BiblioVault - Books about Celebrating

Adapting the Past to Reimagine Possible Futures

Celebrating and Critiquing WAC at 50

Megan J. Kelly

University Press of Colorado, 2024

Developed from presentations at the Fifteenth International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference, this edited collection celebrates the 50th anniversary of the WAC movement while also identifying innovative directions for writing pedagogies, program building and impact, and program mobilization. Contributors reflect on the evolution of WAC as an educational movement as well as the challenges and possibilities facing WAC programs as they respond to the shifting contexts of higher education. The chapters in this collection—found in sections on faculty development, classroom implications, and institutional considerations—offer a range of practices, pedagogies, frameworks, and models for readers who are invested in building and sustaining WAC programs that impact their college and university campuses through cultures of writing. Adapting the Past to Reimagine Possible Futures engages topics such as program assessment, professionalization, and interdisciplinary collaborations, and connections with creative writing. Its 17 chapters testify to WAC’s persistence, resilience, and impact in a dynamic educational landscape.

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Celebrating the Family

Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals

Elizabeth H. Pleck

Harvard University Press, 2000

Nostalgia for the imagined warm family gatherings of yesteryear has colored our understanding of family celebrations. Elizabeth Pleck examines family traditions over two centuries and finds a complicated process of change in the way Americans have celebrated holidays such as Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Chinese New Year, and Passover as well as the life cycle rituals of birth, coming of age, marriage, and death. By the early nineteenth century carnivalesque celebrations outside the home were becoming sentimental occasions that used consumer culture and displays of status and wealth to celebrate the idea of home and family. The 1960s saw the full emergence of a postsentimental approach to holiday celebration, which takes place outside as often as inside the home, and recognizes changes in the family and women's roles, as well as the growth of ethnic group consciousness.

This multicultural, comparative history of American family celebration, rich in detail and spiced with telling anecdotes and illustrations and a keen sense of irony, offers insight into the significance of ethnicity and consumer culture in shaping what people regard as the most memorable moments of family life.

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Making Shabbat

Celebrating and Learning at American Jewish Summer Camps

Joseph Reimer

Brandeis University Press, 2022

An accessible and engaging treatment of the experience of Jewish summer camps.

This book tells the story of how Jewish camps have emerged as creators of positive spiritual experiences for Jewish youth in North America. When Jewish camps began at the dawn of the twentieth century, their leaders had little interest in creating Jewish spiritual experiences for their campers. Yet over the course of the past century, Jewish camps have gradually moved into providing primal Jewish experiences that diverse campers can enjoy, parents appreciate, and alumni fondly recall. Making Shabbat Real explores how Shabbat at camp became the focal point for these primal Jewish experiences, providing an interesting perspective on changing approaches to Jewish education and identity in North America.

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Passion for Peonies

Celebrating the Culture and Conservation of Nichols Arboretum's Beloved Flower

David Michener and Robert Grese, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2020

There’s no more breathtaking signal of summer’s onset than the blooming of peonies. Stunningly beautiful and relatively easy to grow, peonies are a favorite flower everywhere they can be cultivated and for good reason: the heady fragrances and enchanting colors of a peony-rich display create an immersive experience that has enamored generations of garden lovers across the world. This passion is on full display each June at the historic Peony Garden of the University of Michigan’s Nichols Arboretum.

Originally planted in 1922, the Nichols Arboretum Peony Garden now boasts North America’s largest public collection of heirloom herbaceous peonies. The Peony Garden has become a sacred space for the Ann Arbor community, a not-to-be-missed sensation when it erupts each season, as the Ann Arbor Observer once wrote, in “a riot of color, of crimson, rose and shell pink intermingled with fluffy pompoms of creamy white.” The rather short period of peak bloom—about two fleeting weeks each year—only seems to intensify the garden’s appeal, drawing thousands of visitors annually to this spectacular “living museum” on campus that showcases upwards of 10,000 blossoms.

Richly illustrated with hundreds of striking color photos, Passion for Peonies collects twenty short essays that celebrate the story of the Nichols Arboretum Peony Garden as well as the rich social history of peony gardening that it is an integral part of. Together these pieces comprise a love letter both to a magical public space at the University of Michigan and to the broader history and culture of peony gardening. The book will appeal to readers interested in the University of Michigan, the history of public gardens, and of course peonies!

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Thirty-three Years, Thirty-three Works

Celebrating the Contributions of F.E. Abernethy, Texas Folklore Society Secretary-Editor, 1971-2004

Kenneth L. Untiedt

University of North Texas Press, 2016

Wide Awake in the Windy City

Celebrating a Century of Excellence at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management

Matt Golosinski

Northwestern University Press, 2008

In Wide Awake in the Windy City, Matt Golosinski traces the century-long ascent of the Kellogg School of Management, detailing its influence on marketing and its evolution as a globally renowned general management force. The story contextualizes the school's strategic decisions and brings to life some of its most important catalysts — deans, professors, students, and business practitioners.

The school historically turned disadvantage to opportunity, finding innovative ways to remain in the vanguard of management education. At every turn, this journey involved the vision of extraordinary people who, against the odds, created an enduring example of educational excellence.

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