front cover of Figuration Never Died
Figuration Never Died
New York Painterly Painting, 1950–1970
Karen Wilkin
The Artist Book Foundation, 2020
By about 1950, forward-looking New York painting was seen as synonymous with abstraction, especially charged, gestural Abstract Expressionism. But there was also a strong group of dissenters: artists, all born in the 1920s and many of them students of Hans Hofmann, who never lost their enthusiasm for recognizable imagery, without rejecting Abstract Expressionism’s love of malleable oil paint. Although most of them began as abstract artists, they all evolved into painters working from observation, using a fluid, urgent touch to translate their perceptions into eloquent, highly individualized visual languages, almost always informed by the hand; that is, unlike the Color Field and Minimalist artists, these artists remained, for the most part, “painterly” painters. In light of their important contributions to twentieth-century American art, The Artist Book Foundation presents the catalogue for the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center's eponymous 2020 exhibition, Figuration Never Died: New York Painterly Painting, 1950–1970. These rebellious artists include Lois Dodd, Jane Freilicher, Paul Georges, Grace Hartigan, Wolf Kahn, Alex Katz, Albert Kresch, Robert de Niro Sr., Paul Resika, and Anne Tabachnick. The compelling figurative work they made between about 1950 and 1970, in contrast to the prevailing Abstract Expressionism of the time, constitutes a significant chapter in the history of recent American Modernism. Their work not only greatly expands our conception of the story of New York painting, but it also presages and contextualizes today’s multiplicity of artistic concepts and processes. Given both the aesthetic diversity of today’s New York art world and the dependence of many younger artists on digital media or the appearance of digital media, it seems an appropriate moment to reconsider the work of these daring pioneers, as both precursor and opposition to current norms. It is especially important to do this now, while some of these artists are still alive.
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Figures of Time
Affect and the Television of Preemption
Toni Pape
Duke University Press, 2019
Many contemporary television series from Modern Family to How to Get Away with Murder open an episode or season with a conflict and then go back in time to show how that conflict came to be. In Figures of Time Toni Pape examines these narratives, showing how these leaps in time create aesthetic experiences of time that attune their audiences to the political doctrine of preemption—a logic that justifies preemptive action to nullify a perceived future threat. Examining questions of temporality in Life on Mars, the political ramifications of living under the auspices of a catastrophic future in FlashForward, and how Damages disrupts the logic of preemption, Pape shows how television helps shift political culture away from a model of rational deliberation and representation toward a politics of preemption and conformity. Exposing the mechanisms through which television supports a fear-based politics, Pape contends, will allow for the rechanneling of television's affective force into building a more productive and positive politics.
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Filibustering
A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate
Gregory Koger
University of Chicago Press, 2010

In the modern Congress, one of the highest hurdles for major bills or nominations is gaining the sixty votes necessary to shut off a filibuster in the Senate.  But this wasn’t always the case. Both citizens and scholars tend to think of the legislative process as a game played by the rules in which votes are the critical commodity—the side that has the most votes wins. In this comprehensive volume,Gregory Koger shows, on the contrary, that filibustering is a game with slippery rules in which legislators who think fast and try hard can triumph over superior numbers.

Filibustering explains how and why obstruction has been institutionalized in the U.S. Senate over the last fifty years, and how this transformation affects politics and policymaking. Koger also traces the lively history of filibustering in the U.S. House during the nineteenth century and measures the effects of filibustering—bills killed, compromises struck, and new issues raised by obstruction. Unparalleled in the depth of its theory and its combination of historical and political analysis, Filibustering will be the definitive study of its subject for years to come.

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Filibusters and Expansionists
Jeffersonian Manifest Destiny, 1800-1821
Frank L. Owsley
University of Alabama Press, 2004

Demonstrates the passionate interest the Jeffersonian presidents had in wresting land from less powerful foes and expanding Jefferson’s “empire of liberty”

The first two decades of the 19th century found many Americans eager to move away from the crowded eastern seaboard and into new areas where their goals of landownership might be realized. Such movement was encouraged by Presidents Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—collectively known as the Jeffersonians—who believed that the country's destiny was to have total control over the entire North American continent. Migration patterns during this time changed the country considerably and included the roots of the slavery controversy that ultimately led to the Civil War. By the end of the period, although expansionists had not succeeded in moving into British Canada, they had obtained command of large areas from the Spanish South and Southwest, including acreage previously controlled by Native Americans.
 
Utilizing memoirs, diaries, biographies, newspapers, and vast amounts of both foreign and domestic correspondence, Frank Lawrence Owsley Jr. and Gene A. Smith reveal an insider’s view of the filibusters and expansionists, the colorful—if not sometimes nefarious—characters on the front line of the United States’s land grab. Owsley and Smith describe in detail the actions and characters involving both the successful and the unsuccessful efforts to expand the United States during this period—as well as the outspoken opposition to expansion, found primarily among the Federalists in the Northeast.
 

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Filipinos Represent
DJs, Racial Authenticity, and the Hip-hop Nation
Antonio T. Tiongson Jr.
University of Minnesota Press, 2013

The “Hip-hop Nation” has been scouted, staked out, and settled by journalists and scholars alike. Antonio T. Tiongson Jr. steps into this well-mapped territory with questions aimed at interrogating how nation is conceptualized within the context of hip-hop. What happens, Tiongson asks, to notions of authenticity based on hip-hop’s apparent blackness when Filipino youth make hip-hop their own?

Tiongson draws on interviews with Bay Area–based Filipino American DJs to explore the authenticating strategies they rely on to carve out a niche within DJ culture. He shows how Filipino American youth involvement in DJing reconfigures the normal boundaries of Filipinoness predicated on nostalgia and cultural links with an idealized homeland. Filipinos Represent makes the case that while the engagement of Filipino youth with DJ culture speaks to the broadening racial scope of hip-hop—and of what it means to be Filipino—such involvement is also problematic in that it upholds deracialized accounts of hip-hop and renders difference benign.

Looking at the ways in which Filipino DJs legitimize their place in an expressive form historically associated with African Americans, Tiongson examines what these complex forms of identification reveal about the contours and trajectory of contemporary U.S. racial formations and discourses in the post–civil rights era.

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Fill 'er Up
The Glory Days of Wisconsin Gas Stations
Jim Draeger
Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Step back to the day when a visit to the gas station meant service with a smile, a wash of the windshield, and the cheerful question, "Fill 'er up?" Since their unremarkable beginnings as cheap shacks and curbside pumps at the dawn of the automobile age, gas stations have taken many forms and worn many guises: castles, cottages and teepees, Art Deco and Streamline Moderne, clad with wood, stucco, or gleaming porcelain in seemingly infinite variety.
 
The companion volume to the Wisconsin Public Television documentary of the same name, Fill 'er Up: The Glory Days of Wisconsin Gas Stations visits 60 Wisconsin gas stations that are still standing today and chronicles the history of these humble yet ubiquitous buildings. The book tells the larger story of the gas station's place in automobile culture and its evolution in tandem with American history, as well as the stories of the individuals influenced by the gas stations in their lives.
 
Fill 'er Up provides a glimpse into the glory days of gas stations, when full service and free oil changes were the rule and the local station was a gathering place for neighbors. More importantly, Fill 'er Up links the past and the present, showing why gas stations should be preserved and envisioning what place these historic structures can have in the 21st century and beyond.
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Filling the Ark
Animal Welfare in Disasters
Leslie Irvine
Temple University Press, 2009

When disasters strike, people are not the only victims. Hurricane Katrina raised public attention about how disasters affect dogs, cats, and other animals considered members of the human family. In this short but powerful book, noted sociologist Leslie Irvine goes beyond Katrina to examine how disasters like oil spills, fires, and other calamities affect various animal populations—on factory farms, in research facilities, and in the wild.

Filling the Ark argues that humans cause most of the risks faced by animals and urges for better decisions about the treatment of animals in disasters. Furthermore, it makes a broad appeal for the ethical necessity of better planning to keep animals out of jeopardy. Irvine not only offers policy recommendations and practical advice for evacuating animals, she also makes a strong case for rethinking our use of animals, suggesting ways to create more secure conditions.

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Film and Television After 9/11
Edited by Wheeler Winston Dixon
Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

In Film and Television After 9/11, editor Wheeler Winston Dixon and eleven other distinguished film scholars discuss the production, reception, and distribution of Hollywood and foreign films after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and examine how moviemaking has changed to reflect the new world climate.

While some contemporary films offer escapism, much of mainstream American cinema since 9/11 is centered on the desire for a “just war” in which military reprisals and escalation of warfare appear to be both inevitable and justified. Films of 2002 such as Black Hawk Down, Collateral Damage, and We Were Soldiers demonstrate a renewed audience appetite for narratives of conflict, reminiscent of the wave of filmmaking that surrounded American involvement in World War II.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon galvanized the American public initially, yet film critics wonder how this will play out over time. Film and Television After 9/11 is the first book to provide original insights into topics ranging from the international reception of post-9/11 American cinema, re-viewing films of our shared cinematic past in light of the attacks, and exploring parallels between post-9/11 cinema and World War II-era productions.

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Film and the American Moral Vision of Nature
Theodore Roosevelt to Walt Disney
Ronald B. Tobias
Michigan State University Press, 2011
With his square, bulldoggish stature, signature rimless glasses, and inimitable smile—part grimace, part snarl—Theodore Roosevelt was an unforgettable figure, imprinted on the American memory through photographs, the chiseled face of Mount Rushmore, and, especially, film. At once a hunter, explorer, naturalist, woodsman, and rancher, Roosevelt was the quintessential frontiersman, a man who believed that only nature could truly test and prove the worth of man. A documentary he made about his 1909 African safari embodied aggressive ideas of masculinity, power, racial superiority, and the connection between nature and manifest destiny. These ideas have since been reinforced by others—Jesse “Buff alo” Jones, Paul Rainey, Martin and Osa Johnson, and Walt Disney. Using Roosevelt as a starting point, filmmaker and scholar Ronald Tobias traces the evolution of American attitudes toward nature, attitudes that remain, to this day, remarkably conflicted, complex, and instilled with dreams of empire.
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Film Blackness
American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film
Michael Boyce Gillespie
Duke University Press, 2016
In Film Blackness Michael Boyce Gillespie shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, a genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race. Gillespie challenges expectations that black film can or should represent the reality of black life or provide answers to social problems. Instead, he frames black film alongside literature, music, art, photography, and new media, treating it as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture. Gillespie discusses the racial grotesque in Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin (1975), black performativity in Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street (1989), blackness and noir in Bill Duke's Deep Cover (1992), and how place and desire impact blackness in Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy (2008). Considering how each film represents a distinct conception of the relationship between race and cinema, Gillespie recasts the idea of black film and poses new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, and intertextuality.
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Film Nation
Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, Revised Edition
Robert Burgoyne
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Events of the past decade have dramatically rewritten the American national narrative, bringing to light an alternate history of nation, marked since the country’s origins by competing geopolitical interests, by mobility and migration, and by contending ethnic and racial groups.
 
In this revised and expanded edition of Film Nation, Robert Burgoyne analyzes films that give shape to the counternarrative that has emerged since 9/11—one that challenges the traditional myths of the American nation-state. The films examined here, Burgoyne argues, reveal the hidden underlayers of nation, from the first interaction between Europeans and Native Americans (The New World), to the clash of ethnic groups in nineteenth-century New York (Gangs of New York), to the haunting persistence of war in the national imagination (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima) and the impact of the events of 9/11 on American identity (United 93 and World Trade Center).
 
Film Nation provides innovative readings of attempts by such directors as Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, and Oliver Stone to visualize historical events that have acquired a mythical aura in order to open up the past to the contemporary moment.
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Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia
Dixon, Wheeler Winston
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Noir. A shadow looms. The blow, a sharp surprise. Waking and sleeping, the fear is with us and cannot be contained. Paranoia.

Wheeler Winston Dixon's comprehensive work engages readers in an overview of noir and fatalist film from the mid-twentieth century to the present, ending with a discussion of television, the Internet, and dominant commercial cinema. Beginning with the 1940s classics, Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia moves to the "Red Scare" and other ominous expressions of the 1950s that contradicted an American split-level dream of safety and security. The dark cinema of the 1960s hosted films that reflected the tensions of a society facing a new and, to some, menacing era of social expression. From smaller studio work to the vibrating pulse of today's "click and kill" video games, Dixon boldly addresses the noir artistry that keeps audiences in an ever-consumptive stupor.

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Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity
Edward Dimendberg
Harvard University Press, 2004

Film noir remains one of the most enduring legacies of 1940s and ’50s Hollywood. Populated by double-crossing, unsavory characters, this pioneering film style explored a shadow side of American life during a period of tremendous prosperity and optimism. Edward Dimendberg compellingly demonstrates how film noir is preoccupied with modernity—particularly the urban landscape.

The originality of Dimendberg’s approach lies in his examining these films in tandem with historical developments in architecture, city planning, and modern communications systems. He confirms that noir is not simply a reflection of modernity but a virtual continuation of the spaces of the metropolis. He convincingly shows that Hollywood’s dark thrillers of the postwar decades were determined by the same forces that shaped the city itself.

Exploring classic examples of film noir such as The Asphalt Jungle, Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Naked City alongside many lesser-known works, Dimendberg masterfully interweaves film history and urban history while perceptively analyzing works by Raymond Chandler, Edward Hopper, Siegfried Kracauer, and Henri Lefebvre. A bold intervention in cultural studies and a major contribution to film history, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity will provoke debate by cinema scholars, urban historians, and students of modern culture—and will captivate admirers of a vital period in American cinema.

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Film Serials and the American Cinema, 1910-1940
Operational Detection
Ilka Brasch
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
Before the advent of television, cinema offered serialized films as a source of weekly entertainment. This book traces the history from the days of silent screen heroines to the sound era's daring adventure serials, unearthing a thriving film culture beyond the self-contained feature. Through extensive archival research, Ilka Brasch details the aesthetic appeals of film serials within their context of marketing and exhibition, looking at how they adapted the pleasures of a flourishing crime fiction culture to both serial visual culture and the affordances of the media-modernity of the early 20th century. The study furthermore traces the relationship of film serials to the broadcast models of radio and television and thereby shows how film serials introduced modes of storytelling that informedpopular culture even beyond the serial's demise.
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Filmed Thought
Cinema as Reflective Form
Robert B. Pippin
University of Chicago Press, 2020
With the rise of review sites and social media, films today, as soon as they are shown, immediately become the topic of debates on their merits not only as entertainment, but also as serious forms of artistic expression. Philosopher Robert B. Pippin, however, wants us to consider a more radical proposition: film as thought, as a reflective form. Pippin explores this idea through a series of perceptive analyses of cinematic masterpieces, revealing how films can illuminate, in a concrete manner, core features and problems of shared human life.

Filmed Thought examines questions of morality in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, goodness and naïveté in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, love and fantasy in Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, politics and society in Polanski’s Chinatown and Malick’s The Thin Red Line, and self-understanding and understanding others in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place and in the Dardennes brothers' oeuvre. In each reading, Pippin pays close attention to what makes these films exceptional as technical works of art (paying special attention to the role of cinematic irony) and as intellectual and philosophical achievements. Throughout, he shows how films offer a view of basic problems of human agency from the inside and allow viewers to think with and through them. Captivating and insightful, Filmed Thought shows us what it means to take cinema seriously not just as art, but as thought, and how this medium provides a singular form of reflection on what it is to be human.
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Filming Difference
Actors, Directors, Producers, and Writers on Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Film
Edited by Daniel Bernardi
University of Texas Press, 2009

Addressing representation and identity in a variety of production styles and genres, including experimental film and documentary, independent and mainstream film, and television drama, Filming Difference poses fundamental questions about the ways in which the art and craft of filmmaking force creative people to confront stereotypes and examine their own identities while representing the complexities of their subjects.

Selections range from C. A. Griffith's "Del Otro Lado: Border Crossings, Disappearing Souls, and Other Transgressions" and Celine Perreñas Shimizu's "Pain and Pleasure in the Flesh of Machiko Saito's Experimental Movies" to Christopher Bradley's "I Saw You Naked: 'Hard' Acting in 'Gay' Movies," along with Kevin Sandler's interview with Paris Barclay, Yuri Makino's interview with Chris Eyre, and many other perspectives on the implications of film production, writing, producing, and acting.

Technical aspects of the craft are considered as well, including how contributors to filmmaking plan and design films and episodic television that feature difference, and how the tools of cinema—such as cinematography and lighting—influence portrayals of gender, race, and sexuality. The struggle between economic pressures and the desire to produce thought-provoking, socially conscious stories forms another core issue raised in Filming Difference. Speaking with critical rigor and creative experience, the contributors to this collection communicate the power of their media.

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The Films of Bill Morrison
Aesthetics of the Archive
Edited by Bernd Herzogenrath
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Avant-garde filmmaker Bill Morrison has been making films that combine archival footage and contemporary music for decades, and he has recently begun to receive substantial recognition: he was the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, and his 2002 film Decasia was selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. This is the first book-length study of Morrison's work, covering the whole of his career. It gathers specialists throughout film studies to explore Morrison's "aesthetics of the archive"-his creative play with archival footage and his focus on the materiality of the medium of film.
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The Final Battles of the Petersburg Campaign
Breaking the Backbone of the Rebellion
A. Wilson Greene
University of Tennessee Press
The Petersburg Campaign was what finally did it. After months of relentless conflict throughout 1864, the Confederate army led by General Robert E. Lee holed up in the Virginia city of Petersburg as Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant's vastly superior forces lurked nearby. The brutal fighting that took place around the city during 1864 and into 1865 decimated both armies as Grant used his manpower advantage to repeatedly smash the Confederate lines, a tactic that eventually resulted in the decisive breakthrough that ultimately doomed the Confederacy. The breakthrough and the events that led up to it are the subject of A. Wilson Greene's groundbreaking book The Final Battles of the Petersburg Campaign, a significant revision of a much-praised work first published in 2000.

Surprisingly, despite Petersburg's decisive importance to the war's outcome, the campaign has received scant attention from historians.  Greene's book, with its incisive analysis and compelling narrative, changes this, offering readers a rich account of the personalities and strategies that shaped the final phase of the fighting.

Greene's ultimate focus on the climatic engagements of April 2, 1865, the day that Confederate control of Richmond and Petersburg was effectively ended.  The book tells this story from the perspectives of the two army groups that clashed on that day:  the Union Sixth Corps and the Confederate Third Corps. But Greene does more than just recount the military tactics at Petersburg; he also connects the reader intimately with how the war affected society and spotlights the soldiers, both officers and enlisted men, whose experiences defined the outcome. Thanks to his extensive research and consultation of rare source materials, Greene gives readers a vibrant perspective on the campaign that broke the Confederate spirit once and for all.

A. Wilson Greene is president of Pamplin Historical Park & The National Museum of the Civil War Soldier near Petersburg, Virginia. He also has taught at Mary Washington College and worked for sixteen years with the National Park Service.

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Final Light
The Life and Art of V. Douglas Snow
Frank McEntire
University of Utah Press, 2013
The motivating force behind Final Light was to document Snow’s “visual language”—forged early in his career from abstract expressionist influences typified by Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline, among others. Final Light represents the first book to examine the legacy of this significant Utah educator and painter. Renowned scholars, writers, and activists who are familiar with Snow’s work—many of whom were his close friends—recount personal experiences with the artist and delve into his motives, methods, and reputation. The volume not only offers their commentaries, but also contains more than 80 exquisite full-color reproductions of Snow’s paintings, dating from the 1950s until 2009, when he died in an auto accident at the age of eighty-two.

A nationally recognized artist, Snow chose to stay in Utah where, when not teaching at the University of Utah, he roamed the southern Utah desert gaining inspiration from the red rock formations, especially the Cockscomb outside his studio near Capitol Reef National Park. Snow said, “Every artist probably wonders if he or she made the right decision to dig in to a certain place.” He dug into the landscape in and around Southern Utah and never regretted it. Just as “Tennessee Williams’s South, William Faulkner’s Mississippi, [or] John Steinbeck’s West Coast, formed their work,” the desert lands of the Colorado Plateau formed Snow’s. Their sense of place, “without provincialism,” said Snow “is what gives their art its enduring power.” Final Light will appeal to art historians and art lovers, especially those interested in abstract expressionism and the art of Utah, the West, and the Southwest.

Chosen by 15 Bytes, Utah's art magazine, as the most exceptional art book for 2014.  
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The Final Mission
A Boy, a Pilot, and a World at War
Elizabeth Hoban and Lt. Col. Henry Supchak
Westholme Publishing, 2012

The Inspiring True Story of a World War II Bomber Pilot Who Saved an Austrian Village—and the Incredible Search Across a Lifetime to Repay That Debt

In July 1944, Lt. Henry Supchak was flying his second-to-last mission over Germany when his B-17 bomber, Priority Gal, was hit by antiaircraft fire, disabling two engines and wounding him in the thigh. He attempted to reach neutral Switzerland, but was forced instead to order his eight crewmen to bail out over Austria. As Supchak prepared to abandon his aircraft he saw that it was on a collision course with an Alpine village. He instinctively got back into his seat, adjusted the controls, and barely escaped before the plane exploded at the base of a mountain. He parachuted into a pasture where a shepherd boy and his aunt stared in disbelief at this “man who fell from the sky.” Almost immediately, German infantry surrounded the pilot and took him away to solitary confinement. Although slightly burned by the exploding aircraft, the boy managed to find out where the wounded pilot was being held and snuck food and water to him before Supchak and his crew were taken away to a notorious prison camp for the rest of the war.

Liberated by Patton’s Third Army in April 1945, Supchak remained in the air force after World War II and even advised Gregory Peck during the filming of Twelve O’Clock High. But he carried deep scars from his war experience. Plagued by flashbacks, Supchak attempted to find closure. Opening up to his family and others about his aircombat missions and internment failed to rid him of the nagging dreams as he had hoped. But an inspired quest to find his former crew members before they all passed away put the pilot on a path of peace. A world away, an Austrian entrepreneur was searching for Supchak, the enemy pilot he had seen fall from the sky as a boy and whom he had never forgotten. Despite incredible odds, the pilot and the boy were able to meet again at the spot where Priority Gal had gone down, in a magical, miraculous reunion of closure. Beautifully written with honesty and emotion, The Final Mission: A Boy, a Pilot, and a World at War is a gripping and uplifting story of forgiveness, reconciliation, and healing from the devastation of war.

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The Final Mission of Bottoms Up
A World War II Pilot's Story
Dennis R. Okerstrom
University of Missouri Press, 2011
 
On November 18, 1944, the end of the war in Europe finally in sight, American copilot Lieutenant Lee Lamar struggled alongside pilot Randall Darden to keep Bottoms Up, their B-24J Liberator, in the air. They and their crew of eight young men had believed the intelligence officer who, at the predawn briefing at their base in southern Italy, had confided that their mission that day would be a milk run. But that twenty-first mission out of Italy would be their last.
            Bottoms Up was staggered by an antiaircraft shell that sent it plunging three miles earthward, the pilots recovering control at just 5,000 feet. With two engines out, they tried to make it to a tiny strip on a British-held island in the Adriatic Sea and in desperation threw out everything not essential to flight: machine guns, belts of ammunition, flak jackets. But over Pula, in what is now Croatia, they were once more hit by German fire, and the focus quickly became escaping the doomed bomber. Seemingly unable to extricate himself, Lamar all but surrendered to death before fortuitously bailing out. He was captured the next day and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner at a stalag on the Baltic Sea, suffering the deprivations of little food and heat in Europe’s coldest winter in a century. He never saw most of his crew again.
            Then, in 2006, more than sixty years after these life-changing experiences, Lamar received an email from Croatian archaeologist Luka Bekic, who had discovered the wreckage of Bottoms Up. A veteran of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Bekic felt compelled to find out the crew’s identities and fates. Lee Lamar, a boy from a hardscrabble farm in rural northwestern Missouri, had gone to college on the GI Bill, become a civil engineer, gotten married, and raised a family. Yet, for all the opportunity that stemmed from his wartime service, part of him was lost. The prohibition on asking prisoners of war their memories during the repatriation process prevented him from reconciling himself to the events of that November day. That changed when, nearly a year after being contacted by Bekic, Lamar visited the site, hoping to gain closure, and met the Croatian Partisans who had helped some members of his crew escape.
            In this absorbing, alternating account of World War II and its aftermath, Dennis R. Okerstrom chronicles, through Lee Lamar’s experiences, the Great Depression generation who went on to fight in the most expensive war in history. This is the story of the young men who flew Bottoms Up on her final mission, of Lamar’s trip back to the scene of his recurring nightmare, and of a remarkable convergence of international courage, perseverance, and friendship. 
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Final Negotiations
A Story of Love, Loss, and Chronic Illness
Carolyn Ellis
Temple University Press, 2018
In this revised and expanded edition of Final Negotiations—a personal account of caring for her partner, Gene Weinstein, and then coping with losing him to chronic emphysema— Ellis reflects back on her experiences as a caregiver, focusing on identity, vulnerability, emotions, and the aging process of an engaged academic. Now, decades later, she reconsiders who she was then, and how she has continued to be affected both by these events and by writing about them. She contemplates how she might act, think, and feel if she were going through the caregiving process again, now.

Taking an autoethnographic perspective, Ellis focuses on her feeling and thinking self in relationships, narrating particular lived experiences that offer a gateway into understanding interpersonal and cultural life. In her new epilogue, “From New Endings to New Beginnings,” Ellis describes her changed identity and how Final Negotiations informs her life and her understanding of how she and her current partner grow older together. She hopes her book provides companionship and comfort to readers who also will suffer loss in their lives.
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The Final Season
The Perseverance of Pat Summitt
Maria Cornelius
University of Tennessee Press, 2016
With 1,098 wins and eight national championships, Lady Vol Coach Pat Summitt has left a remarkable legacy of perseverance, leadership, and passion for the game—but her victories on the court aren’t the only legacy she has left in her wake.

Since the beginning of her career as Lady Vol head coach at twenty-two years old, Pat Head Summitt effectively established the University of Tennessee Lady Vols as the top women’s athletics program in the nation. The winningest coach in the history of NCAA basketball, Summitt overcame one obstacle after another on the road to every victory, but it is the lives she has impacted along the way that tell the story of her true legacy. Forever a role model for young women, expecting nothing but the best from her players and from those around her, her legacy has never faltered—not even during her final season as head coach, when she faced her fiercest adversary yet: the diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

In The Final Season: The Perseverance of Pat Summitt, Maria M. Cornelius tells the story of her final coaching season through the eyes of those who know her best, from players to support staff to Summitt’s closest friends and advisors. Beginning with the diagnosis that shook the Tennessee community in the summer of 2011 and continuing through to the final game of the 2011–12 season, The Final Season presents readers with a behind-the-scenes look at the conclusion of Summitt’s coaching career, detailing from the perspective of a sports writer how her diagnosis impacted her players and her staff as well as her fans.

With forewords by former Lady Vol Candace Parker and Swish Appeal editor Mike Robinson, The Final Season reveals how Summitt’s remarkable story of perseverance not only united a team of young women but also brought an entire sports following together, revealing an incredible support system that spanned far beyond Summitt’s Tennessee community. The coach’s determined spirit, selfless love, and sense of humor shine through the pages of Cornelius’s book, painting for readers the picture of a beloved leader and detailing the personal moments of defeat and triumph that make Summitt a true champion.
 
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Finally Statehood! Utah's Struggles, 1849-1896
Edward Leo Lyman
Signature Books, 2019
Utah’s quest for statehood lasted longer, involved more political intrigue, and garnered more national attention than any other US territory. While Utahns—especially the Mormon population—hoped statehood would grant them increased political autonomy, the several decades of refusal by church leadership to denounce polygamy stalled even the most carefully executed political schemes. Even without the albatross of polygamy, the territory presented a unique set of challenges. Lingering distrust toward the federal government blurred the lines separating church and state. LDS leaders considered themselves anointed by God to lead the government. Officials sent from Washington to dilute Mormon control found themselves in hostile, dangerous terrain.

Aware of the complexity of this fifty-year struggle, historian Edward Leo Lyman carefully traces the key figures, events, and cultural shifts leading to Utah’s admission to the Union. Utilizing an abundance of careful research, Finally Statehood! is a unique attempt to understand the state’s history on both a local and national level, with each political roadblock, religious conflict, and earnest attempt at compromise meticulously examined under the vantage of time.
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Finance in America
An Unfinished Story
Kevin R. Brine and Mary Poovey
University of Chicago Press, 2017
The economic crisis of 2008 led to an unprecedented focus on the world of high finance—and revealed it to be far more arcane and influential than most people could ever have imagined. Any hope of avoiding future crises, it’s clear, rest on understanding finance itself.
            To understand finance, however, we have to learn its history, and this book fills that need. Kevin R. Brine, an industry veteran, and Mary Poovey, an acclaimed historian, show that finance as we know it today emerged gradually in the late nineteenth century and only coalesced after World War II, becoming ever more complicated—and ever more central to the American economy. The authors explain the models, regulations, and institutions at the heart of modern finance and uncover the complex and sometimes surprising origins of its critical features, such as corporate accounting standards, the Federal Reserve System, risk management practices, and American Keynesian and New Classic monetary economics. This book sees finance through its highs and lows, from pre-Depression to post-Recession, exploring the myriad ways in which the practices of finance and the realities of the economy influenced one another through the years.
            A masterwork of collaboration, Finance in America lays bare the theories and practices that constitute finance, opening up the discussion of its role and risks to a broad range of scholars and citizens.
 
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Financial Aspects of the United States Pension System
Edited by Zvi Bodie and John B. Shoven
University of Chicago Press, 1984
This book provides valuable information and analysis to managers, policymakers, and investment counselors in the rapidly expanding field of pension funding. American workers, too, need answers and insights on how to invest their money and plan for their retirement. fifteen of America's leading financial analysts address such pressing questions as
-What is the current financial status of the elderly, and how vulnerable are they to inflation?
-What is the impact of inflation on the private pension system, and what are the effects of alternative indexing schemes?
-What roles can the social security system play in the provision of retirement income?
-What is the effect of the tax code and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) on corporate pension policy?
-How well funded are corporate pension plans, and is a firm's unfunded pension liability fully reflected in the market value of its common stock?
Many of the conclusions these experts reach contradict and challenge popular views, thus providing fertile ground for innovation in pension planning.
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Financial Basics
A Money-Management Guide for Students, 2nd Edition
Susan Knox
The Ohio State University Press, 2016
Students are confronted with major financial decisions as they enter college, and yet they have little experience with personal finance. Their decisions, if not well made, could adversely affect them throughout their lives. This book is meant to empower students at the beginning of their financial lives with basic, straightforward information on managing bank accounts, creating spending plans, determining how much they can afford to pay for college, making student-loan decisions, establishing a credit history, and other money-management options.
This 2nd edition updates changes in online banking, smartphone apps, credit cards, and student loans but retains basic financial information that ensures students won’t learn about money the hard way. A chapter for parents has been added so they can help their students become financially knowledgeable, and it includes advice for parents about making decisions related to college costs. In addition, a chapter for grandparents contains suggestions on how to help college-bound grandchildren—financially and in other ways—without endangering their own financial security. A basic investments chapter is included for first-time investors.
 
The intent of Financial Basics is to enhance student readers’ financial knowledge and provide money-management options for finding their own best way to become masters of their money.
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Financial Founding Fathers
The Men Who Made America Rich
Robert E. Wright and David J. Cowen
University of Chicago Press, 2006
When you think of the founding fathers, you think of men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin—exceptional minds and matchless statesmen who led the colonies to a seemingly impossible victory over the British and established the constitutional and legal framework for our democratic government. But the American Revolution was about far more than freedom and liberty. It was about economics as well. 

Robert E. Wright and David J. Cowen here chronicle how a different group of founding fathers forged the wealth and institutions necessary to transform the American colonies from a diffuse alliance of contending business interests into one cohesive economic superpower. From Alexander Hamilton to Andrew Jackson, the authors focus on the lives of nine Americans in particular—some famous, some unknown, others misunderstood, but all among our nation’s financial founding fathers. Such men were instrumental in creating and nurturing a financial system that drove economic growth in the nascent United States because they were quick to realize that wealth was as crucial as the Constitution in securing the blessings of liberty and promoting the general welfare. The astonishing economic development made possible by our financial founding fathers was indispensable to the preservation of national unity and of support for a government that was then still a profoundly radical and delicate political experiment.  

Grand in scope and vision, Financial Founding Fathers is an entertaining and inspiring history of the men who made America rich and steered her toward greatness.
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Financial Management for Libraries
William W. Sannwald
American Library Association, 2018

Presenting financial management principles and best practices applicable to both public and academic libraries, this comprehensive text elucidates a broad array of issues crucial for those entering a managerial position. Both thorough and straightforward, Sannwald's treatment

  • gives readers a solid grounding in the basics of accounting and finance, with an emphasis on applicability to library management and operations;
  • ties budgets and strategic planning to library vision, mission, goals, and objectives;
  • discusses the roles of stakeholders such as boards, governmental/municipal bodies, the university, and the community;
  • looks at a variety of funding sources, from tax revenue to gifts and donations, and presents sound strategies for including them when projecting income and expenses;
  • articulates and discusses the pros and cons of various budget strategies;
  • includes sample budgets and forms that can be customized as needed;
  • offers expert guidance on modifying budgets for windfalls and shortfalls;
  • explains operating ratios, fiscal benchmarking, and metrics, demonstrating how to use these to effectively create and manage a budget and assess the fiscal health of the library; and
  • advises on how to effectively prepare and present a budget and annual financial statements to a library's governing agency.
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Financial Markets and Financial Crises
Edited by R. Glenn Hubbard
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Warnings of the threat of an impending financial crisis are not new, but do we really know what constitutes an actual episode of crisis and how, once begun, it can be prevented from escalating into a full-blown economic collapse?

Using both historical and contemporary episodes of breakdowns in financial trade, contributors to this volume draw insights from theory and empirical data, from the experience of closed and open economies worldwide, and from detailed case studies. They explore the susceptibility of American corporations to economic downturns; the origins of banking panics; and the behavior of financial markets during periods of crisis. Sever papers specifically address the current thrift crisis—including a detailed analysis of the over 500 FSLIC-insured thrifts in the southeast—and seriously challenge the value of recent measures aimed at preventing future collapse in that industry. Government economists and policy makers, scholars of industry and banking, and many in the business community will find these timely papers an invaluable reference.
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Financial Missionaries to the World
The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930
Emily S. Rosenberg
Duke University Press, 2003
Winner of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize

Financial Missionaries to the World establishes the broad scope and significance of "dollar diplomacy"—the use of international lending and advising—to early-twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy. Combining diplomatic, economic, and cultural history, the distinguished historian Emily S. Rosenberg shows how private bank loans were extended to leverage the acceptance of American financial advisers by foreign governments. In an analysis striking in its relevance to contemporary debates over international loans, she reveals how a practice initially justified as a progressive means to extend “civilization” by promoting economic stability and progress became embroiled in controversy. Vocal critics at home and abroad charged that American loans and financial oversight constituted a new imperialism that fostered exploitation of less powerful nations. By the mid-1920s, Rosenberg explains, even early supporters of dollar diplomacy worried that by facilitating excessive borrowing, the practice might induce the very instability and default that it supposedly worked against.

"[A] major and superb contribution to the history of U.S. foreign relations. . . . [Emily S. Rosenberg] has opened up a whole new research field in international history."—Anders Stephanson, Journal of American History

"[A] landmark in the historiography of American foreign relations."—Melvyn P. Leffler, author of A Preponderence of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War

"Fascinating."—Christopher Clark, Times Literary Supplement

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Financial Missionaries to the World
The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900-1930
Emily S. Rosenberg
Harvard University Press, 1999

Recently, a volatile global economy has challenged the United States to rethink its financial policies toward economically troubled countries. Emily Rosenberg suggests that perplexing questions about how to standardize practices within the global financial system, and thereby strengthen market economies in unstable areas of the world, go back to the early decades of this century. Then, dollar diplomacy--the practice of extending private U.S. bank loans in exchange for financial supervision over other nations--provided America's major approach to stabilizing economies overseas and expanding its influence.

Policymakers, private bankers, and the members of the emerging profession of international economic advising cooperated in devising arrangements by which U.S. banks would extend foreign loans on the condition that the countries hire U.S. experts to revamp financial systems and exercise some supervision. Rosenberg demonstrates that these arrangements were not simply technical and shows how they became central to foreign policy debates during the 1920s, when increasingly vocal critics at home and abroad assailed dollar diplomacy as a new imperialism. She explores how loan-for-supervision arrangements interrelated with broad cultural notions of racial destiny, professional expertise, and the virtues of manliness. An innovative, interdisciplinary study, Financial Missionaries to the World illuminates the dilemmas of public/private cooperation in foreign economic policy and the incalculable consequences of exercising financial power in the global marketplace.

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Financialization Of Daily Life
Randy Martin
Temple University Press, 2002
While trillions of dollars came and went in the stock market boom of the 1990s, the image of "every man and woman a CEO" may turn out to be the era's lasting legacy. Business news, once reserved to specialized papers or sections of the larger news of the day, came to the forefront in cable television and in cultural images of how ordinary people, through the internet and other avenues could not only master their financial life, but move money and equity around with the ease of a financial titan. Financialization of Daily Life looks at how this transformation occurred, and how it is just now becoming a significant, and troubling, aspect of our political and cultural life.Randy Martin takes us through all of the aspects of our "financialization." He examines how the shift in economic life arose not only from changes in culture, but also from new policy priorities that emphasize controlling inflation over promoting growth. He offers a close reading of self-help literature that teaches parents how to rear financially literate children and to instruct adults in the fundamentals of fiscal management. He examines just what a society that treats financial investment as a national past time really looks like, and how that society is transforming the world.In a country rocked by scandals in accounting and banking, the identification ordinary citizens make with, and the risk with which they engage in, the stock market calls into question the very basis of our economic system. Randy Martin spells out in clear terms the implications our financial doings—and undoing—have for the way we organize our lives, and, especially, our money.
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Financing Anglo-American Trade
The House of Brown, 1800-1880
Edwin J. Perkins
Harvard University Press, 1975

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Financing Corporate Capital Formation
Edited by Benjamin M. Friedman
University of Chicago Press, 1986
Six leading economists examine the financing of corporate capital formation in the U.S. economy. In clear and nontechnical terms, their papers provide valuable information for economists and nonspecialists interested in such questions as why interest rates are so high, why corporate debt has accelerated in recent years, and how government debt affects private financial markets.

Addressing these questions, the contributors focus chiefly on three themes: the actual use of debt and equity financing by corporations in recent years; the factors that drive the financial markets' pricing of debt and equity securities; and the relationship between corporations' real investment decisions and their financial decisions. While some of the papers are primarily expository, others break new ground. Extending his previous work, Robert Taggart finds a closer relationship between corporate and government debt than has been supposed. Zvi Bodie, Alex Kane, and Robert McDonald conclude in their study that the volatility of interest rates under the Volcker regime has led to a rise in real interest rates because of investors' demand for a greater risk premium. All of the papers present empirical findings in a useful analytical framework.

For its new findings and for its expert overview of issues central to an understanding of the U.S. economy, Financing Corporate Capital Formation should be of both historical and practical interest to students of economics and practitioners in the corporate and financial community.
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Financing Low Income Communities
Julia Sass Rubin
Russell Sage Foundation, 2007
Access to capital and financial services is crucial for healthy communities.  However, many impoverished individuals and neighborhoods are routinely ignored by mainstream financial institutions.  This neglect led to the creation of community development financial institutions (CDFIs), which provide low-income communities with financial services and act as a conduit to conventional financial organizations and capital markets. Edited by Julia Sass Rubin, Financing Low-Income Communities brings together leading experts in the field to assess what we know about the challenges of bringing financial services and capital to poor communities, map out future lines of research, and propose policy reforms to make these efforts more effective. The contributors to Financing Low-Income Communities distill research on key topics related to community development finance. Daniel Schneider and Peter Tufano examine the obstacles that make saving and asset accumulation difficult for low-income households—such as the fact that tens of millions of low-income and minority adults don't have a bank account—and consider solutions, like making it easier for low-wage workers to enroll in 401(K) plans. Jeanne Hogarth, Jane Kolodinksy, and Marianne Hilgert review evidence showing that community-based financial education programs can be effective in changing families' saving and budgeting patterns.  Lisa Servon proposes strategies for addressing the challenges facing the microenterprise field in the United States.  Julia Sass Rubin discusses ways community loan and venture capital funds have adapted in response to the decreased availability of funding, and considers potential sources of new capital, such as state governments and public pension funds.  Marva Williams explores the evolution and recent performance of community development banks and credit unions.  Kathleen Engel and Patricia McCoy document the proliferation of predatory lenders, who market loans at onerous interest rates to financially vulnerable families and the devastating effects of such lending on communities—from increased crime to falling home values and lower tax revenues. Rachel Bratt reviews the policies and programs used to make rental and owned housing financially accessible.  Rob Hollister proposes a framework for evaluating the contributions of community development financial institutions. Despite the many accomplishments of CDFIs over the last four decades, changing political and economic conditions make it imperative that they adapt in order to survive.  Financing Low-Income Communities charts out new directions for public and private organizations which aim to end the financial exclusion of marginalized neighborhoods.
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Financing Medicaid
Federalism and the Growth of America's Health Care Safety Net
Shanna Rose
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Conventional wisdom holds that programs for the poor are vulnerable to instability and retrenchment. Medicaid, however, has grown into the nation’s largest intergovernmental grant program, accounting for nearly half of all federal funding to state and local governments. Medicaid’s generous open-ended federal matching grants have given governors a powerful incentive to mobilize on behalf of its maintenance and expansion, using methods ranging from lobbying and negotiation to creative financing mechanisms and waivers to maximize federal financial assistance. Perceiving federal retrenchment efforts as a threat to states’ finances, governors, through the powerful National Governors’ Association, have repeatedly worked together in bipartisan fashion to defend the program against cutbacks.

Financing Medicaidengagingly intertwines theory, historical narrative, and case studies, drawing on sources including archival materials from the National Governors’ Association and gubernatorial and presidential libraries, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data, the Congressional Record, and interviews.

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The Financing of Catastrophe Risk
Edited by Kenneth A. Froot
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Is it possible that the insurance and reinsurance industries cannot handle a major catastrophe? Ten years ago, the notion that the overall cost of a single catastrophic event might exceed $10 billion was unthinkable. With ever increasing property-casualty risks and unabated growth in hazard-prone areas, insurers and reinsurers now envision the possibility of disaster losses of $50 to $100 billion in the United States.

Against this backdrop, the capitalization of the insurance and reinsurance industries has become a crucial concern. While it remains unlikely that a single event might entirely bankrupt these industries, a big catastrophe could place firms under severe stress, jeopardizing both policy holders and investors and causing profound ripple effects throughout the U.S. economy.

The Financing of Catastrophe Risk assembles an impressive roster of experts from academia and industry to explore the disturbing yet realistic assumption that a large catastrophic event is inevitable. The essays offer tangible means of both reassessing and raising the level of preparedness throughout the insurance and reinsurance industries.

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Financing State and Local Economic Development
Michael Barker, ed.
Duke University Press, 1983
The contributors discuss alternative methods of financing state and local economic development, including the role of venture capital in urban development, the role of banking institutions in encouraging the growth of small business, and the place of pension funds in economic growth.
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Finding Betty Crocker
The Secret Life of America’s First Lady of Food
Susan Marks
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

While Betty Crocker is often associated with 1950s happy homemaking, she originally belonged to a different generation. Created in 1921 as a “friend to homemakers” for the Washburn Crosby Company (a forerunner to General Mills) in Minneapolis, her purpose was to answer consumer mail. “She” was actually the women of the Home Service Department who signed Betty’s name. Eventually, Betty Crocker’s local radio show on WCCO expanded, and audiences around the nation tuned her in, tried her money-saving recipes, and wrote Betty nearly 5,000 fan letters per day. In Finding Betty Crocker, Susan Marks offers an utterly unique look at the culinary and marketing history of America’s First Lady of Food.

Susan Marks is a writer/producer/director with her own production company, Lazy Susan Productions.

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Finding Bix
The Life and Afterlife of a Jazz Legend
Brendan Wolfe
University of Iowa Press, 2017
Bix Beiderbecke was one of the first great legends of jazz. Among the most innovative cornet soloists of the 1920s and the first important white player, he invented the jazz ballad and pointed the way to “cool” jazz. But his recording career lasted just six years; he drank himself to death in 1931—at the age of twenty-eight. It was this meteoric rise and fall, combined with the searing originality of his playing and the mystery of his character—who was Bix? not even his friends or family seemed to know—that inspired subsequent generations to imitate him, worship him, and write about him. It also provoked Brendan Wolfe’s Finding Bix a personal and often surprising attempt to connect music, history, and legend.

A native of Beiderbecke’s hometown of Davenport, Iowa, Wolfe grew up seeing Bix’s iconic portrait on everything from posters to parking garages. He never heard his music, though, until cast to play a bit part in an Italian biopic filmed in Davenport. Then, after writing a newspaper review of a book about Beiderbecke, Wolfe unexpectedly received a letter from the late musician's nephew scolding him for getting a number of facts wrong. This is where Finding Bix begins: in Wolfe's good-faith attempt to get the facts right.

What follows, though, is anything but straightforward, as Wolfe discovers Bix Beiderbecke to be at the heart of furious and ever-timely disputes over addiction, race and the origins of jazz, sex, and the influence of commerce on art. He also uncovers proof that the only newspaper interview Bix gave in his lifetime was a fraud, almost entirely plagiarized from several different sources. In fact, Wolfe comes to realize that the closer he seems to get to Bix, the more the legend retreats. 
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Finding Einstein's Brain
Lepore, Frederick E
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Albert Einstein remains the quintessential icon of modern genius. Like Newton and many others, his seminal work in physics includes the General Theory of Relativity, the Absolute Nature of Light, and perhaps the most famous equation of all time: E=mc2.
 
Following his death in 1955, Einstein’s brain was removed and preserved, but has never been fully or systematically studied. In fact, the sections are not even all in one place, and some are mysteriously unaccounted for! In this compelling tale, Frederick E. Lepore delves into the strange, elusive afterlife of Einstein’s brain, the controversy surrounding its use, and what its study represents for brain and/or intelligence studies. 

Carefully reacting to the skepticism of 21st century neuroscience, Lepore more broadly examines the philosophical, medical, and scientific implications of brain-examination. Is the brain simply a computer? If so, how close are we to artificially creating a human brain? Could scientists create a second Einstein? This “biography of a brain” attempts to answer these questions, exploring what made Einstein’s brain anatomy exceptional, and how “found” photographs--discovered more than a half a century after his death--may begin to uncover the nature of genius.
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Finding Freedom
The Untold Story of Joshua Glover, Freedom Seeker
Ruby West Jackson
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2022
First published in 2007, the groundbreaking book Finding Freedom provided the first narrative account of the life of Joshua Glover, the freedom seeker who was famously broken out of jail by thousands of Wisconsin abolitionists in 1854. This paperback edition reframes Glover’s story with a new foreword from historian Christy Clark-Pujara. Employing original research, authors Ruby West Jackson and Walter T. McDonald chronicle Glover's days as an enslaved person in St. Louis, his violent capture and escape in Milwaukee, his journey on the Underground Railroad, and his thirty-three years of freedom in rural Canada. While the catalytic “Glover incident” captured national attention—pitting the state of Wisconsin against the Supreme Court and adding fuel to the pre–Civil War fire—the primary focus is on the ordinary citizens, both Black and white, with whom Joshua Glover interacted. A bittersweet story of bravery and compassion, Finding Freedom provides the first full picture of the man for whom so many fought and around whom so much history was made.
 
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Finding Jobs
Work and Welfare Reform
David Card
Russell Sage Foundation, 2000
Do plummeting welfare caseloads and rising employment prove that welfare reform policies have succeeded, or is this success due primarily to the job explosion created by today's robust economy? With roughly one to two million people expected to leave welfare in the coming decades, uncertainty about their long-term prospects troubles many social scientists. Finding Jobs offers a thorough examination of the low-skill labor market and its capacity to sustain this rising tide of workers, many of whom are single mothers with limited education. Each chapter examines specific trends in the labor market to ask such questions as: How secure are these low-skill jobs, particularly in the event of a recession? What can these workers expect in terms of wage growth and career advancement opportunities? How will a surge in the workforce affect opportunities for those already employed in low-skill jobs? Finding Jobs offers both good and bad news about work and welfare reform. Although the research presented in this book demonstrates that it is possible to find jobs for people who have traditionally relied on public assistance, it also offers cautionary evidence that today's strong economy may mask enduring underlying problems. Finding Jobs shows that the low-wage labor market is particularly vulnerable to economic downswings and that lower skilled workers enjoy less job stability. Several chapters illustrate why financial incentives, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), are as essential to encouraging workforce participation as job search programs. Other chapters show the importance of including provisions for health insurance, and of increasing subsidies for child care to assist the large population of working single mothers affected by welfare reform. Finding Jobs also examines the potential costs of new welfare restrictions. It looks at how states can improve their flexibility in imposing time limits on families receiving welfare, and calls into question the cutbacks in eligibility for immigrants, who traditionally have relied less on public assistance than their native-born counterparts. Finding Jobs is an informative and wide-ranging inquiry into the issues raised by welfare reform. Based on comprehensive new data, this volume offers valuable guidance to policymakers looking to design policies that will increase work, raise incomes, and lower poverty in changing economic conditions.
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Finding Mecca in America
How Islam Is Becoming an American Religion
Mucahit Bilici
University of Chicago Press, 2012
The events of 9/11 had a profound impact on American society, but they had an even more lasting effect on Muslims living in the United States. Once practically invisible, they suddenly found themselves overexposed. By describing how Islam in America began as a strange cultural object and is gradually sinking into familiarity, Finding Mecca in America illuminates the growing relationship between Islam and American culture as Muslims find a homeland in America. Rich in ethnographic detail, the book is an up-close account of how Islam takes its American shape.
 
In this book, Mucahit Bilici traces American Muslims’ progress from outsiders to natives and from immigrants to citizens. Drawing on the philosophies of Simmel and Heidegger, Bilici develops a novel sociological approach and offers insights into the civil rights activities of Muslim Americans, their increasing efforts at interfaith dialogue, and the recent phenomenon of Muslim ethnic comedy. Theoretically sophisticated, Finding Mecca in America is both a portrait of American Islam and a groundbreaking study of what it means to feel at home.
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Finding the Answers to Legal Questions
Virginia M. Tucker
American Library Association, 2017

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Finding the Answers to Legal Questions
A How-To-Do-It Manual
American Library Association
American Library Association, 2011

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Finding the Arctic
History and Culture Along a 2,500-Mile Snowmobile Journey from Alaska to Hudson’s Bay
Matthew Sturm
University of Alaska Press, 2012
The history of the Arctic is rich, filled with fascinating and heroic stories of exploration, multicultural interactions, and humans facing nature at its most extreme. In Finding the Arctic, the accomplished arctic researcher Matthew Sturm collects some of the most memorable and moving of these stories and weaves them around his own story of a 2,500-mile snowmobile expedition across arctic Alaska and Canada.
During that trip, Sturm and six companions followed a circuitous route that brought them to many of the most historic spots in the North. They stood in the footsteps of their predecessors, experienced the landscape and the weather, and gained an intimate perspective on notable historical events, all chronicled here by Sturm. Written with humor and pathos, Finding the Arctic is a classic tale of adventure travel. And throughout the book,Sturm, with his thirty-eight years of experience in the North, emerges as an excellent guide for any who wish to understand the Arctic of today and yesterday.   
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Finding the Movement
Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism
Finn Enke
Duke University Press, 2007
In Finding the Movement, Anne Enke reveals that diverse women’s engagement with public spaces gave rise to and profoundly shaped second-wave feminism. Focusing on women’s activism in Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis-St. Paul during the 1960s and 1970s, Enke describes how women across race and class created a massive groundswell of feminist activism by directly intervening in the urban landscape. They secured illicit meeting spaces and gained access to public athletic fields. They fought to open bars to women and abolish gendered dress codes and prohibitions against lesbian congregation. They created alternative spaces, such as coffeehouses, where women could socialize and organize. They opened women-oriented bookstores, restaurants, cafes, and clubs, and they took it upon themselves to establish women’s shelters, health clinics, and credit unions in order to support women’s bodily autonomy.

By considering the development of feminism through an analysis of public space, Enke expands and revises the historiography of second-wave feminism. She suggests that the movement was so widespread because it was built by people who did not identify themselves as feminists as well as by those who did. Her focus on claims to public space helps to explain why sexuality, lesbianism, and gender expression were so central to feminist activism. Her spatial analysis also sheds light on hierarchies within the movement. As women turned commercial, civic, and institutional spaces into sites of activism, they produced, as well as resisted, exclusionary dynamics.

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Finding the Public Domain
Copyright Review Management System Toolkit
Melissa Levine, Kristina Eden, Justin Bonfiglio, and Richard Adler
Michigan Publishing Services, 2016
Copyright is meant to do something—several things—to accomplish socially desirable ends. One of those ends is to create a space for a free exchange of ideas that allows us to build upon a universe of expression that came before. 
How can I tell if something is in the public domain? This is the central question addressed daily by the Copyright Review Management System (CRMS) project. It is a special question and one essential to the social bargain that society has struck with authors and rights holders.
 
It is also a deceptively simple question. There should be a straightforward answer, especially for books. It should be easy to know when something is—or is not—subject to copyright. And yet, in an age of absolute fluidity of media and medium, even plain old books can be highly complex embodiments of copyright. We need to make it easier to ascertain whether a work is in the public domain. If the rights of copyright holders are to be respected and valued as part of the social bargain, the public domain as a matter of copyright law should be ascertainable and enjoyed
.
Given this complexity, consider the determination of the copyright status of a given creative work as a design problem. How do we move the copyright status of works in the collections of our libraries, museums, and archives from confusion and uncertainty to clarity and opportunity? Working over a span of nearly eight years, the University of Michigan Library received three grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to generously fund CRMS, a cooperative effort by partner research libraries to identify books in the public domain in HathiTrust. The Toolkit is a resource that aims to allow others to understand and replicate the work done by CRMS.
 
 
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Finding the River
An Environmental History of the Elwha
Jeff Crane
Oregon State University Press, 2011

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Finding Time
The Economics of Work-Life Conflict
Heather Boushey
Harvard University Press, 2016

“Ambitious, fast-paced, fact-filled, and accessible.”
Science


“A compelling case for why achieving the right balance of time with our families…is vital to the economic success and prosperity of our nation… A must read.”
—Maria Shriver


From backyard barbecues to the blogosphere, working men and women across the country are raising the same worried question: How can I get ahead at my job while making sure my family doesn’t suffer? A visionary economist who has looked at the numbers behind the personal stories, Heather Boushey argues that resolving the work–life conflict is as vital for us personally as it is essential economically. Finding Time offers ingenious ways to help us carve out the time we need, while showing businesses that more flexible policies can actually make them more productive.

“Supply and demand curves are suddenly ‘sexy’ when Boushey uses them to prove that paid sick days, paid family leave, flexible work schedules, and affordable child care aren’t just cutesy women’s issues for families to figure out ‘on their own time and dime,’ but economic issues affecting the country at large.”
Vogue

“Boushey argues that better family-leave policies should not only improve the lives of struggling families but also boost workers’ productivity and reduce firms’ costs.”
The Economist

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The Fine Arts in America
Joshua C. Taylor
University of Chicago Press, 1979
"Though comparatively short, it is no once-over-lightly chronicle full of insignificant names and dates. It brilliantly achieves its principal aim: to provide readers with a compact but broad and well rounded conception of the progress of the fine arts in America from ca. 1670 to the present day. . . . It is a fascinating book, full of new vistas; it has all the earmarks of an instant classic."—American Artist

"[Taylor] describes changing definitions of art as much as he describes art itself, and he shows how the shifting forms of patronage affected the forms of art. He analyzes artists' associations . . . and he shows how museums and schools have expanded the audience for art. In short, he places artists and their work in cultural context. This treatment of the social history of art is the most original and intriguing aspect of Taylor's sketch."—Journal of American History

"This is a brilliantly subtle book. It builds with one insight after another, and suddenly the reader finds that a whole new way of looking at American art is being proposed. . . . After decades of thinking and looking and teaching, Dr. Taylor has written it all down. This work will become a classic interpretation almost overnight."—Peter Marzio, director, Corcoran Gallery of Art

"Interest in American art is unlikely to abate. . . . Mr. Taylor's short book is an invaluable guide through this activity and to its traditions."—Neil Harris, Wall Street Journal 

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Finish Forty and Home
The Untold World War II Story of B-24s in the Pacific
Phil Scearce
University of North Texas Press, 2011

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Finished Business
My Fifty Years of Headlines, Heroes, and Heartaches
Ray Didinger
Temple University Press, 2021

Ray Didinger opens his lively memoir Finished Business with the Philadelphia Eagles’ upset win in Super Bowl LII. When the Eagles finally hoist the Lombardi Trophy, Didinger does his best to straddle the emotions of a working reporter and a long-suffering Philly fan. His ability to do that is why he has built up such a loyal following.

Didinger began following the Eagles as a kid, hanging out in his grandfather’s bar in Southwest Philadelphia. He spent his summers at the team's training camp in Hershey. It was there he met his idol, flanker Tommy McDonald. He would later write a play, Tommy and Me, about their friendship and his efforts to see McDonald enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Didinger has been covering the Eagles as a newspaper columnist or TV analyst since 1970. Over the years, he wrote sports for the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Philadelphia Daily News. He later produced Emmy Award–winning documentaries for NFL Films before transitioning to sports talk radio and TV analysis.

In five decades, across multiple media platforms, he has interviewed everyone from Hank Aaron, Wayne Gretzky, Muhammad Ali, Julius Erving, Jack Nicklaus, to Mike Schmidt, as well as writing film scripts for Hollywood stars such as Bruce Willis and Alec Baldwin. He went to the White House with the U.S. Olympic team and even explored the bizarre world of professional wrestling.

His stories, told in his familiar, breezy style, capture his enthusiasm for sports and his affection for the fans who still mourn the pennant that eluded the Phillies in 1964. Didinger has become synonymous with Philadelphia sports, and his memoir is as passionate as an autumn Sunday at Lincoln Financial Field.

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Finland-Swedes in Michigan
Mika Roinila
Michigan State University Press, 2012

Who are the Finland-Swedes? Defined as citizens of Finland with a Swedish mother tongue, many know these people as “Swede- Finns” or simply “Swedes.” This book, the first ever to focus on this ethnolinguistic minority living in Michigan, examines the origins of the Finland-Swedes and traces their immigration patterns, beginning with the arrival of hundreds in the United States in the 1860s. A growing population until the 1920s, when immigration restrictions were put in place, the Finland-Swedes brought with them unique economic, social, cultural, religious, and political institutions, explored here in groundbreaking detail. Drawing on archival, church, and congregational records, interviews, and correspondence, this book paints a vivid portrait of Finland-Swedish life in photographs and text, and also includes detailed maps that show the movement of this group over time. The latest title in the Discovering the Peoples of Michigan series even includes a sampling of traditional Finland-Swedish recipes.

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Finns in Michigan
Gary Kaunonen
Michigan State University Press, 2009

In Finns in Michigan Gary Kaunonen probes the intricacies of immigration, labor, and ideology among the members of this intriguing and historically important ethnic group. He skillfully traces the evolution of a vibrant, diverse, dramatic, and at times deeply quarrelsome people who left an indelible mark on the state's history.
     Kaunonen examines the many schisms and splits that define the course of Finnish social life in Michigan. Michigan's Finns flocked to diverse cultural organizations that span a broad ideological spectrum. This book examines an extraordinarily wide range of organizations, including religious institutions, temperance societies, working-class political and labor groups, the cooperative movement, and a nationalist association of Finns.
     Finns in Michigan is a study of the contributions of Michigan's Finns in the workplace, in society, and in cultural life. Unlike previous, sometimes mythologized, histories of the Finns in Michigan, Kaunonen's rendition strives to be a more accurate representation of "the good, the bad, and the other" activities of a group he calls "possibly America's most diverse family."

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Finns in the United States
A History of Settlement, Dissent, and Integration
Auvo Kostiainen
Michigan State University Press, 2014
Late-arriving immigrants during the Great Migration, Finns were, comparatively speaking, a relatively small immigrant group, with about 350,000 immigrants arriving prior to World War II. Nevertheless, because of their geographic concentration in the Upper Midwest in particular, their impact was pronounced. They differed from many other new immigrant groups in a number of ways, including the fact that theirs is not an Indo-European language, and many old-country cultural and social features reflect their geographic location in Europe, at the juncture of East and West. A fresh and up-to-date analysis of Finnish Americans, this insightful volume lays the groundwork for exploring this unique culture through a historical context, followed by an overview of the overall composition and settlement patterns of these newcomers. The authors investigate the vivid ethnic organizations Finns created, as well as the cultural life they sought to preserve and enhance while fitting into their new homeland. Also explored are the complex dimensions of Finnish-American political and religious life, as well as the exodus of many radical leftists to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s. Through the lens of multiculturalism, transnationalism, and whiteness studies, the authors of this volume present a rich portrait of this distinctive group.
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Finns in Wisconsin
Mark Knipping
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2008

From mining to logging to farming, Finns played an important role in the early development of Wisconsin. Although their immigration to the state came later than that of most other groups, their contributions proved just as significant. Finns pride themselves for their sisu, a Finnish term which, roughly translated, means fortitude or perseverance, especially in the face of adversity. They needed their strength of character to help them face the difficult task of building a new life in a new land. Many Finns arriving in Wisconsin, unable to own land at home, hoped to establish themselves as small independent farmers in the new land. They settled mainly in northern Wisconsin, due to jobs and land available there.

This book traces the history of Finnish settlement in Wisconsin, from the large concentrations of Finns in the northern region, to the smaller "Little Finlands" created in other areas of the state. Revised and expanded, this new edition contains the richly detailed story of one Finnish woman, told in her own words, of her hardships and experiences in traveling to a new country and her resourcefulness and strength in adapting to a new culture and building a new life.

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Fire and Desire
Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era
Jane M. Gaines
University of Chicago Press, 2001
In the silent era, American cinema was defined by two separate and parallel industries, with white and black companies producing films for their respective, segregated audiences. Jane Gaines's highly anticipated new book reconsiders the race films of this era with an ambitious historical and theoretical agenda.

Fire and Desire offers a penetrating look at the black independent film movement during the silent period. Gaines traces the profound influence that D. W. Griffith's racist epic The Birth of a Nation exerted on black filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux, the director of the newly recovered Within Our Gates. Beginning with What Happened in the Tunnel, a movie that played with race and sex taboos by featuring the first interracial kiss in film, Gaines also explores the cinematic constitution of self and other through surprise encounters: James Baldwin sees himself in the face of Bette Davis, family resemblance is read in Richard S. Robert's portrait of an interracial family, and black film pioneer George P. Johnson looks back on Micheaux.

Given the impossibility of purity and the co-implication of white and black, Fire and Desire ultimately questions the category of "race movies" itself.
[more]

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A Fire Bell in the Past
The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume I, Western Slavery, National Impasse
Jeffrey L. Pasley
University of Missouri Press, 2021
Many new states entered the United States around 200 years ago, but only Missouri almost killed the nation it was trying to join. When the House of Representatives passed the Tallmadge Amendment banning slavery from the prospective new state in February 1819, it set off a two-year political crisis in which growing northern antislavery sentiment confronted the southern whites’ aggressive calls for slavery’s westward expansion. The Missouri Crisis divided the U.S. into slave and free states for the first time and crystallized many of the arguments and conflicts that would later be settled violently during the Civil War. The episode was, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “a fire bell in the night” that terrified him as the possible “knell of the Union.”

Drawing on the participants in two landmark conferences held at the University of Missouri and the City University of New York, this first of two volumes finds myriad new perspectives on the Missouri Crisis. Celebrating Missouri’s bicentennial the scholarly way, with fresh research and unsparing analysis, this eloquent collection of essays from distinguished historians gives the epochal struggle over Missouri statehood its due as a major turning point in American history.

Contributors include the editors, Christa Dierksheide, David N. Gellman, Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, Robert Lee, Donald Ratcliffe, Andrew Shankman, Anne Twitty, John R. Van Atta, and David Waldstreicher.

 
[more]

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A Fire Bell in the Past
The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume II: “The Missouri Question” and Its Answers
Jeffrey L. Pasley
University of Missouri Press, 2021
Many new states entered the United States around 200 years ago, but only Missouri almost killed the nation it was trying to join. When the House of Representatives passed the Tallmadge Amendment banning slavery from the prospective new state in February 1819, it set off a two-year political crisis in which growing northern antislavery sentiment confronted the aggressive westward expansion of the peculiar institution by southerners. The Missouri Crisis divided the U.S. into slave and free states for the first time and crystallized many of the arguments and conflicts that would later be settled violently during the Civil War. The episode was, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “a fire bell in the night” that terrified him as the possible “knell of the Union.”

Drawn from the of participants in two landmark conferences held at the University of Missouri and the City University of New York, those who contributed original essays to this second of two volumes—a group that includes young scholars and foremost authorities in the field—answer the Missouri “Question,” in bold fashion, challenging assumptions both old and new in the long historiography by approaching the event on its own terms, rather than as the inevitable sequel of the flawed founding of the republic or a prequel to its near destruction.

This second volume of A Fire Bell in the Past features a foreword by Daive Dunkley. Contributors include Dianne Mutti Burke, Christopher Childers, Edward P. Green, Zachary Dowdle, David J. Gary, Peter Kastor, Miriam Liebman, Matthew Mason, Kate Masur, Mike McManus, Richard Newman, and Nicholas Wood.
 
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Fire Dreams
Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South
Laura McTighe, with Women With A Vision
Duke University Press, 2024
For thirty-five years, the New Orleans-based Black feminist collective Women With A Vision (WWAV) has fought for the liberation of their communities through reproductive justice, harm reduction, abolition feminism, racial justice, and sex workers' rights. In 2012, shortly after one of WWAV's biggest organizing victories, arsonists firebombed and destroyed their headquarters. Fire Dreams is an innovative collaboration between WWAV and Laura McTighe, who work in community to build a social movement ethnography of the organization’s post-arson rebirth. Rooting WWAV in the geography of the South and the living history of generations of Black feminist thinkers, McTighe and WWAV weave together stories from their founders’ pioneering work during the Black HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s and their groundbreaking organizing to end criminalization in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina---with other movements for liberation as accomplices. Together, the authors refuse the logics of racial capitalism and share WWAV’s own world-building knowledges, as well as their methods for living these Black feminist futures now. Fire Dreams is a vital toolkit for grassroots organizers, activist-scholars, and all those who dream to make the world otherwise.
[more]

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Fire in the Big House
America’s Deadliest Prison Disaster
Mitchel P. Roth
Ohio University Press, 2019

On April 21, 1930—Easter Monday—some rags caught fire under the Ohio Penitentiary’s dry and aging wooden roof, shortly after inmates had returned to their locked cells after supper. In less than an hour, 320 men who came from all corners of Prohibition-era America and from as far away as Russia had succumbed to fire and smoke in what remains the deadliest prison disaster in United States history.

Within 24 hours, moviegoers were watching Pathé’s newsreel of the fire, and in less than a week, the first iteration of the weepy ballad “Ohio Prison Fire” was released. The deaths brought urgent national and international focus to the horrifying conditions of America’s prisons (at the time of the fire, the Ohio Penitentiary was at almost three times its capacity). Yet, amid darkening world politics and the first years of the Great Depression, the fire receded from public concern.

In Fire in the Big House, Mitchel P. Roth does justice to the lives of convicts and guards and puts the conflagration in the context of the rise of the Big House prison model, local and state political machinations, and American penal history and reform efforts. The result is the first comprehensive account of a tragedy whose circumstances—violent unrest, overcrowding, poorly trained and underpaid guards, unsanitary conditions, inadequate food—will be familiar to prison watchdogs today.

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A Fire in Their Hearts
Yiddish Socialists in New York
Tony Michels
Harvard University Press, 2009

In a compelling history of the Jewish community in New York during four decades of mass immigration, Tony Michels examines the defining role of the Yiddish socialist movement in the American Jewish experience.

The movement, founded in the 1880s, was dominated by Russian-speaking intellectuals, including Abraham Cahan, Mikhail Zametkin, and Chaim Zhitlovsky. Socialist leaders quickly found Yiddish essential to convey their message to the Jewish immigrant community, and they developed a remarkable public culture through lectures and social events, workers’ education societies, Yiddish schools, and a press that found its strongest voice in the mass-circulation newspaper Forverts.

Arguing against the view that socialism and Yiddish culture arrived as Old World holdovers, Michels demonstrates that they arose in New York in response to local conditions and thrived not despite Americanization, but because of it. And the influence of the movement swirled far beyond the Lower East Side, to a transnational culture in which individuals, ideas, and institutions crossed the Atlantic. New York Jews, in the beginning, exported Yiddish socialism to Russia, not the other way around.

The Yiddish socialist movement shaped Jewish communities across the United States well into the twentieth century and left an important political legacy that extends to the rise of neoconservatism. A story of hopeful successes and bitter disappointments, A Fire in Their Hearts brings to vivid life this formative period for American Jews and the American left.

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Fire, Native Peoples, and the Natural Landscape
Edited by Thomas R. Vale
Island Press, 2002

For nearly two centuries, the creation myth for the United States imagined European settlers arriving on the shores of a vast, uncharted wilderness. Over the last two decades, however, a contrary vision has emerged, one which sees the country's roots not in a state of "pristine" nature but rather in a "human-modified landscape" over which native peoples exerted vast control.

Fire, Native Peoples, and the Natural Landscape seeks a middle ground between those conflicting paradigms, offering a critical, research-based assessment of the role of Native Americans in modifying the landscapes of pre-European America. Contributors focus on the western United States and look at the question of fire regimes, the single human impact which could have altered the environment at a broad, landscape scale, and which could have been important in almost any part of the West. Each of the seven chapters is written by a different author about a different subregion of the West, evaluating the question of whether the fire regimes extant at the time of European contact were the product of natural factors or whether ignitions by Native Americans fundamentally changed those regimes.

An introductory essay offers context for the regional chapters, and a concluding section compares results from the various regions and highlights patterns both common to the West as a whole and distinctive for various parts of the western states. The final section also relates the findings to policy questions concerning the management of natural areas, particularly on federal lands, and of the "naturalness" of the pre-European western landscape.


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Fire Road
Donald Anderson
University of Iowa Press, 2001
Stephen Mann-- loyal son, war veteran, divorced father--is the subject of Donald Anderson's contemporary short-story cycle, Fire Road. In this award-winning collection, Mann negotiates life's punches through gain and loss, love and death, and the all too random dangers of being human. Woven between each personal story are poetic vignettes of isolated moments-- the headlines in a morning paper, a political murder--and the century's most violent tragedies--the bombing of Hiroshima, the firestorm at Dresden. Each vingette is a constant, powerful reminder of the human capacity to love and, ultimately, to destroy. A bruising view of one man's tumultuous journey through life, Fire Road explores the small and large crimes we all commit in the name of love and fear, despair and longing.
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The Fire Spreads
Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South
Randall J. Stephens
Harvard University Press, 2008

Today pentecostalism claims nearly 500 million followers worldwide. An early stronghold was the American South, where believers spoke in unknown tongues, worshipped in free-form churches, and broke down social barriers that had long divided traditional Protestants. Thriving denominations made their headquarters in the region and gathered white and black converts from the Texas plains to the Carolina low country.

Pentecostalism was, in fact, a religious import. It came to the South following the post-Civil War holiness revival, a northern-born crusade that emphasized sinlessness and religious empowerment. Adherents formed new churches in the Jim Crow South and held unconventional beliefs about authority, power, race, and gender. Such views set them at odds with other Christians in the region. By 1900 nearly all southern holiness folk abandoned mainline churches and adopted a pessimistic, apocalyptic theology. Signs of the last days, they thought, were all around them.

The faith first took root among anonymous religious zealots. It later claimed southern celebrities and innovators like televangelists Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, T. D. Jakes, and John Hagee; rock-and-roll icons Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard; and, more recently, conservative political leaders such as John Ashcroft.

With the growth of southern pentecostal denominations and the rise of new, affluent congregants, the movement moved cautiously into the evangelical mainstream. By the 1980s the once-apolitical faith looked entirely different. Many still watched and waited for spectacular signs of the end. Yet a growing number did so as active political conservatives.

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Fire under the Ashes
An Atlantic History of the English Revolution
John Donoghue
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In Fire under the Ashes, John Donoghue recovers the lasting significance of the radical ideas of the English Revolution, exploring their wider Atlantic history through a case study of Coleman Street Ward, London. Located in the crowded center of seventeenth-century London, Coleman Street Ward was a hotbed of political, social, and religious unrest. There among diverse and contentious groups of puritans a tumultuous republican underground evolved as the political means to a more perfect Protestant Reformation. But while Coleman Street has long been recognized as a crucial location of the English Revolution, its importance to events across the Atlantic has yet to be explored.

Prominent merchant revolutionaries from Coleman Street led England’s imperial expansion by investing deeply in the slave trade and projects of colonial conquest. Opposing them were other Coleman Street puritans, who having crossed and re-crossed the ocean as colonists and revolutionaries, circulated new ideas about the liberty of body and soul that they defined against England’s emergent, political economy of empire. These transatlantic radicals promoted social justice as the cornerstone of a republican liberty opposed to both political tyranny and economic slavery—and their efforts, Donoghue argues, provided the ideological foundations for the abolitionist movement that swept the Atlantic more than a century later.

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Firebrands
The Untold Story of Four Women Who Made and Unmade Prohibition
Gioia Diliberto
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Guaranteed to change how you picture Prohibition, this lively history turns the spotlight on four women in the immediate aftermath of winning the vote who played influential roles on all sides of the Eighteenth and Twenty-First Amendments.

In the popular imagination, the story of Prohibition in America is a story of men and male violence, one full of federal agents fighting gangsters over the sale of moonshine. In contrast, Firebrands is the story of four Jazz Age dynamos—all women –who were forces behind the passage, the enforcement, the defiance, and, ultimately, the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. They battled each other directly, and they learned to marshal clout with cowed and hypocritical legislators, almost all of them men. Their clash over Prohibition stands as the first significant exercise of women’s political power since women gained the right to vote, and their influence on the American political scene wouldn’t be equaled for decades.

In Gioia Diliberto’s fresh and timely take on this period of history, we meet Ella Boole, the stern and ambitious leader of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, who campaigned fiercely to introduce Prohibition and fought desperately to keep it alive. We also meet Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the most powerful woman in America at the time, who served as the top federal prosecutor charged with enforcing Prohibition. Diliberto tells the story, too, of silent film star Texas Guinan, who ran New York speakeasies backed by the mob and showed that Prohibition was not only absurd but unenforceable. And, she follows Pauline Morton Sabin, a glamorous Manhattan aristocrat who belatedly recognized the cascading evil in Prohibition and mobilized the movement to kill it.

These women led their opposing forces of “Wets” and “Drys” across a teeming landscape of bootleggers, gangsters, federal agents, temperance fanatics, and cowardly politicians, many of them secret drunks. Building on the momentum of suffrage, they forged a path for the activists who followed during the great civil rights battles of the mid-twentieth century. Yet, they have been largely lost to history. In Firebrands, Diliberto finally gives these dynamic figures their due, creating a varied and dramatic portrait of women wielding power, in politics, society, and popular culture.
 
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The Fires of New England
A Story of Protest and Rebellion in Antebellum America
Eric J. Morser
University of Massachusetts Press, 2017
In the winter of 1834, twenty men convened in Keene, New Hampshire, and published a fiery address condemning their state's legal system as an abomination that threatened the legacy of the American Revolution. They attacked New Hampshire's constitution as an archaic document that undermined democracy and created a system of conniving attorneys and judges. They argued that the time was right for their neighbors to rise up and return the Granite State to the glorious pathway blazed by the nation's founders.

Few people embraced the manifesto and its radical message. Nonetheless, as Eric J. Morser illustrates in this eloquently written and deeply researched book, the address matters because it reveals how commercial, cultural, political, and social changes were remaking the lives of the men who drafted and shared it in the 1830s. Using an imaginative range of sources, Morser artfully reconstructs their moving personal tales and locates them in a grander historical context. By doing so, he demonstrates that even seemingly small stories from antebellum America can help us understand the rich complexities of the era.
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The Fires of Patriotism
Alaskans in the Days of the First World War 1910-1920
Preston Jones
University of Alaska Press, 2013
In the early twentieth century, Alaska was facing an exciting future as the newest US territory. Yet just five years after its official designation, the country entered World War I and citizens were called to fight. Despite the threat of a looming economic collapse, Alaska sent more people per capita to war than any other state and displayed a patriotism that rivaled that of any of the states.

The Fires of Patriotism explores Alaska’s wartime experience, bringing to light new stories and new characters from a decade that shook the world. This multifaceted book explores the era through engaging stories and rare photos, offering a fresh perspective on World War I from a marginal land that forged its place in the greater unity of the country.
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Firestorm
How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future
Edward Struzik
Island Press, 2019
"Frightening...Firestorm comes alive when Struzik discusses the work of offbeat scientists."  —New York Times Book Review

"Comprehensive and compelling." —Booklist


"A powerful message." —Kirkus

"Should be required reading." —Library Journal 

For two months in the spring of 2016, the world watched as wildfire ravaged the Canadian town of Fort McMurray. Firefighters named the fire “the Beast.” It acted like a mythical animal, alive with destructive energy, and they hoped never to see anything like it again. Yet it’s not a stretch to imagine we will all soon live in a world in which fires like the Beast are commonplace. A glance at international headlines shows a remarkable increase in higher temperatures, stronger winds, and drier lands– a trifecta for igniting wildfires like we’ve rarely seen before.

This change is particularly noticeable in the northern forests of the United States and Canada. These forests require fire to maintain healthy ecosystems, but as the human population grows, and as changes in climate, animal and insect species, and disease cause further destabilization, wildfires have turned into a potentially uncontrollable threat to human lives and livelihoods.

Our understanding of the role fire plays in healthy forests has come a long way in the past century. Despite this, we are not prepared to deal with an escalation of fire during periods of intense drought and shorter winters, earlier springs, potentially more lightning strikes and hotter summers. There is too much fuel on the ground, too many people and assets to protect, and no plan in place to deal with these challenges.

In Firestorm, journalist Edward Struzik visits scorched earth from Alaska to Maine, and introduces the scientists, firefighters, and resource managers making the case for a radically different approach to managing wildfire in the 21st century. Wildfires can no longer be treated as avoidable events because the risk and dangers are becoming too great and costly. Struzik weaves a heart-pumping narrative of science, economics, politics, and human determination and points to the ways that we, and the wilder inhabitants of the forests around our cities and towns, might yet flourish in an age of growing megafires.
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Fireweed
A Political Autobiography
Gerda Lerner
Temple University Press, 2003
In Fireweed, Gerda Lerner, a pioneer and leading scholar in women's history, tells her story of moral courage and commitment to social change with a novelist's skill and a historian's command of context. Lerner's memoir focuses on the formative experiences that made her an activist for social justice before her academic career began. The child of a well-to-do Viennese Jewish family, she was still a teenager when a fascist regime came to power in 1934, and she became involved in the underground resistance movement. The Nazi takeover of Austria cast her into prison, then forced her and her family into exile; she alone was able to leave Europe. Once in the United States, she experienced the harshness of the Depression and despair over the fate of her family. Still, she persisted in adapting to the new culture and to becoming a writer. Here she met and married her life-long partner, Carl Lerner, a film editor and director. Together they become deeply involved in left-wing activities, from struggling to unionize the film industry and resisting the blacklist in Hollywood to community organizing for peace, for an interracial civil rights movement, and for better schools in New York City. Lerner insists that her decades of grassroots organizing largely account for the theoretical insights she was later able to bring to the development of women's history. In Fireweed, Lerner presents her life in the context of the major historical events of the twentieth century and the repression of dissent. Hers is a gripping story about surviving hardship and summoning the courage to live according to one's convictions.
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The First Amendment and LGBT Equality
A Contentious History
Carlos A. Ball
Harvard University Press, 2017

Conservative opponents of LGBT equality in the United States often couch their opposition in claims of free speech, free association, and religious liberty. It is no surprise, then, that many LGBT supporters equate First Amendment arguments with resistance to their cause. The First Amendment and LGBT Equality tells another story, about the First Amendment’s crucial yet largely forgotten role in the first few decades of the gay rights movement.

Between the 1950s and 1980s, when many courts were still openly hostile to sexual minorities, they nonetheless recognized the freedom of gay and lesbian people to express themselves and associate with one another. Successful First Amendment cases protected LGBT publications and organizations, protests and parades, and individuals’ right to come out. The amendment was wielded by the other side only after it had laid the groundwork for major LGBT equality victories.

Carlos A. Ball illuminates the full trajectory of this legal and cultural history. He argues that, in accommodating those who dissent from LGBT equality on grounds of conscience, it is neither necessary nor appropriate to depart from the established ways in which American antidiscrimination law has, for decades, accommodated equality dissenters. But he also argues that as progressives fight the First Amendment claims of religious conservatives and other LGBT opponents today, they should take care not to erode the very safeguards of liberty that allowed LGBT rights to exist in the first place.

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The First Amendment Bubble
How Privacy and Paparazzi Threaten a Free Press
Amy Gajda
Harvard University Press, 2015

In determining the news that’s fit to print, U.S. courts have traditionally declined to second-guess professional journalists. But in an age when news, entertainment, and new media outlets are constantly pushing the envelope of acceptable content, the consensus over press freedoms is eroding. The First Amendment Bubble examines how unbridled media are endangering the constitutional privileges journalists gained in the past century.

For decades, judges have generally affirmed that individual privacy takes a back seat to the public’s right to know. But the growth of the Internet and the resulting market pressures on traditional journalism have made it ever harder to distinguish public from private, news from titillation, journalists from provocateurs. Is a television program that outs criminals or a website that posts salacious videos entitled to First Amendment protections based on newsworthiness? U.S. courts are increasingly inclined to answer no, demonstrating new resolve in protecting individuals from invasive media scrutiny and enforcing their own sense of the proper boundaries of news.

This judicial backlash now extends beyond ethically dubious purveyors of infotainment, to mainstream journalists, who are seeing their ability to investigate crime and corruption curtailed. Yet many—heedless of judicial demands for accountability—continue to push for ever broader constitutional privileges. In so doing, Amy Gajda warns, they may be creating a First Amendment bubble that will rupture in the courts, with disastrous consequences for conventional news.

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The First Amendment, Democracy, and Romance
Steven Shiffrin
Harvard University Press, 1990

Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated the individualism, rebelliousness, anti-authoritarianism, and the spirit of nonconformity within all of us. In The First Amendment, Democracy, and Romance, Steven Shiffrin argues that romantics like Emerson have more to teach us about freedom of speech and democracy than does Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: if the first amendment is to have a single organizing symbol, let it be the image of the dissenter. A major purpose of the first amendment, says Shiffrin, is to protect those who would break out of orthodox forms.

Although the Emersonian ideal of freedom of speech has deep roots in the nation's culture, it has been subtly denigrated in recent first-amendment theory and seriously abused in practice. Yet Shiffrin believes that the first amendment can provide a sensible accommodation among a host of conflicting values in a changing world, and can also stand as a national symbol—in short, it can allow for both social construction and romance.

Blending insights from literature, philosophy, political science, history, rhetoric, and law, Shiffrin maintains that the romantic tradition sheds light not only on a range of free-speech issues, such as libel, flag burning, and the commercialization of the mass media, but also on subjects of broader theoretical controversy, including liberalism, pragmatism, and the republican revival. In addition to its original approach to the law, this book brings new observations and fresh insights to its discussions of the role of the first amendment in American culture. It will interest a general audience as well as lawyers, journalists, and scholars in a variety of academic fields.

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First Amendment Institutions
Paul Horwitz
Harvard University Press, 2012

Addressing a host of hot-button issues, from the barring of Christian student groups and military recruiters from law schools and universities to churches’ immunity from civil rights legislation in hiring and firing ministers, Paul Horwitz proposes a radical reformation of First Amendment law. Arguing that rigidly doctrinal approaches can’t account for messy, real-world situations, he suggests that the courts loosen their reins and let those institutions with a stake in First Amendment freedoms do more of the work of enforcing them.

Universities, the press, libraries, churches, and various other institutions and associations are a fundamental part of the infrastructure of public discourse. Rather than subject them to ill-fitting, top-down rules and legal categories, courts should make them partners in shaping public discourse and First Amendment law, giving these institutions substantial autonomy to regulate their own affairs. Self-regulation and public criticism should be the key restraints on these institutions, not judicial fiat. Horwitz suggests that this approach would help the law enhance the contribution of our “First Amendment institutions” to social and political life. It would also move us toward a conception of the state as a participating member of our social framework, rather than a reigning and often overbearing sovereign.

First Amendment Institutions offers a new vantage point from which to evaluate ongoing debates over topics ranging from campaign finance reform to campus hate speech and affirmative action in higher education. This book promises to promote—and provoke—important new discussions about the shape and future of the First Amendment.

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The First Amendment Lives On
Conversations Commemorating Hugh M. Hefner's Legacy of Enduring Free Speech and Free Press Values
Stuart N. Brotman
University of Missouri Press, 2022

Hugh M. Hefner’s legacy of enduring free speech and free press values is embodied in the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Awards, established in 1979, which honor leading First Amendment scholars and advocates. Hefner also had a lifelong interest in film censorship issues and supported teaching about them at the University of Southern California for 20 years. His deep commitment to these values was confirmed when the author was granted unrestricted access to over 3,000 personal scrapbooks, which Hefner had kept in order to track free speech and press issues during his lifetime.
 
The format of the book is an homage to the in-depth conversational interviews Hefner pioneered as the editor and publisher of Playboy magazine. Stuart Brotman conducted in-person conversations with eight persons who in their lifetimes have come to represent a “greatest generation” of free speech and free press scholars and advocates. Notably, these conversations include:

Geoffrey R. Stone
Floyd Abrams
Nadine Strossen
Burt Neuborne
David D. Cole
Lucy A. Dalglish
Bob Corn-Revere
Rick Jewell

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First Amendment Studies in Arkansas
The Richard S. Arnold Prize Essays
Stephen Smith
University of Arkansas Press, 2016

This collection of fourteen essays written by young communication scholars at the University of Arkansas presents unique insights into how First Amendment issues have played out in the state. Rather than exploring the particular legal issues and the constitutional principles enunciated by the courts, First Amendment Studies tells the stories of actual people expressing challenged or unpopular points of view and reveals the ways that constitutional controversies arise from the actions of local officials and individual citizens.

Drawing on public documents as well as extensive interviews with participants, these essays demonstrate the dynamics of democratic dissent—on college campuses, in public schools, in churches, on the streets, in the forests and on the farms, and in legislative chambers and courtrooms.

Each essay was selected for the Richard S. Arnold Prize in First Amendment Studies, an endowed fund established in 1999 to encourage University of Arkansas graduate students in communication and the liberal arts to explore and examine questions about freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
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The First American Women Architects
Sarah Allaback
University of Illinois Press, 2007
By 1920, there were over two hundred women practicing architecture in the United States, actively working on major design and building projects before they were even given the right to vote. These women designed thousands of buildings nationwide: apartments in Kansas City, hotels in the nation's national parks, churches in Michigan, and mansions on the coast of California, to name a few. In The First American Women Architects, Sarah Allaback chronicles the lives and careers of more than seventy pioneering female architects practicing in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly all of whom have been forgotten--until now.

Organized alphabetically as a reference guide, this volume provides a biographical sketch of each architect's life, education, and professional career, and a list of known works and sources for further research. Many of these remarkable women have never before appeared in any other history, making The First American Women Architects a unique and invaluable reference for students and scholars interested in women's history and architecture. As an instructive record of the legacy of women in architectural history, this book will also serve as a stimulating indicator of the broadening potential for women and other minorities within the field of architecture.

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The First and Second United States Empires
Jack Ericson Eblen
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968
In the late eighteenth century the fledgling republic of the United States was faced with the problem of devising a form of government to oversee its vast land possessions north and west of the Ohio River. To fill this need, Thomas Jefferson drafted the Ordinance of 1784, which evolved into the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Deliberately modeled on the British colonial system, it granted territorial governors broad autocratic powers. It defined government in the Northwest, and all other subsequent territories in the public domain.  Eblen defines two historical periods (empires): 1787-1848; and 1849-1912; based on government land acquisition. This book describes the nature of government in all the contiguous territories of the United States, offering an original and comprehensive view of the role and meaning of territorial government, and the administration of the Western territories.
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First Books
The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama
Philip D. Beidler
University of Alabama Press, 1999
This case study in cultural mythmaking shows how antebellum Alabama created itself out of its own printed texts, from treatises on law and history to satire, poetry, and domestic novels.
 

Early 19th-century Alabama was a society still in the making. Now Philip Beidler tells how the first books written and published in the state influenced the formation of Alabama's literary and political culture. As Beidler shows, virtually overnight early Alabama found itself in possession of the social, political, and economic conditions required to jump start a traditional literary culture in the old Anglo-European model: property-based class relationships, large concentrations of personal wealth, and professional and merchant classes of similar social, political, educational, and literary views.

Beidler examines the work of well-known writers such as humorist Johnson J. Hooper and novelist Caroline Lee Hentz, and takes on other classic pieces like Albert J. Pickett's History of Alabama and Alexander Beaufort Meek's epic poem The Red Eagle. Beidler also considers lesser-known works like Lewis B. Sewall's verse satire The Adventures of Sir John Falstaff the II, Henry Hitchcock's groundbreaking legal volume Alabama Justice of the Peace, and Octavia Walton Levert's Souvenirs of Travel. Most of these works were written by and for society's elite, and although many celebrate the establishment of an ordered way of life, they also preserve the biases of authors who refused to write about slavery yet continually focused on the extermination of Native Americans.
 
First Books returns us to the world of early Alabama that these texts not only recorded but helped create. Written with flair and a strong individual voice, it will appeal not only to scholars of Alabama history and literature but also to anyone interested in the antebellum South.
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The First Chouteaus
RIVER BARONS OF EARLY ST. LOUIS
William E. Foley and C. David Rice
University of Illinois Press, 1983
 
For more than half a century, Auguste and Pierre Chouteau dominated trade and enterprise in the Mississippi Valley. In their various roles as merchants, Indian traders, bankers, land speculators, governmental advisors, public officials, and community leaders, the Chouteau brothers exerted a tremendous influence on westward expansion. This is the first full account of their lives and illustrious careers.
 
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The First Cold War
The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson in U.S. - Soviet Relations
Donald E. Davis & Eugene P. Trani
University of Missouri Press, 2002
In The First Cold War, Donald E. Davis and Eugene P. Trani review the Wilson administration’s attitudes toward Russia before, during, and after the Bolshevik seizure of power. They argue that before the Russian Revolution, Woodrow Wilson had little understanding of Russia and made poor appointments that cost the United States Russian goodwill. Wilson later reversed those negative impressions by being the first to recognize Russia’s Provisional Government, resulting in positive U.S.–Russian relations until Lenin gained power in 1917.
Wilson at first seemed unsure whether to recognize or repudiate Lenin and the Bolsheviks. His vacillation finally ended in a firm repudiation when he opted for a diplomatic quarantine having almost all of the ingredients of the later Cold War. Davis and Trani argue that Wilson deserves mild criticism for his early indecision and inability to form a coherent policy toward what would become the Soviet Union. But they believe Wilson rightly came to the conclusion that until the regime became more moderate, it was useless for America to engage it diplomatically.
The authors see in Wilson’s approach the foundations for the “first Cold War”—meaning not simply a refusal to recognize the Soviet Union, but a strong belief that its influence was harmful and would spread if not contained or quarantined. Wilson’s Soviet policy in essence lasted until Roosevelt extended diplomatic recognition in the 1930s. But The First Cold War suggests that Wilson’s impact extended beyond Roosevelt to Truman, showing that the policies of Wilson and Truman closely resemble each other with the exception of an arms race. Wilson’s intellectual reputation lent credibility to U.S. Cold War policy from Truman to Reagan, and the reader can draw a direct connection from Wilson to the collapse of the USSR. Wilsonians were the first Cold War warriors, and in the era of President Woodrow Wilson, the first Cold War began.
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First Day at Gettysburg
Crisis at the Crossroads
Warren W. Hassler Jr
University of Alabama Press, 1970

“Hassler’s history will survive as our most detailed narrative of the first day’s battle, examining the day’s action so minutely that no succeeding historian of Gettysburg will be able to ignore it. Hassler’s book has solid virtues in addition to its thoroughness of detail: it offers a persuasive argument that the first day’s events largely determined the eventual outcome of the battle; Hassler displays uncommonly complete knowledge of the battlefield terrain [and] makes uniquely good use of the information that can be gleaned from the monuments and markers on the battlefield.” – American Historical Review

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First Day to Final Grade, Third Edition
A Graduate Student's Guide to Teaching
Anne Curzan and Lisa Damour
University of Michigan Press, 2011
The third edition of First Day to Final Grade: A Graduate Student’s Guide to Teaching is designed to help new graduate student teaching assistants navigate the challenges of teaching undergraduates. Both a quick reference tool and a fluid read, the book focuses on the “how tos” of teaching, such as setting up a lesson plan, running a discussion, and grading, as well as issues specific to the teaching assistant’s unique role as both student and teacher.
 
This new edition incorporates newer teaching and learning pedagogy. The book has been updated to reflect the role of technology both inside and outside the classroom. In addition, a new chapter has been added that discusses successfully transitioning from being a teaching assistant to being hired as a full-time instructor.
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The First Fifteen
How Asian American Women Became Federal Judges
Susan Oki Mollway
Rutgers University Press, 2022
In 1998, an Asian woman first joined the ranks of federal judges with lifetime appointments. It took ten years for the second Asian woman to be appointed. Since then, however, over a dozen more Asian women have received lifetime federal judicial appointments.
 
This book tells the stories of the first fifteen. In the process, it recounts remarkable tales of Asian women overcoming adversity and achieving the American dream, despite being the daughters of a Chinese garment worker, Japanese Americans held in internment camps during World War II, Vietnamese refugees, and penniless Indian immigrants. Yet The First Fifteen also explores how far Asian Americans and women still have to go before the federal judiciary reflects America as a whole. 
 
In a candid series of interviews, these judges reflect upon the personal and professional experiences that led them to this distinguished position, as well as the nerve-wracking political process of being nominated and confirmed for an Article III judgeship. By sharing their diverse stories, The First Fifteen paints a nuanced portrait of how Asian American women are beginning to have a voice in determining American justice.
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The First Fifty Years
A Jubilee in Prose and Poetry Honoring Women Rabbis
Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell, Jessica Greenbaum, Rabbi Hara E. Person
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2023
The ordination of Rabbi Sally J. Priesand in 1972 was a watershed moment in Jewish history. In The First Fifty Years, contributors from across the Jewish and gender
spectrums reflect on the meaning of this moment and the ensuing decades, both personally and for the Jewish community. In short pieces of new prose, authors—
many of them pioneering rabbis—share stories, insights, analysis, and celebrations of women in the rabbinate. These are intertwined with a wealth of poetry that
poignantly captures the spirit of this anniversary. The volume is a deep, heartfelt tribute to women rabbis and their indelible impact on all of us.
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First Founders
American Puritans and Puritanism in an Atlantic World
Francis J. Bremer
University of New Hampshire Press, 2012
Francis J. Bremer has spent his entire career broadening our understanding of America’s colonial founders. Now, in this eminently readable collection of biographies, Bremer brings us a surprisingly varied and dynamic group of characters who continue to guide and influence America today. With its cast of magistrates, women, clergy, merchants, and Native Americans, First Founders underscores the breadth of early American experience and the profound transatlantic roots of our country’s forebears. Bremer succeeds in bringing little-known figures out of the shadows, while allowing us to appreciate better known figures in an entirely new light.

This is a truly fascinating look at the Puritans with keenly drawn portraits and the insight that only a lifetime of scholarship can achieve. It should become the standard introduction to the field. Written in the mold of Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers and Gordon Wood’s Revolutionary Characters, the book will appeal to general readers, students, and scholars alike.
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First Freedom
The Responses of Alabama's Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction
Peter Kolchin
University of Alabama Press, 2008
Crucial changes occurred during the years following the Civil War as blacks manifested their desire to live as independently as possible and to reject every social relation reminiscent of slavery. This classic study of the history of post-slave societies helped to initiate historiographic trends that remain central to the study of emancipation.
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First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt
Homicide in Chicago, 1875-1920
Jeffrey S. Adler
Harvard University Press, 2006

Between 1875 and 1920, Chicago's homicide rate more than quadrupled, making it the most violent major urban center in the United States--or, in the words of Lincoln Steffens, "first in violence, deepest in dirt." In many ways, however, Chicago became more orderly as it grew. Hundreds of thousands of newcomers poured into the city, yet levels of disorder fell and rates of drunkenness, brawling, and accidental death dropped. But if Chicagoans became less volatile and less impulsive, they also became more homicidal.

Based on an analysis of nearly six thousand homicide cases, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt examines the ways in which industrialization, immigration, poverty, ethnic and racial conflict, and powerful cultural forces reshaped city life and generated soaring levels of lethal violence. Drawing on suicide notes, deathbed declarations, courtroom testimony, and commutation petitions, Jeffrey Adler reveals the pressures fueling murders in turn-of-the-century Chicago. During this era Chicagoans confronted social and cultural pressures powerful enough to trigger surging levels of spouse killing and fatal robberies. Homicide shifted from the swaggering rituals of plebeian masculinity into family life and then into street life.

From rage killers to the "Baby Bandit Quartet," Adler offers a dramatic portrait of Chicago during a period in which the characteristic elements of modern homicide in America emerged.

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The First Infantry Division and the U.S. Army Transformed
Road to Victory in Desert Storm, 1970-1991
Gregory Fontenot
University of Missouri Press, 2017
This fast-paced and compelling read closes a significant gap in the historiography of the late Cold War U.S. Army and is crucial for understanding the current situation in the Middle East.

From the author's introduction:
“My purpose is a narrative history of the 1st Infantry Division from 1970 through the Operation Desert Storm celebration held 4th of July 1991. This story is an account of the revolutionary changes in the late Cold War. The Army that overran Saddam Hussein’s Legions in four days was the product of important changes stimulated both by social changes and institutional reform. The 1st Infantry Division reflected benefits of those changes, despite its low priority for troops and material. The Division was not an elite formation, but rather excelled in the context of the Army as an institution.”

This book begins with a preface by Gordon R. Sullivan, General, USA, Retired. In twelve chapters, author Gregory Fontenot explains the history of the 1st infantry Division from 1970 to 1991. In doing so, his fast-paced narrative includes elements to expand the knowledge of non-military readers. These elements include a glossary, a key to abbreviations, maps, nearly two dozen photographs, and thorough bibliography.

The First infantry Division and the U.S. Army Transformed: Road to Victory in Desert Storm is published with support from the First Division Museum at Cantigny.
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First Ladies and the Press
The Unfinished Partnership of the Media Age
Maurine H. Beasley
Northwestern University Press, 2005
At her first press conference, Eleanor Roosevelt, uncertain of her role as hostess or leader, passed a box of candied grapefruit peel to the thirty-five women journalists. Nearly sixty years later, Hillary Clinton, an accomplished professional woman and lawyer, tried to mollify her critics by handing out her chocolate-chip cookie recipe. These exchanges tells us as much about the social—and political—roles of women in America as they do about the relation of the first lady to the press and the public. Looking at the personal interaction between each first lady from Martha Washington to Laura Bush and the mass media of her day, Maurine H. Beasley traces the growth of the institution of the first lady as a part of the American political system. Her work shows how media coverage of first ladies, often limited to stereotypical ideas about women, has not adequately reflected the importance of their role.
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First Lady from Plains
Rosalynn Carter
University of Arkansas Press, 1994
First Lady from Plains, first published in 1984, is Rosalynn’s Carter’s autobiography, covering her life from her childhood in Plains, Georgia, through her time as First Lady. It is “a readable, lively and revealing account of the Carters and their remarkable journey from rural Georgia to the White House in a span of ten years” (The New York Times).
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The First Lady of Olympic Track
The Life and Times of Betty Robinson
Joe Gergen
Northwestern University Press, 2014

The 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam were the first in which women—over the objections of many, including Pope Pius XI and the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin—were allowed to run in the marquee track events.

Equally remarkable is the story behind the first female gold medal winner in the 100-meter dash, sixteen-year-old American Betty Robinson. A prodigy running in just her fourth organized meet, Robinson stunned the world, earning special praise from the president of the 1928 American Olympic Committee, General Douglas MacArthur. But Robinson’s triumph soon became tragedy when in 1931 she was involved in a life-threatening plane crash. Unable to assume a sprinter’s crouch, she nevertheless joined fellow pioneer Jesse Owens at the infamous 1936 Berlin Olympics, and achieved further glory on the relay team. Journalist Joe Gergen’s The First Lady of Olympic Track rescues an exceptional figure from obscurity.

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First Lady of the Confederacy
Varina Davis’s Civil War
Joan E. Cashin
Harvard University Press, 2008

When Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederacy, his wife, Varina Howell Davis, reluctantly became the First Lady. For this highly intelligent, acutely observant woman, loyalty did not come easily: she spent long years struggling to reconcile her societal duties to her personal beliefs. Raised in Mississippi but educated in Philadelphia, and a long-time resident of Washington, D.C., Mrs. Davis never felt at ease in Richmond. During the war she nursed Union prisoners and secretly corresponded with friends in the North. Though she publicly supported the South, her term as First Lady was plagued by rumors of her disaffection.

After the war, Varina Davis endured financial woes and the loss of several children, but following her husband's death in 1889, she moved to New York and began a career in journalism. Here she advocated reconciliation between the North and South and became friends with Julia Grant, the widow of Ulysses S. Grant. She shocked many by declaring in a newspaper that it was God's will that the North won the war.

A century after Varina Davis's death in 1906, Joan E. Cashin has written a masterly work, the first definitive biography of this truly modern, but deeply conflicted, woman. Pro-slavery but also pro-Union, Varina Davis was inhibited by her role as Confederate First Lady and unable to reveal her true convictions. In this pathbreaking book, Cashin offers a splendid portrait of a fascinating woman who struggled with the constraints of her time and place.

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The First Liberty
America's Foundation in Religious Freedom, Expanded and Updated
William Lee Miller
Georgetown University Press, 2003

At a time when the concept of religion-based politics has taken on new and sometimes ominous tones—even within the United States—it is not only right, but also urgently necessary that William Lee Miller revisit his profound exploration of the place of religious liberty and church and state in America. For this revised edition of The First Liberty, Miller has written a pointed new introduction, discussing how religious liberty has taken on deeper dimensions in a post-9/11 world. With new material on recent Supreme Court cases involving church-state relations and a new concluding chapter on America's religious and political landscape, this volume is an eloquent and thorough interpretation of how religious faith and political freedom have blended and fused to form part of our collective history-and most importantly, how each concept must respect the boundaries of the other.

Though many claim the United States to be a "Christian Nation," Miller provides a fascinatingly vivid account of the philosophical skirmishes and political machinations that led to the "wall of separation" between church and state. That famous phrase is Jefferson's, though it does not appear in the Declaration of Independence nor in the Constitution. But Miller follows this seminal idea from three great standard-bearers of religious liberty: Jefferson, Madison, and Roger Williams. Jefferson, who wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the precursor of the First Amendment of the Constitution; James Madison, who was politically responsible for Virginia's acceptance of religious liberty and who, a few years later, helped draft the Bill of Rights; and the even earlier figure, the radical dissenter Roger Williams, who propounded the idea of religious freedom not as a rational secularist but out of a deeply held spiritual faith.

Miller re-creates the fierce and vibrant debate among the founding fathers over the means of establishing public virtue in the absence of established religion—a debate that still reverberates in today's passionate arguments about civil rights, school prayer, abortion, Christmas crèches, conscientious objection during warfare—and demonstrates how the right to hold any religious belief has dynamically shaped American political life.

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First Meal
Julie Green
Oregon State University Press, 2023

Wrongful convictions haunt the American criminal justice system, as revealed in recent years by DNA and other investigative tools. And every wrongfully convicted person who walks free, exonerated after years or decades, carries part of that story. From those facts, artist Julie Green posed a seemingly simple question: When you have been denied all choice, what do you choose to eat on the first day of freedom?

In the small details of life at such pivotal moments, a vast new landscape of the world can emerge, and that is the core concept of First Meal. Partnering with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, Green and her coauthor, award-winning journalist Kirk Johnson, have created a unique melding of art and narration in the portraits and stories of twenty-five people on the day of their release.

Food and punishment have long been intertwined. The tradition of offering a condemned person a final meal before execution, for example, has been explored by psychologists, filmmakers, and others—including Green herself in an earlier series of criminal-justice themed paintings, The Last Supper. First Meal takes on that issue from the other side: food as a symbol of autonomy in a life restored. Set against the backdrop of a flawed American legal system, First Meal describes beauty, pain, hope and redemption, all anchored around the idea—explored by writers from Marcel Proust to Michael Pollan—that food touches us deeply in memory and emotion.

In Green’s art, state birds and surreal lobsters soar over places where wrongful convictions unfolded, mistaken witnesses shout their errors, glow-in-the-dark skylines evoke homecoming. Johnson’s essays take us inside those moments—from the courtrooms where things went wrong to the pathways of faith and resilience that kept people sane through their years of injustice. First Meal seeks to inform and spread awareness, but also celebrate the humanity that unites us, and the idea that gratitude and euphoria—even as it mixes with grief and the awareness of loss—can emerge in places we least expect.

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First Peoples of Great Salt Lake
A Cultural Landscape from Nevada to Wyoming
Steven R. Simms
University of Utah Press, 2023

Great Salt Lake is a celebrated, world-recognized natural landmark. It, and the broader region bound to it, is also a thoroughly cultural landscape; generations of peoples made their lives there. In an eminently readable narrative, Steven Simms, one of the foremost archaeologists of the region, traces the scope of human history dating from the Pleistocene, when First Peoples interacted with the lapping waters of Lake Bonneville, to nearly the present day. Through vivid descriptions of how people lived, migrated, and mingled, with persistence and resilience, Simms honors the long human presence on the landscape.

First Peoples of Great Salt Lake takes a different approach to understanding the ancients than is typical of archaeology. De-emphasizing categories and labels, it traces changing environments, climates, and peoples through the notion of place. It challenges the "Pristine Myth," the cultural bias that Indigenous peoples were timeless, changeless, primitive, and the landscapes they lived in sparsely populated and perpetually pristine. First Peoples and their descendants modified the forests and understory vegetation, shaped wildlife populations, and adapted to long-term climate change. Native Americans of Great Salt Lake were very much part of their world, and the story here is one of long continuity through dramatic cultural change.


 
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