Anne Wetzell Armstrong adored her adopted hometown. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, she moved with her family to the “West End” (Fort Sanders) area of Knoxville, Tennessee, in the 1880s, a pivotal decade for a city just getting past the trauma of the Civil War and becoming an economically diverse and culturally cosmopolitan center. Author of The Seas of God (1915), set in a thinly disguised Knoxville (called “Kingsville”), Armstrong was privileged, unconventional, and modern. She was divorced (she later married an Armstrong of Knoxville’s Bleak House), a single mother, and worked—not only as a teacher at Knoxville Girls High School but also in personnel with National City Company of New York and in industrial relations at Eastman Kodak. Her second novel, This Day and Time (1930), is regarded as the first fictional work to treat Appalachia realistically.
Journalist John Gunther’s 1946 description of Knoxville as the “ugliest city I ever saw in America” served as the impetus for Armstrong to pen a memoir of a city she remembered quite differently. Sophisticated and witty, Of Time and Knoxville provides lively, sometimes scandalous sketches of such well-known Knoxville figures as Lizzie Crozier French, Armstrong’s mentor and a leader in the woman’s suffrage movement; Perez Dickinson, businessman and owner of the socially popular Island Home farm (and cousin of Emily Dickinson); and Mary Boyce Temple, clubwoman, philanthropist, and socialite, whose home is preserved as the last extant single-family residence in downtown Knoxville. Complemented by Linda Behrend’s excellent introduction and meticulous annotations, this distinctive memoir also delivers an unusual picture of Knoxville’s beloved Market Square and vividly depicts fin de siècle Knoxville, with its great food at hotel restaurants and lively events at dance halls. Armstrong also details the tragic Flat Creek train wreck of 1889, which seriously injured her own father and led to his death five years later. Of Time and Knoxville is a must-read for lovers of Knoxville, Victorian America, women’s history, and memoir.
Once upon a time in Texas...there were liberal activists of various stripes who sought to make the state more tolerant and more tolerable. David Richards was one of them. In this fast-paced, often humorous memoir, he remembers the players, the strategy sessions, the legal and political battles, and the wins and losses that brought significant gains in civil rights, voter rights, labor law, and civil liberties to the people of Texas from the 1950s to the 1990s.
In his work as a lawyer, Richards was involved in cases covering voters' rights, school finance reform, and a myriad of civil liberties and free speech cases. In telling these stories, he vividly evokes the "glory days" of Austin liberalism, when a who's who of Texas activists plotted strategy at watering holes such as Scholz Garden and the Armadillo World Headquarters. Likewise, he offers vivid portraits of liberal politicians from Ralph Yarborough to Ann Richards (his former wife), progressive journalists such as Molly Ivins and the Texas Observer staff, and the hippies, hellraisers, and musicians who all challenged Texas's conservative status quo.
Fun and innovative exercises and prompts for creative writing students
Once Upon a Time in the Twenty-First Century: Unexpected Exercises in Creative Writing is a unique creative writing text that will appeal to a wide range of readers and writers—from grade nine through college and beyond. Successful creative writers from numerous genres constructed these exercises, including poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction to one-act plays, song lyrics, genre fiction, travel guides, comics and beyond. The exercises use a broad range of creative approaches, aesthetics, and voices, all with an emphasis on demystifying the writing process and having fun.
Editor Robin Behn has divided the book into three writing sections: Genres and Forms, Sources and Methods, and Style and Subject. In each section, Behn offers a brief introduction which explains how to get started and specific ways to develop one’s writing. Each introduction is followed by extensive exercises that draw on literature from classic to contemporary, as well as other art forms and popular culture. Examples range from Flannery O’Connor and Langston Hughes to Allen Ginsberg and Gertrude Stein, from Jamaica Kincaid and James Joyce to Arlo Guthrie and Harryette Mullen. Integrated within the exercises are apt examples of student writings that have emerged from actual use of the exercises in both the classroom and in writing groups. The book concludes with general advice and direction on how to get published.
Based on years of hands-on experiences in the teaching of creative writing in high schools, colleges, and after-school writing clubs, this volume of exercises offers inestimable value to students and teachers in the traditional classroom, as well as a growing number of homeschoolers, those who are part of a writing club or group, and independent writers and learners of all ages.
Abortion, affirmative action, the "right to die," pornography and free speech, homosexuality and sex discrimination: as eagerly as the Supreme Court's rulings on these hot issues are awaited and as intently as they're studied, they never seem to settle anything once and for all. But something is settled in the process--in the incremental approach--as Cass Sunstein shows us in this instructive book.
One of America's preeminent constitutional scholars, Sunstein mounts a defense of the most striking characteristic of modern constitutional law: the inclination to decide one case at a time. Examining various controversies, he shows how--and why--the Court has avoided broad rulings on issues from the legitimacy of affirmative action to the "right to die," and in doing so has fostered rather than foreclosed public debate on these difficult topics. He offers an original perspective on the right of free speech and the many novel questions raised by Congress's efforts to regulate violent and sexual materials on new media such as the Internet and cable television. And on the relationship between the Constitution and homosexuality and sex discrimination, he reveals how the Court has tried to ensure against second-class citizenship--and the public expression of contempt for anyone--while leaving a degree of flexibility to the political process.
One Case at a Time also lays out, and celebrates, the remarkable constellation of rights--involving both liberty and equality--that now commands a consensus in American law. An authoritative guide to the Supreme Court, the book offers a new understanding of the American Constitution, and of the relationship between democracy and constitutionalism, and between rights and self-government.
Hillis analyzes forms of ritual and fetishism made possible through second-generation virtual environments such as Second Life and the popular practice of using webcams to “lifecast” one’s life online twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Discussing how people create and identify with their electronic avatars, he shows how the customs of virtual-world chat reinforce modern consumer-based subjectivities, allowing individuals to both identify with and distance themselves from their characters. His consideration of web-cam cultures links the ritual of exposing one’s life online to a politics of visibility. Hillis argues that these new “rituals of transmission” are compelling because they provide a seemingly material trace of the actual person on the other side of the interface.
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