front cover of Organized Crime in Chicago
Organized Crime in Chicago
Beyond the Mafia
Robert M. Lombardo
University of Illinois Press, 2013
This book provides a comprehensive sociological explanation for the emergence and continuation of organized crime in Chicago. Tracing the roots of political corruption that afforded protection to gambling, prostitution, and other vice activity in Chicago and other large American cities, Robert M. Lombardo challenges the dominant belief that organized crime in America descended directly from the Sicilian Mafia. According to this widespread "alien conspiracy" theory, organized crime evolved in a linear fashion beginning with the Mafia in Sicily, emerging in the form of the Black Hand in America's immigrant colonies, and culminating in the development of the Cosa Nostra in America's urban centers.
 
Looking beyond this Mafia paradigm, this volume argues that the development of organized crime in Chicago and other large American cities was rooted in the social structure of American society. Specifically, Lombardo ties organized crime to the emergence of machine politics in America's urban centers. From nineteenth-century vice syndicates to the modern-day Outfit, Chicago's criminal underworld could not have existed without the blessing of those who controlled municipal, county, and state government. These practices were not imported from Sicily, Lombardo contends, but were bred in the socially disorganized slums of America where elected officials routinely franchised vice and crime in exchange for money and votes. This book also traces the history of the African-American community's participation in traditional organized crime in Chicago and offers new perspectives on the organizational structure of the Chicago Outfit, the traditional organized crime group in Chicago.
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Organizing Access To Capital
Advocacy And The Democratization
edited by Gregory D. Squires
Temple University Press, 2003
Community activists were delighted with the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act, but they came to realize that it would take more than the word of law to bring about real change. This book gives voice to the activists who took it upon themselves to agitate for increased investment by financial institutions in their local communities. They tell of their struggles to get banks, mortgage companies and others to rethink their lending policies. Their stories, drawn from experiences in Chicago, New York, Milwaukee, Boston, Pittsburgh, and other cities around the country, offer insight into the way our political/economic system really works.
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Organizing Dixie
Alabama's Workers in the Industrial Era
Philip Taft
University of Alabama Press, 2007

"As befits a state in which coal, iron, and steel were the bulwarks of its industrial sector, Taft stresses that history of unionism among coal miners and iron and steel workers. Here we learn much about the experiences of the United Mine Workers of America and the Steel Workers Organizing Committee—United Steelworkers of America in the Deep South. Yet Taft does not neglect the history of other Alabama workers. Building tradesmen, railroad employees, textile millhands, and Gadsden’s rubber workers all appear in the pages of this book. Here we have the most complete and modern history of a state labor movement in the South written from the perspective of its institutional leaders." —American Historical Review

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Organizing for Equality
The Evolution of Women's and Racial-Ethnic Organizations in America, 1955-1985
Minkoff, Debra C
Rutgers University Press, 1995

Women and racial-ethnic minorities have had long histories of mobilizing for equality in U.S. society, but recent decades have witnessed an unprecedented expansion in the number and visibility of voluntary and activist organizations committed to challenging gender and racial-ethnic discrimination. What conditions have encouraged this growth? Going beyond more familiar accounts of social movement development, Debra Minkoff uses multivariate techniques to demonstrate that there is an ecology of organizational evolution that has shaped the formation and survival of national women's, African-American, Asian American, and Latino social and political organizations. Changes in the environment for action during the 1960s promoted the creation of a niche for women's and minority organizational activity, and this sector continued to expand even as the climate for social action became increasingly conservative during the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on recent advances in both social movement and organizational theory and research, Minkoff offers an organizational analysis of the evolution of the women's and racial-ethnic social change sector since the mid-1950s. She provides an original synthesis of social movement and organizational theory, and unique analysis of the development of these women's and minority organizations from the civil rights era to the present.

 

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Organizing for Foreign Policy Crises
Presidents, Advisers, and the Management of Decision Making
Patrick J. Haney
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Presidents often assemble ad hoc groups of advisers to help them make decisions during foreign policy crises. These advisers may include the holders of the traditional foreign policy positions--secretaries of state and defense--as well as others from within and without the executive branch. It has never been clear what role these groups play in the development of policy. In this landmark study, Patrick Haney examines how these crisis decision groups were structured and how they performed the tasks of providing information, advice, and analysis to the president. From this, Haney investigates the links between a president's crisis management structure and the decision-making process that took place during a foreign policy crisis.
Haney employs case studies to examine the different ways presidents from Truman through Bush used crisis decision-making groups to help manage foreign policy crises. He looks at the role of these groups in handling the Berlin blockade in 1948, the Suez Crisis in 1956, the Tet offensive in 1968, the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the Panama invasion in 1989, among other crises. He extends our understanding of the organization, management and behavior of the decision-making groups presidents assemble during foreign policy crises. This book will appeal to scholars of the American presidency and American foreign policy.
Patrick Haney is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Miami University of Ohio.
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Organizing Freedom
Black Emancipation Activism in the Civil War Midwest
Jennifer R. Harbour
Southern Illinois University Press, 2020
Organizing Freedom is a riveting and significant social history of black emancipation activism in Indiana and Illinois during the Civil War era. By enlarging the definition of emancipation to include black activism, author Jennifer R. Harbour details the aggressive, tenacious defiance through which Midwestern African Americans—particularly black women—made freedom tangible for themselves.

Despite banning slavery, Illinois and Indiana share an antebellum history of severely restricting rights for free black people while protecting the rights of slaveholders. Nevertheless, as Harbour shows, black Americans settled there, and in a liminal space between legal slavery and true freedom, they focused on their main goals: creating institutions like churches, schools, and police watches; establishing citizenship rights; arguing against oppressive laws in public and in print; and, later, supporting their communities throughout the Civil War.
Harbour’s sophisticated gendered analysis features black women as being central to the seeking of emancipated freedom. Her distinct focus on what military service meant for the families of black Civil War soldiers elucidates how black women navigated life at home without a male breadwinner at the same time they began a new, public practice of emancipation activism. During the tumult of war, Midwestern black women negotiated relationships with local, state, and federal entities through the practices of philanthropy, mutual aid, religiosity, and refugee and soldier relief.

This story of free black people shows how the ideal of equality often competed against reality in an imperfect nation. As they worked through the sluggish, incremental process to achieve abolition and emancipation, Midwestern black activists created a unique regional identity.

 
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Organizing Locally
How the New Decentralists Improve Education, Health Care, and Trade
Bruce Fuller
University of Chicago Press, 2015
We love the local. From the cherries we buy, to the grocer who sells them, to the school where our child unpacks them for lunch, we express resurgent faith in decentralizing the institutions and businesses that arrange our daily lives. But the fact is that huge, bureaucratic organizations often still shape the character of our jobs, schools, the groceries where we shop, and even the hospitals we entrust with our lives. So how, exactly, can we work small, when everything around us is so big, so global and standardized? In Organizing Locally, Bruce Fuller shows us, taking stock of America’s rekindled commitment to localism across an illuminating range of sectors, unearthing the crucial values and practices of decentralized firms that work.
           
Fuller first untangles the economic and cultural currents that have eroded the efficacy of—and our trust in—large institutions over the past half century. From there we meet intrepid leaders who have been doing things differently. Traveling from a charter school in San Francisco to a veterans service network in Iowa, from a Pennsylvania health-care firm to the Manhattan branch of a Swedish bank, he explores how creative managers have turned local staff loose to craft inventive practices, untethered from central rules and plain-vanilla routines. By holding their successes and failures up to the same analytical light, he vividly reveals the key cornerstones of social organization on which motivating and effective decentralization depends. Ultimately, he brings order and evidence to the often strident debates about who has the power—and on what scale—to structure how we work and live locally.

Written for managers, policy makers, and reform activists, Organizing Locally details the profound decentering of work and life inside firms, unfolding across postindustrial societies. Its fresh theoretical framework explains resurging faith in decentralized organizations and the ingredients that deliver vibrant meaning and efficacy for residents inside. Ultimately, it is a synthesizing study, a courageous and radical new way of conceiving of American vitality, creativity, and ambition. 
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Organizing the Lakota
The Political Economy of the New Deal on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations
Thomas Biolsi
University of Arizona Press, 1992
In 1933 the United States Office of Indian Affairs began a major reform of Indian policy, organizing tribal governments under the provisions of the Indian Reorganization Act and turning over the administration of reservations to these new bodies. Organizing the Lakota considers the implementation of this act among the Lakota (Western Sioux or Teton Dakota) from 1933 through 1945.

Biolsi pays particular attention to the administrative means by which the OIA retained the power to design and implement tribal "self-government" as well as the power to control the flow of critical resources—rations, relief employment, credit—to the reservations. He also shows how this imbalance of power between the tribes and the federal bureaucracy influenced politics on the reservations, and argues that the crisis of authority faced by the Lakota tribal governments among their own would-be constituents—most dramatically demonstrated by the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation—is a direct result of their disempowerment by the United States.
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Organizing Women
Home, Work, and the Institutional Infrastructure of Print in Twentieth-Century America
Christine Pawley
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

In the first decades of the twentieth century, print-centered organizations spread rapidly across the United States, providing more women than ever before with opportunities to participate in public life. While most organizations at the time were run by and for white men, women—both Black and white—were able to reshape their lives and their social worlds through their participation in these institutions.

Organizing Women traces the histories of middle-class women—rural and urban, white and Black, married and unmarried—who used public and private institutions of print to tell their stories, expand their horizons, and further their ambitions. Drawing from a diverse range of examples, Christine Pawley introduces readers to women who ran branch libraries and library schools in Chicago and Madison, built radio empires from their midwestern farms, formed reading clubs, and published newsletters. In the process, we learn about the organizations themselves, from libraries and universities to the USDA extension service and the YWCA, and the ways in which women confronted gender discrimination and racial segregation in the course of their work.

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Orgies of Feeling
Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom
Elisabeth R. Anker
Duke University Press, 2014
Melodrama is not just a film or literary genre but a powerful political discourse that galvanizes national sentiment to legitimate state violence. Finding virtue in national suffering and heroism in sovereign action, melodramatic political discourses cast war and surveillance as moral imperatives for eradicating villainy and upholding freedom. In Orgies of Feeling, Elisabeth R. Anker boldly reframes political theories of sovereignty, freedom, and power by analyzing the work of melodrama and affect in contemporary politics. Arguing that melodrama animates desires for unconstrained power, Anker examines melodramatic discourses in the War on Terror, neoliberal politics, anticommunist rhetoric, Hollywood film, and post-Marxist critical theory. Building on Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of "orgies of feeling," in which overwhelming emotions displace commonplace experiences of vulnerability and powerlessness onto a dramatic story of injured freedom, Anker contends that the recent upsurge in melodrama in the United States is an indication of public discontent. Yet the discontent that melodrama reflects is ultimately an expression of the public's inability to overcome systemic exploitation and inequality rather than an alarmist response to inflated threats to the nation.
 
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The Oriental Obscene
Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era
Sylvia Shin Huey Chong
Duke University Press, 2011
The Oriental Obscene is a sophisticated analysis of Americans’ reactions to visual representations of the Vietnam War, such as the photograph of the “napalm girl,” news footage of the Tet Offensive, and feature films from The Deer Hunter to Rambo: First Blood Part II. Sylvia Shin Huey Chong combines psychoanalytic and film theories with U.S. cultural history to explain what she terms the oriental obscene: racialized fantasies that Americans derived largely from images of Asians as the perpetrators or victims of extreme violence. Chong contends that these fantasies helped Americans to process the trauma of the Vietnam War, as well as the growth of the Asian American population after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the postwar immigration of Southeast Asian refugees. The oriental obscene animated a wide range of political narratives, not only the movements for and against the war, but causes as diverse as the Black Power movement, law-and-order conservatism, second-wave feminism, and the nascent Asian American movement. During the Vietnam era, pictures of Asian bodies were used to make sense of race, violence, and America’s identity at home and abroad.
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Oriental Shadows
The Presence of the East in Early American Literature
Jim Egan
The Ohio State University Press

Through the use of several iconic early American authors (Anne Bradstreet, James Kirkpatrick, Benjamin Franklin, and Edgar Allan Poe), Jim Egan’s Oriental Shadows: The Presence of the East in Early American Literature explores the presence of “the East” in American writing.

The specter of the East haunted the literature of colonial British America and the new United States, from the earliest promotional pamphlets to the most aesthetically sophisticated works of art of the American Renaissance. Figures of Persia, China, Arabia, and other Oriental people, places, and things played crucial roles in many British American literary works, serving as key images in early American writers’ efforts to demonstrate that early American culture could match—and perhaps even surpass—European standards of refinement. These writers offered the East as a solution to America’s perceived inferior civilized status by suggesting that America become more civilized not by becoming more European but instead by adopting aesthetic styles and standards long associated with an East cast as superior aesthetically to both America and Europe.

In bringing to light this largely overlooked archive of images within the American literary canon, Oriental Shadows suggests that the East played a key role in the emergence of a distinctively American literary tradition and, further, that early American identity was born as much from figures of the East as it was from the colonists’ encounters with the frontier.
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Orientalism and Modernism
The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams
Zhaoming Qian
Duke University Press, 1995
Chinese culture held a well-known fascination for modernist poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. What is less known but is made fully clear by Zhaoming Qian is the degree to which oriental culture made these poets the modernists they became. This ambitious and illuminating study shows that Orientalism, no less than French symbolism and Italian culture, is a constitutive element of Modernism.
Consulting rare and unpublished materials, Qian traces Pound’s and Williams’s remarkable dialogues with the great Chinese poets—Qu Yuan, Li Bo, Wang Wei, and Bo Juyi—between 1913 and 1923. His investigation reveals that these exchanges contributed more than topical and thematic ideas to the Americans’ work and suggests that their progressively modernist style is directly linked to a steadily growing contact and affinity for similar Chinese styles. He demonstrates, for example, how such influences as the ethics of pictorial representation, the style of ellipsis, allusion, and juxtaposition, and the Taoist/Zen–Buddhist notion of nonbeing/being made their way into Pound’s pre-Fenollosan Chinese adaptations, Cathay, Lustra, and the Early Cantos, as well as Williams’s Sour Grapes and Spring and All. Developing a new interpretation of important work by Pound and Williams, Orientalism and Modernism fills a significant gap in accounts of American Modernism, which can be seen here for the first time in its truly multicultural character.
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Orientals
Robert Lee
Temple University Press, 1999
Sooner or later every Asian American must deal with the question "Where do you come from?" It is probably the most familiar if least aggressive form of racism. It is a tip-off to the persistent notion that people of Asian ancestry are not real Americans, that "Orientals" never really stop being loyal to their foreign homeland, no matter how long they or their families have been in this country. Confronting the cultural stereotypes that have been attached to Asian Americans over the last 150 years, Robert G. Lee seizes the label "Oriental" and asks where it came from.

The idea  of Asians as mysterious strangers who could not be assimilated into the cultural mainstream was percolating to the surface of American popular culture in the mid-nineteenth century, when Chinese immigrant laborers began to arrive in this country in large numbers. Lee shows how the bewildering array of racialized images first proffered by music hall songsters and social commentators have evolved and become generalized to all Asian Americans, coalescing in particular stereotypes. Whether represented as Pollutant, Coolie, Deviant, Yellow Peril, Model Minority, or Gook,  the Oriental is portrayed as alien and a threat to the American family -- the nation writ small.

Refusing to balance positive and negative stereotypes, Lee connects these stereotypes to particular historical moments, each marked by shifting class relations and cultural crises. Seen as products of history and racial politics, the images that have prevailed in songs, fiction, films, and nonfiction polemics are contradictory and complex. Lee probes into clashing images of Asians as (for instance) seductively exotic or devious despoilers of (white) racial purity, admirably industrious or an insidious threat to native laborers. When Lee dissects the  ridiculous, villainous, or pathetic characters that amused or alarmed the  American public, he finds nothing generated by the real Asian American experience; whether they come from the Gold Rush camps or Hollywood films or the cover of  Newsweek, these inhuman images are manufactured to play out America's racial myths.

Orientals comes to grips with the ways that  racial stereotypes come into being and serve the purposes of the dominant culture.
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Orientations
Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora
Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa, eds.
Duke University Press, 2001
Asian and Asian American studies emerged, respectively, from Cold War and social protest ideologies. Yet, in the context of contemporary globalization, can these ideological distinctions remain in place? Suggesting new directions for studies of the Asian diaspora, the prominent scholars who contribute to this volume raise important questions about the genealogies of these fields, their mutual imbrication, and their relationship to other disciplinary formations, including American and ethnic studies.
With its recurrent themes of transnationalism, globalization, and postcoloniality, Orientations considers various embodiments of the Asian diaspora, including a rumination on minority discourses and performance studies, and a historical look at the journal Amerasia. Exploring the translation of knowledge from one community to another, other contributions consider such issues as Filipino immigrants’ strategies for enacting Asian American subjectivity and the link between area studies and the journal Subaltern Studies. In a section that focuses on how disciplines—or borders—form, one essay discusses “orientalist melancholy,” while another focuses on the construction of the Asian American persona during the Cold War. Other topics in the volume include the role Asian immigrants play in U.S. racial politics, Japanese American identity in postwar Japan, Asian American theater, and the effects of Asian and Asian American studies on constructions of American identity.

Contributors. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Rey Chow, Kandice Chuh, Sharon Hom, Yoshikuni Igarashi, Dorinne Kondo, Russell Leong, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Martin F. Manalansan IV, David Palumbo-Liu, R. Radhakrishnan, Karen Shimakawa, Sau-ling C. Wong

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The Origin and Development of Scholarly Historical Periodicals
Margaret F. Stieg
University of Alabama Press, 2005

"This is a pioneering study and represents a major undertaking. . . . Stieg succeeds in making intelligible the diffuse and highly diversified nature of the historical periodical. At minimum, this title should be required reading of all history graduate students in methodology courses. Many senior historians would also benefit from a review of its contents. . . . Information and library science students specializing in scholarly communication should digest the entire study." —Journal of Education for Library and Information Science

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The Origin and Distribution of Birds in Coastal Alaska and British Columbia
The Lost Manuscript of Ornithologist Harry S. Swarth
Christopher W. Swarth
Oregon State University Press, 2022
At the time of his death in 1935, Harry S. Swarth, head of the Mammalogy and Ornithology Departments at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, had been preparing a manuscript reflecting on twenty-five years of his research in coastal Alaska and British Columbia. “The Distribution and Migrations of Birds in Adjacent Alaska and British Columbia” summarized Swarth’s research, ideas, and conjectures on the bird life in the region, including theories about when and how birds populated this vast territory after the retreat of glaciers near the end of the Pleistocene. Drawing on his field experiences and his forty published scientific papers, Swarth’s manuscript represented state-of-the-art science for the time. And his ideas hold up; his papers are still cited by ornithologists today.

In 2019, Christopher Swarth, Harry’s grandson and a scientist in his own right, discovered the forgotten manuscript. This book includes the original unpublished manuscript, accompanied by contextual essays from contemporary ornithologists who examine the impact and relevance of Swarth’s research on coastal bird diversity, fox sparrow migration, and the systematic puzzle of the timberline sparrow. Expedition maps display field camps and exploration routes, and species checklists illustrate the variety of birds observed at key field sites. To bring additional color and insight, The Origin and Distribution of Birds in Coastal Alaska and British Columbia also includes excerpts from Harry Swarth’s field notes, a comprehensive list of Harry Swarth’s publications, and a glossary with historic and contemporary bird names. Naturalists, ornithologists, birders, and all those who want to learn more about the natural history of the region will delight in the rediscovery of this long-lost treasure.
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The Origin of Others
Toni Morrison
Harvard University Press, 2017

America’s foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?

Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin of Others. In her search for answers, the novelist considers her own memories as well as history, politics, and especially literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Camara Laye are among the authors she examines. Readers of Morrison’s fiction will welcome her discussions of some of her most celebrated books—Beloved, Paradise, and A Mercy.

If we learn racism by example, then literature plays an important part in the history of race in America, both negatively and positively. Morrison writes about nineteenth-century literary efforts to romance slavery, contrasting them with the scientific racism of Samuel Cartwright and the banal diaries of the plantation overseer and slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood. She looks at configurations of blackness, notions of racial purity, and the ways in which literature employs skin color to reveal character or drive narrative. Expanding the scope of her concern, she also addresses globalization and the mass movement of peoples in this century. National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Morrison’s most personal work of nonfiction to date.

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The Original Guitar Hero and the Power of Music
The Legendary Lonnie Johnson, Music, and Civil Rights
Dean Alger
University of North Texas Press, 2014

front cover of The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment
The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment
Its Letter and Spirit
Randy E. Barnett, Evan D. Bernick
Harvard University Press, 2021

A Federalist Notable Book

“An important contribution to our understanding of the 14th Amendment.”
Wall Street Journal

“By any standard an important contribution…A must-read.”
National Review

“The most detailed legal history to date of the constitutional amendment that changed American law more than any before or since…The corpus of legal scholarship is richer for it.”
Washington Examiner

Adopted in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment profoundly changed the Constitution, giving the federal judiciary and Congress new powers to protect the fundamental rights of individuals from being violated by the states. Yet, the Supreme Court has long misunderstood or ignored the original meaning of its key Section I clauses.

Barnett and Bernick contend that the Fourteenth Amendment must be understood as the culmination of decades of debate about the meaning of the antebellum Constitution. In the course of this debate, antislavery advocates advanced arguments informed by natural rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the common law, as well as what is today called public-meaning originalism.

The authors show how these arguments and the principles of the Declaration in particular eventually came to modify the Constitution. They also propose workable doctrines for implementing the amendment’s key provisions covering the privileges and immunities of citizenship, due process, and equal protection under the law.

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The Original Rush Limbaugh
Lawyer, Legislator, and Civil Libertarian
Dennis K. Boman
University of Missouri Press, 2012
            Born at the end of the nineteenth century into a farming family of modest means in southeastern Missouri, Rush Hudson Limbaugh Sr. led a distinguished professional life as an attorney, legislator, and special ambassadorial representative of the United States. Today his descendants benefit from his reputation for integrity and public-spiritedness as a lawyer and member of his community, a legacy that lives on in his family in the careers of two federal district court judges, Stephen Limbaugh Sr. and Jr., and David Limbaugh, a practicing attorney and a nationally known author and political commentator. Moreover, Limbaugh’s character and life has gained wider renown on the radio talk show of his grandson and namesake.
            In this biography, Dennis K. Boman recounts Limbaugh’s legal career, which spanned most of the twentieth century and included a number of important events in Missouri history. His legal prowess first came to wider public notice when he managed the impeachment trial of state treasurer Larry Brunk, who was accused of misconduct in office. Among his later achievements was presiding over the infamous 1935 case Ware vs. Muench, in which a young woman sued for the return of her infant son. The case gained widespread attention, and the daily courtroom proceedings were reported in detail by newspapers across the United States. His legal opinion in the case was widely quoted and upheld by the Supreme Court of Missouri.
            In the midst of the Great Depression, as a state legislator, although a member of the minority party, Limbaugh led the effort to pass significant legislation, including the more fair distribution of the state tax burden, the founding of the Missouri state highway patrol, and the construction of state roads. In the late 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Limbaugh to represent the United States as a goodwill ambassador to India.
            As a respected lawyer, Limbaugh was selected to serve on different civil rights commissions. First a member of the American Bar Association’s Special Committee on the Bill of Rights, he later was appointed its chair. This committee investigated the circumstances of African Americans, especially in the South, and sought to find practical ways to end racial discrimination and segregation. Moreover, he served as a member of the Special Committee on Civil Rights and Social Unrest in 1964 and 1965, as well as a commissioner on the Missouri Commission on Human Rights and Responsibilities, which examined violations of civil rights and led to legislation to protect non-whites from discrimination.
            Boman conducted personal interviews with many members of the Limbaugh family, whose candid answers add invaluable insights into Limbaugh’s character and career. Boman delves into Limbaugh’s memoirs, family correspondence, and personal papers, as well as newspaper accounts, to chronicle the life of a man who served his state and country until his death at the age of 104.
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Originalism and the Good Constitution
John O. McGinnis and Michael B. Rappaport
Harvard University Press, 2013

Originalism holds that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted according to its meaning at the time it was enacted. In their innovative defense of originalism, John McGinnis and Michael Rappaport maintain that the text of the Constitution should be adhered to by the Supreme Court because it was enacted by supermajorities—both its original enactment under Article VII and subsequent Amendments under Article V. A text approved by supermajorities has special value in a democracy because it has unusually wide support and thus tends to maximize the welfare of the greatest number.

The authors recognize and respond to many possible objections. Does originalism perpetuate the dead hand of the past? How can following the original meaning be justified, given that African Americans and women were excluded from the enactment of the Constitution in 1787 and many of its subsequent Amendments? What is originalism’s place in interpretation of the Constitution, when after two hundred years there is so much non-originalist precedent?

A fascinating counterfactual they pose is this: had the Supreme Court not interpreted the Constitution so freely, perhaps the nation would have resorted to the Article V amendment process more often and with greater effect. Their book will be an important contribution to the literature on originalism, which is now the most prominent theory of constitutional interpretation.

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Origins and Destinations
The Making of the Second Generation
Renee Luthra
Russell Sage Foundation, 2018
The  children of immigrants continue a journey begun by their parents.  Born or raised in the United States, this second generation now stands over 20 million strong. In this insightful new book, immigration scholars Renee Luthra, Thomas Soehl, and Roger Waldinger provide a fresh understanding the making of the second generation, bringing both their origins and destinations into view.

Using surveys of second generation immigrant adults in New York and Los Angeles, Origins and Destinations explains why second generation experiences differ across national origin groups and why immigrant offspring with the same national background often follow different trajectories.  Inter-group disparities stem from contexts of both emigration and immigration.  Origin countries differ in value orientations: immigrant parents transmit lessons learned in varying contexts of emigration to children raised in the U.S.  A system of migration control sifts immigrants by legal status, generating a context of immigration that favors some groups over others. Both contexts matter: schooling is higher among immigrant children from more secular societies (South Korea) than among those from more religious countries (the Philippines).   When immigrant groups enter the U.S. migration system through a welcoming door, as opposed to one that makes authorized status difficult to achieve, education propels immigrant children to better jobs. 
 
Diversity is also evident among immigrant offspring whose parents stem from the same place.  Immigrant children grow up with homeland connections, which can both hurt and harm: immigrant offspring get less schooling when a parent lives abroad, but more schooling if parents in the U.S. send money to relatives living abroad.  Though all immigrants enter the U.S. as non-citizens, some instantly enjoy legal status, while others spend years in the shadows.  Children born abroad, but raised in the U.S. are all everyday Americans, but only some have become de jure Americans, a difference yielding across-the-board positive effects, even among those who started out in the same country.
 
Disentangling the sources of diversity among today’s population of immigrant offspring, Origins and Destinations provides a compelling new framework for understanding the second generation that is transforming America.
 
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The Origins and Rise of Associate Degree Nursing Education
Patricia T. Haase
Duke University Press, 1990
The Origins and Rise of Associate Degree Nursing Education offers an analytical history of the beginnings and development of associate degree nursing (ADN) programs and the role of the caregivers it produces in the health care system. Nurses may be trained in two-, three-, or four-year programs, but all are eligible to take the accreditation examination to be licensed as registered nurses (RNs). The question of distinguishing between “professional” nurses from bachelor programs and “technical” nurses from the associate degree programs has become an important and controversial issue in nursing.
Advocates have long contended that the associate degree nurse is vital to the American health care system. This study, funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, confirms this view. In recent years the Foundation has invested more than $6.1 million in the development of the ADN, awarded by junior and community colleges. Many participants in the ADN projects for the Kellogg Foundation have noted that, despite the importance of the ADN and the controversy about its place in nursing education, the literature is scattered and hard to identity. The Origins and Rise of Associate Degree Nursing Education and the companion bibliography will provide much-needed information to educators, hospital and nursing administrators, nursing leaders, and public policy makers—all of whom must cope with the growing nursing shortage and increasingly difficult issues in health policy and administration.
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The Origins of Bioethics
Remembering When Medicine Went Wrong
John A. Lynch
Michigan State University Press, 2019
The Origins of Bioethics argues that what we remember from the history of medicine and how we remember it are consequential for the identities of doctors, researchers, and patients in the present day. Remembering when medicine went wrong calls people to account for the injustices inflicted on vulnerable communities across the twentieth century in the name of medicine, but the very groups empowered to create memorials to these events often have a vested interest in minimizing their culpability for them. Sometimes these groups bury this past and forget events when medical research harmed those it was supposed to help. The call to bioethical memory then conflicts with a desire for “minimal remembrance” on the part of institutions and governments. The Origins of Bioethics charts this tension between bioethical memory and minimal remembrance across three cases—the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook Hepatitis Study, and the Cincinnati Whole Body Radiation Study—that highlight the shift from robust bioethical memory to minimal remembrance to forgetting.
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The Origins of Canadian and American Political Differences
Jason Kaufman
Harvard University Press, 2009

Why do the United States and Canada have such divergent political cultures when they share one of the closest economic and cultural relationships in the world? Canadians and Americans consistently disagree over issues such as the separation of church and state, the responsibility of government for the welfare of everyone, the relationship between federal and subnational government, and the right to marry a same-sex partner or to own an assault rifle.

In this wide-ranging work, Jason Kaufman examines the North American political landscape to draw out the essential historical factors that underlie the countries’ differences. He discusses the earliest European colonies in North America and the Canadian reluctance to join the American Revolution. He compares land grants and colonial governance; territorial expansion and relations with native peoples; immigration and voting rights. But the key lies in the evolution and enforcement of jurisdictional law, which illuminates the way social relations and state power developed in the two countries.

Written in an accessible and engaging style, this book will appeal to readers of sociology, politics, law, and history as well as to anyone interested in the relationship between the United States and Canada.

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The Origins of Central Banking in the United States
Jr Richard H.Timberlake
Harvard University Press, 1978

This book recounts the emergence of central banking Ideas and Institutions In this country—from the formation of the First Bank of the United States to the enactment of the Federal Reserve System. Focusing on the Intellectual and practical origins of monetary policy, Timberlake offers the first study on the political economy of central banking. He traces the Ideas that surrounded monetary events through records of congressional debates, documents of the House and Senate, and reports of the Secretary of the Treasury and the Comptroller of the Currency. Almost none of this material has been used before as a method of analyzing monetary Institutions and their growth.

Timberlake's principal assumption is that these debates and government activities mirrored social norms. He corrects some traditional beliefs surrounding such monetary mysteries as the causes of the inflation of 1812-1815, the effects of the Specie Circular, and the decline of silver influence In the early 1890s. Economists, historians, lawyers, government policy makers, and politicians will welcome the new insights on the origins of central banking in the economic and political milieus of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries.

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The Origins of Christian Anti-Internationalism
Conservative Evangelicals and the League of Nations
Markku Ruotsila
Georgetown University Press, 2008

The roots of conservative Christian skepticism of international politics run deep. In this original work Markku Ruotsila artfully unearths the historical and theological origins of evangelical Christian thought on modern-day international organizations and U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the fierce debates over the first truly international body—the League of Nations.

After describing the rise of the Social Gospel movement that played a vital, foundational role in the movement toward a League of Nations, The Origins of Christian Anti-Internationalism examines the arguments and tactics that the most influential confessional Christian congregations in the United States—dispensational millenialists, Calvinists, Lutherans, and, to a lesser extent, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Christian Restorationists—used to undermine domestic support for the proposed international body. Ruotsila recounts how these groups learned to co-opt less religious-minded politicians and organizations that were likewise opposed to the very concept of international multilateralism. In closely analyzing how the evangelical movement successfully harnessed political activism to sway U.S. foreign policy, he traces a direct path from the successful battle against the League to the fundamentalist-modernist clashes of the 1920s and the present-day debate over America's role in the world.

This exploration of why the United States ultimately rejected the League of Nations offers a lucid interpretation of the significant role that religion plays in U.S. policymaking both at home and abroad. Ruotsila's analysis will be of interest to scholars and practitioners of theology, religious studies, religion and politics, international relations, domestic policy, and U.S. and world history.

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The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875–1925
A Documentary History
John C. Brereton
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996
This volume describes the formative years of English composition courses in college through a study of the most prominent documents of the time: magazine articles, scholarly reports, early textbooks, teachers' testimonies-and some of the actual student papers that provoked discussion. Includes writings by leading scholars of the era such as Adams Sherman Hill, Gertrude Buck, William Edward Mead, Lane Cooper, William Lyon Phelps, and Fred Newton Scott.
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The Origins of Cool in Postwar America
Joel Dinerstein
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Cool. It was a new word and a new way to be, and in a single generation, it became the supreme compliment of American culture. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America uncovers the hidden history of this concept and its new set of codes that came to define a global attitude and style. As Joel Dinerstein reveals in this dynamic book, cool began as a stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion, and a youthful search for social change.

Through eye-opening portraits of iconic figures, Dinerstein illuminates the cultural connections and artistic innovations among Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among others. We eavesdrop on conversations among Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Miles Davis, and on a forgotten debate between Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer over the "white Negro" and black cool. We come to understand how the cool worlds of Beat writers and Method actors emerged from the intersections of film noir, jazz, and existentialism. Out of this mix, Dinerstein sketches nuanced definitions of cool that unite concepts from African-American and Euro-American culture: the stylish stoicism of the ethical rebel loner; the relaxed intensity of the improvising jazz musician; the effortless, physical grace of the Method actor. To be cool is not to be hip and to be hot is definitely not to be cool.

This is the first work to trace the history of cool during the Cold War by exploring the intersections of film noir, jazz, existential literature, Method acting, blues, and rock and roll. Dinerstein reveals that they came together to create something completely new—and that something is cool.
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The Origins of Moral Theology in the United States
Three Different Approaches
Charles E. Curran
Georgetown University Press, 1997

Charles E. Curran presents the first in-depth analysis of the origins of Catholic moral theology in the United States, focusing on three significant figures in the late nineteenth century and demonstrating that methodological pluralism and theological diversity existed in the Church even then.

Curran begins by tracing the historical development of moral theology, especially as presented in nineteenth-century manuals of moral theology, which offered a legal model of morality including a heavy emphasis on canon law. He then probes the different approaches and ideas of three important writers: Aloysius Sabetti, a Jesuit who was a typical, as well as the most influential, American manualist; Thomas J. Bouquillon, first chair of moral theology at Catholic University of America, a neoscholastic who criticized the manuals' approach as narrow and incomplete for failing to address principles, virtues, and the connection to systematic theology; and clerical educator John B. Hogan, a casuist who developed a more inductive and historically conscious methodology.

Curran describes how all three men dealt in different ways with the increasing role of authoritative teachings in moral theology from the Vatican. He also shows how they reflected their American context and the views of their own time on women and sexuality.

So little attention has been paid to the development of moral theology in this country that these authors are unknown to many scholars. Curran's book corrects this oversight and proposes that the ferment revealed in their writings offers important lessons for contemporary Catholic moral theology.

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The Origins of the Dual City
Housing, Race, and Redevelopment in Twentieth-Century Chicago
Joel Rast
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Chicago is celebrated for its rich diversity, but, even more than most US cities, it is also plagued by segregation and extreme inequality. More than ever, Chicago is a “dual city,” a condition taken for granted by many residents. In this book, Joel Rast reveals that today’s tacit acceptance of rising urban inequality is a marked departure from the past. For much of the twentieth century, a key goal for civic leaders was the total elimination of slums and blight. Yet over time, as anti-slum efforts faltered, leaders shifted the focus of their initiatives away from low-income areas and toward the upgrading of neighborhoods with greater economic promise. As misguided as postwar public housing and urban renewal programs were, they were born of a long-standing reformist impulse aimed at improving living conditions for people of all classes and colors across the city—something that can’t be said to be a true priority for many policymakers today. The Origins of the Dual City illuminates how we normalized and became resigned to living amid stark racial and economic divides.
 
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Origins of the National Forests
Harold K. Steen, ed.
Duke University Press, 1992
The national forests lay across America's diverse ecological and political geography, their 191 million acres ocuppying about 10 percent of the nation's land base. On the occasion of the centennial of the National Forest System, Origins of the National Forests examines the issues that have confronted the development, management, and use of the national forests since their inception in 1891.
The national forests are a major source of wood, water, minerals, forage, animal life and habitat, and wilderness. Yet questions of who controls and who benefits from the resources have posed problems and conflicts from the origins of the Forest Service to the present. Based on a 1991 Forest History Society conference, the essays collected here discuss a range of important topics surrounding our national forests, including the relationship between the federal and state systems that regulate the forests; the privately owned lands within the forests that are governed by federal statutes, state laws, and county ordinances; the ill-defined rights of those who lived on the land long before it was a national forest and were forced off the land; and the effect of early policymaking decisions made within the framework of the emerging Conservation Movement.

Contributors. Ron Arnold, Pamela A. Conners, Mary S. Culpin, Stanley Dempsey, Peter Gillis, Donn E. Headley, Robert L. Hendricks, Stephen Larrabee, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Dennis L. Lynch, Michael McCarthy, Char Miller, Joseph A. Miller, James Muhn, Kevin Palmer, Donald Pisani, John F. Reiger, William Rowley, Michael Ryan, William E. Shands, Harold K. Steen, Richard White, Gerald W. Williams

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Origins of the TVA
The Muscle Shoals Controversy, 1920-1932
Preston J. Hubbard
University of Alabama Press, 2005
"Professor Hubbard's painstaking study, Origins of the TVA, shows the thorny course of events before TVA was born....Students of legislation and party politics will be grateful to Professor Hubbard for his careful and useful narrative of the long conflict over policy. His work is well done. He has examined the public records and some of the private papers....Professor Hubbard's volume is a credit to its author and to the press which published it." --J. B. Shannon, The University of Nebraska, in Political Science Quarterly
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Origins of the War with Mexico
The Polk-Stockton Intrigue
By Glenn W. Price
University of Texas Press, 1967

In the spring of 1846 James K. Polk announced that the Mexican Army had invaded United States territory and had “shed American blood upon the American soil.” This political rhetoric, as Glenn W. Price establishes in Origins of the War with Mexico: The Polk-Stockton Intrigue, is part of the myth of American innocence. It represents the “internal contradiction between professed values and patterns of action,” perpetuated by American historical writing that emphasizes national consequences of the acquisition of foreign territory and minimizes both its international significance and the importance of the diplomatic and military methods used.

A conflict with Mexico, leading to territorial expansion of the United States, was not unwanted. California was Polk’s prime objective from the beginning of his administration, and this Mexican province was to be acquired by conquest in a war initiated on the Texas-Mexican border. To this end Polk sent several agents to Texas, but the man at the center of the war intrigue was Commodore Robert F. Stockton, independently wealthy, prominent in politics, and the head of great business enterprises.

Sufficient evidence exists to substantiate in every important particular the steps in Polk’s path of intrigue: his attempts to bribe Mexican officials; his efforts to encourage revolutionary forces in the Mexican provinces; his use of the threat of force to frighten Mexico into selling California; his attempt to initiate a war by proxy through the government of Texas and Anson Jones.

If Polk was unwilling to assume responsibility for aggressive war, Stockton was not; he arrived in Galveston with a squadron of naval vessels in May of 1845, prepared to finance an army of three thousand men from his personal funds to avoid the overt involvement of the government of the United States. But, says Price, for all the internationally dangerous implications of such a maneuver, the two men who played the chief roles in the war intrigue of 1845 are representative in their written and spoken expression of faith in American righteousness of action and in the American tradition of the divine mission.

Based on extensive research into the written and spoken words of the people who were involved, directly and indirectly, in the events, this analysis (which will be considered revisionist) of the origins of the War with Mexico is the result of the kind of objective approach to national history for which the author makes a plea in his preface and conclusion and in his interpretive comments throughout the work. The historian, Price believes, “has the extraordinary advantage of being able to examine mankind from that distance and elevation and detachment which so often reveals, as it is designed to reveal, the gulf between pretension and performance.”

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Orphan Trains
The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed
Stephen O'Connor
University of Chicago Press, 2004
In mid-nineteenth-century New York, vagrant youth, both orphans and runaways, filled the streets. For years the city had been sweeping these children into prisons or almshouses, but in 1853 the young minister Charles Loring Brace proposed a radical solution to the problem by creating the Children's Aid Society, an organization that fought to provide homeless children with shelter, education, and, for many, a new family in the country. Combining a biography of Brace with firsthand accounts of orphans, Stephen O'Connor here tells of the orphan trains that, between 1854 and 1929, spirited away some 250,000 destitute children to rural homes in every one of the forty-eight contiguous states.

A powerful blend of history, biography, and adventure, Orphans Trains remains the definitive work on this little-known episode in American history.
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Orphan Trains to Missouri
Michael D. Patrick & Evelyn Goodrich Trickel
University of Missouri Press, 1997

As an "orphan train" crossed the country, it left part of its cargo at each stop, a few children in one small town and a few in another. Even though farmers needed many hands for labor, most of the small farm communities could not or would not take all of the children on the train. As the train moved to its next stop, those children not taken feared no one would ever want them.

Early immigration laws encouraged the poor of Europe to find new hope with new lives in the United States. But sometimes the immigrants exchanged a bad situation in their native country for an even worse one on the streets of New York and other industrial cities. As a result, the streets were filled with crowds of abandoned children that the police called "street arabs." Many New York citizens blamed the street arabs for crime and violence in the city and wanted them placed in orphan homes or prisons.

In 1853 a man by the name of Charles Loring Brace, along with other well-to-do men in New York City, founded the Children's Aid Society. The society planned to give food, lodging, and clothing to homeless children and provide educational and trade opportunities for them. But the number of children needing help was so large that the Children's Aid Society was unable to care for them, and Brace developed a plan to send many of the children to the rural Midwest by train. He was convinced that the children of the streets would find many benefits in rural America. In 1854 he persuaded the board of the society to send the first trainload of orphans west. With this, the orphan trains were born.

Cheap fares, the central location of the state, and numerous small farming towns along the railroad tracks made Missouri the perfect hub for the orphan trains, even though many areas of the state were still largely unsettled. Researchers have estimated that from 150,000 to 400,000 children were sent out on orphan trains, with perhaps as many as 100,000 being placed in Missouri.

Orphan Trains to Missouri documents the history of the children on those Orphan Trains--their struggles, their successes, and their failures. Touching stories of volunteers who oversaw the placement of the orphans as well as stories of the orphans themselves make this a rich record of American and midwestern history.

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Orphic Bend
Music and Innovative Poetics
Robert L. Zamsky
University of Alabama Press, 2021
Restages fundamental debates about the relationship between poetry and music

WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE


Orphic Bend: Music and Innovative Poetics explores the impact of music on recent pioneering literary practices in the United States. Adopting the myth of Orpheus as its framework, Robert L. Zamsky argues that works by Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, John Taggart, Tracie Morris, and Nathaniel Mackey restage ancient debates over the relationship between poetry and music even as they develop work that often sharply diverges from traditional literary forms. Opening each chapter with a consideration of the orphic roots of lyric, Zamsky integrates contemporary debates over the prospects and limitations of humanism, the meaningfulness of gesture and performance, and the nature of knowledge with the poetics of the writers under consideration, grounding his analysis in close readings of their work.
 
The myth of Orpheus is used as a lens throughout the book, its different facets illuminating sometimes dramatically different aspects of the shared framework of poetry and music. In the case of Bernstein, for instance, Zamsky highlights Ezra Pound’s meditations on the relationship between poetry and music (the ground upon which Pound seeks to recapture the lost possibilities of the Renaissance) and Bernstein’s incisive critique of Pound. For her part, Morris emphasizes the performative power of spoken language, foregrounding the fact that all spoken language bears cultural, communal, and personal marks of the speaker, improving an ensemble self even within the most elemental features of language. Meanwhile, in Mackey’s work, the orphic voice of the poet powerfully reaches toward an order of knowledge in which poetry and music are nearly indecipherable from one another. In this sense, music and the musicality of poetic language are the gateways for Mackey’s Gnosticism, the mechanisms of initiation into a realm, not of secrets to be learned, but of visionary knowing that continuously unfolds.
 
The text explores a range of musical influences on the writers under consideration, from opera to different iterations of jazz, and underscores the variety of ways in which music informs their work. Many of these writers effectively present a theory of music in their invocations of it as an inspiration for, or as an analog to, poetic practice. Zamsky’s focus on poetry and music echoes important interdisciplinary studies on literary modernism, a period for which the importance of music to literary practice is well established and extends that discussion to the contemporary context. In doing so, Orphic Bend provides an important opportunity to consider both the specific legacy of modernism, and to situate contemporary writers in broader historical contexts.
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Orrin Porter Rockwell
Man of God Son of Thunder
Benita N. Schindler
University of Utah Press, 1983

The legend of the Destroying Angel of Mormondom was well established by the time of his death, of natural causes, in 1878. Travelers sang ballads about him as they gathered around their campfires at night. Mothers used his name to frighten children into obedience. He was accused of literally hundreds of murders, all in the name of the Mormon Church.

Yet behind all the myth was a man, a human being. Orrin Porter Rockwell believed in his prophet, Joseph Smith. He spent most of a year chained in an Independence dungeon for his belief, then walked across Missouri to Nauvoo, stumbling into Joseph’s house on Christmas Day. Joseph said to him then, “Cut not thy hair and no bullet or blade can harm thee,” and the legend was born.

Rockwell continued to serve the leaders of his church—as hunter, guide, messenger, scout, guerilla, emissary to the Indians, and lawman. He traveled thousands of miles, raised three families, accumulated land and wealth—and favorably impressed almost everyone who met him. But although he walked with presidents and generals, scholars and scoundrels, in a life lived at the center of many of the great events of the American frontier, he has remained an enigma, a source of continuing controversy.

Harold Schindler’s remarkable investigative skills led him into literally thousands of unlikely places in his search for the truth about Rockwell. Dale L. Morgan, one of the west’s foremost historians, called the first edition “…an impressive job of research, one of the most impressive in recent memory, in the Mormon field. Mr. Schindler has shown great energy and sagacity in dealing with a difficult, highly controversial subject; and he has also made maximum use of the latest scholarship and newly available archival resources.”

But the author was not satisfied until he had probed even more deeply, and this revised and enlarged second edition contains greatly expanded documentation as well as textual additions that flesh out the characters and events of this classic drama of early America.

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Orthodoxies in Massachusetts
Rereading American Puritanism
Janice Knight
Harvard University Press, 1994

Reexamining religious culture in seventeenth-century New England, Janice Knight discovers a contest of rival factions within the Puritan orthodoxy. Arguing that two distinctive strains of Puritan piety emerged in England prior to the migration to America, Knight describes a split between rationalism and mysticism, between theologies based on God’s command and on God’s love. A strong countervoice, expressed by such American divines as John Cotton, John Davenport, and John Norton and the Englishmen Richard Sibbes and John Preston, articulated a theology rooted in Divine Benevolence rather than Almighty Power, substituting free testament for conditional covenant to describe God’s relationship to human beings.

Knight argues that the terms and content of orthodoxy itself were hotly contested in New England and that the dominance of rationalist preachers like Thomas Hooker and Peter Bulkeley has been overestimated by scholars. Establishing the English origins of the differences, Knight rereads the controversies of New England’s first decades as proof of a continuing conflict between the two religious ideologies. The Antinomian Controversy provides the focus for a new understanding of the volatile processes whereby orthodoxies are produced and contested. This book gives voice to this alternative piety within what is usually read as the univocal orthodoxy of New England, and shows the political, social, and literary implications of those differences.

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The Osage in Missouri
Kristie C. Wolferman
University of Missouri Press, 1997

On November 10, 1808, the American militia and the chiefs from the Little Osage and Big Osage nations celebrated. Fort Osage, built on a Missouri River bluff 250 miles west of St. Louis, was officially opened on that date, and the Osage Indians signed a treaty with the Americans written by Governor Meriwether Lewis.

Fort Osage, intended as a citadel for the opening of the great American West, was also to function as a trading post for the Osage Nation. It was President Jefferson's hope that Fort Osage and other fort-trading posts would not only keep peace on the frontier but would also begin a new era in relations between Native Americans and the United States. For a short time, the fort did provide the Osage with a place to trade their furs. It also offered them limited protection from the many other tribes who were their enemies. However, the Osage chiefs discovered very quickly that the fort was small consolation for the lands they had given up by signing the treaty.

In this well-written and very readable work, Kristie C. Wolferman traces the history of the Osage Nation from its origins to its forced departure from Missouri. She demonstrates the ways in which the Osage culture changed with each new encounter of the Osage with Europeans. The Osage had already experienced many contacts with the white man before Fort Osage came to be. They had encountered French trader-trappers, explorers, missionaries, Spanish administrators, and early settlers. Their lives had been changed by the influx of white disease, by the use of European trade goods and weapons, and by the political control of Spanish, French, and American governments. As a result, the Fort Osage experiment came too late to establish lasting good relations between the white men and the Indians.

The Osage in Missouri suggests that the white men could never understand the Osage way of life, nor the Osage the white men's way. But Osage culture, greatly altered by Europeans and Americans, would never be the same again. The Osage would be forced to sacrifice most of their traditions and beliefs, as well as their homeland, on the way to becoming "civilized."

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Oscar W. Underwood
A Political Biography
Evans C. Johnson
University of Alabama Press, 2006

Although Oscar W. Underwood was considered a titan of his age, few American political figures have suffered such neglect as he. Except for his candidacy for the Democratic nomination in 1924, his political career is largely forgotten even in Alabama. The one place in which Underwood is well remembered is in the folklore of Congress, where he is widely regarded as a great party leader who had mastered the rules perhaps as thoroughly as any member of Congress. This mastery, together with steady work, personal magnetism, and a willingness to compromise, made him effective as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in formulating a majority program after the Democrats seized control of the House in 1910. Pat Harrison, Underwood's lieutenant as minority leader, referred to Underwood as the "greatest natural parliamentarian, the greatest leader of a law-making body that I ever saw."

--from the Preface to Oscar W. Underwood: A Political Biography

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Oscar Wilde in America
The Interviews
Edited by Matthew Hofer and Gary Scharnhorst
University of Illinois Press, 2013
Better known in 1882 as a cultural icon than a serious writer, Oscar Wilde was brought to North America for a major lecture tour on Aestheticism and the decorative arts. With characteristic aplomb, he adopted the role as the ambassador of Aestheticism, and he tried out a number of phrases, ideas, and strategies that ultimately made him famous as a novelist and playwright. This exceptional volume cites all ninety-one of Wilde's interviews and contains transcripts of forty-eight of them, and it also includes his lecture on his travels in America.
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Osceola's Legacy
Patricia Riles Wickman
University of Alabama Press, 2006

A bestselling, up-to-date evaluation of a legendary Indian leader. Named Outstanding Book by the Gustavus Myers Center for the  Study of Human Rights. "Osceola's Legacy is significant for its geneology and archaeological study of this Native American and his interaction with the federal government during the 1800s. The catalog of photographs of Osceola portraits and his personal possessions makes this a worthwhile reference book as well." --Georgia Historical Quarterly

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The (Other) American Traditions
Nineteenth-Century Women Writers
Warren, Joyce W
Rutgers University Press, 1993

The American literary canon has been the subject of debate and change for at least a decade.  As women writers and writers of color are being rediscovered and acclaimed, the question of whether they are worthy of inclusion remains open.

The (Other) American Traditions
brings together for the first time in one place, essays on individual writers and traditions that begin to ask the harder questions. How do we talk about these writers once we get beyond the historical issues?  How is their work related to their male counterparts? How is it similar: how is it different? Are differences related to gender or race or class? How has the selection of books in the literary canon (Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, and James) led to a definition of the American tradition that was calculated to exclude women? Do we need a new critical vocabulary to discuss these works? Should we stop talking about a tradition and begin to talk about many traditions? How did black American women writers develop strategies for speaking out when they were doubly in jeopardy of being ignored as blacks and as women? The volume offers irrefutable proof that the writers, the critics who work on their texts, all these questions, and the expansion of the canon matter very much indeed.

Contributors: Nina Baym, Deborah Carlin, Joanne Dobson, Josephine Donovan, Judith Fetterley, Frances Smith Foster, Susan K. Harris, Karla F.C. Holloway, Paul Lauter, Diane Lichtenstein, Carla L. Peterson, Carol J. Singley, Jane Tompkins, Joyce W. Warren and Sandra A. Zagarell.

    

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The Other Americans in Paris
Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth, 1880-1941
Nancy L. Green
University of Chicago Press, 2014
While Gertrude Stein hosted the literati of the Left Bank, Mrs. Bates-Batcheller, an American socialite and concert singer in Paris, held sumptuous receptions for the Daughters of the American Revolution in her suburban villa. History may remember the American artists, writers, and musicians of the Left Bank best, but the reality is that there were many more American businessmen, socialites, manufacturers’ representatives, and lawyers living on the other side of the River Seine.  Be they newly minted American countesses married to foreigners with impressive titles or American soldiers who had settled in France after World War I with their French wives, they provide a new view of the notion of expatriates.

Nancy L. Green thus introduces us for the first time to a long-forgotten part of the American overseas population—predecessors to today’s expats—while exploring the politics of citizenship and the business relationships, love lives, and wealth (and poverty for some) of Americans who staked their claim to the City of Light. The Other Americans in Paris shows that elite migration is a part of migration tout court and that debates over “Americanization” have deep roots in the twentieth century.
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Other Americans
The Art of Latin America in the US Imaginary
Matthew Bush
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

Grounded in perspectives of affect theory, Other Americans examines the writings of Roberto Bolaño and Daniel Alarcón; films by Alfonso Cuarón, Claudia Llosa, Matt Piedmont, and Joel and Ethan Coen; as well as the Netflix serials Narcos and El marginal. These widely consumed works about Latin America—equally balanced between narratives produced in the United States and in the region itself—are laden with fear, anxiety, and shame, which has an impact that exceeds the experience of reception. The negative feelings encoded in visions of Latin America become common coinage for US audiences, shaping their ideological relationship with the region and performing an affective interpellation. By analyzing the underlying melodramatic structures of these works that would portray Latin America as an implicit other, Bush examines a process of affective comprehension that foments an us/them, or north/south binary in the reception of Latin America’s globalized art.

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The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict
Making America's Middle East Policy, from Truman to Reagan
Steven L. Spiegel
University of Chicago Press, 1985
The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict illuminates the controversial course of America's Middle East relations from the birth of Israel to the Reagan administration. Skillfully separating actual policymaking from the myths that have come to surround it, Spiegel challenges the belief that American policy in the Middle East is primarily a relation to events in that region or is motivated by bureaucratic constraints or the pressures of domestic politics. On the contrary, he finds that the ideas and skills of the president and his advisors are critical to the determination of American policy. This volume received the 1986 National Jewish Book Award.
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The Other Bostonians
Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970
Stephan Thernstrom
Harvard University Press, 1973

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The Other Brahmins
Boston's Black Upper Class 1750-1950
Adelaide Cromwell
University of Arkansas Press, 1995

Adelaide Cromwell’s pioneering work explores race and the social caste system in an atypical northern environment over a period of two centuries. Based on scholarly sources, interviews, and questionnaires, the study identifies those blacks in Boston who exercised political, economic, and social leadership from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. The central focus is a comparison of black and white upper-class women in the 1940s.

This rare look at a black social microcosm not located in the South is seminal and timely. Because it concludes at a critical period in American history, The Other Brahmins paints a colorful backdrop for evaluating subsequent changes in urban sociology and stratification. In a groundbreaking study, Cromwell effectively challenges the simplistic notions of hierarchy as they pertain to race.

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The Other California
The Great Central Valley In Life And Letters
Gerald W. Haslam
University of Nevada Press, 1993

Oildale native, Gerald Haslam, doesn’t like it when folks dismiss the Central Valley as boring and flat. In this collection of essays, he argues that it is California’s heartland and economic hub. In addition, the valley has produced a crop of gifted writers. These nineteen essays range from reminiscences of childhood and adolescence to a portrait of Mexican-Americans and their position in the Valley’s society to a moving essay about having the author’s aging father come to live with the family. Even if you have never lived in the Valley, reading this book will give you an entirely new perspective the next time you drive into it.

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The OTHER FIFTIES
INTERROGATING MIDCENTURY AMERICAN ICONS
Joel Foreman
University of Illinois Press, 1997
From the Edsel to Eisenhower, from Mau Mau to Doris Day, and from Ayn Rand to Elvis, contributors to The Other Fifties topple the decade's already weakened image as a time of unprecedented peace, prosperity, and conformity. Representing the fifties as a period of cultural transformation, contributors reveal the gradual "unmaking" of traditions and value systems that took place as American culture prepared itself for the more easily observed cultural turbulence of the 1960s. Well known contributors demonstrate how television, the novel, the Hollywood movie, the Broadway musical, and rock and roll assaulted midcentury American attitudes toward sexuality, race, gender, and class, so altering public sensibilities that what was novel or shocking in the fifties seems tame or even downright difficult to grasp today. They also rebut the widely held view that 1950s consumerism led to cultural homogeneity, replacing this view with a picture of robust popular markets that defied conservative controls and actively subverted
conventional norms and values. Brushing away the haze of an era, The Other Fifties will help readers understand the decade not as placid or repressed, but as a time when emancipatory desires struggled to articulate themselves.
 
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The Other Henry James
John Carlos Rowe
Duke University Press, 1998
In The Other Henry James, John Carlos Rowe offers a new vision of Henry James as a social critic whose later works can now be read as rich with homoerotic suggestiveness. Drawing from recent work in queer and feminist theory, Rowe argues that the most fruitful approach to James today is one that ignores the elitist portrait of the formalist master in favor of the writer as a vulnerable critic of his own confused and repressive historical moment.
Rowe traces a particular development in James’s work, showing how in his early writings James criticized women’s rights, same-sex relations, and other social and political trends now identified with modern culture; how he ambivalently explored these aspects of modernity in his writings of the 1880s; and, later, how he increasingly identified with such modernity in his heretofore largely ignored or marginally treated fiction of the 1890s. Building on recent scholarship that has shown James to be more anxious about gender roles, more conflicted, and more marginal a figure than previously thought, Rowe argues that James—through his treatment of women, children, and gays—indicts the values and conventions of the bourgeoisie. He shows how James confronts social changes in gender roles, sexual preferences, national affiliations, and racial and ethnic identifications in such important novels as The American, The Tragic Muse, What Maisie Knew, and In the Cage, and in such neglected short fiction as “The Last of the Valerii,” “The Death of the Lion,” and “The Middle Years.”
Positioning James’s work within an interpretive context that pits the social and political anxieties of his day against the imperatives of an aesthetic ideology, The Other Henry James will engage scholars, students, and teachers of American literature and culture, gay literature, and queer theory.


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The Other Jersey Shore
Life on the Delaware River
Michael Aaron Rockland
Rutgers University Press, 2024
River otters, black bears, and red foxes drink from its clear waters. Prickly pear cacti grow from the red shale cliffs that overlook it, while on the river near Bordentown lies the archeological remnants of a sprawling estate built by the former King of Spain, Napoleon’s brother, who lived there for almost twenty years. You might imagine this magical and majestic waterway is located in some faraway land. But in fact, it’s the backbone and lifeblood of the Garden State: the Delaware River.
 
The Other Jersey Shore takes readers on a personal tour of the New Jersey portion of the Delaware River and its surroundings. You will learn about the role that the river played in human history, including Washington’s four crossings of the Delaware during the Revolutionary War. And you will also learn about the ecological history of the river itself, once one of the most polluted waterways in the country and now one of the cleanest, providing drinking water for 17 million people. Michael Aaron Rockland, a long-time New Jersey resident, shows readers his very favorite spots along the Delaware, including the pristine waterfalls and wilderness in the Delaware Water Gap recreation area. Along the way, he shares engrossing stories and surprising facts about the river that literally defines western New Jersey. 

 
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The Other Jonathan Edwards
Selected Writings on Society, Love, and Justice
Gerald McDermott
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
Widely regarded as perhaps America's greatest theologian, Jonathan Edwards still suffers the stereotype of hellfire preacher obsessed with God's wrath. In this anthology, Gerald McDermott and Ronald Story seek to correct that common view by showing that Edwards was also a compassionate, socially conscious minister of the first order.

Through a selection of sermons and primary writings, McDermott and Story reveal an Edwards who preached love toward all humanity regardless of belief or appearance; who demanded private and public charity to the poor; who criticized hard-hearted business dealings as impious and socially destructive; and who condemned envy and status-seeking as anti-Christian and anti-community. This "other" Jonathan Edwards preached about grace and the love of God but also about responsive constitutional government, the iniquities of hypocrisy and corruption, and the nature of wise leadership. He acknowledged the need for national defense but left room for popular revolt from tyranny. He anticipated a millennial age of peace and prosperity and believed that people should live in the world as they would live through grace in heaven.

Jonathan Edwards was, in sum, a worldly as well as spiritual reformer who resisted the materialistic, acquisitive, and individualistic currents of American culture. For these reasons, McDermott and Story think he may have lessons to teach us today.
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Other Men's Lives
Experiences of a Doughboy, 1917–1919
William J. Reddan
Westholme Publishing, 2017
An Attack by an American Infantry Company During World War I and Its Aftermath
 “Who can explain the feelings or thoughts of a soldier during the last few minutes before a battle? He fixes his bayonet, sees that his rifle is working properly, loads it, turns the safety lock, doing a dozen things, automatically from force of training. Just a faint trace of nervousness. . . . A few of us were think­ing of a wife and children hoping if it was our turn to ‘Go West,’ that the folks back home would not feel too badly.”—from Other Men’s Lives
Receiving orders in March 1917 to report for active service in the European war, Capt. William J. Reddan and his New Jersey National Guard unit joined the 29th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army. Following training for “Over There,” which included maneuvering under live machine gun and grenade fire and constant bayonet drills, Reddan assumed command of Company B, 114th Infantry—two hundred officers and men. Arriving in France in June 1918, Reddan and his company entered the frontline trenches along the Alsace front in August. Fighting side by side with the French, the 114th conducted patrols in “no man’s land,” repulsed attacks, and endured artillery and chemical barrages. Toward the end of September, the regiment was moved by truck to a new sector: the Argonne Forest. Here, Reddan and his company would be part of the Meuse-Argonne offensive, the largest in the history of the U.S. Army. This final Allied assault would last until the Armistice, November 11, 1918, and claim the most American lives of the war. On October 12, Reddan and the rest of the 114th Infantry were ordered to take a German position that was supposed to offer little resistance; instead, Reddan watched in horror as his company was destroyed: of his two hundred officers and men, only thirteen survived the ordeal. Wounded by both shrapnel and gas, Reddan was evacuated to a field hospital and did not return to his unit until after peace was declared.
Written in 1936, Other Men’s Lives: Experiences of a Doughboy, 1917–1919 recounts the complete story of Reddan’s company in the World War, including the true story of what happened in that tragic October battle as well as the political aftermath that sought to exonerate the upper command who had bungled the operation. 
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The Other Missouri History
Populists, Prostitutes, and Regular Folk
Edited & Intro by Thomas M. Spencer
University of Missouri Press, 2005
The essays in The Other Missouri History explore a wide range of topics in Missouri social history. By dealing with the lives of ordinary Missourians, these pieces examine the effects of significant social and economic change at all levels of society. With a broader scope in Missouri history than previous studies, this book demonstrates how Missourians have been affected by issues of race, class, and gender.
Gregg Andrews's essay, “The Racial Politics of Reconstruction in Ralls County, 1865–1870,” examines how race shaped the political culture in Ralls County during the Reconstruction Era. Andrews argues that race-baiting was used prominently by editors of the Ralls County Record to discredit Radicals in the county and was perhaps the most powerful political weapon that conservatives and later Democrats could use to gain the allegiance of voters.
Farmers are another popular topic for those practicing the “other Missouri history.” Michael J. Steiner's “The Failure of Alliance/Populism in Northern Missouri” provides insight into the economic and rhetorical reasons for the failure of Populism in Missouri. Steiner contends that white farmers in northern Missouri were happy with the status quo and rejected calls for radical reform and major change in the agricultural economy.
Women began to become active in public life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Janice Brandon-Falcone's “Constance Runcie and the Runcie Club of St. Joseph” examines the first two decades of an important women's club that still exists in St. Joseph, Missouri.
Also included in The Other Missouri History are essays by Deborah J. Henry, Daniel A. Graff, Bonnie Stepenoff, Robert Faust, and Amber R. Clifford.
Because of the diverse issues addressed, this volume will appeal to general readers of Missouri and Midwestern history, as well as to those who teach courses in history and have sought a supplemental text.
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The Other Movement
Indian Rights and Civil Rights in the Deep South
Denise E. Bates
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Examines the most visible outcome of the Southern Indian Rights Movement: state Indian affairs commissions

In recalling political activism in the post-World War II South, rarely does one consider the political activities of American Indians as they responded to desegregation, the passing of the Civil Rights Acts, and the restructuring of the American political party system. Native leaders and activists across the South created a social and political movement all their own, which drew public attention to the problems of discrimination, poverty, unemployment, low educational attainment, and poor living conditions in tribal communities.

While tribal-state relationships have historically been characterized as tense, most southern tribes—particularly non-federally recognized ones—found that Indian affairs commissions offered them a unique position in which to negotiate power. Although individual tribal leaders experienced isolated victories and generated some support through the 1950s and 1960s, the creation of the inter-tribal state commissions in the 1970s and 1980s elevated the movement to a more prominent political level. Through the formalization of tribal-state relationships, Indian communities forged strong networks with local, state, and national agencies while advocating for cultural preservation and revitalization, economic development, and the implementation of community services.

This book looks specifically at Alabama and Louisiana, places of intensive political activity during the civil rights era and increasing Indian visibility and tribal reorganization in the decades that followed. Between 1960 and 1990, U.S. census records show that Alabama’s Indian population swelled by a factor of twelve and Louisiana’s by a factor of five. Thus, in addition to serving as excellent examples of the national trend of a rising Indian population, the two states make interesting case studies because their Indian commissions brought formerly disconnected groups, each with different goals and needs, together for the first time, creating an assortment of alliances and divisions.
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The Other One
Stories
Hasanthika Sirisena
University of Massachusetts Press, 2016
Set in Sri Lanka and America, the ten short stories in this debut collection feature characters struggling to contend with the brutality of a decades-long civil war while also seeking security, love, and hope. The characters are students, accountants, soldiers, servants. They are immigrants and strivers. They are each forced to make sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, choices. What they share, despite what they've endured, is the sustaining power of human connection.

An excerpt from the book:

"All I want to know is when you are coming? When are you bringing my sons, my family?"

She watched as a gecko, tinier than normal, skittered across the far wall. It disappeared into a small crack. The room was very hot, and she hadn't turned on the ceiling fan so that the family could save a little money. She took a handkerchief from her nightstand and wiped the beads of sweat from her forehead and the back of her neck.

"I can't leave malli alone here. He's making progress but—"

"It will be for two years only. Then you can sponsor him."

"The lawyer says it's not so easy."

"He's a grown man. Let the government take him. The government did this to malli. Let the government pay the price for his care."

Even though there was no chance that her brother Ranjith could hear her, Anoja dropped her voice. "Malli is all alone here. He has nobody but aiya and me."
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The Other Oregon
People, Environment, and History East of the Cascades
Thomas R. Cox
Oregon State University Press, 2019
The Other Oregon: People, Environment, and History East of the Cascades is a multidisciplinary work that ranges widely through a diverse and often under-appreciated land, drawing on the fields of environmental history, cultural and physical geography, and natural resource management to tell a comprehensive and compelling story.

With a staggering variety of landscapes, from high desert to alpine peaks, Oregon east of the Cascades encompasses seventeen counties and two time zones. Although this vast region defies generalization, its history is distinct from the rest of Oregon. The interrelationship between its people and the land has always been central, but that relationship has evolved and changed over time. Regional economies that were once largely exploitive and dedicated to commodity exports have slowly moved toward the husbanding of resources and to broader and deeper appreciations.

Historian Thomas Cox reveals the complexity of interactions between the people of Eastern Oregon, the land, natural resources, and one another, demonstrating how the region’s history speaks to larger American issues. The 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, covered in detail within these pages, further reveals the relevance of Eastern Oregon to the larger world.

Written in clear and engaging prose and informed by extensive research, The Other Oregon will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the environment, social change, and the relationships among the diverse people who make up Oregon society east of the Cascades. It will appeal to area residents and visitors, students of the American West, environmental historians, biologists, land managers, and anyone with an abiding interest in the region.
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Other People's Colleges
The Origins of American Higher Education Reform
Ethan W. Ris
University of Chicago Press, 2022
An illuminating history of the reform agenda in higher education.

For well over one hundred years, people have been attempting to make American colleges and universities more efficient and more accountable. Indeed, Ethan Ris argues in Other People’s Colleges, the reform impulse is baked into American higher education, the result of generations of elite reformers who have called for sweeping changes in the sector and raised existential questions about its sustainability. When that reform is beneficial, offering major rewards for minor changes, colleges and universities know how to assimilate it. When it is hostile, attacking autonomy or values, they know how to resist it. The result is a sector that has learned to accept top-down reform as part of its existence.
 
In the early twentieth century, the “academic engineers,” a cadre of elite, external reformers from foundations, businesses, and government, worked to reshape and reorganize the vast base of the higher education pyramid. Their reform efforts were largely directed at the lower tiers of higher education, but those efforts fell short, despite the wealth and power of their backers, leaving a legacy of successful resistance that affects every college and university in the United States. Today, another coalition of business leaders, philanthropists, and politicians is again demanding efficiency, accountability, and utility from American higher education. But, as Ris argues, top-down design is not destiny. Drawing on extensive and original archival research, Other People’s Colleges offers an account of higher education that sheds light on today’s reform agenda. 
 
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Other People's Wars
The US Military and the Challenge of Learning from Foreign Conflicts
Georgetown University Press, 2023

Case studies explore how to improve military adaptation and preparedness in peacetime by investigating foreign wars

Preparing for the next war at an unknown date against an undetermined opponent is a difficult undertaking with extremely high stakes. Even the most detailed exercises and wargames do not truly simulate combat and the fog of war. Thus, outside of their own combat, militaries have studied foreign wars as a valuable source of battlefield information. The effectiveness of this learning process, however, has rarely been evaluated across different periods and contexts.

Through a series of in-depth case studies of the US Army, Navy, and Air Force, Brent L. Sterling creates a better understanding of the dynamics of learning from “other people’s wars,” determining what types of knowledge can be gained from foreign wars, identifying common pitfalls, and proposing solutions to maximize the benefits for doctrine, organization, training, and equipment.

Other People’s Wars explores major US efforts involving direct observation missions and post-conflict investigations at key junctures for the US armed forces: the Crimean War (1854–56), Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), Spanish Civil War (1936–39), and Yom Kippur War (1973), which preceded the US Civil War, First and Second World Wars, and major army and air force reforms of the 1970s, respectively. The case studies identify learning pitfalls but also show that initiatives to learn from other nations’ wars can yield significant benefits if the right conditions are met. Sterling puts forth a process that emphasizes comprehensive qualitative learning to foster better military preparedness and adaptability.

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The Other Presences
Reading Literature Other-Wise after the Transnational Turn in American Studies
Florian Tatschner
Dartmouth College Press, 2019
Florian Tatschner examines an alternative mode of reading fictional texts in the context of North American literature through “reading other-wise”: a mode of reading that regards the other in narratives not merely as a discursive construct of alterity, but as a presencing of otherness that resists discursive fixity. Waldenfels’s phenomenology constitutes the foundational approach of this work, and Lyotard’s poststructuralist philosophy of language, with its distinction between discursivity and figurality, offers a suitable framework for negotiating the relation between otherness and alterity. Drawing on the increasingly significant term “presence” in connection with phenomenon of otherness, Tatschner attempts to close a scholarly gap in the discourse on aesthetics regarding cultural difference as well as the relation between presence and aesthetics in American studies.
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The Other Quiet Professionals
Lessons for Future Cyber Forces from the Evolution of Special Forces
Christopher Paul
RAND Corporation, 2014
With the establishment of U.S. Cyber Command, the cyber force is gaining visibility and authority, but challenges remain, particularly in the areas of acquisition and personnel recruitment and career progression. A review of commonalities, similarities, and differences between the still-nascent U.S. cyber force and early U.S. special operations forces, conducted in 2010, offers salient lessons for the future direction of U.S. cyber forces.
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The Other School Reformers
Conservative Activism in American Education
Adam Laats
Harvard University Press, 2015

The idea that American education has been steered by progressive values is celebrated by liberals and deplored by conservatives, but both sides accept it as fact. Adam Laats shows that this widely held belief is simply wrong. Upending the standard narrative of American education as the product of courageous progressive reformers, he calls to center stage the conservative activists who decisively shaped America’s classrooms in the twentieth century. The Other School Reformers makes clear that, in the long march of American public education, progressive reform has more often been a beleaguered dream than an insuperable force.

Laats takes an in-depth look at four landmark school battles: the 1925 Scopes Trial, the 1939 Rugg textbook controversy, the 1950 ouster of Pasadena Public Schools Superintendent Willard Goslin, and the 1974 Kanawha County school boycott. Focused on issues ranging from evolution to the role of religion in education to the correct interpretation of American history, these four highly publicized controversies forced conservatives to articulate their vision of public schooling—a vision that would keep traditional Protestant beliefs in America’s classrooms and push out subversive subjects like Darwinism, socialism, multiculturalism, and feminism. As Laats makes clear in case after case, activists such as Hiram Evans and Norma Gabler, Homer Chaillaux and Louise Padelford were fiercely committed to a view of the curriculum that inculcated love of country, reinforced traditional gender roles and family structures, allowed no alternatives to capitalism, and granted religion a central role in civic life.

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The Other Side of Grief
The Home Front and the Aftermath in American Narratives of the Vietnam War
Maureen Ryan
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
The lingering aftereffects of the Vietnam War resonate to this day throughout American society: in foreign policy, in attitudes about the military and war generally, and in the contemporary lives of members of the so-called baby boom generation who came of age during the 1960s and early 1970s. While the best-known personal accounts of the war tend to center on the experience of combat, Maureen Ryan's The Other Side of Grief examines the often overlooked narratives—novels, short stories, memoirs, and films—that document the war's impact on the home front.

In analyzing the accounts of Vietnam veterans, women as well as men, Ryan focuses on the process of readjustment, on how the war continued to insinuate itself into their lives, their families, and their communities long after they returned home. She looks at the writings of women whose husbands, lovers, brothers, and sons served in Vietnam and whose own lives were transformed as a result. She also appraises the experiences of the POWs who came to be embraced as the war's only heroes; the ordeal of Vietnamese refugees who fled their "American War" to new lives in the United States; and the influential movement created by those who committed themselves to protesting the war.

The end result of Ryan's investigations is a cogent synthesis of the vast narrative literature generated by the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Together those stories powerfully demonstrate how deeply the legacies of the war penetrated American culture and continue to reverberate still.
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The Other Side of Silence
Sign Language and the Deaf Community in America
Arden Neisser
Gallaudet University Press, 1983

Arden Neisser’s classic book on American Sign Language (ASL) and the Deaf community is again available, with a new prologue. The Other Side of Silence explores the Deaf community through telling interviews and research from across the country.

       In widely varying encounters, Neisser heard Deaf individuals recall how their teachers suppressed ASL, how linguists foster conflicting theories, and how various institutions of the deaf dilute ASL to suit hearing patrons. This seminal book reveals the warmth, creativity, and resilience of Deaf people, and offers an update of the community today.

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The Other Side of the Coin
Public Opinion toward Social Tax Expenditures
Christopher G. Faricy
Russell Sage Foundation, 2021
Despite high levels of inequality and wage stagnation over several decades, the United States has done relatively little to address these problems—at least in part due to public opinion, which remains highly influential in determining the size and scope of social welfare programs that provide direct benefits to retirees, unemployed workers or poor families. On the other hand, social tax expenditures—or tax subsidies that help citizens pay for expenses such as health insurance or the cost of college and invest in retirement plans—have been widely and successfully implemented, and they now comprise nearly 40 percent of the spending of the American social welfare state.  In The Other Side of the Coin, political scientists Christopher Ellis and Christopher Faricy examine public opinion towards social tax expenditures—the other side of the American social welfare state—and their potential to expand support for such social investment.
 
Tax expenditures seek to accomplish many of the goals of direct government expenditures, but they distribute money indirectly, through tax refunds or reductions in taxable income, rather than direct payments on goods and services or benefits. They tend to privilege market-based solutions to social problems such as employer-based tax subsidies for purchasing health insurance versus government-provided health insurance. Drawing on nationally representative surveys and survey experiments, Ellis and Faricy show that social welfare policies designed as tax expenditures, as opposed to direct spending on social welfare programs, are widely popular with the general public. Contrary to previous research suggesting that recipients of these subsidies are often unaware of indirect government aid—sometimes called “the hidden welfare state”—Ellis and Faricy find that citizens are well aware of them and act in their economic self-interest in supporting tax breaks for social welfare purposes. The authors find that many people view the beneficiaries of social tax expenditures to be more deserving of government aid than recipients of direct public social programs, indicating that how government benefits are delivered affects people’s views of recipients’ worthiness. Importantly, tax expenditures are more likely to appeal to citizens with anti-government attitudes, low levels of trust in government, or racial prejudices. As a result, social spending conducted through the tax code is likely to be far more popular than direct government spending on public programs that have the same goals. 
 
The first empirical examination of the broad popularity of tax expenditures, The Other Side of the Coin provides compelling insights into constructing a politically feasible—and potentially bipartisan—way to expand the scope of the American welfare state.
 
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The Other Side of the Fence
American Migrants in Mexico
By Sheila Croucher
University of Texas Press, 2009

A growing number of Americans, many of them retirees, are migrating to Mexico's beach resorts, border towns, and picturesque heartland. While considerable attention has been paid to Mexicans who immigrate to the U.S., the reverse scenario receives little scrutiny. Shifting the traditional lens of North American migration, The Other Side of the Fence takes a fascinating look at a demographic trend that presents significant implications for the United States and Mexico.

The first in-depth account of this trend, Sheila Croucher's study describes the cultural, economic, and political lives of these migrants of privilege. Focusing primarily on two towns, San Miguel de Allende in the mountains and Ajijic along the shores of Lake Chapala, Croucher depicts the surprising similarities between immigrant populations on both sides of the border. Few Americans living in Mexico are fluent in the language of their new land, and most continue to practice the culture and celebrate the national holidays of their homeland, maintaining close political, economic, and social ties to the United States while making political demands on Mexico, where they reside.

Accessible, timely, and brimming with eye-opening, often ironic, findings, The Other Side of the Fence brings an important perspective to borderlands debates.

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The Other Side of the Sixties
Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics
Andrew III, John A
Rutgers University Press, 1997
What were young conservatives doing in the 1960s while SDS and SNCC were working to move the political center to the left? The Other Side of the Sixties offers a gripping account of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), an organization that became a leading force in promoting conservative ideas and that helped lay the groundwork for today's conservatism. John Andrew has mined unique archival material to document YAF's efforts to form a viable organization, define a new conservatism, attack the liberal establishment, and seize control of the Republican party, all while battling voter hostility and internal factionalism. The author also uncovers the Kennedy administration's use of the IRS to subvert YAF and other right-wing organizations through tax audits and investigations. By painting a more balanced portrait of political thinking in the sixties, Andrew offers a new and much needed look at the ideological atmosphere of a vibrant decade.
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Other Sisterhoods
LITERARY THEORY AND U.S. WOMEN OF COLOR
Edited by Sandra Kumamoto Stanley
University of Illinois Press, 1998
      Where are the women writers of color? Where are their theoretical voices?
        The fifteen contributors to Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and
        U.S. Women of Color examine the ways that women writers of color have
        contributed to the discourse of literary and cultural theory. They focus
        on the impact of key issues, such as social construction and identity
        politics, on the works of women writers of color, as well as on the ways
        these women deal with differences relating to gender, class, race/ethnicity,
        and sexuality. The book also explores the ways women writers of color
        have created their own ethnopoetics within the arena of literary and cultural
        theory, helping to redefine the nature of theory itself.
      "A sophisticated resource that will do much to carry us through
        to the next century. Great work!" -- Alvina E. Quintana, author of
        Home Girls: Chicana Literary Voices
      CONTRIBUTORS:Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, AnaLouise Keating, Dionne
        Espinoza, Kimberly N. Brown, Marilyn Edelstein, Tomo Hattori, Robin Riley
        Fast, King-Kok Cheung, Timothy Libretti, Renae Moore Bredin, Jennifer
        Browdy de Hernandez, Kimberly M. Blaeser, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Eun Kyung
        Min, Cecilia Rodriguez Milanes
 
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The Other Texas Frontier
By Harry Huntt Ransom; edited by Hazel H. Ransom; foreword by John Graves
University of Texas Press, 1984

“One is tempted to say that wherever there was a frontier in America there was a counterfrontier and that the main purpose of this counterfrontier was not only to help man grow or dig or catch or kill his livng but also to put this man in communication with the traditions of his kind and thereby secure to his descendants the benefits of the free mind.” —Harry Huntt Ransom

The reflections of Harry Huntt Ransom (1908–1976) in The Other Texas Frontier present an alternative to the stereotypical picture of the brash, blustery heroes of the Texas frontier. Here, in six highly readable essays, Ransom posits a thesis of the counterfrontier: a quiet settling of the land by thoughtful, undramatic citizens who, he says, were the other Texans—the Texans without guns. Three of the essays are profiles of gifted men from Texas’ nineteenth century: Ashbel Smith, physician, diplomat, and first president of the Board of Regents of the University of Texas; Sherman Goodwin, physician, horticulturalist, bibliophile (and Ransom’s own grandfather); and Swante Palm, Swedish immigrant, bibliographer, and generous patron of the University of Texas libraries.

Harry Huntt Ransom, one of Texas’ most accomplished men of letters and for forty-one years an integral part of the University of Texas System as professor, dean, president, and chancellor, leaves an extraordinary legacy to Texas for both his educational and literary service. Though educated out of state, he returned to his native Texas after completion of his PhD at Yale to teach, research, and write in the fields of copyright law, literary history, and bibliography. As founder of the Humanities Research Center, he was squarely in the tradition of the men he was writing about.

Compiled and edited after Ransom’s death by his wife, Hazel H. Ransom, the literary sketches of The Other Texas Frontier form a book that Ransom himself had outlined but had not completed.

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The Other Trail of Tears
The Removal of the Ohio Indians
Mary Stockwell
Westholme Publishing
The Story of the Longest and Largest Forced Migration of Native Americans in American History
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was the culmination of the United States’ policy to force native populations to relocate west of the Mississippi River. The most well-known episode in the eviction of American Indians in the East was the notorious “Trail of Tears” along which Southeastern Indians were driven from their homes in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to reservations in present-day Oklahoma. But the struggle in the South was part of a wider story that reaches back in time to the closing months of the War of 1812, back through many states—most notably Ohio—and into the lives of so many tribes, including the Delaware, Seneca, Shawnee, Ottawa, and Wyandot (Huron). They, too, were forced to depart from their homes in the Ohio Country to Kansas and Oklahoma. The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Indians by award-winning historian Mary Stockwell tells the story of this region’s historic tribes as they struggled following the death of Tecumseh and the unraveling of his tribal confederacy in 1813. At the peace negotiations in Ghent in 1814, Great Britain was unable to secure a permanent homeland for the tribes in Ohio setting the stage for further treaties with the United States and encroachment by settlers. Over the course of three decades the Ohio Indians were forced to move to the West, with the Wyandot people ceding their last remaining lands in Ohio to the U.S. Government in the early 1850s. The book chronicles the history of Ohio’s Indians and their interactions with settlers and U.S. agents in the years leading up to their official removal, and sheds light on the complexities of the process, with both individual tribes and the United States taking advantage of opportunities at different times. It is also the story of how the native tribes tried to come to terms with the fast pace of change on America’s western frontier and the inevitable loss of their traditional homelands. While the tribes often disagreed with one another, they attempted to move toward the best possible future for all their people against the relentless press of settlers and limited time.
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Other Worlds
Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions
Christopher G. White
Harvard University Press, 2018

What do modern multiverse theories and spiritualist séances have in common? Not much, it would seem. One is an elaborate scientific theory developed by the world’s most talented physicists. The other is a spiritual practice widely thought of as backward, the product of a mystical world view fading under the modern scientific gaze.

But Christopher G. White sees striking similarities. He does not claim that séances or other spiritual practices are science. Yet he points to ways that both spiritual practices and scientific speculation about multiverses and invisible dimensions are efforts to peer into the hidden elements and even the existential meaning of the universe. Other Worlds examines how the idea that the universe has multiple, invisible dimensions has inspired science fiction, fantasy novels, films, modern art, and all manner of spiritual thought reaching well beyond the realm of formal religion. Drawing on a range of international archives, White analyzes how writers, artists, filmmakers, televangelists, and others have used the scientific idea of invisible dimensions to make supernatural phenomena such as ghosts and miracles seem more reasonable and make spiritual beliefs possible again for themselves and others.

Many regard scientific ideas as disenchanting and secularizing, but Other Worlds shows that these ideas—creatively appropriated in such popular forms as C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, the art of Salvador Dalí, or the books of the counterculture physicist “Dr. Quantum”—restore a sense that the world is greater than anything our eyes can see, helping to forge an unexpected kind of spirituality.

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Others Had It Worse
Sour Dock, Moonshine, and Hard Times in Davis County, Iowa
Vetra Melrose Padget Covert and Chris D. Baker
University of Iowa Press, 2013
In 1977, while studying journalism at the University of Iowa, Chris Baker gave his grandmother a notebook and asked her to write about her childhood. Years later, long after her death in 1990, he found the tattered yellow notebook. In twenty-nine handwritten pages, the woman he knew as Grandma Covert had recorded her younger life in rural Iowa between 1920 and 1929. Writing about herself from the ages of four to thirteen, Vetra Covert sent a simple message back to her grandson: “That’s just the way it was. Others had it worse. We got by.”
 
Captivated by this glimpse of a woman very different from the more formidable grandmother of his memory, Chris Baker reframed Vetra’s journal to create a narrative of her childhood and a window into rural Iowa life in the 1920s. Transcribing her words into nine chapters that illuminate home, family, neighbors, school, and social life, he has composed a collection of candid, whimsical, sometimes ornery stories that will resonate with anyone who has ever tried to decipher the lives found in old letters and photos.
 
Vetra’s was not a romantic little-house-on-the-prairie childhood. She grew up with seven brothers and sisters (every new baby was “a supprise”) in a dilapidated log cabin near a small town now vanished from the Iowa map. Two rooms up, two rooms down, no plumbing, no electricity, holes in the roof and floor so big “you could of throwed a cat through them.” Her father was a bootlegger-farmer who measured his corn yield in gallons, not bushels, a moonshiner occasionally harassed by federal agents. Although family stories now present him as a quaint old-timer, the reality of living with him was much starker.
 
In his introduction to Vetra’s recollections, Chris Baker reveals the harsh truths underlying her authentic, uncomplaining account. By honoring her legacy, he discovered a newfound respect for her and for her family’s ability to survive despite the devastating forces of poverty, isolation, and the looming Great Depression. Together he and his grandmother have created an enduring chapter in family history.

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"Our Aim Was Man"
Andrew's Sharpshooters in the American Civil War
Roberta Senechal de la Roche
University of Massachusetts Press, 2016
One was a father who worried about his fellow soldiers’ swearing. Another hoped to enter Harvard College. The third was a farmer whose letters home depict the later stages of the war. The fourth had turned to boot making when he did not inherit land. Based on the letters, diaries, and memoirs of four members of the First Company Massachusetts Sharpshooters, known as Andrew’s Sharpshooters, this book provides a rare glimpse into the experiences of Union Army snipers. The company was one of the first units in American military history to be equipped with telescope-sighted rifles to enable long-distance targeting. Despite complaints that snipers violated codes of honorable combat, the members of Andrew’s Sharpshooters generally expressed quiet pride in being an elite unit of highly skilled soldiers—“cool blooded sharpshooters,” as one of them said. Introduced and edited by Roberta Senechal de la Roche, these primary accounts include new details about the equipment, training, and deployment of snipers in the Army of the Potomac. They also reveal the challenges of covert warfare and include rich detail on the everyday problems of Civil War soldiers, including bad food, disease, punishing marches, and homesickness. The collected documents also convey the trials of those left on the home front.
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Our America
Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism
Walter Benn Michaels
Duke University Press, 1997
Arguing that the contemporary commitment to the importance of cultural identity has renovated rather than replaced an earlier commitment to racial identity, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that the idea of culture, far from constituting a challenge to racism, is actually a form of racism. Our America offers both a provocative reinterpretation of the role of identity in modernism and a sustained critique of the role of identity in postmodernism.
“We have a great desire to be supremely American,” Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1924. That desire, Michaels tells us, is at the very heart of American modernism, giving form and substance to a cultural movement that would in turn redefine America’s cultural and collective identity—ultimately along racial lines. A provocative reinterpretation of American modernism, Our America also offers a new way of understanding current debates over the meaning of race, identity, multiculturalism, and pluralism.
Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their commitment to resolve the meaning of identity—linguistic, national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of the same year, which honored the truly native, reconceptualized national identity, so the major texts of American writers such as Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and Williams reinvented identity as an object of pathos—something that can be lost or found, defended or betrayed. Our America is both a history and a critique of this invention, tracing its development from the white supremacism of the Progressive period through the cultural pluralism of the Twenties. Michaels’s sustained rereading of the texts of the period—the canonical, the popular, and the less familiar—exposes recurring concerns such as the reconception of the image of the Indian as a symbol of racial purity and national origins, the relation between World War I and race, contradictory appeals to the family as a model for the nation, and anxieties about reproduction that subliminally tie whiteness and national identity to incest, sterility, and impotence.
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Our American Israel
The Story of an Entangled Alliance
Amy Kaplan
Harvard University Press, 2018

An essential account of America’s most controversial alliance that reveals how the United States came to see Israel as an extension of itself, and how that strong and divisive partnership plays out in our own time.

Our American Israel tells the story of how a Jewish state in the Middle East came to resonate profoundly with a broad range of Americans in the twentieth century. Beginning with debates about Zionism after World War II, Israel’s identity has been entangled with America’s belief in its own exceptional nature. Now, in the twenty-first century, Amy Kaplan challenges the associations underlying this special alliance.

Through popular narratives expressed in news media, fiction, and film, a shared sense of identity emerged from the two nations’ histories as settler societies. Americans projected their own origin myths onto Israel: the biblical promised land, the open frontier, the refuge for immigrants, the revolt against colonialism. Israel assumed a mantle of moral authority, based on its image as an “invincible victim,” a nation of intrepid warriors and concentration camp survivors. This paradox persisted long after the Six-Day War, when the United States rallied behind a story of the Israeli David subduing the Arab Goliath. The image of the underdog shattered when Israel invaded Lebanon and Palestinians rose up against the occupation. Israel’s military was strongly censured around the world, including notes of dissent in the United States. Rather than a symbol of justice, Israel became a model of military strength and technological ingenuity.

In America today, Israel’s political realities pose difficult challenges. Turning a critical eye on the turbulent history that bound the two nations together, Kaplan unearths the roots of present controversies that may well divide them in the future.

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Our Americas
Political and Cultural Imaginings, Volume 2004
Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman, eds.
Duke University Press
Named 2004 Best Special Issue by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals

This special issue of Radical History Review takes as its inspiration Cuban writer and revolutionary José Martí’s famous 1891 essay “Our America.” Focusing on Martí’s appropriation of the term “America”—used to refer to a transnational, regional project of solidarity in Latin America and to suggest a new epistemology that challenged the ideologies underpinning U.S. imperialism—Our Americas: Political and Cultural Imaginings investigates the highly contested concept of “the Americas” as it has been defined and deployed in differing strategic and politically informed ways across history. The issue is dedicated to probing the transnational political and social possibilities that emerge when the discursive boundaries established by fields such as “Latin American studies” and “American studies”—as well as the geopolitical boundaries drawn during the colonial era—are expanded or transgressed.

Drawing on history, cultural anthropology, literary criticism, and memoirs, the works in this collection, gathered from contributors from an array of geographic locales, seek to integrate “Latin America,” “North America,” “the Caribbean,” and other regions. Striving to move beyond a simple joining of “Latin America” and the United States, the transnational concept of “the Americas” is explored and complicated through essays that examine the contrasting visions of Latin American independence embodied in the writings of revolutionaries from different nations; discuss the ramifications of a political treaty that institutionalized a separation between Mexico and the United States; deconstruct the exclusionary discourses of U.S. nationalism; and expose the ways in which institutionalized racism and homophobia are roadblocks to social and political solidarity in Latin America. In discussion forums, contributors plumb the history and current relevance of the concept of “Latin America” for intellectual, social, and political work and address the unique challenges facing those who seek to teach “the Americas.”

Contributors. Arturo Arias, John Beck, John D. Blanco, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Patricio Del Real, Ian Christopher Fletcher, Paul Giles, Salah D. Hassan, Martin Hopenhayn, Aisha Khan, R. J. Lambrose, Ian Lekus, Kate Masur, Enrique C. Ochoa, Diana Paton, Rossana Reguillo, Gemma Robinson, Aimee Carillo Rowe, Maria Josefina Saldana-Portillo, Sandhya Shukla, Heidi Tinsman, Carlos E. Bojorquez Urzaiz

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Our Children, Their Children
Confronting Racial and Ethnic Differences in American Juvenile Justice
Edited by Darnell F. Hawkins and Kimberly Kempf-Leonard
University of Chicago Press, 2005
In Our Children, Their Children, a prominent team of researchers argues that a second-rate and increasingly punitive juvenile justice system is allowed to persist because most people believe it is designed for children in other ethnic and socioeconomic groups. While public opinion, laws, and social policies that convey distinctions between "our children" and "their children" may seem to conflict with the American ideal of blind justice, they are hardly at odds with patterns of group differentiation and inequality that have characterized much of American history.

Our Children, Their Children provides a state-of-the-science examination of racial and ethnic disparities in the American juvenile justice system. Here, contributors document the precise magnitude of these disparities, seek to determine their causes, and propose potential solutions. In addition to race and ethnicity, contributors also look at the effects on juvenile justice of suburban sprawl, the impact of family and neighborhood, bias in postarrest decisions, and mental health issues. Assessing the implications of these differences for public policy initiatives and legal reforms, this volume is the first critical summary of what is known and unknown in this important area of social research.
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Our Common Bonds
Using What Americans Share to Help Bridge the Partisan Divide
Matthew Levendusky
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A compelling exploration of concrete strategies to reduce partisan animosity by building on what Democrats and Republicans have in common.  
 
One of the defining features of twenty-first-century American politics is the rise of affective polarization: Americans increasingly not only disagree with those from the other party but distrust and dislike them as well. This has toxic downstream consequences for both politics and social relationships. Is there any solution?  
 
Our Common Bonds
shows that—although there is no silver bullet that will eradicate partisan animosity—there are concrete interventions that can reduce it. Matthew Levendusky argues that partisan animosity stems in part from partisans’ misperceptions of one another. Democrats and Republicans think they have nothing in common, but this is not true. Drawing on survey and experimental evidence, the book shows that it is possible to help partisans reframe the lens through which they evaluate the out-party by priming commonalities—specifically, shared identities outside of politics, cross-party friendships, and common issue positions and values identified through civil cross-party dialogue.  Doing so lessons partisan animosity, and it can even reduce ideological polarization. The book discusses what these findings mean for real-world efforts to bridge the partisan divide.   
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Our Common Country
Mutual Good Will in America
Warren G. Harding, Edited by Warren G. Harding, III, & Intro by Robert H. Ferrell
University of Missouri Press, 2003
Our Common Country is a collection of informal addresses, eighteen in all, given by Warren G. Harding as president-elect that defined his vision for the United States. What makes these addresses as relevant today as they were in 1921 is the unsettled mood of the country. Even though World War I is now a distant memory, today’s Americans have suffered through similar conflicts.
In 1917 when Americans went off to war, the red, white, and blue flew everywhere. Two million American soldiers went to France and fifty thousand of them died; the battle of the Meuse-Argonne was one of the costliest in American history. With the announcement by America’s allies that the United States’s contributions to the war were insignificant compared to their own, President Wilson’s leadership began to collapse. Also, the domestic economy’s boom was turning to a bust and the national debt was expanding. The general consensus of Americans was that “things had gone to hell in a handbasket.”
            In an effort to ease the minds of troubled and confused Americans, President Harding tried to provide them with inspiration. Addressing different groups of the population—mothers, veterans, patriots, farmers, businessmen, the press—he sought to send a consistent personal message of reassurance. During his administration, he would bring a formal end to the war by signing the Treaty of Berlin and would limit strategic armaments through the treaties of the Washington Conference. He would also establish the Bureau of the Budget, thereby bringing order to the departmental and bureaucratic requests that had disgraced budget making for decades. He planted the seeds for a department of health, education, and welfare, which was finally realized thirty years later. Although the former president was much maligned after his death, his good works during his term of office speak for themselves and show concern for his fellow Americans. His warmth, strength of character, and intelligence are demonstrated throughout these addresses. Harding spoke to his own time, yet these addresses speak to our own confusing times as well.
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Our Common Lands
Defending The National Parks
Edited by David J. Simon; Foreword by Joseph L. Sax
Island Press, 1988

This accessible book explains the complexities of key environmental laws and how they can be used to protect our national parks. It includes discussions of successful and unsuccessful attempts to use the laws and how the courts have interpreted them.

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Our Dear-Bought Liberty
Catholics and Religious Toleration in Early America
Michael D. Breidenbach
Harvard University Press, 2021

How early American Catholics justified secularism and overcame suspicions of disloyalty, transforming ideas of religious liberty in the process.

In colonial America, Catholics were presumed dangerous until proven loyal. Yet Catholics went on to sign the Declaration of Independence and helped to finalize the First Amendment to the Constitution. What explains this remarkable transformation? Michael Breidenbach shows how Catholic leaders emphasized their church’s own traditions—rather than Enlightenment liberalism—to secure the religious liberty that enabled their incorporation in American life.

Catholics responded to charges of disloyalty by denying papal infallibility and the pope’s authority to intervene in civil affairs. Rome staunchly rejected such dissent, but reform-minded Catholics justified their stance by looking to conciliarism, an intellectual tradition rooted in medieval Catholic thought yet compatible with a republican view of temporal independence and church–state separation. Drawing on new archival material, Breidenbach finds that early American Catholic leaders, including Maryland founder Cecil Calvert and members of the prominent Carroll family, relied on the conciliarist tradition to help institute religious toleration, including the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649.

The critical role of Catholics in establishing American church–state separation enjoins us to revise not only our sense of who the American founders were, but also our understanding of the sources of secularism. Church–state separation in America, generally understood as the product of a Protestant-driven Enlightenment, was in key respects derived from Catholic thinking. Our Dear-Bought Liberty therefore offers a dramatic departure from received wisdom, suggesting that religious liberty in America was not bestowed by liberal consensus but partly defined through the ingenuity of a persecuted minority.

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Our Deep Gossip
Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire
Christopher Hennessy; Foreword by Christopher Bram
University of Wisconsin Press, 2013
From Walt Whitman forward, a century and a half of radical experimentation and bold speech by gay and lesbian poets has deeply influenced the American poetic voice. In Our Deep Gossip, Christopher Hennessy interviews eight gay men who are celebrated American poets and writers: Edward Field, John Ashbery, Richard Howard, Aaron Shurin, Dennis Cooper, Cyrus Cassells, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Kazim Ali. The interviews showcase the complex ways art and life intertwine, as the poets speak about their early lives, the friends and communities that shaped their work, the histories of gay writers before them, how sex and desire connect with artistic production, what coming out means to a writer, and much more.
            While the conversations here cover almost every conceivable topic of interest to readers of poetry and poets themselves, the book is an especially important, poignant, far-reaching, and enduring document of what it means to be a gay artist in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America.
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Our Enduring Values
Librarianship in the 21st Century
Michael Gorman
American Library Association, 2000

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Our Enduring Values Revisited
Librarianship in an Ever-Changing World
Michael Gorman
American Library Association, 2015

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Our First Family’s Home
The Ohio Governor’s Residence and Heritage Garden
Mary Alice Mairose
Ohio University Press, 2008

This richly illustrated volume tells the story of thehome that has served as Ohio’s executive residence since 1957, and of the nine governors and their families who have lived in the house. Our First Family’s Home offers the first complete history of the residence and garden that represent Ohio to visiting dignitaries and the citizens of the state alike. Once in a state of decline, the house has been lovingly restored and improved by itsresidents. Development of the Ohio Heritage Garden has increased the educational potential of the house and has sparked an interest in the preservation of native plant species. Looking toward the future, the Residence is also taking the lead in promoting environmental issues such as solar powerand green energy.

Photographs by award-winning environmental photographer Ian Adams and botanical art by Dianne McElwain showcase the beauty of the home’s architecture and the myriad of native plants that grace the three acres on which the Residence stands. Dianne McElwain is a member of the American Society of Botanical Artists in New York. Her botanical paintings have won numerous awards and are found in prestigious collections throughout the United States.

Essays highlight the Jacobethan Revival architecture and the history of the home. The remaining pieces cover the garden and include an intimate tour of the Heritage Garden, which was inspired by Ohio’s diverse landscape. Finally, former Governor Ted Strickland and First Lady Frances Strickland discuss the increasing focus on green energy at the Governor’s Residence and First Lady Emerita Hope Taft explains how native plants can help sustain the environment.

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Our Hidden Landscapes
Indigenous Stone Ceremonial Sites in Eastern North America
Lucianne Lavin
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Challenging traditional and long-standing understandings, this volume provides an important new lens for interpreting stone structures that had previously been attributed to settler colonialism. Instead, the contributors to this volume argue that these locations are sacred Indigenous sites.

This volume introduces readers to eastern North America’s Indigenous ceremonial stone landscapes (CSLs)—sacred sites whose principal identifying characteristics are built stone structures that cluster within specific physical landscapes. Our Hidden Landscapes presents these often unrecognized sites as significant cultural landscapes in need of protection and preservation.

In this book, Native American authors provide perspectives on the cultural meaning and significance of CSLs and their characteristics, while professional archaeologists and anthropologists provide a variety of approaches for better understanding, protecting, and preserving them. The chapters present overwhelming evidence in the form of oral tradition, historic documentation, ethnographies, and archaeological research that these important sites created and used by Indigenous peoples are deserving of protection.

This work enables archaeologists, historians, conservationists, foresters, and members of the general public to recognize these important ritual sites.

Contributors
Nohham Rolf Cachat-Schilling
Robert DeFosses
James Gage
Mary Gage
Doug Harris
Julia A. King
Lucianne Lavin
Johannes (Jannie) H. N. Loubser
Frederick W. Martin
Norman Muller
Charity Moore Norton
Paul A. Robinson
Laurie W. Rush
Scott M. Strickland
Elaine Thomas
Kathleen Patricia Thrane
Matthew Victor Weiss
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Our Kind of Historian
The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr.
E. James West
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

Journalist, activist, popular historian, and public intellectual, Lerone Bennett Jr. left an indelible mark on twentieth-century American history and culture. Rooted in his role as senior editor of Ebony magazine, but stretching far beyond the boundaries of the Johnson Publishing headquarters in Chicago, Bennett’s work and activism positioned him as a prominent advocate for Black America and a scholar whose writing reached an unparalleled number of African American readers.

This critical biography—the first in-depth study of Bennett’s life—travels with him from his childhood experiences in Jim Crow Mississippi and his time at Morehouse College in Atlanta to his later participation in a dizzying range of Black intellectual and activist endeavors. Drawing extensively on Bennett’s previously inaccessible archival collections at Emory University and Chicago State, as well as interviews with close relatives, colleagues, and confidantes, Our Kind of Historian celebrates his enormous influence within and unique connection to African American communities across more than half a century of struggle.

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Our Land & Land Policy
Speeches Lectures, and Miscellaneous Writings
Kenneth C. Wenzer
Michigan State University Press, 1999

Even before the publication of Progress and Poverty in 1879, San Francisco political economist and publisher Henry George (1839-1897) had written extensively about what he considered to be the causes for worldwide economic inequity—land monopolization and speculation by wealthy entrepreneurs and corrupt politicians. But his attacks on these evils were coupled with a plan for a possible brighter future, for a world in which disparities between people of different classes could be adjusted. By the time he died in 1897, his assessments of liberal 19th-century economic theory were critically acclaimed in Europe and the United States.  
      Michigan State University Press's new edition of Our Land and Land Policy includes the texts of speeches George delivered and essays he published during three decades of political activism. These pieces were chosen originally in 1901 by George's son, Henry George, Jr., to portray the expansiveness and depth of his father's philosophy and the sincerity with which the elder George struggled throughout his life for social justice.  
 

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Our Latest Longest War
Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan
Edited by Aaron B. O'Connell
University of Chicago Press, 2017
The first rule of warfare is to know one’s enemy. The second is to know thyself. More than fifteen years and three quarters of a trillion dollars after the US invasion of Afghanistan, it’s clear that the United States followed neither rule well.

America’s goals in Afghanistan were lofty to begin with: dismantle al Qaeda, remove the Taliban from power, remake the country into a democracy. But not only did the mission come completely unmoored from reality, the United States wasted billions of dollars, and thousands of lives were lost. Our Latest Longest War is a chronicle of how, why, and in what ways the war in Afghanistan failed. Edited by historian and Marine lieutenant colonel Aaron B. O’Connell, the essays collected here represent nine different perspectives on the war—all from veterans of the conflict, both American and Afghan. Together, they paint a picture of a war in which problems of culture and an unbridgeable rural-urban divide derailed nearly every field of endeavor. The authors also draw troubling parallels to the Vietnam War, arguing that deep-running ideological currents in American life explain why the US government has repeatedly used armed nation-building to try to transform failing states into modern, liberal democracies. In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, this created a dramatic mismatch of means and ends that neither money, technology, nor the force of arms could overcome.

The war in Afghanistan has been the longest in US history, and in many ways, the most confounding.  Few who fought in it think it has been worthwhile.  These are difficult topics for any American or Afghan to consider, especially those who lost friends or family in it. This sobering history—written by the very people who have been fighting the war—is impossible to ignore.
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Our Masters the Rebels
A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861-1865
Michael C.C. Adams
Harvard University Press, 1978

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Our Movie Heritage
Tom McGreevey and Joanne L Yeck
Rutgers University Press, 1997
ÒOur Movie Heritage is both a vividly illustrated encyclopedia and a suspense story replete with heroes and heroines and an imperiled treasure of such great worth that one feels impelled to ride to its rescue.ÓÑOlivia deHavillandÒThis book reads like a suspense story. Will we care enough, it asks, to save the rest of our great movie heritage before itÕs too late?  For all of us who love the movies there can only be one answer.ÓÑFay Kanin, chair of the National Film Preservation Board

Our Movie Heritage should be read by anyone interested in motion picture history.  Without film preservation, there can be no valid film history.  Documents, autobiographies, oral histories, and secondary sources are of importance, but viewing the actual films preserved or restored to a state comparable to the way they were originally viewed is of inestimable importance.Rudy Behlmer, film historian and author of Memo from David O. Selznick

Our Movie Heritage is an enticing, up to the minute account of the complex National Film preservation effort, and should be read by anyone interested in our rich cinematic heritage.Mary Lea Bandy, chief curator, The Museum of Modern Art

 Imagine an America without any images of itself no Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz, no Orson Welles in Citizen Kane,  and no Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca.  Movies are an extraordinary personal and collective history of the American people. Unfortunately, over 90 percent of America's silent films are already lost to us, and more than half of the American feature films made before 1950 no longer exist. Whether it is a piece of cellulose nitrate exposed in 1910 or a strip of Eastman Color acetate stock produced in the 1970s all film self-destructs. Rapidly.

Our Movie Heritage is a highly readable and informative view of the world of film preservation, showing the work being done to save our national treasure trove of film history. Full of tales of discovery and rescue, the book is an urgent plea for preservation. Our Movie Heritage describes the race against time currently under way both in the public and private sectors in order to salvage what is left in vaults, theaters, and private collections. The book explains the basics of film preservation, covering the who, what, when, where, and how of the field, with top archivists and film restoration experts expressing their concerns and hopes for the future of movies. This beautifully produced book, with over one hundred pictures of top stars, directors, and film people, is itself a treasure that showcases the importance of this legacy.
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Our Musicals, Ourselves
A Social History of the American Musical Theatre
John Bush Jones
Brandeis University Press, 2004
Our Musicals, Ourselves is the first full-scale social history of the American musical theater from the imported Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas of the late nineteenth century to such recent musicals as The Producers and Urinetown. While many aficionados of the Broadway musical associate it with wonderful, diversionary shows like The Music Man or My Fair Lady, John Bush Jones instead selects musicals for their social relevance and the extent to which they engage, directly or metaphorically, contemporary politics and culture. Organized chronologically, with some liberties taken to keep together similarly themed musicals, Jones examines dozens of Broadway shows from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present that demonstrate numerous links between what played on Broadway and what played on newspapers’ front pages across our nation. He reviews the productions, lyrics, staging, and casts from the lesser-known early musicals (the “gunboat” musicals of the Teddy Roosevelt era and the “Cinderella shows” and “leisure time musicals” of the 1920s) and continues his analysis with better-known shows including Showboat, Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma, South Pacific, West Side Story, Cabaret, Hair, Company, A Chorus Line, and many others. While most examinations of the American musical focus on specific shows or emphasize the development of the musical as an art form, Jones’s book uses musicals as a way of illuminating broader social and cultural themes of the times. With six appendixes detailing the long-running diversionary musicals and a foreword by Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist of Fiddler on the Roof, Jones’s comprehensive social history will appeal to both students and fans of Broadway.
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Our National Park System
Caring for America's Greatest Natural and Historic Treasures
Dwight F. Rettie
University of Illinois Press, 1995
This is the first comprehensive look at America's national park system, an insider's tour covering the system and the National Park Service, the agency responsible for its care. Dwight F. Rettie, former chief of the NPS policy development office, is uniquely qualified to address the state--the problems and the possibilities--of the system, which is comprised of millions of acres of land in more than 350 areas around the nation, including historic sites, battlefields, and recreation areas.
    
Rettie agrees, as many critics have claimed, that the system is in disarray; he proposes in detail stronger management operations, clearer and more stringent measures of personnel performance, and training of park rangers to help them become professionals knowledgeable about the scientific management and protection of resources.
    
For a concerned public as well as for policy-makers and students of government, this comprehensive analysis and outline may provide hope--and a future--for the invaluable legacy that is our national park system.
 
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Our National Parks
John Muir
University of Wisconsin Press, 1981
Our National Parks is a guidebook supreme, an exciting introduction to Yosemite and several other magnificent parks by the man who, more than any other person, helped to create them. After this fast-paced trip with Muir, past visitors to the parks will want to revisit them with new insights, and those who have never wandered these trails will not rest until they have done so.
    The book, long out of print, was originally published in 1901, its ten essays having previously appeared as articles in the Atlantic Monthly. Muir wrote them with a single purpose—to entice people, by his descriptions, to come to the parks, to see and enjoy them. If enough people did so, reasoned Muir, they would surely love the wilderness as he did, and the parks would be preserved.
    Muir carried out his public relations mission with remarkable success. Every page of this book carries his unbridled and irresistible enthusiasm. Our National Parks is part reminiscence, part philosophy, and mostly enticing description. It is all vintage Muir.
    Although the book treats Yellowstone, Sequoia, General Grant, and other national parks of the Western U.S., Muir devotes the bulk of the work to his first love—Yosemite, settled into the heart of the Sierra Nevada. Indeed, six of the book’s chapters are devoted to Yosemite, treating the forests, wild gardens, fountains and streams, animals, and birds of the park. The concluding essay is an impassioned plea to save American forests.
    All visitors to the great western national parks—and all who will one day visit them—will be captivated by Muir’s descriptions. The grandeur of this wilderness is reflected in the very spirit of John Muir. Both shine through every page of this remarkable book.
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front cover of Our National Parks and the Search for Sustainability
Our National Parks and the Search for Sustainability
By Bob R. O'Brien
University of Texas Press, 1999

"Yosemite Valley in July of 1967 would have had to be seen to be believed. There was never an empty campsite in the valley; you had to create a space for yourself in a sea of cars, tents, and humanity.... The camp next to ours had fifty people in it, with rugs hung between the trees, incense burning, and a stereo set going full volume."

Scenes such as this will probably never be repeated in Yosemite or any other national park, yet the urgent problem remains of balancing the public's desire to visit the parks with the parks' need to be protected from too many people and cars and too much development. In this book, longtime park visitor and professional geographer Bob O'Brien explores the National Park Service's attempt to achieve "sustainability"—a balance that allows as many people as possible to visit a park that is kept in as natural a state as possible.

O'Brien details methods the NPS has used to walk the line between those who would preserve vast tracts of land for "no use" and those who would tap the Yellowstone geysers to generate electricity. His case studies of six western "crown jewel" parks show how rangers and other NPS employees are coping with issues that impact these cherished public landscapes, including visitation, development, and recreational use.

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front cover of Our Nazi
Our Nazi
An American Suburb’s Encounter with Evil
Michael Soffer
University of Chicago Press, 2024
The first book to lay bare the life of a Nazi camp guard who settled in a Chicago suburb and to explore how his community and others responded to discoveries of Nazis in their midst.
 
Reinhold Kulle seemed like the perfect school employee. But in 1982, as his retirement neared, his long-concealed secret came to light. The chief custodian at Oak Park and River Forest High School outside Chicago had been a Nazi, a member of the SS, and a guard at a brutal slave labor camp during World War II.
 
Similar revelations stunned communities across the country. Hundreds of Reinhold Kulles were gradually discovered: men who had patrolled concentration camps, selected Jews for execution, and participated in mass shootings—and who were now living ordinary suburban lives. As the Office of Special Investigations raced to uncover Hitler’s men in the United States, neighbors had to reconcile horrific accusations with the helpful, kind, and soft-spoken neighbors they thought they knew. Though Nazis loomed in the American consciousness as evil epitomized, in Oak Park—a Chicago suburb renowned for its liberalism—people rose to defend Reinhold Kulle, a war criminal.
 
Drawing on archival research and insider interviews, Oak Park and River Forest High School teacher Michael Soffer digs into his community’s tumultuous response to the Kulle affair. He explores the uncomfortable truths of how and why onetime Nazis found allies in American communities after their gruesome pasts were uncovered.
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front cover of Our Neck of the Woods
Our Neck of the Woods
Exploring Minnesota's Wild Places
Daniel J. Philippon
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

What are the odds of finding Minnesota's tiniest orchid? Why take a Breathalyzer test to study frogs? How does ice fishing warm the heart? Who would live in such a cold, lean region? Our Neck of the Woods takes on these and other urgent (and sometimes quirky) questions, showcasing writers' own experiences in the best-loved places in Minnesota, including the North Shore, Lake Bemidji, the western prairies and grasslands, the Boundary Waters, and the Mesabi Iron Range.

The outdoor experiences described here range from sweeping natural history observations to adventurous tales of coming-of-age camping and hunting trips. We follow notable writers and conservationists Sigurd F. Olson, Paul Gruchow, Bill Holm, Jan Zita Grover, Greg Breining, Laurie Allmann, and many others as they descend a frozen river toward Lake Superior, explore a crystalline palace at minus 20 degrees, and trace a family's history along the Mississippi River. Writing on such themes as embracing winter, making camp, and finding wildness even amid development, these authors tell of hunting, fishing, birding, canoeing, and other great outdoor activities that help define what it means to be Minnesotan.

Drawn from the pages of Minnesota Conservation Volunteer magazine-published by the Department of Natural Resources since 1940-these writings evoke a strong sense of place and suggest that the outdoor experiences we share with others come to mean the most to us. With rich observations and spirited tales, Our Neck of the Woods beckons Minnesotans to work, play, and explore in the natural places close to their homes and hearts.

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