A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY1421 start with A start with A
Alexandria Goes to War chronicles the lives of men and women whose service made the city unique in the exceptional quality and variety of talent it provided to the Confederate cause. Some of these sixteen individuals are familiar to Civil War readers as their contributions to the southern war effort brought them special notoriety: General Lee, of course, and his son Custis; Samuel Cooper, the senior general in the Confederate army; and Commodore French Forrest. For others less well known—attorneys George Brent and Douglas Forrest, engineer Wilson Presstman, politician Daniel Funsten, student Randolph Fairfax, and immigrant Patrick O’Gorman—the Civil War provided an opportunity to exercise their full talents.
Alexandrians Orton Williams and Frank Stringfellow became celebrated for their colorful adventures. Montgomery Corse’s life paralleled major developments in mid-nineteenth-century America. Alexander Hunter went on to become a noted author of Civil War remembrances. Kundahl also examines the fate of Anne Frobel, a Southern sympathizer who spent the entire war behind Union lines. The survey concludes by reflecting on the role of Edgar Warfield, who well represents those forlorn survivors of the Lost Cause.
Taken as a whole, these profiles constitute a microcosm of the South’s desperate gamble to secede from the Union and form its own nation. The accounts of their service represent not only a single community’s contribution to the redefining contest in American life but also highlight the diverse endeavors that constituted the southern war effort. Their stories reflect the sacrifices made throughout the region for a cause that became hopeless.
George G. Kundahl served as executive director of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and as a principal deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Defense. After thirty-four years of commissioned service in the U.S. Army, he is now major general, US Army Retired. A graduate of Davidson College, he received an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Alabama. Kundahl is the author of Confederate Engineer: Training and Campaigning with John Morris Wampler. He and his wife divide time between their home in Alexandria and the French Riviera.
Frank Kearns was the go-to guy at CBS News for danger- ous stories in Africa and the Middle East in the 1950s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s. By his own account, he was nearly killed 114 times. He took stories that nobody else wanted to cover and was challenged to get them on the air when nobody cared about this part of the world. But his stories were warning shots for conflicts that play out in the headlines today.
In 1957, Senator John Kennedy described America’s view of the Algerian war for independence as the Eisenhower Administration’s “head in the sand policy.” So CBS News decided to find out what was really happening there and to determine where Algeria’s war for independence fit into the game plan for the Cold War. They sent Frank Kearns to find out.
Kearns took with him cameraman Yousef (“Joe”) Masraff and 400 pounds of gear, some of which they shed, and they hiked with FLN escorts from Tunisia, across a wide “no-man’s land,” and into the Aures Mountains of eastern Algeria, where the war was bloodiest. They carried no passports or visas. They dressed as Algerians. They refused to bear weapons. And they knew that if captured, they would be executed and left in unmarked graves. But their job as journalists was to seek the truth whatever it might turn out to be.
This is Frank Kearns’s diary.
An Important Book in America’s Early Encounter with the Arab World
“A pungent satire on American affairs.” —Samuel Eliot Morison
In 1787, while American sailors languished in a Barbary prison, delegates debated the Constitution in Philadelphia. Despite America’s desire to respond to the crisis, without a central government, the new republic had no means to create a naval force. Enter an anonymously published book, The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania: or, Letters Written by a Native of Algiers on the Affairs of the United States in America, which began circulating among the delegates. Consisting of a series of letters ostensibly written by an Algerian agent “Mehmet” back to his leader, the spy predicted that the former colonies would never be able to resolve their differences and be “ruined by disunion.” The book created a sensation and it helped tip the balance for those in favor of adopting the new Constitution. Following the Constitution’s final ratification in 1789, the United States created a navy and began asserting its power overseas. With its commentary about men and women, business and pleasure, and historical and religious comparisons between nations, The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania provides both a contemporary snapshot of early American life and the political ideas of the period. Never before reprinted, and recently rated one of the five best works in the history of America’s encounter with the Arab world, this new edition is edited by historian Timothy Marr, who reconsiders the importance of this early work in the political and literary history of the United States.
This legendary figure now comes to life in an integrated work of biography and letters that reveals the personal as well as the professional woman. In documenting Hamilton's evolution from a childhood of privilege to a life of social advocacy, the volume opens a window on women reformers and their role in Progressive Era politics and reform. Because Hamilton was a keen observer and vivid writer, her letters--more than 100 are included here--bring an unmatched freshness and immediacy to a range of subjects, such as medical education; personal relationships and daily life at Hull House; the women's peace movement; struggles for the protection of workers' health; academic life at Harvard; politics and civil liberties during the cold war; and the process of growing old. Her story takes the reader from the Gilded Age to the Vietnam War.
She was first considered "subversive" during World War I, yet she lived to protest our involvement in Vietnam. She was America's foremost industrial toxicologist, a pioneer in medicine and in social reform, long-time resident of Hull House, pacifist and civil libertarian. She was Edith Hamilton's sister, and the first woman on the faculty of Harvard, though she retired--an assistant professor in the school of public health--ten years before women medical students were admitted.
This legendary figure now comes to life in an integrated work of biography and letters. A keen observer and an extraordinarily complex woman, Alice Hamilton left a rich correspondence, spanning the period from 1888 to 1965, that forms a journal of her times as well as of her life. The letters document the range of her involvement, from the battle against lead poisoning to debates with Felix Frankfurter over civil liberties. But as Alice Hamilton describes a woman's medical education in the late nineteenth century, her unlikely adventures in city slums, mine shafts, and factories, her work with Jane Addams and the women's peace movement, we also witness the stages of one woman's evolution from self-deprecating girl to leading social advocate. The charming details of her girlhood help us to understand her conflicted need to escape Victorian constraints without violating her own notion of femininity, a dilemma resolved only by a career combining science with service.
Beautifully realized works themselves, these letters have been woven by Barbara Sicherman into an exemplary biography that opens a window on the Progressive era.
An intensely private woman, Earle lived in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and four children and conducted much of her research either by mail or at the newly established Long Island Historical Society. She began writing on the eve of her fortieth birthday, and the impressive body of scholarship she generated over the next fifteen years stimulated new interest in early American social customs, domestic routines, foodways, clothing, and childrearing patterns.
Written in a style calculated to appeal to a wide readership, Earle's richly illustrated books recorded the intimate details of what she described as colonial "home life." These works reflected her belief that women had played a key historical role, helping to nurture communities by constructing households that both served and shaped their families. It was a vision that spoke eloquently to her contemporaries, who were busily creating exhibitions of early American life in museums, staging historical pageants and other forms of patriotic celebration, and furnishing their own domestic interiors.
Past biographies, histories, and government documents have ignored Alice Paul's contribution to the women's suffrage movement, but this groundbreaking study scrupulously fills the gap in the historical record. Masterfully framed by an analysis of Paul's nonviolent and visual rhetorical strategies, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign narrates the remarkable story of the first person to picket the White House, the first to attempt a national political boycott, the first to burn the president in effigy, and the first to lead a successful campaign of nonviolence.
Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene also chronicle other dramatic techniques that Paul deftly used to gain publicity for the suffrage movement. Stunningly woven into the narrative are accounts of many instances in which women were in physical danger. Rather than avoid discussion of Paul's imprisonment, hunger strikes, and forced feeding, the authors divulge the strategies she employed in her campaign. Paul's controversial approach, the authors assert, was essential in changing American attitudes toward suffrage.
This interdisciplinary collection brings together contributors working in Asian American studies, English, anthropology, sociology, and art history. They consider issues of cultural authenticity raised by Asian American participation in hip hop and jazz, the emergence of an orientalist “Indo-chic” in U.S. youth culture, and the circulation of Vietnamese music variety shows. They examine the relationship between Chinese restaurants and American culture, issues of sexuality and race brought to the fore in the video performance art of a Bruce Lee–channeling drag king, and immigrant television viewers’ dismayed reactions to a Chinese American chef who is “not Chinese enough.” The essays in Alien Encounters demonstrate the importance of scholarly engagement with popular culture. Taking popular culture seriously reveals how people imagine and express their affective relationships to history, identity, and belonging.
Contributors. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Kevin Fellezs, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Joan Kee, Nhi T. Lieu, Sunaina Maira, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Sukhdev Sandhu, Christopher A. Shinn, Indigo Som, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, Oliver Wang
Between the early 1900s and the late 1950s, the attitudes of white Californians toward their Asian American neighbors evolved from outright hostility to relative acceptance. Charlotte Brooks examines this transformation through the lens of California’s urban housing markets, arguing that the perceived foreignness of Asian Americans, which initially stranded them in segregated areas, eventually facilitated their integration into neighborhoods that rejected other minorities.
Against the backdrop of cold war efforts to win Asian hearts and minds, whites who saw little difference between Asians and Asian Americans increasingly advocated the latter group’s access to middle-class life and the residential areas that went with it. But as they transformed Asian Americans into a “model minority,” whites purposefully ignored the long backstory of Chinese and Japanese Americans’ early and largely failed attempts to participate in public and private housing programs. As Brooks tells this multifaceted story, she draws on a broad range of sources in multiple languages, giving voice to an array of community leaders, journalists, activists, and homeowners—and insightfully conveying the complexity of racialized housing in a multiracial society.
The book begins with the Krueger-Scott Mansion’s deep history, followed by the sequence of events surrounding the proposed Cultural Center. Last owned by African-American millionaire and beauty-culture entrepreneur Louise Scott, the Victorian Krueger-Scott Mansion was built by beer baron Gottfried Krueger in 1888. Through the history of the Mansion, and the ultimately failed Cultural Center project, one learns about the Newark that African Americans migrated to, what they found when they got there, how living in the city changed them, and how they, individually and collectively, changed Newark.
After the Cultural Center project was officially halted in 2000, the cassette tapes of the oral history interviews were stored away at the Newark Public Library. Ten years later they were unearthed, and ultimately digitized. As of yet, no one has applied these sources directly to their research. Deeply committed to these rich, insightful stories, Singer calls for a more thoughtful consideration of all cities, reminding us that Newark is much more than its 1967 rebellion.
A timely and provocative discussion of alienation as an intersectional category of life under racial capitalism and white supremacy
From the divisiveness of the Trump era to the Covid-19 pandemic, alienation has become an all-too-familiar contemporary concept. In this groundbreaking book, James A. Tyner offers a novel framework for understanding the alienated subject, situating it within racial capitalism and white supremacy. Directly addressing current economic trends and their rhetoric of xenophobia, discrimination, and violence, The Alienated Subject exposes the universal whitewashing of alienation.
Drawing insight from a variety of sources, including Marxism, feminism, existentialism, and critical race theory, Tyner develops a critique of both the liberal subject and the alienated subject. Through an engagement with the recent pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, he demonstrates how the alienated subject is capable of both compassion and cruelty; it is a sadomasochist. Tyner goes on to emphasize the importance of the particular places we find the alienated subject and how the revolutionary transformation of alienation is inherently a spatial struggle. Returning to key interlocutors from Sartre to Fromm, he examines political notions of distance and the spatial practices of everyday life as well as the capitalist conditions that give rise to the alienated subject.
For Tyner, the alienated subject is not the iconic, romanticized image of Marx’s proletariat. Here he calls for an affirmation of love as a revolutionary concept, necessary for the transformation of a society marred by capitalism into an emancipated, caring society conditioned by socially just relations.
Amid calls for retrenchment or restraint, Selden makes the case that a policy focused on maintaining American military preeminence and the demonstrated willingness to use force may be what sustains the cooperation of second-tier states, which in turn help to maintain US hegemony at a manageable cost.
In The Aliites, Spencer Dew traces the history and impact of Ali’s radical fusion of law and faith. Dew uncovers the influence of Ali’s teachings, including the many movements they inspired. As Dew shows, Ali’s teachings demonstrate an implicit yet critical component of the American approach to law: that it should express our highest ideals for society, even if it is rarely perfect in practice. Examining this robustly creative yet largely overlooked lineage of African American religious thought, Dew provides a window onto religion, race, citizenship, and law in America.
A nineteenth-century entrepreneur’s bold, innovative marketing helped transform flower gardens into one of America’s favorite hobbies.
“There is much that is hard and productive of sorrow in this sin-plagued world of ours; and, had we no flowers, I believe existence would be hard to be borne.” So states a customer’s 1881 letter—one of thousands James Vick regularly received. Vick’s business, selling flower seeds through the mail, wasn’t unique, but it was wildly successful because he understood better than his rivals how to engage customers’ emotions. He sold the love of flowers along with the flower seeds.
Vick was genuinely passionate about floriculture, but he also pioneered what we now describe as integrated marketing. He spent a mind-boggling $100,000 per year on advertising (mostly to women, his target demographic); he courted newspaper editors for free publicity; his educational guides presaged today’s content marketing; he recruited social influencers to popularize neighborhood gardening clubs; and he developed a visually rich communication and branding strategy to build customer loyalty and inflect their purchasing needs with purchasing desire.
According to 2016 Pew Research Center survey data, Millennials are more likely to have visited a public library in the past year than any other adult demographic. But despite being core library users, millennials and other younger generations are often underrepresented on library boards and library advocacy groups, including Friends groups and Foundations. But you can change that, with the help of this planner’s hands-on worksheets, brainstorming activities, checklists, and expert advice. Using this toolkit from United for Libraries you will
- understand generational differences and commonalities through statistics and analysis of Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials and Generation Z/post-Millennials;
- learn how to navigate the challenges of fundraising with the “debt generations” by persuasively answering the question “what’s in it for me?”;
- master the ABCs of recruitment and retention, tailoring them to fit your library;
- craft several customized pitches, giving you confidence no matter the situation or audience;
- discover how to cement buy-in from two key groups, current organization members and your new recruits, thereby ensuring acceptance and enthusiasm all around;
- work towards defining and managing diversity for your advocacy group; and
- use tried and true methods for successful onboarding of volunteers, including a Board Member Orientation Checklist and guidance on mentoring.
Using this resource, libraries of all kinds will be empowered to grow and strengthen their recruitment, retention, and training of Trustees, Friends, and Foundation members.
From All Anybody Ever Wanted of Me Was to Work...
"Starting around 1950, people stopped raising chickens, milking cows, and raising hogs. They just buy it at the store, ready to eat. A lot buy a steer and have it processed in Dongola and put it in their freezer. What a difference! Girls have got it so easy now. They don't even know what it was like to start out. And I guess my mother's life, when she started out, was as hard again as mine, because they had to make everything by hand. I don't know if it could get any easier for these girls. But they don't know what it was like, and they never will. Everything is packaged. All you do is go to the store and buy you a package and cook it. Automatic washers and dryers. I'm glad they don't have to work like I did. Very glad."
Edith Bradley Rendleman's story of her life in southern Illinois is remarkable in many ways. Recalling the first half of the twentieth century in great detail, she vividly cites vignettes from her childhood as her family moved from farm to farm until settling in 1909 in the Mississippi bottoms of Wolf Lake. She recounts the lives and times of her family and neighbors during an era gone forever.
Remarkable for the vivid details that evoke the past, Rendleman's account is rare in another respect: memoirs of the time—usually written by people from elite or urban families—often reek of nostalgia. But Rendleman's memoir differs from the norm. Born poor in rural southern Illinois, she tells an unvarnished tale of what it was really like growing up on a tenant farm early this century.
Some of the most striking news stories from natural disasters are of animals tied to trees or cats swimming through murky flood waters. Although the issue of evacuating pets has gained more attention in recent disasters, there are still many failures throughout local and national systems of managing pets and accommodating animals in emergencies.
All Creatures Safe and Sound is a comprehensive study of what goes wrong in our disaster response that shows how people can better manage pets in emergencies—from the household level to the large-scale, national level. Authors Sarah DeYoung and Ashley Farmer offer practical disaster preparedness tips while they address the social complexities that affect disaster management and animal rescue. They track the developments in the management of pets since Hurricane Katrina, including an analysis of the 2006 PETS Act, which dictates that animals should be included in hazard and disaster planning. Other chapters focus on policies in place for sheltering and evacuation, coalitions for animal welfare and the prevention of animal cruelty, organizational coordination, decision-making, preparedness, the role of social media in animal rescue and response, and how privilege and power shape disaster experiences and outcomes.
Using data they collected from seven major recent American disasters, ranging from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Florence to the Camp, Tubbs, and Carr Fires in California and the Hawaii Lava Flow, the authors provide insights about the successes and failures of animal care. All Creatures Safe and Sound also outlines what still needs to change to best prepare for the safety and welfare of pets, livestock, and other companion animals in times of crisis.
Runner-up, Carr P. Collins Award for Best Book of Non-Fiction, 2021
Go-Go’s bassist Kathy Valentine’s story is a roller coaster of sex, drugs, and of course, music; it’s also a story of what it takes to find success and find yourself, even when it all comes crashing down.
At twenty-one, Kathy Valentine was at the Whisky in Los Angeles when she met a guitarist from a fledgling band called the Go-Go’s—and the band needed a bassist. The Go-Go’s became the first multi-platinum-selling, all-female band to play instruments themselves, write their own songs, and have a number one album. Their debut, Beauty and the Beat, spent six weeks at the top of the Billboard 200 and featured the hit songs “We Got the Beat” and “Our Lips Are Sealed.” The record's success brought the pressures of a relentless workload and schedule culminating in a wild, hazy, substance-fueled tour that took the band from the club circuit to arenas, where fans, promoters, and crew were more than ready to keep the party going.
For Valentine, the band's success was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream—but it’s only part of her story. All I Ever Wanted traces the path that took her from her childhood in Texas—where she all but raised herself—to the height of rock n’ roll stardom, devastation after the collapse of the band that had come to define her, and the quest to regain her sense of self after its end. Valentine also speaks candidly about the lasting effects of parental betrayal, abortion, rape, and her struggles with drugs and alcohol—and the music that saved her every step of the way. Populated with vivid portraits of Valentine’s interactions during the 1980s with musicians and actors from the Police and Rod Stewart to John Belushi and Rob Lowe, All I Ever Wanted is a deeply personal reflection on a life spent in music.
Tarbell was the only woman in her class of forty students at Allegheny College, and upon graduation she began an internship at The Chautauquan, which was the start of a lifelong immersion in the world of journalism. She further honed her skills during a three-year stint in Paris, but the breakthrough came in 1894 when she was hired as a full-time writer for McClure's Magazine.
It was at McClure's--where, again, she was the only woman on staff--that Tarbell made her name as a determined journalist, one of the fearless brigade of truth-seekers famously chastised by Theodore Roosevelt, who coined the term ‘muckraker' in order to discredit those who attacked senators in print. Tarbell wrote serialized biographies of Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln, as well as a landmark series of articles on Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller.
In All in the Day's Work, Tarbell turns her keen eye on herself, recalling the events of her fascinating life with the same honesty, verve, and scrupulous accuracy she brought to her journalistic work, offering insight along the way into the people, places, and issues of her time.
A fresh take on the history of modern American gambling, All In provides a closer look at the shifting economic, cultural, religious, and political conditions that facilitated gambling’s expansion and prominence in American consumerism and popular culture. In its pages, a diverse range of essays covering commercial and Native American casinos, sports betting, lotteries, bingo, and more piece together a picture of how gambling became so widespread over the course of the twentieth century.
Drawing from a range of academic disciplines, this collection explores five aspects of American gambling history: crime, advertising, politics, religion, and identity.
In doing so, All In illuminates the on-the-ground debates over gambling’s expansion, the failed attempts to thwart legalized betting, and the consequences of its present ubiquity in the United States.
He employs an array of forms and voices, whether penning a break-up letter to America or a literary rock-n-roll road song dedicated to prairie scientists, or giving pregame pep talks to his son’s losing football team. Here, too, are moving portrayals of his father’s last effort as a small-town lawyer to defend the rights of abused women, and his own efforts as a writing teacher to honor the personal stories of his students.
From his Iowa backyard to the edge of the Arctic Circle, from the forgotten recesses of the body to the far reaches of the solar system, this book demonstrates the ways imagination and informed compassion can, as Price describes it, expand thousandfold the boundaries of what we might “have naïvely considered an individual self.”
As fate would have it, his adoptive father, a German-Jewish refugee raised by a loveless and embittered stepmother after his own mother died in childbirth, has inflicted on his stepson a fate uncannily—and terrifyingly—similar to his own: Having first adopted Michael, in part, to help his dying wife, he then imposes on him the same sort of penurious and loveless stepmother whom he himself had had to survive. With these revelations, the "mysteries" that seem to have permeated Michael's childhood are laid bare, triggering a quest for belonging that will infiltrate the author's entire adult life.
All My Relatives provides a new way of reading popular works such as The Woman Warrior, The Joy Luck Club, The Color Purple and John Edgar Wideman's Sent for You Yesterday. TuSmith's study will appeal to general readers as well as students and scholars of American culture, ethnic studies, and American literature.
"An original contribution to the field. TuSmith's willingness to step over invisible boundaries and to draw parallels between the cultural contexts of several ethnic groups at once is refreshing and important." --Amy Ling, University of Wisconsin, Madison
"Ambitious and timely . . . a significant work that Americanists will want to read. TuSmith does an excellent job of clarifying the meaning and significance of the term "ethnicity" in relation to American literature."--Ramón Saldívar, Stanford University
". . . TuSmith establishes the importance of traditional (usually oral) modes of expression to ethnic texts that are both relational and accessible . . . . [S]hould become a standard point of reference in the emerging field of comparative American literature."--Choice
Bonnie TuSmith is Assistant Professor of English, Bowling Green State University.
Winner, John G. Cawelti Award for the Best Textbook/Primer, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2019
MPCA/ACA Book Award, Midwest Popular Culture Association / Midwest American Culture Association, 2020
Taking a multifaceted approach to attitudes toward race through popular culture and the American superhero, All New, All Different? explores a topic that until now has only received more discrete examination. Considering Marvel, DC, and lesser-known texts and heroes, this illuminating work charts eighty years of evolution in the portrayal of race in comics as well as in film and on television.
Beginning with World War II, the authors trace the vexed depictions in early superhero stories, considering both Asian villains and nonwhite sidekicks. While the emergence of Black Panther, Black Lightning, Luke Cage, Storm, and other heroes in the 1960s and 1970s reflected a cultural revolution, the book reveals how nonwhite superheroes nonetheless remained grounded in outdated assumptions. Multiculturalism encouraged further diversity, with 1980s superteams, the minority-run company Milestone’s new characters in the 1990s, and the arrival of Ms. Marvel, a Pakistani-American heroine, and a new Latinx Spider-Man in the 2000s. Concluding with a discussion of contemporary efforts to make both a profit and a positive impact on society, All New, All Different? enriches our understanding of the complex issues of racial representation in American popular culture.
With this colorful study, Reid Mitchell takes us to Mardi Gras--to a yearly ritual that sweeps the richly multicultural city of New Orleans into a frenzy of parades, pageantry, dance, drunkenness, music, sexual display, and social and political bombast. In All on a Mardi Gras Day Mitchell tells us some of the most intriguing stories of Carnival since 1804. Woven into his narrative are observations of the meaning and messages of Mardi Gras--themes of unity, exclusion, and elitism course through these tales as they do through the Crescent City.
Moving through the decades, Mitchell describes the city's diverse cultures coming together to compete in Carnival performances. We observe powerful social clubs, or krewes, designing their elaborate parade displays and extravagant parties; Creoles and Americans in conflict over whose dances belong in the ballroom; enslaved Africans and African Americans preserving a sense of their heritage in processions and dances; white supremacists battling Reconstruction; working-class blacks creating the flamboyant Krewe of Zulu; the birth and reign of jazz; the gay community holding lavish balls; and of course tourists purchasing an authentic experience according to the dictates of our commercial culture. Interracial friction, nativism, Jim Crow separatism, the hippie movement--Mitchell illuminates the expression of these and other American themes in events ranging from the 1901 formation of the anti-prohibitionist Carrie Nation Club to the controversial 1991 ordinance desegregating Carnival parade krewes.
Through the conflicts, Mitchell asserts, "I see in Mardi Gras much what I hear in a really good jazz band: a model for the just society, the joyous community, the heavenly city...A model for community where individual expression is the basis for social harmony and where continuity is the basis for creativity." All on a Mardi Gras Day journeys into a world where hope persists for a rare balance between diversity and unity.
All Our Trials explores the organizing, ideas, and influence of those who placed criminalized and marginalized women at the heart of their antiviolence mobilizations. This activism confronted a "tough on crime" political agenda and clashed with the mainstream women’s movement’s strategy of resorting to the criminal legal system as a solution to sexual and domestic violence. Drawing on extensive archival research and first-person narratives, Thuma weaves together the stories of mass defense campaigns, prisoner uprisings, broad-based local coalitions, national gatherings, and radical print cultures that cut through prison walls. In the process, she illuminates a crucial chapter in an unfinished struggle––one that continues in today’s movements against mass incarceration and in support of transformative justice.
All Play and No Work directly contradicts the promoted ideals of work found in American society, culture, and within the broader New Deal itself. Gagliardi shows how comedies of the Great Depression engaged questions of labor, labor history, and labor ethics. He considers the breadth of the FTP’s production history, staging plays including Ah, Wilderness!, Help Yourself, and Mississippi Rainbow.
Gagliardi examines backstage comedies, middle-class comedies, comedies of chance, and con-artist comedies that employed diverse casts and crew and contained radical economic and labor ideas. He contextualizes these plays within the ideologically complicated New Deal, showing how programs like the Social Security Act straddled progressive ideals and conservative, capitalist norms. Addressing topics including the politicization of theatrical labor and the real dangers of unchecked economic con artists, the comic plays of the FTP reveal acts of political resistance and inequality that reflected the concerns of their audiences.
In the middle of the night, somewhere in Oklahoma—or is it Missouri?—a bus hurtles down an anonymous American highway. Its passengers, among them two children traveling on their own, a retired salesman, an unwed teenage mother, an unemployed chemist, and the driver who ferries and broods over all of them, are in the middle of their journeys. Soon, two of the passengers will be lost, and then the bus itself will lose its way.
The open road and, before that, the open frontier have long been part of the American romance, cherished features of the nation's traditional vision of itself. In her latest novel, A. G. Mojtabai stands this tradition on its head. Instead of the expansive thrust into unknown territory, the camaraderie of the open road, adventure, and the joys of vagabondage, we witness constriction, isolation, and fear. Instead of freedom, we find people fleeing from coast to coast in search of home and the ever-beckoning, ever-retreating promise of a better life. Richly drawn, evocative, and thought-provoking, All That Road Going is a challenging new departure from the road novel canon.
In this transnational, interdisciplinary history, Carmel Finley answers these questions and more as she explores how government subsidies propelled the expansion of fishing from a coastal, in-shore activity into a global industry. While nation states struggling for ocean supremacy have long used fishing as an imperial strategy, the Cold War brought a new emphasis: fishing became a means for nations to make distinct territorial claims. A network of trade policies and tariffs allowed cod from Iceland and tuna canned in Japan into the American market, destabilizing fisheries in New England and Southern California. With the subsequent establishment of tuna canneries in American Samoa and Puerto Rico, Japanese and American tuna boats moved from the Pacific into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans after bluefin. At the same time, government subsidies in nations such as Spain and the Soviet Union fueled fishery expansion on an industrial scale, with the Soviet fleet utterly depleting the stock of rosefish (or Pacific ocean perch) and other groundfish from British Columbia to California. This massive global explosion in fishing power led nations to expand their territorial limits in the 1970s, forever changing the seas.
Looking across politics, economics, and biology, All the Boats on the Ocean casts a wide net to reveal how the subsidy-driven expansion of fisheries in the Pacific during the Cold War led to the growth of fisheries science and the creation of international fisheries management. Nevertheless, the seas are far from calm: in a world where this technologically advanced industry has enabled nations to colonize the oceans, fish literally have no place left to hide, and the future of the seas and their fish stocks is uncertain.
How colleges and universities can respond to legal pressures while remaining true to their educational missions.
Not so long ago, colleges and universities had little interaction with the law. In the 1970s, only a few well-heeled universities even employed in-house legal counsel. But now we live in the age of tenure-denial lawsuits, free speech battles, and campus sexual assault investigations. Even athletics rules violations have become a serious legal matter. The pressures of regulation, litigation, and legislation, Louis Guard and Joyce Jacobsen write, have fostered a new era in higher education, and institutions must know how to respond.
For many higher education observers and participants, including most administrators and faculty, the maze of legal mandates and potential risks can seem bewildering. Guard, a general counsel with years of higher education law experience, and Jacobsen, a former college president, map this unfamiliar terrain. All the Campus Lawyers provides a vital, up-to-date assessment of the impact of legal concerns on higher education and helps readers make sense of the most pressing trends and issues, including civil rights; free speech and expression; student life and wellness; admissions, advancement, and community relations; governance and oversight; the higher education business model; and on-campus crises, from cyberattacks to pandemics.
As well as informing about the latest legal and regulatory developments affecting higher education, Guard and Jacobsen offer practical guidance to those in positions of campus authority. There has never been a more crucial time for college and university boards, presidents, inside and outside counsel, and other higher education leaders to know the law and prepare for legal challenges.
"O'Brien's historical overview of the transition from 19th-century denominational colleges to 20th-century research-driven and largely secular ones is provocative. Cleverly written and well-focused, the book addresses the financial pressures facing higher education and asks vital questions about cutbacks and curricula."—Publishers Weekly
"Lively, engaging, and richly suggestive." —Francis Oakley, Commonweal
"O'Brien employs calm, powerful reason, without sensationalism. His perspective is illuminating. . . . All the Essential Half-Truths About Higher Education is one of the wisest and most useful treatments of American higher education." —John Attarian, Detroit News
Carmel Finley reveals that the fallibility of MSY lies at its very inception—as a tool of government rather than science. The foundational doctrine of MSY emerged at a time when the US government was using science to promote and transfer Western knowledge and technology, and to ensure that American ships and planes would have free passage through the world’s seas and skies. Finley charts the history of US fisheries science using MSY as her focus, and in particular its application to halibut, tuna, and salmon fisheries. Fish populations the world over are threatened, and All the Fish in the Sea helps to sound warnings of the effect of any management policies divested from science itself.
Many consider the new gay visibility a sign of social acceptance, while others charge that it is mere window dressing, obscuring the dogged persistence of discrimination. Walters moves beyond these positions and instead argues that these realities coexist: gays are simultaneously depicted as the sign of social decay and the chic flavor of the month. Taking on the common wisdom that visibility means progress, All the Rage maps the terrain on which gays are accepted as witty accessories in movies, gain access to political power, and yet still fall into constrictive stereotypes. Walters warns us with clarity and wit of the pitfalls of equating visibility with full integration into the fabric of American society. From the playful TV fantasies of lesbian weddings on Friends to the very real obstacles confronting gay marriage, from the award-winning comedy Will & Grace to Bible-thumping radio superhost Dr. Laura, All the Rage takes on naive celebrants and jaded naysayers alike. With a sophisticated mix of caution and optimism, it provides an illuminating guide through these exciting, controversial times.
But which of these teams was the greatest?
All the Way to #1 is the first book to thoroughly document the nation’s top high school football teams from the 20th century. Identifying seventeen legendary programs, football historian Timothy Hudak tells the exciting and entertaining stories of how these teams came to prominence on the national stage. Fans will be particularly interested in Hudak’s conclusion about which of these teams was the best.
Filled with 330 black and white photos, statistics, and the most comprehensive listing of the 20th century’s high school football champions found anywhere, All the Way to #1 is a one-of-a-kind book that will be perfect for fans across the country.
As Kenneth J. Bindas points out, the FMP leadership was more conservative than that of the sister projects in art, theater, and writing. Its stated aim of "raising" the taste of musicians and citizens alike created a particular problem. Although many unemployed musicians came from the sphere of popular music, such as jazz and Tin Pan Alley, the FMP chose to emphasize "cultured" music, particularly the orchestral works of composers in the European classical tradition. Inevitably, this created tension within the project, as those musicians deemed "popular" received second-class treatment and, in the case of racial and ethnic minorities, were segregated and stereotyped. Despite these troubles, Bindas demonstrates, the FMP succeeded in bringing music to millions of listeners across the country.
The decorations, songs, special ways of dressing, and rituals carry deep significance that is viscerally felt by even young tots. Ritual has the capacity to condense a plethora of meaning into a unified metaphor such as a Christmas tree, a menorah, or the American flag. These symbols allow children and adults to co-opt the meaning of symbols in flexible and age-relevant ways, all while the symbols are still treasured and shared in common.
From his celebrated appearance, hatchet in hand, in Parson Mason Locke Weems’s Life of Washington to Booth Tarkington’s Penrod, the all-American boy was an iconic figure in American literature for well over a century. Sometimes he was a “good boy,” whose dutiful behavior was intended as a model for real boys to emulate. Other times, he was a “bad boy,” whose mischievous escapades could be excused either as youthful exuberance that foreshadowed adult industriousness or as deserved attacks on undemocratic pomp and pretension. But whether good or bad, the all-American boy was a product of the historical moment in which he made his appearance in print, and to trace his evolution over time is to take a fresh view of America’s cultural history, which is precisely what Larzer Ziff accomplishes in All-American Boy.
Ziff looks at eight classic examples of the all-American boy—young Washington, Rollo, Tom Bailey, Tom Sawyer, Ragged Dick, Peck’s “bad boy,” Little Lord Fauntleroy, and Penrod—as well as two notable antitheses—Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield. Setting each boy in a rich cultural context, Ziff reveals how the all-American boy represented a response to his times, ranging from the newly independent nation’s need for models of democratic citizenship, to the tales of rags-to-riches beloved during a century of accelerating economic competition, to the recognition of adolescence as a distinct phase of life, which created a stage on which the white, middle-class “solid citizen” boy and the alienated youth both played their parts.
With a specific focus on exploring how American culture, institutions, and social structures influence the circumstances, frequency, and severity of mass shootings in the United States, All-American Massacre advances emerging theoretical perspectives and forges fresh approaches, new research questions, and innovative data and conclusions.
Bringing together pioneering scholars, this groundbreaking compilation of research and analysis identifies the social roots of this insidious threat and prompts new reflections on how we can stop the seemingly endless cycle of horror and death.All-American Massacre helps clarify the unique nature and salience of mass shootings in American life.
Contributors: Melanie Brazzell, Tristan Bridges, Ryan Broll, F. Chris Curran, Sarah E. Daly, Salvatore D’Angelo, James Densley, Tom Diaz, Scott Duxbury, Benjamin W. Fisher, Betsy Friauf, Emma E. Fridel, Celene Fuller, Daniel Gascón, Patrick J. Gauding, Brooke Miller Gialopsos, Simon Gottschalk, Donald P. Haider-Markel, Stephanie Howells, Cheryl Lero Jonson, Mark R. Joslyn, Jessie Klein, Aaron Kupchik, Alison J. Marganski, Melissa M. Moon, Kristen J. Neville, Jaimee Nix, Daniel Okamura, Patrick F. Parnaby, Jillian Peterson, Michael Phillips, Paul Reeping, Jason R. Silva, William A. Stadler, Lindsay Steenberg, Tara Leigh Tober, Jillian J. Turanovic, Abigail Vegter, Stanislav Vysotsky, Lacey N. Wallace and the editors
Allegheny City, known today as Pittsburgh’s North Side, was the third-largest city in Pennsylvania when it was controversially annexed by the City of Pittsburgh in 1907. Founded in 1787 as a reserve land tract for Revolutionary War veterans in compensation for their service, it quickly evolved into a thriving urban center with its own character, industry, and accomplished residents. Among those to inhabit the area, which came to be known affectionately as “The Ward,” were Andrew Carnegie, Mary Cassatt, Gertrude Stein, Stephen Foster, and Martha Graham. Once a station along the underground railroad, home to the first wire suspension bridge, and host to the first World Series, the North Side is now the site of Heinz Field, PNC Park, the Andy Warhol Museum, the National Aviary, and world headquarters for corporations such as Alcoa and the H. J. Heinz Company.
Dan Rooney, longtime North Side resident, joins local historian Carol Peterson in creating this highly engaging history of the cultural, industrial, and architectural achievements of Allegheny City from its humble beginnings until the present day. The authors cover the history of the city from its origins as a simple colonial outpost and agricultural center to its rapid emergence alongside Pittsburgh as one of the most important industrial cities in the world and an engine of the American economy. They explore the life of its people in this journey as they experienced war and peace, economic boom and bust, great poverty and wealth—the challenges and opportunities that fused them into a strong and durable community, ready for whatever the future holds. Supplemented by historic and contemporary photos, the authors take the reader on a fascinating and often surprising street-level tour of this colorful, vibrant, and proud place.
During the nineteenth century, nearly ten thousand Americans traveled to Germany to study in universities renowned for their research and teaching. By the mid-twentieth century, American institutions led the world. How did America become the center of excellence in higher education? And what does that story reveal about who will lead in the twenty-first century?
Allies and Rivals is the first history of the ascent of American higher education seen through the lens of German-American exchange. In a series of compelling portraits of such leaders as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Martha Carey Thomas, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Emily J. Levine shows how academic innovators on both sides of the Atlantic competed and collaborated to shape the research university. Even as nations sought world dominance through scholarship, universities retained values apart from politics and economics. Open borders enabled Americans to unite the English college and German PhD to create the modern research university, a hybrid now replicated the world over.
In a captivating narrative spanning one hundred years, Levine upends notions of the university as a timeless ideal, restoring the contemporary university to its rightful place in history. In so doing she reveals that innovation in the twentieth century was rooted in international cooperation—a crucial lesson that bears remembering today.
What qualities make an ally useful in coalition warfare, and when is an ally more trouble than it’s worth? Allies That Count analyzes the utility of junior partners in coalition warfare and reaches surprising conclusions.
In this volume, Olivier Schmitt presents detailed case-study analysis of several US allies in the Gulf War, the Kosovo campaign, the Iraq War, and the war in Afghanistan. He also includes a broader comparative analysis of 204 junior partners in various interventions since the end of the Cold War. This analysis bridges a gap in previous studies about coalition warfare, while also contributing to policy debates about a recurring defense dilemma. Previous works about coalition warfare have focused on explaining how coalitions are formed, but little attention has been given to the issue of their effectiveness. Simultaneously, policy debates, have framed the issue of junior partners in multinational military operations in terms of a trade-off between the legitimacy that is allegedly gained from a large number of coalition states vs. the decrease in military effectiveness associated with the inherent difficulties of coalition warfare. Schmitt determines which political and military variables are more likely to create utility, and he challenges the conventional wisdom about the supposed benefit of having as many states as possible in a coalition. Allies That Count will be of interest to students and scholars of security studies and international relations as well as military practitioners and policymakers.
Isa Leshko shows us, brilliantly, with this collection of portraits. To create these portraits, she spent hours with her subjects, gaining their trust and putting them at ease. The resulting images reveal the unique personality of each animal. It’s impossible to look away from the animals in these images as they unforgettably meet our gaze, simultaneously calm and challenging. In these photographs we see the cumulative effects of the hardships of industrialized farm life, but also the healing that time can bring, and the dignity that can emerge when farm animals are allowed to age on their own terms.
Each portrait is accompanied by a brief biographical note about its subject, and the book is rounded out with essays that explore the history of animal photography, the place of beauty in activist art, and much more. Open this book to any page. Meet Teresa, a thirteen-year-old Yorkshire Pig, or Melvin, an eleven-year-old Angora Goat, or Tom, a seven-year-old Broad Breasted White Turkey. You’ll never forget them.
The book traces Richards from his boyhood in rural Parowan, Utah, to Cornell and through his service as an officer in World War I and his teaching career in Los Angeles. His story is that of a remarkable athlete, but also that of a man struggling for personal fulfillment while endeavoring to retain his Mormon heritage amid his changing religious circumstances and participation. More than a century has passed since Alma Richards won an Olympic gold medal, yet this story about man and sport—the drive to excel, victory as validation of hard work, the quest for public recognition and, ultimately, the achievement of self-identity and self-satisfaction—still resonates today.
Like every edition since the almanac first appeared in 1972, the 2014 edition is helmed by veteran political analyst Michael Barone. Together with Chuck McCutcheon, collaborator since 2012, and two new editors, Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, and Josh Kraushaar, managing editor at National Journal, Barone offers an unparalleled perspective on contemporary politics.
Full of maps, census data, and detailed information about the American political landscape, the 2014 Almanac of American Politics remains the most comprehensive resource for journalists, politicos, business people, and academics.
Due to both his family background and the prevalence of U.S. media in Latin America, Cavalcanti already felt immersed in U.S. culture before arriving in Kentucky in 1981 to complete graduate studies. At that time, opportunities for advancement in the United States exceeded those in Brazil, and in an era of military dictatorships throughout much of Latin America, Cavalcanti sought in the United States a nation of laws. In this memoir, he reflects on the dynamics of acculturation, immigrant parenting, interactions with native-born U.S. citizens, and the costs involved in rejecting his country of birth for an adopted nation. He also touches on many of the factors that contribute to migration in both the “sending” and “receiving” countries and explores the contemporary phenomenon of accelerated immigration.
With its blend of personal anecdotes and scholarly information, Almost Home addresses both individual and policy-related issues to provide a moving portrait of the impact of migration on those who, like Cavalcanti, confront both the wonder and the disorientation inherent in the immigrant experience.
At vaudeville theaters, international expositions, commercial nightclubs, and military bases, Hawaiian women acted as ambassadors of aloha, enabling Americans to imagine Hawai'i as feminine and benign, and the relation between colonizer and colonized as mutually desired. By the 1930s, Hawaiian culture, particularly its music and hula, had enormous promotional value. In the 1940s, thousands of U.S. soldiers and military personnel in Hawai'i were entertained by hula performances, many of which were filmed by military photographers. Yet, as Adria L. Imada shows, Hawaiians also used hula as a means of cultural survival and countercolonial political praxis. In Aloha America, Imada focuses on the years between the 1890s and the 1960s, examining little-known performances and films before turning to the present-day reappropriation of hula by the Hawaiian self-determination movement.
Robert A. Ferguson investigates the nature of loneliness in American fiction, from its mythological beginnings in Rip Van Winkle to the postmodern terrors of 9/11. At issue is the dark side of a trumpeted American individualism. The theme is a vital one because a greater percentage of people live alone today than at any other time in U.S. history.
The many isolated characters in American fiction, Ferguson says, appeal to us through inward claims of identity when pitted against the social priorities of a consensual culture. They indicate how we might talk to ourselves when the same pressures come our way. In fiction, more visibly than in life, defining moments turn on the clarity of an inner conversation.
Alone in America tests the inner conversations that work and sometimes fail. It examines the typical elements and moments that force us toward a solitary state—failure, betrayal, change, defeat, breakdown, fear, difference, age, and loss—in their ascending power over us. It underlines the evolving answers that famous figures in literature have given in response. Figures like Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and Toni Morrison’s Sethe and Paul D., or Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March and Marilynne Robinson’s John Ames, carve out their own possibilities against ruthless situations that hold them in place. Instead of trusting to often superficial social remedies, or taking thin sustenance from the philosophy of self-reliance, Ferguson says we can learn from our fiction how to live alone.
When Gina Oliva first went to school in 1955, she didn’t know that she was “different.” If the kindergarten teacher played a tune on the piano to signal the next exercise, Oliva didn’t react because she couldn’t hear the music. So began her journey as a “solitary,” her term for being the only deaf child in the entire school. Gina felt alone because she couldn’t communicate easily with her classmates, but also because none of them had a hearing loss like hers. It wasn’t until years later at Gallaudet University that she discovered that she wasn’t alone and that her experience was common among mainstreamed deaf students. Alone in the Mainstream recounts Oliva’s story, as well as those of many other solitaries.
In writing this important book, Oliva combined her personal experiences with responses from the Solitary Mainstream Project, a survey that she conducted of deaf and hard of hearing adults who attended public school. Oliva matched her findings with current research on deaf students in public schools and confirmed that hearing teachers are ill-prepared to teach deaf pupils, they don’t know much about hearing loss, and they frequently underestimate deaf children. The collected memories in Alone in the Mainstream add emotional weight to the conviction that students need to be able to communicate freely, and they also need peers to know they are not alone.
Alone on the Colorado takes readers on the adventure of running rivers and riding the rails, while painting a unique and optimistic portrait of Depression-era America.
Most observers agree that marriage in America has been changing. Some think it is in decline, that the growth of individualism has made it increasingly difficult to achieve satisfying and stable relationships. Others believe that changes, such as increasing gender equality, have made marriage a better arrangement for men as well as women.
Based on two studies of marital quality in America twenty years apart, this book takes a middle view, showing that while the divorce rate has leveled off, spouses are spending less time together—people may be “bowling alone” these days, but married couples are also eating alone. Indeed, the declining social capital of married couples—including the fact that couples have fewer shared friends—combined with the general erosion of community ties in American society has had pervasive, negative effects on marital quality.
At the same time, family income has increased, decision-making equality between husbands and wives is greater, marital conflict and violence have declined, and the norm of lifelong marriage enjoys greater support than ever.
The authors conclude that marriage is an adaptable institution, and in accommodating the vast changes that have occurred in society over the recent past, it has become a less cohesive, yet less confining arrangement.
Along the Maysville Road details the life of the trail from its beginnings as a buffalo trace, through its role in populating and transforming an early American West, to its decline in regional and national affairs. This biography of a road thus serves as a microhistory of social and cultural change in the Early American Republic. Integral to this story are the people and groups who traveled and settled along the road: backcountry pioneers, refined Virginia gentry, poor and middling farmers, artisans and merchants from eastern cities, and of course the women and slaves who arrived with them. While these groups imported differing worldviews into the new American West, the merchant class’s commitment to commercial development, material acquisition, and individual achievement prophesied the triumph of a liberal economic order throughout nineteenth-century America. Alongside this individualistic impulse arose increasing pressure to abandon older identities based on regional origins and ethnic backgrounds and to accept a collective historical memory for the growing nation. Throughout the Early Republic, the call of the open road facilitated what it means to be “American.”
Craig Thompson Friend is associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida. He edits the Florida Historical Quarterly and is author of Kentucky Frontiers, 1750–1852 (forthcoming) and editor of The Buzzel About Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land.
In these pages, the reader will witness the dramatic creation of the Tetons; the arrival of the first humans, bands of fur-clad Early Hunters who ventured into the valley some 10,000 years ago; the coming and going of the later Indian tribes; and the nearly incredible journey of John Colter, who back in 1807 is said to have been the first white man to have found his way through the wilderness and into Jackson Hole.
Here, too, the reader will meet the boisterous mountain men, trappers such as Jim Bridger and the former slave, Jim Beckwourth, who roamed the Rockies when St. Louis was still a frontier village; a little Mormon boy who ran away from home and lived with the Indians before becoming a Pony Express rider; a most unusual Englishman who describes a terrible tragedy that befell his Indian wife and half-breed children; a glory-seeking lieutenant who led six cavalrymen on a foolhardy expedition that almost cost them their lives; and a nineteenth-century president of the United States who took a pack trip through Jackson Hole, allegedly leaving a trail of empty bottles behind.
And there is more, much more--the story of the pioneers, those hardy few who dared to settle in this high and inhospitable land; the story of outlaws, a shoot-out, vigilance committees and an Indian "massacre" that embarrassed the New York Times; the story of the deliverance of the world's largest elk herd from the many perils that threatened it with extinction; and, finally, the story of the long and angry controversy over the preservation of the Tetons and Jackson Hole as a national park, a struggle called "one of the most remarkable conservation fights of the twentieth century."
All these and still other episodes in the long and colorful cavalcade of Jackson Hole are woven together to form a work of Western Americana rich in anecdotes and portraits of delightfully eccentric characters.
In this significant recovery project, Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach investigates the institutions and streetscapes of Black Chicago that fueled an entire literary and artistic movement. She argues that African American authors and artists--such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, painter Archibald Motley, and many others--viewed and presented black reality from a specific geographic vantage point: the view along the streets of Bronzeville. Schlabach explores how the particular rhythms and scenes of daily life in Bronzeville locations, such as the State Street "Stroll" district or the bustling intersection of 47th Street and South Parkway, figured into the creative works and experiences of the artists and writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance. She also covers in detail the South Side Community Art Center and the South Side Writers' Group, two institutions of art and literature that engendered a unique aesthetic consciousness and political ideology for which the Black Chicago Renaissance would garner much fame.
Life in Bronzeville also involved economic hardship and social injustice, themes that resonated throughout the flourishing arts scene. Schlabach explores Bronzeville's harsh living conditions, exemplified in the cramped one-bedroom kitchenette apartments that housed many of the migrants drawn to the city's promises of opportunity and freedom. Many struggled with the precariousness of urban life, and Schlabach shows how the once vibrant neighborhood eventually succumbed to the pressures of segregation and economic disparity. Providing a virtual tour South Side African American urban life at street level, Along the Streets of Bronzeville charts the complex interplay and intersection of race, geography, and cultural criticism during the Black Chicago Renaissance's rise and fall.
Black works from the startling premise that the United States is a continent pretending to be a country. He examines the cultural clashes—and the tense harmony—between the numerous regional cultures uneasily contained within the United States’ wide bounds. Suburban sprawl, the triumph of consumerism, the war over health care, immigration, and Christian evangelicalism all play a part in these pages, as Black unravels the tangled web of American life during the past forty-five years. He locates such tensions in the tug-of-war between the unitary and divisive pressures that have always defined the character of American government, and in the alternating rise and fall of individualism and conformity in American society as well. Black also has some telling new reflections on America’s role abroad, from Nixon’s Vietnam to George W. Bush's Iraq.
Drawing on travels from Virginia to California to Alaska, Black deftly reveals in Altered States the less-examined aspects of American culture as they are manifested in its diverse peoples and landscapes from coast to coast.
Yet, if the use of drugs is a constant in American history, the way they have been perceived has varied extensively. Just as the corrupting cigarettes of the early twentieth century ("coffin nails" to contemporaries) became the glamorous accessory of Hollywood stars and American GIs in the 1940s, only to fall into public disfavor later as an unhealthy and irresponsible habit, the social significance of every drug changes over time.
The essays in this volume explore these changes, showing how the identity of any psychoactive substance—from alcohol and nicotine to cocaine and heroin—owes as much to its users, their patterns of use, and the cultural context in which the drug is taken, as it owes to the drug's documented physiological effects. Rather than seeing licit drugs and illicit drugs, recreational drugs and medicinal drugs, "hard" drugs and "soft" drugs as mutually exclusive categories, the book challenges readers to consider the ways in which drugs have shifted historically from one category to another.
In addition to the editors, contributors include Jim Baumohl, Allan M. Brandt, Katherine Chavigny, Timothy Hickman, Peter Mancall, Michelle McClellan, Steven J. Novak, Ron Roizen, Lori Rotskoff, Susan L. Speaker, Nicholas Weiss, and William White.
An Alternate Pragmatism for Going Public interrogates composition’s most prominent responses to contemporary K–16 education reform. By “going public,” teachers, scholars, and administrators rightfully reassert their expertise against corporate-political standards and assessments like the Common Core, Complete College America, and the Collegiate Learning Assessment. However, author Jim Webber shows that composition’s professional imperative for self-defense only partly fulfils the broader aims of “going public,” which include fostering public participation that can assess and potentially affirm the public good of professional judgment.
Drawing on the pragmatic/democratic tradition, Webber envisions an alternate rhetoric of professionalism, one that not only reasserts compositionists’ expertise but also expands opportunities for publics to authorize this expertise. While this public inquiry and engagement may not safeguard professional standing against neoliberal reform, it reorients composition toward an equally important goal, enabling publics to gauge the adequacy of the educational standardization so often advocated by contemporary reform.
An Alternate Pragmatism for Going Public shows how public engagement can serve composition’s efforts related to “going public.”
Alternative Alcott includes works never before reprinted, including "How I Went Out to Service," "My Contraband," and "Psyche's Art." It also contains Behind a Mask, her most important sensation story; the full and correct text of her last unfinished novel, Diana and Persis; "Transcendental Wild Oats"; Hospital Sketches; and Alcott's other important texts on nineteenth-century social history. This anthology brings together for the first time a variety of Louisa May Alcott's journalistic, satiric, feminist, and sensation texts. Elaine Showalter has provided an excellent introduction and notes to the collection.
Through vivid and searching portraits of these three redoubtable journalists, prize-winning historian John L. Thomas traces for the first time the evolving ideologies of the most significant reformers of their age.
Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and Henry Lloyd’s Wealth against Commonwealth each in its turn became an international bestseller, championing a course of national policy and social reform that owed allegiance neither to the large-scale capitalist model then emerging, nor to the bureaucratic socialism espoused on the left. Also common to the vast writings of all three were a deep distrust of partisan machine politics and a mounting sense of social crisis which neither spoilsmanship nor materialism seemed able to address.
Seeking instead diversity and cooperation within society, small economic units, and simplicity in government, the authors of these works were moved to defend strikes during the heyday of industrial capitalism. They spoke out for international peace when imperialism was rampant. They called for the preservation of community values in the face of urban sprawl. And they urged the goals of brotherhood and interdependence in an age when survival of the fittest was seen as holy writ.
They failed magnificently as apostles of a radical culture based on the ideal of a community, yet their intellectual legacy was not lost: their heirs include the broad movement that took the name Progressive, the New Deal, and the hopeful crusades of the 1960s. This magnificent book is their memorial and their history.
Michael S. Goldstein's Alternative Health Care is the first comprehensive account of the growing presence of alternative medicine in American society. Beginning with the basic premises of alternative medicine, Goldstein's book examines the clinical, economic, and political realities of the broad range of alternative care options and practices in the United States and explains why alternative medicine has become a viable choice for so many people who are ill or who seek to remain healthy.
Bringing history, policy, practice, personal experience, and in-depth sociological analysis together into one comprehensive volume, Goldstein -- one of the first recipients of funding from the National Institute of Health for research on alternative medicine -- also studies the complexities of the relationship between spirituality and alternative medicine and the changing role of alternative medicine in the larger context of American health care. Probing such issues as the corporatization of medicine, the role of alternative medicine in health care, and the dynamic relationship between conventional and alternative treatments, Goldstein's Alternative Health Care is more than the long-awaited introduction to the many forms of alternative medicine. It is also the measure of the implications of such care for practitioners, businesses, policymakers, and patients alike.
Alternative Health Care is the definitive guide for the millions of Americans interested in alternative medicine and treatment, American health care, the sociology of medicine, and American social issues.
In the United States, the entanglement of sports and education has persisted for over a century. Multimillion-dollar high school football stadiums, college coaches whose salaries are many times those of their institutions’ presidents, psychological and educational tolls on student-athletes, and high-profile academic scandals are just symptoms of a system that has come under increasing fire. Institutions large and small face persistent quandaries: which do they value more, academic integrity or athletic success? Which takes precedence: prioritizing elite teams and athletes, or making it possible for all students to participate in sports? How do we create opportunities for academic—not just athletic—development for players?
In Alternative Models of Sports Development in America, B. David Ridpath—a leading sports development researcher who has studied both the US system and the European club model—offers clear steps toward creating a new status quo. He lays out four possible alternative models that draw various elements from academic, athletic, and European approaches. His proposals will help increase access of all young people to the benefits of sports and exercise, allow athletes to also thrive as students, and improve competitiveness. The result is a book that will resonate with sports development professionals, academic administrators, and parents.
In the century and a half since the Civil War, various entities, both private and public, have earnestly sought to safeguard the legacy of that seismic conflict through the preservation of its battlefields. In Altogether Fitting and Proper—a title taken from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—Timothy B. Smith provides the most comprehensive synthesis ever written of the long, often fraught history of those preservation efforts, which began even as the war was still raging and have continued up through the present day.
Smith traces the story of battlefield park establishment from the war and the Reconstruction era through the “Golden Age of Preservation” at the turn of the century, to the New Deal period and well beyond. He pays close attention to the evolution of public policy, as the creation and oversight of parks shifted from the War Department to the National Park Service, and explores the evolving ways in which the Civil War has been remembered over the years, most significantly with regard to its causes: slavery and race. While Smith’s primary focus is on the famous national parks—Gettysburg, Shiloh, Antietam, Chickamauga, and others—he also examines the endeavors of state and local governments, as well as an assortment of private organizations, to establish parks and monuments for lesser-known battle sites. The ongoing conflicts between preservationists and commercial developers form another key element of the narrative.
As Smith makes clear, the story of battlefield preservation is in many ways a story of people—from Civil War veterans like Henry Boynton, the Medal of Honor winner who oversaw the development of the first national military park at Chickamauga, to Jim Lighthizer, the president of the Civil War Trust, the private charitable organization spearheading the twenty-first-century preservation movement. In their dedication to this particular cause, such individuals and the groups they represent have kept a central event in American history alive in our collective memory.
Cowboy, judge, federal official, then business executive, Wilson McCarthy mirrored change and growth in the twentieth-century West. Leading the Denver & Rio Grande back from the brink saved a vital link in the national transportation system. The D&RGW ran over and through the scenic Rockies, developing mineral resources, fighting corporate wars, and helping build communities. The Depression brought it to its knees. Accepting federal assignment to save the line, McCarthy turned it into a paragon of mid-century railroading, represented by the streamlined, Vista-Domed California Zephyr, although success hauling freight was of more economic importance. Prior to that, McCarthy’s life had taken him from driving livestock in Canada to trying to drive the national economy as a director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the first line of federal attack on the Depression. Always a Cowboy positions McCarthy’s story in a rich historical panorama..
Will Bagley is the author of Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows
Edgar Allen Imhoff renders a series of touching, colorful vignettes about growing up in southern Illinois during the Great Depression. He writes poignantly of his family and their struggles (including his father’s exhausting but successful effort at self-education) as he revisits his early childhood years in the country and his eventual move to the town of Murphysboro, where he encountered school bullies, outstanding teachers, first love, World War II, and adolescence.
Imhoff contrasts these memories of his youth with events, incidents, and thoughts from his more recent past. While writing a government check with six figures to the left of the decimal, he remembers how his mother once scrounged together thirty cents so Imhoff and his brother and sister could go to the circus with their classmates. Listening to President Carter give a speech in the Rose Garden reminds him of the contrasting elocutionary style of the Reverend William Boatman, the pastor at his country church, which was built by Imhoff’s great-great-grandfather and others.
Through such contrasts, Imhoff not only paints a loving picture of his past, he also comments on the alienation and emptiness that mark many lives in the United States, especially those of modern nomads. Imhoff has himself become a nomad, living far from the land of his birth, enjoying a successful and rewarding career. Yet he is drawn repeatedly to his past, his family, his childhood home, and the intricate combination of events, attitudes, values, and loyalties that influenced and molded him.
As honest and no-nonsense as the artist herself, Always the Queen is LaSalle's in-her-own-words story of a lifetime in music. Moving to Chicago as a teen, LaSalle launched a career in gospel and blues that eventually led to the chart-topping 1971 smash ”Trapped by a Thing Called Love” and a string of R&B hits. She reinvented herself as a soul-blues artist as tastes changed and became a headliner on the revitalized southern soul circuit and at festivals nationwide and overseas. Revered for a tireless dedication to her music and fans, LaSalle continued to tour and record until shortly before her death.
Despite being heralded as the answer to racial conflict in the post–civil rights United States, the principal political effect of multiracialism is neither a challenge to the ideology of white supremacy nor a defiance of sexual racism. More accurately, Jared Sexton argues in Amalgamation Schemes, multiculturalism displaces both by evoking long-standing tenets of antiblackness and prescriptions for normative sexuality.
In this timely and penetrating analysis, Sexton pursues a critique of contemporary multiracialism, from the splintered political initiatives of the multiracial movement to the academic field of multiracial studies, to the melodramatic media declarations about “the browning of America.” He contests the rationales of colorblindness and multiracial exceptionalism and the promotion of a repackaged family values platform in order to demonstrate that the true target of multiracialism is the singularity of blackness as a social identity, a political organizing principle, and an object of desire. From this vantage, Sexton interrogates the trivialization of sexual violence under chattel slavery and the convoluted relationship between racial and sexual politics in the new multiracial consciousness.
An original and challenging intervention, Amalgamation Schemes posits that multiracialism stems from the conservative and reactionary forces determined to undo the gains of the modern civil rights movement and dismantle radical black and feminist politics.
Jared Sexton is assistant professor of African American studies and film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Having spent more than thirty years in the service of his church, Lyman began to move away from its teachings after a series of conflicts with its second leader, Brigham Young. Lyman was one of the first Mormons to criticize the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which led to his dismissal as an apostle. He was excommunicated in 1870 and became one of the foremost spokesmen of the Godbeite Church of Zion movement before his death in 1877. Author Edward Leo Lyman chronicles Amasa Lyman’s life and interactions with Mormon history with an honesty true to his ancestor’s freethinking spirit.
Winner of the Francis Armstrong Madsen Best Utah History Book Award from the Utah Division of State History.
John W. Davis (1873-1955) was the most important national politician to call West Virginia home. Nominated for president by the Democratic Party in 1924, Davis lost to the incumbent Calvin Coolidge. This diary is an engaging day-by-day account of Davis's service as U.S. ambassador to England at a pivotal point in modern history. The recent World War and Russian Revolution, the new thirst for oil, the old strife in Ireland, and the final days of the Wilson presidency fill this diary with enduring significance. Davis also offers a look at the personalities which shaped the post-war world and describes the pageantry and social life of America's most coveted ambassadorial assignment.
In 1969, Henry Catto was selling insurance in San Antonio, Texas. Just twenty years later, he presented his credentials as ambassador to the Court of St. James's to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, at Buckingham Palace. In this engaging memoir, he retraces his journey from Texas outsider to Washington insider, providing a fascinating look at the glamour, day-to-day work, and even occasional danger that come with being a high-level representative of the United States government.
Catto's posts brought him into contact with the world's most powerful leaders and left him with a wealth of stories, which he recounts amusingly in these pages. He was the official host for Queen Elizabeth's visit to America during the Bicentennial year—and one of José Napoleon Duarte's protectors after his failed 1972 coup attempt in El Salvador. Catto accompanied Richard Nixon on his historic trip to Russia, sparred with Bill Moyers and the producers of "60 Minutes" as Caspar Weinberger's spokesman at the Pentagon, and hosted George Bush's planning meeting with Margaret Thatcher at the beginning of the Persian Gulf War. In telling these and other stories, he offers behind-the-scenes glimpses into how political power really works in Washington, London, and other world capitals.
The title story presents a self-centered and captivating woman who ruthlessly steals her orphan cousin's lover. In "Circumstance," a pioneer woman returning home through the woods at night is caught by a panther; her husband, who has come to save her, can only watch from the ground as she sings for her life, pinned in a tree. A train engineer hallucinates again and again that he is running over his wife. And Mrs. Craven, who's a bit "weak" in the head, mindlessly repeats "Three men went down cellar and only two came up." These stories combine elements of the best ghost stories—timing, detail, and character —with just enough chill to make you think twice about turning out your lights at night.
Every child knows what it means to play, but the rest of us can merely speculate. Is it a kind of adaptation, teaching us skills, inducting us into certain communities? Is it power, pursued in games of prowess? Fate, deployed in games of chance? Daydreaming, enacted in art? Or is it just frivolity? Brian Sutton-Smith, a leading proponent of play theory, considers each possibility as it has been proposed, elaborated, and debated in disciplines from biology, psychology, and education to metaphysics, mathematics, and sociology.
Sutton-Smith focuses on play theories rooted in seven distinct “rhetorics”—the ancient discourses of Fate, Power, Communal Identity, and Frivolity and the modern discourses of Progress, the Imaginary, and the Self. In a sweeping analysis that moves from the question of play in child development to the implications of play for the Western work ethic, he explores the values, historical sources, and interests that have dictated the terms and forms of play put forth in each discourse’s “objective” theory.
This work reveals more distinctions and disjunctions than affinities, with one striking exception: however different their descriptions and interpretations of play, each rhetoric reveals a quirkiness, redundancy, and flexibility. In light of this, Sutton-Smith suggests that play might provide a model of the variability that allows for “natural” selection. As a form of mental feedback, play might nullify the rigidity that sets in after successful adaption, thus reinforcing animal and human variability. Further, he shows how these discourses, despite their differences, might offer the components for a new social science of play.
After contextualizing the postwar use of shadow imagery in the wake of the atomic bomb, Ambiguous Borderlands looks at shadows in print works, detailing the reemergence of the pulp fiction crime fighter the Shadow in the late-1950s writings of Sylvia Plath, Amiri Baraka, and Jack Kerouac. Using Freudian and Jungian conceptions of the unconscious, Mortenson then discusses Kerouac’s and Allen Ginsberg’s shared dream of a “shrouded stranger” and how it shaped their Beat aesthetic. Turning to the visual, Mortenson examines the dehumanizing effect of shadow imagery in the Cold War photography of Robert Frank, William Klein, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Mortenson concludes with an investigation of the use of chiaroscuro in 1950s film noir and the popular television series The Twilight Zone, further detailing how the complexities of Cold War society were mirrored across these media in the ubiquitous imagery of light and dark.
From comics to movies, Beats to bombs, Ambiguous Borderlands provides a novel understanding of the Cold War cultural context through its analysis of the image of the shadow in midcentury media. Its interdisciplinary approach, ambitious subject matter, and diverse theoretical framing make it essential reading for anyone interested in American literary and popular culture during the fifties and sixties.
In 1769, Spain took action to solidify control over its northern New World territories by establishing a series of missions and presidios in what is now modern California. To populate these remote establishments, the Spanish crown relied on Franciscan priests, whose role it was to convince the Native Californian population to abandon their traditional religious practices and adopt Catholicism. During their tutelage, the Indians of California would be indoctrinated into Spanish society, where they would learn obedience to the church and crown.
The legal system of Southern California has been used by Anglo populations as a social and demographic tool to control Native Americans. Following the Mexican-American War and the 1849 Gold Rush, as California property values increased and transportation corridors were established, Native Americans remained a sharply declining presence in many communities, and were likely to be charged with crimes. The sentences they received were lighter than those given to Anglo offenders, indicating that the legal system was used as a means of harassment. Additionally, courts chronicled the decline of the once flourishing native populations with each case of drunkenness, assault, or rape that appeared before the bench. Nineteenth-century American society had little sympathy for the plight of Indians or for the destruction of their culture. Many believed that the Indians of Southern California would fade from history because of their inability to adapt to a changing world. While many aspects of their traditional culture have been irreparably lost, the people of southern California are, nevertheless, attempting to recreate the cultures that were challenged by the influx of Europeans and later Americans to their lands.
1992 Myers Center Outstanding Book on Human Rights
Historians have produced scores of studies on white men, extraordinary white women, and even the often anonymous mass of enslaved Black people in the United States. But in this innovative work, Adele Logan Alexander chronicles there heretofore undocumented dilemmas of one of nineteenth-century America’s most marginalized groups—free women of color in the rural South.
Ambiguous Lives focuses on the women of Alexander’s own family as representative of this subcaste of the African-American community. Their forbears, in fact, included Africans, Native Americans, and whites. Neither black nor white, affluent nor impoverished, enslaved nor truly free, these women of color lived and died in a shadowy realm situated somewhere between the legal, social, and economic extremes of empowered whites and subjugated blacks. Yet, as Alexander persuasively argues, these lives are worthy of attention precisely because of these ambiguities—because the intricacies, gradations, and subtleties of their anomalous experience became part of the tangled skein of American history and exemplify our country’s endless diversity, complexity, and self-contradictions.
Written as a “reclamation” of a long-ignored substratum of our society, Ambiguous Lives is more than the story of one family—it is a well-researched and fascinating profile of America, its race and gender relations, and its complex cultural weave.
By juxtaposing the voices of women and men from all walks of life, Sigel finds that women's perceptions of gender relations are complex and often contradictory. Although most women see gender discrimination pervading nearly all social interactions—private as well as public—they do not invariably feel that they personally have been its victims. They want to see discrimination ended, but believe that men do not necessarily share this goal. Women are torn, according to Sigel, between the desire to improve their positions relative to men and the desire to avoid open conflict with them. Their desire not to jeopardize their relations with men, Sigel holds, helps explain women's willingness to accommodate a less-than-egalitarian situation by, for example, taking on the second shift at home or by working harder than men on the job. Sigel concludes that, although men and women agree on the principle of gender equality, definitions as well as practice differ by gender.
This complex picture of how women, while not always content with the status quo, have chosen to accommodate to the world they must face every day is certain to provoke considerable debate.
Politically, the Bush White House sought the entrenchment of consistent Republican electoral majorities. Institutionally, the Bush administration sought to preserve control of Congress by maintaining reliable partisan Republican majorities, and to influence the federal courts with a steady stream of conservative judicial appointees. The administration also sought increased autonomy over the executive branch by the aggressive use of executive orders and bureaucratic reorganizations in response to 9/11.
Many of these efforts were at least partially successful. But ultimately the fate of the Bush presidency was tied to its greatest single gamble, the Iraq War. The flawed prosecution of that conflict, combined with other White House management failures and finally a slumping economy, left Bush and the Republican Party deeply unpopular and the victim of strong electoral reversals in 2006 and the election victory of Barack Obama in 2008. The American public had turned against the Bush agenda in great part because of the negative outcomes resulting from the administration's pursuit of that agenda.
This book assembles prominent presidential scholars to measure the trajectory of Bush's aspirations, his accomplishments, and his failures. By examining presidential leadership, popular politics and policymaking in this context, the contributors begin the work of understanding the unique historical legacy of the Bush presidency.
In Ambition, Competition, and Electoral Reform, Jamie L. Carson and Jason M. Roberts present an original study of U.S. congressional elections and electoral institutions for 1872-1944 from a contemporary political science perspective. Using data on late nineteenth and early twentieth century congressional elections, the authors test the applicability in a historical context of modern political science theories, assess the effects of institutional reforms, and identify the factors that shape the competitiveness of elections. They present several key findings: the strategic politicians theory is applicable in an era without candidate-centered campaigns; there was an incumbency advantage prior to the full development of candidate-centered campaigns; institutional reforms have had a significant effect on elections; and the degree of electoral competition frequently correlates with elected officials' responsiveness to citizens.
Drawing on an in-depth study of real schools on the South Side of Chicago, Elizabeth McGhee Hassrick, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Lisa Rosen argue that effectively meeting the challenge of educational inequality requires a complete reorganization of institutional structures as well as wholly new norms, values, and practices that are animated by a relentless commitment to student learning. They examine a model that pulls teachers out of their isolated classrooms and places them into collaborative environments where they can share their curricula, teaching methods, and assessments of student progress with a school-based network of peers, parents, and other professionals. Within this structure, teachers, school leaders, social workers, and parents collaborate to ensure that every child receives instruction tailored to his or her developing skills. Cooperating schools share new tools for assessment and instruction and become sites for the training of new teachers. Parents become respected partners, and expert practitioners work with researchers to evaluate their work and refine their models for educational organization and practice. The authors show not only what such a model looks like but the dramatic results it produces for student learning and achievement.
The result is a fresh, deeply informed, and remarkably clear portrait of school reform that directly addresses the real problems of educational inequality.
Explores childhood in relation to blackness, transfeminism, queerness, and deportability to interrogate what “the child” makes possible
The concept of childhood contains many contested and ambivalent meanings that have extraordinary implications, particularly for those staking their claim for belonging and justice on the wish for inclusion within it. In Ambivalent Childhoods, Jacob Breslow examines contemporary U.S. social justice movements (including Black Lives Matter, transfeminism, queer youth activism, and antideportation movements) to discover and reveal how childhood operates within and against them.
Ambivalent Childhoods brings together critical race, trans, feminist, queer, critical migration, and psychoanalytic theories to explore the role of childhood in shaping and challenging the disposability of young black life, the steadfastness of the gender binary, the queer life of children’s desires, and the precarious status of migrants. Through an engagement with“the psychic life of the child” that combines theoretical discussions of childhood, blackness, transfeminism, and deportability with critical readings of films, narrative, images, and social justice movements, Breslow demonstrates how childhood requires sustained attention as a complex and ambivalent site for contesting the workings of power, not only for the young.
Ambivalent Childhoods is a forward-thinking and intersectional analysis of how childhood affects activism, national belonging, and the violence directed against queer, trans, and racialized people.
Jones's study focuses on the ways in which U.S. migration affects the lives of families in these two subregions. Migrants from Zacatecas have traditionally come from rural areas and have gone to California and Illinois. Migrants from Coahuila, on the other hand, usually come from urban areas and have almost exclusively preferred locations in nearby Texas. The different motivations of both groups for migrating, and the different economic and social effects upon their home areas realized by migrating, form the core of this book. The comparison also lends the book its uniqueness, since no other study has made such an in-depth comparison of two areas.
Jones addresses the basic dichotomy of structuralists (who maintain that dependency and disinvestment are the rule for families and communities in sending areas) and functionalists (who believe that autonomy and reinvestment are the case of migrants and their families in home regions). Jones finds that much of the primary literature is based on uneven and largely outdated data that leans heavily on two sending states, Jalisco and Michoacan. His fresh analysis shows that communities and regions of Mexico, rather than families only, account for differing migration patterns and differing social and economic results of these patterns.
Jones's study will be of value not only to scholars and practitioners working in the field of Mexican migration, but also, for its innovative methodology, to anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and historians whose interests include human migration patterns in any part of the world
Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death uses psychoanalytic theory in combination with historical, cultural, and literary contexts to examine the complex motif of death in a full range of Bierce’s writings. Scholarly interest in Bierce, whose work has long been undervalued, has grown significantly in recent years. This new book contributes to the ongoing reassessment by providing new contexts for joining the texts in his canon in meaningful ways.
Previous attempts to consider Bierce from a psychological perspective have been superficial, often reductive Freudian readings of individual stories such as “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “The Death of Halpin Frayser.” This new volume not only updates these interpretations with insights from post-Freudian theorists but uses contemporary death theory as a framework to analyze the sources and expressions of Bierce’s attitudes about death and dying. This approach makes it possible to discern links among texts that resolve some of the still puzzling ambiguities that have—until now—precluded a fuller understanding of both the man and his writings.
Lively and engaging, Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death adds valuable new insights not only to the study of Bierce but to that of nineteenth-century American literature in general.
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