With twenty chapters from leading scholars in African American history, urban studies, architecture, women's studies, American studies, and city planning, "We Shall Independent Be " illuminates African Americans' efforts to claim space in American society despite often hostile resistance. As these essays attest, Black self-determination was central to the methods African Americans employed in their quest to establish a sense of permanence and place in the United States.

Contributors define space to include physical, social, and intellectual sites throughout the Northern and Southern regions of the United States, ranging from urban milieus to the suburbs and even to swamps and forests. They explore under-represented locations such as burial grounds, courtrooms, schools, and churches. Moreover, contributors demonstrate how Black consciousness and ideology challenged key concepts of American democracy - such as freedom, justice, citizenship, and equality - establishing African American space in social and intellectual areas.

Ultimately, "We Shall Independent Be " recovers the voices of African American men and women from the antebellum United States through the present and chronicles their quest to assert their right to a place in American society. By identifying, examining, and telling the stories of contested sites, this volume demonstrates the power of African American self-definition and agency in the process of staking a physical and ideological claim to public space

How to live with difference—not necessarily in peace, but with resilience, engagement, and a lack of vitriol—is a defining worry in America at this moment. The poets, fiction writers, and essayists (plus one graphic novelist) who contributed to Welcome to the Neighborhood don’t necessarily offer roadmaps to harmonious neighboring. Some of their narrators don’t even want to be neighbors. Maybe they grieve, or rage. Maybe they briefly find resolution or community. But they do approach the question of what it means to be neighbors, and how we should do it, with open minds and nuance.

The many diverse contributors give this collection a depth beyond easy answers. Their attentions to the theme of neighborliness as an ongoing evolution offer hope to readers: possible pathways for rediscovering community, even just by way of a shared wish for it. The result is an enormously rich resource for the classroom and for anyone interested in reflecting on what it means to be American today, and how place and community play a part.

Contributors include Leila Chatti, Rita Dove, Jonathan Escoffery, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Amina Gautier, Ross Gay, Mark Halliday, Joy Harjo, Edward Hirsch, Marie Howe, Sonya Larson, Dinty W. Moore, Robert Pinsky, Christine Schutt, and many more.

Held annually, the McCall, Idaho, winter carnival has become a modern tradition. A festival and celebration, it is also a source of community income and opportunity for shared community effort; a chance to display the town attractively to outsiders and to define and assert McCall's identity; and consequently, a source of disagreement among citizens over what their community is, how it should be presented, and what the carnival means.

Though rooted in the broad traditions of community festival, annual civic events, often sponsored by chambers of commerce, such as that in McCall, are as much expressions of popular culture and local commerce as of older traditions. Yet they become dynamic, newer community traditions, with artistic, informal, and social meanings and practices that make them forms of folklore as well as commoditized culture. Winter Carnival is the first volume in a new Utah State University Press series titled Ritual, Festival, and Celebration and edited by folklorist Jack Santino.

The lyceum movement gained momentum in the decades preceding the Civil War, presenting members with the opportunity to participate in literary life and engage with the issues of the day. While urban lyceums played host to a who’s who of nineteenth-century intellectual life, literary societies also cropped up in thousands of villages across the nation, acting as influential sites of learning, creativity, and community engagement. In rural New England, ordinary men and women, farmers and intelligentsia, selectmen and schoolchildren came together to write and perform poetry and witty parodies and debate a wide range of topics, from women’s rights and temperance to slavery, migration, and more.

Wit and Wisdom takes readers inside this long-forgotten tradition, providing new access to the vibrant voices, surprising talents, and understated humor on display on many a cold winter’s night. Having uncovered dozens of handwritten newspapers produced by village lyceums across Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts, Joan Newlon Radner proves that these close-knit groups offered a vital expression of the beliefs, ambitions, and resilience of rural New Englanders.

A number of years ago, Douglas Harper moved to northern New York to teach in a small college. Upon his arrival there his department chairman noted his eight-year-old Saab and said, "You'll be meeting Willie." Haper spent the next years establishing not only a working relationship but a friendship with Willie. In Working Knowledge, he introduces us to Willie, a mechanic and jack-of-all-trades. With this engaging and insightful profile—part biography, part ethnography, and part photo essay—Harper documents what Willie does and how he does it. Harper's dignified portrait captures a disappearing feature of modern life—the essential human factor in the world of work.