanghai, the tender depictions of astrophysical phenomena and human-wildlife relations in the children’s stories of Miyazawa Kenji.
Attending closely to the political and ethical consequences of this realist turn, this study focuses on the common struggle of science and art to reclaim the invisible as an object of representation and belief.
In When Sex Changed, Layne Parish Craig analyzes the ways literary texts responded to the political, economic, sexual, and social values put forward by the birth control movements of the 1910s to the 1930s in the United States and Great Britain.
Discussion of contraception and related topics (including feminism, religion, and eugenics) changed the way that writers depicted women, marriage, and family life. Tracing this shift, Craig compares disparate responses to the birth control controversy, from early skepticism by mainstream feminists, reflected in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, to concern about the movement’s race and class implications suggested in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, to enthusiastic speculation about contraception’s political implications, as in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas.
While these texts emphasized birth control’s potential to transform marriage and family life and emancipate women from the “slavery” of constant childbearing, birth control advocates also used less-than-liberatory language that excluded the poor, the mentally ill, non-whites, and others. Ultimately, Craig argues, the debates that began in these early political and literary texts—texts that document both the birth control movement’s idealism and its exclusionary rhetoric—helped shape the complex legacy of family planning and women’s rights with which the United States and the United Kingdom still struggle.
As Saheed Aderinto shows, British colonizers saw prostitution as an African form of sexual primitivity and a problem to be solved as part of imperialism's "civilizing mission". He details the Nigerian response to imported sexuality laws and the contradictory ways both African and British reformers advocated for prohibition or regulation of prostitution. Tracing the tensions within diverse groups of colonizers and the colonized, he reveals how wrangling over prostitution camouflaged the negotiating of separate issues that threatened the social, political, and sexual ideologies of Africans and Europeans alike.
The first book-length project on sexuality in early twentieth century Nigeria, When Sex Threatened the State combines the study of a colonial demimonde with an urban history of Lagos and a look at government policy to reappraise the history of Nigerian public life.
Since World War II, Protestant sermons have been an influential tool for defining American citizenship in the wake of national crises.
In the aftermath of national tragedies, Americans often turn to churches for solace. Because even secular citizens attend these services, they are also significant opportunities for the Protestant religious majority to define and redefine national identity and, in the process, to invest the nation-state with divinity. The sermons delivered in the wake of crises become integral to historical and communal memory—it matters greatly who is mourned and who is overlooked.
Melissa M. Matthes conceives of these sermons as theo-political texts. In When Sorrow Comes, she explores the continuities and discontinuities they reveal in the balance of state power and divine authority following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of JFK and MLK, the Rodney King verdict, the Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11 attacks, the Newtown shootings, and the Black Lives Matter movement. She argues that Protestant preachers use these moments to address questions about Christianity and citizenship and about the responsibilities of the Church and the State to respond to a national crisis. She also shows how post-crisis sermons have codified whiteness in ritual narratives of American history, excluding others from the collective account. These civic liturgies therefore illustrate the evolution of modern American politics and society.
Despite perceptions of the decline of religious authority in the twentieth century, the pulpit retains power after national tragedies. Sermons preached in such intense times of mourning and reckoning serve as a form of civic education with consequences for how Americans understand who belongs to the nation and how to imagine its future.
Two tropical commodities—coffee and sugar—dominated Latin American export economies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When Sugar Ruled: Economy and Society in Northwestern Argentina, Tucumán, 1876–1916 presents a distinctive case that does not quite fit into the pattern of many Latin American sugar economies.
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the province of Tucumán emerged as Argentina’s main sugar producer, its industry catering almost exclusively to the needs of the national market and financed mostly by domestic capital. The expansion of the sugar industry provoked profound changes in Tucumán’s economy as sugar specialization replaced the province’s diversified productive structure. Since ingenios relied on outside growers for the supply of a large share of the sugarcane, sugar production did not produce massive land dispossession and resulted in the emergence of a heterogeneous planter group. The arrival of thousands of workers from neighboring provinces during the harvest season transformed rural society dramatically. As the most dynamic sector in Tucumán’s economy, revenues from sugar enabled the provincial government to participate in the modernizing movement sweeping turn-of-the-century Argentina.
Patricia Juarez-Dappe uncovers the unique features that characterized sugar production in Tucumán as well as the changes experienced by the province’s economy and society between 1876 and 1916, the period of most dramatic sugar expansion. When Sugar Ruled is an important addition to the literature on sugar economies in Latin America and Argentina.
Weaving insightful analysis into a collective biography of gospel icons, When Sunday Comes explores the music's essential place as an outlet for African Americans to express their spiritual and cultural selves.
In postwar America, not everyone wanted to move out of the city and into the suburbs. For decades before World War II, New York's tenants had organized to secure renters' rights. After the war, tenant activists raised the stakes by challenging the newly-dominant ideal of homeownership in racially segregated suburbs. They insisted that renters as well as owners had rights to stable, well-maintained homes, and they proposed that racially diverse urban communities held a right to remain in place--a right that outweighed owners' rights to raise rents, redevelop properties, or exclude tenants of color. Further, the activists asserted that women could participate fully in the political arenas where these matters were decided.
Grounded in archival research and oral history, When Tenants Claimed the City: The Struggle for Citizenship in New York City Housing shows that New York City's tenant movement made a significant claim to citizenship rights that came to accrue, both ideologically and legally, to homeownership in postwar America. Roberta Gold emphasizes the centrality of housing to the racial and class reorganization of the city after the war; the prominent role of women within the tenant movement; and their fostering of a concept of "community rights" grounded in their experience of living together in heterogeneous urban neighborhoods.
Over time, however, the practicality and versatility of such clothing led to social acceptance, laying the foundation for the emergence of the now ubiquitous yet distinctly American style known as sportswear. Although we take it for granted, Warner observes, this is the first time in the history of the world that such universality has existed in clothing, and it has lasted now for well over half a century—in itself a marvel, considering the speed of fashion change in an era of instant messages and images.
“The whole world is watching!” cried protestors at the 1968 Democratic convention as Chicago police beat them in the streets. When some of that violence was then aired on network television, another kind of hell broke loose. Some viewers were stunned and outraged; others thought the protestors deserved what they got. No one—least of all Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley—was happy with how the networks handled it.
In When the News Broke, Heather Hendershot revisits TV coverage of those four chaotic days in 1968—not only the violence in the streets but also the tumultuous convention itself, where Black citizens and others forcefully challenged southern delegations that had excluded them, anti-Vietnam delegates sought to change the party’s policy on the war, and journalists and delegates alike were bullied by both Daley’s security forces and party leaders. Ultimately, Hendershot reveals the convention as a pivotal moment in American political history, when a distorted notion of “liberal media bias” became mainstreamed and nationalized.
At the same time, she celebrates the values of the network news professionals who strived for fairness and accuracy. Despite their efforts, however, Chicago proved to be a turning point in the public’s trust in national news sources. Since those critical days, the political Right in the United States has amplified distrust of TV news, to the point where even the truest and most clearly documented stories can be deemed “fake.” As Hendershot demonstrates, it doesn’t matter whether the “whole world is watching” if people don’t believe what they see.
In researching accounts of diasporic Chinese offspring who returned to their parents’ ancestral country, author Patricia Chu learned that she was not alone in the experience of growing up in America with an abstract affinity to an ancestral homeland and community. The bittersweet emotions she had are shared in Asian American literature that depicts migration-related melancholia, contests official histories, and portrays Asian American families as flexible and transpacific.
Where I Have Never Been explores the tropes of return, tracing both literal return visits by Asian emigrants and symbolic “returns”: first visits by diasporic offspring. Chu argues that these Asian American narratives seek to remedy widely held anxieties about cultural loss and the erasure of personal and family histories from public memory. In fiction, memoirs, and personal essays, the writers of return narratives—including novelists Lisa See, May-lee Chai, Lydia Minatoya, and Ruth Ozeki, and best-selling author Denise Chong, diplomat Yung Wing, scholar Winberg Chai, essayist Josephine Khu, and many others—register and respond to personal and family losses through acts of remembrance and countermemory.
In Where Is Juliet Stuart Poyntz?, Denise M. Lynn argues that Poyntz's sudden disappearance was the final straw for many on the American political left, who then abandoned Marxism and began to embrace anti-communism. In the years to follow, the left crafted narratives of her disappearance that became central to the Cold War. While scholars have thoroughly analyzed the influence of the political right in the anti-communism of this era, this captivating and compelling study is unique in exploring the influence of the political left.
Donald Davidson (1893-1968) may well be the most unjustifiably neglected figure in twentieth-century southern literature. One of the most important poets of the Fugitive movement, he also produced a substantial body of literary criticism, the libretto for an American folk opera, a widely used composition textbook, and the recently discovered novel The Big Ballad Jamboree. As a social and political activist, Davidson had significant impact on conservative thought in this century, imfluencing important scholars from Cleanth Brooks to M. E. Bradford.
Despite these accomplishments, Donald Davidson has received little critical attention from either the literary or the southern scholarly community. Where No Flag Flies is Mark Royden Winchell's redress of this critical disservice. A comprehensive intellectual biography of Davidson, this seminal work offers a complete narrative of Davidson's life with all of its triumphs and losses, frustrations and fulfillments.
Winchell provides the reader with more than a simple study of a man and his achievements; he paints a complete portrait of the times in which Davidson published, from the 1930s to the early 1960s. Davidson was more directly involved in political and social activities than most writers of his generation, and Winchell provides the context, both literary and historical, in which Davidson's opinions and works developed. At the same time, Winchell offers detailed evaluations of Davidson's poetry, fiction, historical writings, and essays.
Drawing upon a wealth of previously unpublished archival material, including Davidson's letters and diary, Where No Flag Flies provides unique access to one of the most original minds of the twentieth-century South. Donald Davidson may not have achieved the recognition he deserved, but this remarkable biography finally makes it possible for a considerable literary audience to discover his true achievement.
Winner of the John Collier Jr. Award for Still Photography
Where the Roads All End tells the remarkable story of an American family’s eight anthropological expeditions to the remote Kalahari Desert in South-West Africa (Namibia) during the 1950s. Raytheon co-founder Laurence Marshall, his wife Lorna, and children John and Elizabeth recorded the lives of some of the last remaining hunter-gatherers, the so-called Bushmen, in what is now recognized as one of the most important ventures in the anthropology of Africa. Largely self-taught as ethnographers, the family supplemented their research with motion picture film and still photography to create an unparalleled archive that documents the Ju/’hoansi and the /Gwi just as they were being settled by the government onto a “Bushman Preserve.” The Marshalls’ films and publications popularized a strong counternarrative to existing negative stereotypes of the “Bushman” and revitalized academic studies of these southern African hunter-gatherers.
This vivid and multilayered account of a unique family enterprise focuses on 25,000 still photographs in the archives of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Illustrated with over 300 images, Where the Roads All End reflects on the enduring ethnographic record established by the Marshalls and the influential pathways they charted in anthropological fieldwork, visual anthropology, ethnographic film, and documentary photography.
This rare find--a journal of a young backwoods woman--provides a unique picture of rural life in southwestern Alabama early in the 20th century.
"I am a little Alabama girl living on the frontier where the wild animals is plentiful," wrote May Jordan in 1912. During the hunting season her father traveled Washington County buying furs, and May--already 23--accompanied him on two of these trips, cooking meals, helping out with the business, and recording their experiences.
May's diary of these trips from December 1912 to March 1914 describes the routine of the fur trade and provides a vivid portrait of wilderness travel and social customs. Through May's eyes, readers can experience the sights and sounds of pine forests and swamps, the difficulty of wading through waist-deep mud, and the neighborliness of the people living in this isolated area. May also shares both the solace of religious faith and her love of laughter as reflected in the jokes she records.
Elisa Moore Baldwin provides an introduction that traces Jordan family history and describes economic, social, and political conditions during the period. Baldwin also includes annotations based on court records, census rolls, and other primary sources and photographs of many of the characters in May's narrative to provide a vivid picture of the times. Because few first-person accounts exist of the life of poor whites, this diary will be invaluable to students of southern and women's history; no comparable work exists for this part of Alabama during this era. May's journal takes us to another world and teaches us about the lively human spirit in the face of hardship and loneliness.
During these years, West and Johnson knew virtually everyone in New York's artistic, intellectual, and political circles. Their friends included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Carl Van Vechten, Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, and many others. West moved easily between the bohemian milieu of her artistic soul mates and the bourgeois, respectable soirees of prominent social and political figures.
In this book, Professors Mitchell and Davis provide a carefully researched profile of West and her circle that serves as an introduction to a well-edited, representative collection of her out-of-print, little-known, or unpublished writings, supplemented by many family photographs. The editors document West's "womanist" upbringing and her relationships with her mother, Rachel Benson West, and other strong-minded women, including her longtime companion Marian Minus.
The volume includes examples of West's probing social criticism in the form of WPA essays and stories, as well as her interviews with Southern migrants. A centerpiece of the book is her unpublished novella, Where the Wild Grape Grows, which explores with grace and gentle irony the complex relationship of three retired women living on Martha's Vineyard. Several of West's exquisitely observed nature pieces, published over a span of twenty years in the Vineyard Gazette, are also reprinted.
In this unprecedented study, Linda Fuller sets out to explain why the working class was largely missing from the 1989-90 revolution. Drawing on pre- and post-revolutionary visits to East German work sites and dozens of interviews, Fuller documents workers' day-to-day experience of the labor process, workplace union politics, and class. She shows how all three factors led most workers to withdraw from politics, even while prompting a handful to become actively involved in the struggle.
What might a sensible community choose to do if its economy has fallen apart and becoming a ghost town is not an acceptable option? Unfortunately, answers to this question have long been measured against an implicit standard: the postwar economy of the 1950s. After showing why that economy provides an implausible standard—made possible by the lack of economic competition from the European and Asian countries, winners or losers, touched by the war—John Henry Schlegel attempts to answer the question of what to do.
While Waiting for Rain first examines the economic history of the United States as well as that of Buffalo, New York: an appropriate stand-in for any city that may have seen its economy start to fall apart in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. It makes clear that neither Buffalo nor the United States as a whole has had an economy in the sense of “a persistent market structure that is the fusion of an understanding of economic life with the patterns of behavior within the economic, political, and social institutions that enact that understanding” since both economies collapsed. Next, this book builds a plausible theory of how economic growth might take place by examining the work of the famous urbanist, Jane Jacobs, especially her book Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Her work, like that of many others, emphasizes the importance of innovation for economic growth, but is singular in its insistence that such innovation has to come from local resources. It can neither be bought nor given, even by well-intentioned political actors. As a result Americans generally, as well as locally, are like farmers in the midst of a drought, left to review their resources and wait. Finally, it returns to both the local Buffalo and the national economies to consider what these political units might plausibly do while waiting for an economy to emerge.
The party whips are essential components of the U.S. legislative system, responsible for marshalling party votes and keeping House and Senate party members in line. In The Whips, C. Lawrence Evans offers a comprehensive exploration of coalition building and legislative strategy in the U.S. House and Senate, ranging from the relatively bipartisan, committee-dominated chambers of the 1950s to the highly polarized congresses of the 2000s. In addition to roll call votes and personal interviews with lawmakers and staff, Evans examines the personal papers of dozens of former leaders of the House and Senate, especially former whips. These records allowed Evans to create a database of nearly 1,500 internal leadership polls on hundreds of significant bills across five decades of recent congressional history.
The result is a rich and sweeping understanding of congressional party leaders at work. Since the whips provide valuable political intelligence, they are essential to understanding how coalitions are forged and deals are made on Capitol Hill.
They came from all corners of the country-fifteen young, idealistic, educated men and women drawn to Knoxville, Tennessee, to work for the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the first of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal projects. Mostly holding entry-level jobs, these young people became friends and lovers, connecting to one another at work and through other social and political networks..
What the fifteen failed to realize was that these activities-union organizing and, for most, membership in the Communist Party-would plunge them into a maelstrom that would endanger, and for some, destroy their livelihoods, social standing, and careers. White Collar Radicals follows their lives from New Deal activism in the 1930s through the 1940s and 1950s government investigations into what were perceived as subversive deeds.
Aaron D. Purcell shows how this small group of TVA idealists was unwillingly thrust from obscurity into the national spotlight, victims and participants of the second? [not sure is it is needed] Red Scare in the years following World War II. The author brings into sharp focus the determination of the government to target and expose alleged radicals of the 1930s during the early Cold War period. The book also demonstrates how the national hysteria affected individual lives.
White Collar Radicals is both a historical study and a cautionary tale. The Knoxville Fifteen, who endured the dark days of the McCarthy Era, now have their story told for the first time-a story that offers modern-day lessons on freedom, civil liberties, and the authority of the government.
Aaron D. Purcell is an associate professor and director of special collections at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg
With a focus on the contradictions and ironies that suffuse Filipino history, Rafael delineates the multiple ways that colonialism has both inhabited and enabled the nationalist discourse of the present. His topics range from the colonial census of 1903-1905, in which a racialized imperial order imposed by the United States came into contact with an emergent revolutionary nationalism, to the pleasures and anxieties of nationalist identification as evinced in the rise of the Marcos regime. Other essays examine aspects of colonial domesticity through the writings of white women during the first decade of U.S. rule; the uses of photography in ethnology, war, and portraiture; the circulation of rumor during the Japanese occupation of Manila; the reproduction of a hierarchy of languages in popular culture; and the spectral presence of diasporic Filipino communities within the nation-state. A critique of both U.S. imperialism and Filipino nationalism, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History creates a sense of epistemological vertigo in the face of former attempts to comprehend and master Filipino identity.
This volume should become a valuable work for those interested in Southeast Asian studies, Asian-American studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies.
Lori Harrison-Kahan examines writings by Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as the blackface performances of vaudevillian Sophie Tucker and controversies over the musical and film adaptations of Show Boat and Imitation of Life. Moving between literature and popular culture, she illuminates how the dynamics of interethnic exchange have at once produced and undermined the binary of black and white.
Originally published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2003, this first book in Louise Wagenknecht’s trilogy about life in the Klamath Mountains is now available through Oregon State University Press, together with Light on the Devils (2011) and Shadows on the Klamath (2021).
Focusing on the intersection of race, gender, and sex in the antiprostitution campaigns, Brian Donovan analyzes the reactions of native-born whites to new immigrant groups in Chicago, to African Americans in New York City, and to Chinese immigrants in San Francisco. Donovan shows how reformers employed white slavery narratives of sexual danger to clarify the boundaries of racial categories, allowing native-born whites to speak of a collective "us" as opposed to a "them." These stories about forced prostitution provided an emotionally powerful justification for segregation, as well as other forms of racial and sexual boundary maintenance in urban America.
This pioneering study, prepared by the semi-official Polish-Russian Group on Difficult Matters, is a comprehensive effort to document and fully disclose the major conflicts and interrelations between the two nations from 1918 to 2008, events that have often been avoided or presented with a strong political bias. This is the English translation of this major study, which has received acclaim for its Polish and Russian editions.
The chapters offer parallel histories by prominent Polish and Russian scholars who recount each country’s version of the event in question. Among the topics discussed are the 1920 Polish-Russian war, the origins of World War II and the notorious Hitler-Stalin pact, the infamously shrouded Katyn massacre, the communization of Poland, Cold War relations, the Solidarity movement and martial law, and the renewed relations of contemporary Poland and Russia.
The White Tattoo is a smart, always surprising collection of American stories. William J. Cobb knows and loves his character and places. His first collection of short stories, The White Tattoo, revels in the undeniable allure of the physical world even as it is juxtaposed with the twists and kinks of psychological and emotional pain. At one extreme is the tense, torturous psychology of “Motel Ice,” whose narrative voice emerges from the mind of a mentally disturbed Jehovah’s Witness gazing out on a world of temptation and redemption. Similarly hyperdramatic in its conclusion and its arc of betrayal and violent aftermath, “For All You Dorks, Blah Blah Blah” conjures up a sleepwalking, murderous father who is less culpable in the harm he causes but all the while most destructive.
Stylistically, the stories crackle, snap, and zing. Several of them, including “The Wishes,” “The Atmosphere of Vienna,” and “Dark Matter,” use an idiosyncratic, Tilt-O-Whirl narrative marked by a swirling, shifting focus and point of view, trying to create a multifaceted, complex vision of the world by dipping in and out of the consciousness of various characters.
Fernandes portrays everyday life and politics in the shantytowns of Caracas through accounts of community-based radio, barrio assemblies, and popular fiestas, and the many interviews she conducted with activists and government officials. Most of the barrio activists she presents are Chávez supporters. They see the leftist president as someone who understands their precarious lives and has made important changes to the state system to redistribute resources. Yet they must balance receiving state resources, which are necessary to fund their community-based projects, with their desire to retain a sense of agency. Fernandes locates the struggles of the urban poor within Venezuela’s transition from neoliberalism to what she calls “post-neoliberalism.” She contends that in contemporary Venezuela we find a hybrid state; while Chávez is actively challenging neoliberalism, the state remains subject to the constraints and logics of global capital.
Just weeks after CBS correspondent George Polk was murdered in Greece in 1948, his peers created the "George Polk Award" to honor the best in American journalism. Polk would have been bitterly disappointed, however, had he known that the "best in American journalism" accepted, largely without protest, an investigation into his death in which evidence was not only ignored but manufactured to convict innocent men—an investigation in which politics played a bigger role than the truth.
Reconstructing the murder, investigation, trial, and aftermath, Who Killed George Polk? offers a penetrating analysis of the willingness of the American media—including CBS and a committee of prominent journalists headed by Walter Lippmann—to accept the government's version of events despite numerous inconsistencies. The book also explores the fate of the handful of journalists who had questioned the original coverup and shows that even when additional developments turned the official version on its head, they were no longer in a position to press for a new investigation. All had become victims of anticommunist witchhunts.
Arguing that this mainstream media and the U.S. government were so blinded by cold war political considerations that they overlooked the most obvious culprits for the Polk murder, Elias Vlanton proves that Polk was likely killed neither by the communists, as originally charged, nor by corrupt Greek government officials, as claimed by a recent book and in a CBS "Sixty Minutes" broadcast. Instead, based on evidence uncovered during Vlanton's 19-year investigation, the author presents the only plausible scenario of how and why Polk was murdered.
At its core, this perceptive interrogation explores how the press served U.S. national interests at the expense of the truth and journalistic integrity.
Who Shall Enter Paradise? recounts in detail the history of Christian-Muslim engagement in a core area of sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous nation, home to roughly equal numbers of Christians and Muslims. It is a region today beset by religious violence, in the course of which history has often been told in overly simplified or highly partisan terms. This book reexamines conversion and religious identification not as fixed phenomena, but as experiences shaped through cross-cultural encounters, experimentation, collaboration, protest, and sympathy.
Shobana Shankar relates how Christian missions and African converts transformed religious practices and politics in Muslim Northern Nigeria during the colonial and early postcolonial periods. Although the British colonial authorities prohibited Christian evangelism in Muslim areas and circumscribed missionary activities, a combination of factors—including Mahdist insurrection, the abolition of slavery, migrant labor, and women’s evangelism—brought new converts to the faith. By the 1930s, however, this organic growth of Christianity in the north had given way to an institutionalized culture based around medical facilities established in the Hausa emirates. The end of World War II brought an influx of demobilized soldiers, who integrated themselves into the local Christian communities and reinvigorated the practice of lay evangelism.
In the era of independence, Muslim politicians consolidated their power by adopting many of the methods of missionaries and evangelists. In the process, many Christian men and formerly non-Muslim communities converted to Islam. A vital part of Northern Nigerian Christianity all but vanished, becoming a religion of “outsiders.”
Up-to-date yet rooted in history, Whose America? provides a sophisticated account of recent immigration policy while mapping the ideological struggle to answer an essential question: which people have the right to make America their home or refuge?
Contributors: Leisy Abrego, Carl Bon Tempo, Julio Capó, Jr., Carly Goodman, Julia Rose Kraut, Monique Laney, Carl Lindskoog, Yael Schacher, and Elliott Young
Contemporary discussions of China tend to focus on politics and economics, giving Chinese culture little if any attention. Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China offers a corrective, revealing the crucial role that fiction plays in helping contemporary Chinese citizens understand themselves and their nation. Where history fails to address the consequences of man-made and natural atrocities, David Der-Wei Wang argues, fiction arises to bear witness to the immemorial and unforeseeable.
Beginning by examining President Xi Jinping’s call in 2013 to “tell the good China story,” Wang illuminates how contemporary Chinese cultural politics have taken a “fictional turn,” which can trace its genealogy to early modern times. He does so by addressing a series of discourses by critics within China, including Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, and Shen Congwen, as well as critics from the West such as Arendt, Benjamin, and Deleuze. Wang highlights the variety and vitality of fictional works from China as well as the larger Sinophone world, ranging from science fiction to political allegory, erotic escapade to utopia and dystopia. The result is an insightful account of contemporary China, one that affords countless new insights and avenues for understanding.
"It should certainly be the task of historians to explain the nation's triumphs as effectively as they have explained its failures, and Zunz in this intelligent, learned and ambitious book suggests a valuable new model for doing so."—Alan Brinkley, Times Literary Supplement
"Zunz is evenhanded in his judgments. . . . His thesis is both imaginative and well grounded in the appropriate sources."—David M. Oshinsky, New York Times Book Review
"Zunz is an innovative and perceptive social critic. He crosses disciplinary boundaries with ease and felicity, and is particularly adept at illustrating large themes with unusual but telling details."—Kent Blaser, American Studies
"An eye-opening introduction to the shaping of modern America."—Foreign Affairs
Is there life after postmodernism? Many claim that it sounded the death knell for history, art, ideology, science, possibly all of Western philosophy, and certainly for the concept of reality itself. Responding to essential questions regarding whether the humanities can remain politically and academically relevant amid this twenty-first-century uncertainty, Why the Humanities Matter offers a guided tour of the modern condition, calling upon thinkers in a variety of disciplines to affirm essential concepts such as truth, goodness, and beauty.
Offering a lens of "new humanism," Frederick Aldama also provides a liberating examination of the current cultural repercussions of assertions by such revolutionary theorists as Said, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, as well as Latin Americanists such as Sommer and Mignolo. Emphasizing pedagogy and popular culture with equal verve, and writing in colloquial yet multifaceted prose, Aldama presents an enlightening way to explore what "culture" actually does—who generates it and how it shapes our identities—and the role of academia in sustaining it.
Why do civilians suffer most during times of violent conflict? Why are civilian fatalities as much as eight times higher, calculated globally for current conflicts, than military fatalities? In Why They Die, Daniel Rothbart and Karina V. Korostelina address these questions through a systematic study of civilian devastation in violent conflicts. Pushing aside the simplistic definition of war as a guns-and-blood battle between two militant groups, the authors investigate the identity politics underlying conflicts of many types. During a conflict, all those on the opposite side are perceived as the enemy, with little distinction between soldiers and civilians. As a result, random atrocities and systematic violence against civilian populations become acceptable.
Rothbart and Korostelina devote the first half of the book to case studies: deportation of the Crimean Tatars from the Ukraine, genocide in Rwanda, the Lebanon War, and the war in Iraq. With the second half, they present new methodological tools for understanding different types of violent conflict and discuss the implications of these tools for conflict resolution.
Sandra Laugier has long been a key liaison between American and European philosophical thought, responsible for bringing American philosophers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Stanley Cavell to French readers—but until now her books have never been published in English. Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy rights that wrong with a topic perfect for English-language readers: the idea of analytic philosophy.
Wallace Stegner called its stacks “enchanted.” Barbara Tuchman called it “my Archimedes bathtub, my burning bush.” But to Thomas Wolfe, it was a place of “wilderment and despair.” Since its opening in 1915, the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library has led a spirited life as Harvard’s physical and, in a sense, its spiritual heart. Originally intended as the memorial to one man, it quickly grew into a symbol of the life of the mind with few equals anywhere—and like all symbols, it has enjoyed its share of contest and contradiction. At the unlikely intersection of such disparate episodes as the sinking of the Titanic, the social upheavals of the 1960s, and the shifting meaning of books and libraries in the information age, Widener is at once the storehouse and the focus of rich and ever-growing hoards of memory.
With copious illustrations and wide-ranging narrative, Widener: Biography of a Library is not only a record of benefactors and collections; it is the tale of the students, scholars, and staff who give a great library its life.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the wild animal story emerged in Canadian literature as a distinct genre, in which animals pursue their own interests—survival for themselves, their offspring, and perhaps a mate, or the pure pleasure of their wildness.
Bringing together some of the most celebrated wild animal stories, Ralph H. Lutts places them firmly in the context of heated controversies about animal intelligence and purposeful behavior. Widely regarded as entertaining and educational, the early stories—by Charles G. D. Roberts, Ernest Thompson Seton, John Muir, Jack London and others—had an avid readership among adults and children. But some naturalists and at least one hunter—Theodore Roosevelt—discredited these writers as "nature fakers," accusing them of falsely portraying animal behavior.
The stories and commentaries collected here span the twentieth century. As present day animal behaviorists, psychologists, and the public attempt to sort out the meaning of what animals do and our obligations to them, Ralph Lutts maps some of the prominent features of our cultural landscape.
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Other selections include esssays by Theoore Roosevelt, John Burroughs, Margaret Atwood, and Ralph H. Lutts.
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One of the most knowledgeable and provocative explicators of Paul de Man's writings, Rodolphe Gasché, a philosopher by training, demonstrates for the first time the systematic coherence of the critic's work, insisting that de Man continues to merit close attention despite his notoriously difficult and obscure style. Gasché shows that de Man's "reading" centers on a dimension of the texts that is irreducible to any possible meaning, a dimension characterized by the "absolutely singular."
Given that de Man and Derrida are both termed deconstructionists, Gasché differentiates between the two by emphasizing Derrida's primary interest in "writing," and postulates that the best way to come to terms with de Man's works is to "read" them athwart the writings of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida. He shows his respect for the "immanent logic" of de Man's thought--which he lays out in great detail--while revealing his uneasiness at the oddness of that thought and its consequences.
Wild horses have been a subject of bitter controversy in the West for decades. To some, they are symbols of the West’s wild, free heritage. To others, they are rapacious grazers that destroy habitat and compete with domestic livestock and indigenous wildlife for scanty food and water. For years, free-ranging horses and burros were rounded up and shipped to slaughterhouses to be killed and turned into pet food. This practice provided an income for the “mustangers” who trapped and sold them, but it also involved horrendous cruelty and abuse of the animals.
Velma Johnston, who became known as “Wild Horse Annie,” undertook to stop the removal of wild horses and burros from US public lands and protect them from the worst aspects of mustanging. Her campaign attracted nationwide attention, as it led her from her rural Nevada County to state offices and finally to Washington, DC. Author Alan J. Kania worked closely with Johnston for seven years, and his biography provides unique insight into Wild Horse Annie’s life and her efforts to save the West’s wild horse herds through the passage of protective legislation.
A brutally powerful, unflinching account of the heroin epidemic that swept across Catalonia in the 1980s, Wild Horses tells the story of a group of friends as they buy, sell, and consume heroin and other drugs in their hometown. Told through a kaleidoscope of voices, stories, song lyrics, and heartbreakingly all-too-real characters, Cussà’s novel, originally published in 2000, is already a true classic of modern storytelling that is both shocking and captivating at the same time.
Information science was a burgeoning field in the early years of the Cold War, and while public and academic libraries acted as significant sites for the information boom, it is unsurprising that McCarthyism and censorship would shape what they granted readers access to and acquired. Wild Intelligence traces a different history of information management, examining the privately assembled collections of poets and their knowledge-building practices at midcentury.
Taking up case studies of four poets who began writing during the 1950s and 1960s, including Charles Olson (1910–1970), Diane di Prima (1934–2020), Gerrit Lansing (1928–2018), and Audre Lorde (1934–1992), M. C. Kinniburgh shows that the postwar American poet’s library should not just be understood according to individual books within their collection but rather as an archival resource that reveals how poets managed knowledge in a growing era of information overload. Exploring traditions and systems that had been overlooked, buried, occulted, or censored, these poets sought to recover a sense of history and chart a way forward.
Tracing the configuration of the slapstick, destitute Peladita/Peladito and the Pachuca/Pachuco (depicted in flashy zoot suits) from 1928 to 2004, Wild Tongues is an ambitious, extensive examination of social order in Mexican and Chicana/o cultural productions in literature, theater, film, music, and performance art.
From the use of the Peladita and the Peladito as stock characters who criticized various aspects of the Mexican government in the 1920s and 1930s to contemporary performance art by María Elena Gaitán and Dan Guerrero, which yields a feminist and queer-studies interpretation, Rita Urquijo-Ruiz emphasizes the transnational capitalism at play in these comic voices. Her study encompasses both sides of the border, including the use of the Pachuca and the Pachuco as anti-establishment, marginal figures in the United States. The result is a historically grounded, interdisciplinary approach that reimagines the limitations of nation-centered thinking and reading.
Beginning with Daniel Venegas’s 1928 novel, Las aventuras de don Chipote o Cuando los pericos mamen, Rita Urquijo-Ruiz’s Wild Tongues demonstrates early uses of the Peladito to call attention to the brutal physical demands placed on the undocumented Mexican laborer. It explores Teatro de Carpa (tent theater) in-depth as well, bringing to light the experience of Mexican Peladita Amelia Wilhelmy, whose “La Willy” was famous for portraying a cross-dressing male soldier who criticizes the failed Revolution. In numerous other explorations such as these, the political, economic, and social power of creativity continually takes center stage.
--New York Times Book Review
"The cultural and literary achievements of black American women are examined and celebrated in some 20 enjoyable, erudite essays by prominent scholars, critics, and activists."
--Publishers Weekly
This book is the first comprehensive collection of critical and theoretical essays to explore the literary and multi-cultural traditions of Black American women in many genres over a broad span of time. The essays explore cultural and literary experience in a wide context and offer a variety of critical theoretical constructs in which to view that experience. The editors have written excellent introductions providing both historical and comparative discussions of the contemporary literary renaissance. The book also includes a valuable bibliography of selected English-language works by Black women in the Americas from the 1970s to the present.
The “others” referred to in the title are women, for the most part Cather’s contemporaries, whose artistic projects allow for points of comparison with Cather. They include the Wagnerian diva Olive Fremstad, renowned for her category-defying voice; Blair Niles, an ethnographer and novelist of jazz-age Harlem and the prisons of New Guinea; Laura Gilpin, photographer of the American Southwest; and Pat Barker, whose Regeneration trilogy places World War I writers—and questions of sexuality and gender—at its center. In the process of studying these women and their work, Goldberg forms innovative new insights into a wide range of Cather’s celebrated works, from O Pioneers! and My Ántonia to her later books The Song of the Lark, One of Ours, The Professor’s House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl.
By applying his unique talent to the study of Cather’s literary genius, Jonathan Goldberg makes a significant and new contribution to the study of American literature and queer studies.
Unraveling the mysteries of Naked Lunch, exploring the allure of fascination
William Burroughs is both an object of widespread cultural fascination and one of America’s great writers. In this study, Oliver Harris elucidates the complex play of secrecy and revelation that defines the allure of fascination. Unraveling the mystifications of Burroughs the writer, Harris discovers what it means to be fascinated by a figure of major cultural influence and unearths a secret history behind the received story of one of America’s great original writers.
In William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, Harris examines the major works Burroughs produced in the 1950s—Junky, Queer, The Yage Letters, and Naked Lunch—to piece together an accurate, material record of his creative history during his germinal decade as a writer. Refuting the “junk paradigm” of addiction that has been used to categorize and characterize much of Burroughs’ oeuvre, Harris instead focuses on the significance of Burroughs’ letter writing and his remarkable and unsuspected use of the epistolary for his fiction. As Burroughs said to Allen Ginsberg about Naked Lunch, “the real novel is letters to you.” Drawing on rare access to manuscripts, the book suggests new ways of comprehending Burroughs’s unique politics and aesthetics and offers the first accurate account of the writing of Naked Lunch.
Proclaimed "one of the great American writers of short fiction" by the New York Times Book Review, William Goyen (1915-1983) had a quintessentially American literary career, in which national recognition came only after years of struggle to find his authentic voice, his audience, and an artistic milieu in which to create. These letters, which span the years 1937 to 1983, offer a compelling testament to what it means to be a writer in America.
A prolific correspondent, Goyen wrote regularly to friends, family, editors, and other writers. Among the letters selected here are those to such major literary figures as W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Joyce Carol Oates, William Inge, Elia Kazan, Elizabeth Spencer, and Katherine Anne Porter.
These letters constitute a virtual autobiography, as well as a fascinating introduction to Goyen's work. They add an important chapter to the study of American and Texas literature of the twentieth century.
An examination of the career of Texas Ranger and immigration official William Hanson illustrating the intersections of corruption, state-building, and racial violence in early twentieth century Texas.
At the Texas-Mexico border in the 1910s and 1920s, William Hanson was a witness to, and an active agent of, history. As a Texas Ranger captain and then a top official in the Immigration Service, he helped shape how US policymakers understood the border, its residents, and the movement of goods and people across the international boundary. An associate of powerful politicians and oil company executives, he also used his positions to further his and his patrons' personal interests, financial and political, often through threats and extralegal methods.
Hanson’s career illustrates the ways in which legal exclusion, white-supremacist violence, and official corruption overlapped and were essential building blocks of a growing state presence along the border in the early twentieth century. In this book, John Weber reveals Hanson’s cynical efforts to use state and federal power to proclaim the border region inherently dangerous and traces the origins of current nativist politics that seek to demonize the border population. In doing so, he provides insight into how a minor political appointee, motivated by his own ambitions, had lasting impacts on how the border was experienced by immigrants and seen by the nation.
Born in Civil War–era Cincinnati in 1857, William Howard Taft rose rapidly through legal, judicial, and political ranks, graduating from Yale and becoming a judge while still in his twenties. In 1900, President William McKinley appointed Taft to head a commission charged with preparing the Philippines for US-led civil government, setting the stage for Taft’s involvement in US-Philippine relations and the development of his imperial vision across two decades. While biographies of Taft and histories of US-Philippine relations are easy to find, few works focus on Taft’s vision for the Philippines that, despite a twenty-year crusade, would eventually fail. William Howard Taft and the Philippines fills this void in the scholarship, taking up Taft’s vantage point on America’s imperialist venture in the Philippine Islands between 1900 and 1921.
Adam D. Burns traces Taft’s course through six chapters, beginning with his years in the islands and then following it through his tenure as President Roosevelt’s secretary of war, his term as president of the United States, and his life after departing the White House. Across these years Taft continued his efforts to forge a lasting imperial bond and prevent Philippine independence.
Grounded in extensive primary source research, William Howard Taft and the Philippines is an engaging work that will interest scholars of Philippine history, American foreign policy, imperialism, the American presidency, the Progressive Era, and more.
Known as a beloved, longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker, William Maxwell worked closely with such legendary writers as Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Mary McCarthy, and John Cheever. His own novels include They Came Like Swallows and the American Book Award-winning So Long, See You Tomorrow, and many consider him to be one of the twentieth century's most important writers. Barbara Burkhardt's William Maxwell: A Literary Life represents the first major critical study of this Illinois writer's life and work.
Writing with an economy and elegance befitting her subject, Burkhardt addresses Maxwell's highly autobiographical fiction by skillfully interweaving his biography with her own critical interpretations. She contextualizes his fiction in terms of events including his mother's early death from influenza, his marriage, and the role of his psychoanalysis under the guidance of Theodor Reik. Drawing on a wide range of previously unavailable material, Burkhardt includes letters Maxwell received from authors such as Eudora Welty and Louise Bogan, excerpts from his unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, and her own interviews with Maxwell and key figures from his life, including John Updike, Roger Angell, New Yorker fiction editor Robert Henderson, and Maxwell's family and friends.
Along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs (1914––97) is an iconic figure of the Beat generation. In William S. Burroughs, Phil Baker investigates this cult writer’s life and work—from small-town Kansas to New York in the ’40s, Mexico and the South American jungle, to Tangier and the writing of Naked Lunch, to Paris and the Beat Hotel, and ’60s London—alongside Burrough’s self-portrayal as an explorer of inner space, reporting back from the frontiers of experience.
After accidentally shooting his wife in 1951, Burroughs felt his destiny as a writer was bound up with a struggle to come to terms with the “Ugly Spirit” that had possessed him. In this fascinating biography, Baker explores how Burroughs’s early absorption in psychoanalysis shifted through Scientology, demonology, and Native American mysticism, eventually leading Burroughs to believe that he lived in an increasingly magical universe, where he sent curses and operated a “wishing machine.” His lifelong preoccupation with freedom and its opposites—forms of control or addiction—coupled with the globally paranoid vision of his work can be seen to evolve into a larger ecological concern, exemplified in his idea of a divide between decent people or “Johnsons” and those who impose themselves upon others, wrecking the planet in the process.
Drawing on newly available material, and rooted in Burroughs’s vulnerable emotional life and seminal friendships, this insightful and revealing study provides a powerful and lucid account of his career and significance.
William Styron - American Writers 98 was first published in 1971. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
A self-educated wage earner raised in the slums of a large industrial city, William Z. Foster became a brilliant union organizer who helped build the American Federation of Labor and, later, radical Trade Union Educational League. Embracing socialism, syndicalism, and communism in turn, Foster rose through the ranks of the American Communist Party to stand at the forefront of labor politics throughout the 1920s. Yet by the time he died in 1961, in a Moscow hospital far from the meat-packing plants and steel mills where he had built his reputation, Foster's political marginalism stood as a symbol for the isolation of American labor radicalism in the postwar era.
Integrating both the indigenous and the international factors that determined the fate of American communism, William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism provides a new understanding of the basis for radicalism among twentieth-century American workers.
In the process of describing Wilson's legacy, Ninkovich reinterprets most of the twentieth century's main foreign policy developments. He views the 1920s, for example, not as an isolationist period but as a reversion to Taft's Dollar Diplomacy. The Cold War, with its faraway military interventions, illustrates Wilsonian America's preoccupation with achieving a cohesive world opinion and its abandonment of traditional, regional conceptions of national interest.
The Wilsonian Century offers a striking alternative to traditional interest-based interpretations of U.S. foreign policy. In revising the usual view of Wilson's contribution, Ninkovich shows the extraordinary degree to which Wilsonian ideas guided American policy through a century of conflict and tension.
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