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Drawing from 167 examples of decorative needlework—primarily samplers and quilts from 114 collections across the United States—made by individual women aged forty years and over between 1820 and 1860, this exquisitely illustrated book explores how women experienced social and cultural change in antebellum America.

The book is filled with individual examples, stories, and over eighty fine color photographs that illuminate the role that samplers and needlework played in the culture of the time. For example, in October 1852, Amy Fiske (1785–1859) of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, stitched a sampler. But she was not a schoolgirl making a sampler to learn her letters. Instead, as she explained, “The above is what I have taken from my sampler that I wrought when I was nine years old. It was w[rough]t on fine cloth [and] it tattered to pieces. My age at this time is 66 years.”

Situated at the intersection of women’s history, material culture study, and the history of aging, this book brings together objects, diaries, letters, portraits, and prescriptive literature to consider how middle-class American women experienced the aging process. Chapters explore the physical and mental effects of “old age” on antebellum women and their needlework, technological developments related to needlework during the antebellum period and the tensions that arose from the increased mechanization of textile production, and how gift needlework functioned among friends and family members. Far from being solely decorative ornaments or functional household textiles, these samplers and quilts served their own ends. They offered aging women a means of coping, of sharing and of expressing themselves. These “threads of time” provide a valuable and revealing source for the lives of mature antebellum women.

Publication of this book was made possible in part through generous funding from the Coby Foundation, Ltd and from the Quilters Guild of Dallas, Helena Hibbs Endowment Fund.

A Store Almost in Sight tells the story of commercial development in central Missouri from the early days of American settlement following the Louisiana Purchase to the Civil War. Focusing on those counties near or on the Missouri River, historian Jeff Bremer confirms that the history of the frontier is also the history of the spread of capitalist values. The letters, journals, diaries, and travel accounts of Missouri settlers and visitors reveal how small decisions made by Missouri’s rural white settlers—ranging from how much of a certain crop to plant to how many eggs to take to the local store—contributed to the establishment of a market economy in the state.

Most Missourians welcomed the opportunity to take part in commercial markets. Farmwomen sold eggs or butter to peddlers and in nearby towns, while men took surplus corn or pork to stores for credit. Immigrants searched for the most fertile land closest to waterways, to ensure they would have large harvests and an easy way to ship them to market. Families floated farm goods downriver until steamboats transformed rural life by drastically reducing the cost of transportation and boosting farm production and consumption. Traders also trekked west across the plains to trade at the inland entrepôt of Santa Fe. The waves of migrants headed for Oregon and California in the 1840s and 1850s further encouraged commercial development. However, most white settlers lacked the necessary financial means to be capitalists in a technical sense, seeking instead a “competency,” or comfortable independence.

This fresh reinterpretation of the American frontier will interest anyone who wants to understand the economic and social significance of westward migration in U.S. history. It gives the reader a gritty, grassroots sense of how ordinary people made their livings and built communities in the lands newly opened to American settlement.

The miners' strike against Pittston Coal in 1989–1990, which spread throughout southwestern Virginia, southern West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky, was one of the most important strikes in the history of American labor, and, as Richard Brisbin observes, "one of the longest and largest incidents of civil disorder and civil disobedience in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century." The company aggressively sought to break the strike, and workers and their families used a variety of tactics—lawful and unlawful—to resist Pittston's efforts as the situation quickly turned ugly.

In A Strike like No Other Strike: Law and Resistance during the Pittston Coal Strike of 1989–1990, Richard Brisbin offers a compelling study of the exercise of political power. In considering the legal significance of the strike, Brisbin asks the larger question of whether even extreme transgression or resistance can fracture the "imagined coherence of the law." He shows how each party in the strike invoked the law to justify its actions while attacking those of the other side as unlawful. In the end, both sides lost; although the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of the union, most of the strikers faced elimination of their jobs and an ongoing struggle for pensions and health benefits.

Law school can be a joyous, soul-transforming challenge that leads to a rewarding career. It can also be an exhausting, self-limiting trap. It all depends on making smart decisions. When every advantage counts, A Student’s Guide to Law School is like having a personal mentor available at every turn.

As a recent graduate and an appellate lawyer, Andrew Ayers knows how high the stakes are—he’s been there, and not only did he survive the experience, he graduated first in his class. In A Student’s Guide to Law School he shares invaluable insight on what it takes to make a successful law school journey. Originating in notes Ayers jotted down while commuting to his first clerkship with then-Judge Sonia Sotomayor, and refined throughout his first years as a lawyer, A Student’s Guide to Law School offers a unique balance of insider’s knowledge and professional advice.

Organized in four parts, the first part looks at tests and grades, explaining what’s expected and exploring the seven choices students must make on exam day. The second part discusses the skills needed to be a successful law student, giving the reader easy-to-use tools to analyze legal materials and construct clear arguments.

The third part contains advice on how to use studying, class work, and note-taking to find your best path. Finally, Ayers closes with a look beyond the classroom, showing students how the choices they make in law school will affect their career—and even determine the kind of lawyer they become.

The first law school guide written by a recent top-ranked graduate, A Student’s Guide to Law School is relentlessly practical and thoroughly relevant to the law school experience of today’s students. With the tools and advice Ayers shares here, students can make the most of their investment in law school, and turn their valuable learning experiences into a meaningful career.

In 1911, leading English suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst visited America. Unlike other suffragette leaders, who spent their time in America among the social elite, Pankhurst wasted no time getting right to the heart of America’s social problems. She visited striking laundry workers in New York and female prisoners in Philadelphia and Chicago, and she grappled firsthand with shocking racism in Nashville.
            This book gathers Pankhurst’s writings from the year-long visit, in which she reveals her shock at the darkness hidden in American life, and draws parallels to her experiences of imprisonment and misogyny in her own country. Never before published, these writings mark an important stage in the development of the suffragette's thought, which she brought back to Britain to inform the burgeoning suffrage campaign there.
 

June 12, 1952—only a local sportswriter showed up at the Eau Claire airport to greet a newly signed eighteen-year-old shortstop from Alabama toting a cardboard suitcase. "I was scared as hell," said Henry Aaron, recalling his arrival as the new recruit on the city’s Class C minor league baseball team.
Forty-two years later, as Aaron approached the stadium where the Eau Claire Bears once played, an estimated five thousand people surrounded a newly raised bronze statue of a young "Hank" Aaron at bat. "I had goosebumps," he said later. "A lot of things happened to me in my twenty-three years as a ballplayer, but nothing touched me more than that day in Eau Claire." For the people of Eau Claire, Aaron’s summer two years before his Major League debut with the Milwaukee Braves symbolizes a magical time, when baseball fans in a small city in northern Wisconsin could live a part of the dream.

A Tale of Two Bridges is a history of two versions of the San Francisco—Oakland Bay Bridge: the original bridge built in 1936 and a replacement for the eastern half of the bridge finished in 2013. The 1936 bridge revolutionized transportation in the Bay Area and profoundly influenced settlement patterns in the region. It was also a remarkable feat of engineering. In the 1950s the American Society of Civil Engineers adopted a list of the “Seven Engineering Wonders” of the United States. The 1936 structure was the only bridge on the list, besting even the more famous Golden Gate Bridge. One of its greatest achievements was that it was built on time (in less than three years) and came in under budget. Mikesell explores in fascinating detail how the bridge was designed by a collection of the best-known engineers in the country as well as the heroic story of its construction by largely unskilled laborers from California, joined by highly skilled steel workers.

By contrast, the East Span replacement, which was planned between 1989 and 1998, and built between 1998 and 2013, fell victim to cost overruns in the billions of dollars, was a decade behind schedule, and suffered from structural problems that has made it a perpetual maintenance nightmare.

This is narrative history in its purest form. Mikesell excels at explaining highly technical engineering issues in language that can be understood and appreciated by general readers. Here is the story of two very important bridges, which provides a fair but uncompromising analysis of why one bridge succeeded and the other did not.

 

In 1609, two years after its English founding, colonists struggled to stay alive in a tiny fort at Jamestown.John Smith fought to keep order, battling both English and Indians. When he left, desperate colonists ate lizards, rats, and human flesh. Surviving accounts of the “Starving Time” differ, as do modern scholars’ theories.

Meanwhile, the Virginia-bound Sea Venture was shipwrecked on Bermuda, the dreaded, uninhabited “Isle of Devils.” The castaways’ journals describe the hurricane at sea as well as murders and mutinies on land. Their adventures are said to have inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

A year later, in 1610, the Bermuda castaways sailed to Virginia in two small ships they had built. They arrived in Jamestown to find many people in the last stages of starvation; abandoning the colony seemed their only option. Then, in what many people thought was divine providence, three English ships sailed into Chesapeake Bay. Virginia was saved, but the colony’s troubles were far from over.

Despite glowing reports from Virginia Company officials, disease, inadequate food, and fear of Indians plagued the colony. The company poured thousands of pounds sterling and hundreds of new settlers into its venture but failed to make a profit, and many of the newcomers died. Bermuda—with plenty of food, no native population, and a balmy climate—looked much more promising, and in fact, it became England’s second New World colony in 1612.

In this fascinating tale of England’s first two New World colonies, Bernhard links Virginia and Bermuda in a series of unintended consequences resulting from natural disaster, ignorance of native cultures, diplomatic intrigue, and the fateful arrival of the first Africans in both colonies. Written for general as well as academic audiences, A Tale of Two Colonies examines the existing sources on the colonies, sets them in a transatlantic context, and weighs them against circumstantial evidence.

From diplomatic correspondence and maps in the Spanish archives to recent archaeological discoveries at Jamestown, Bernhard creates an intriguing history. To weave together the stories of the two colonies, which are fraught with missing pieces, she leaves nothing unexamined: letters written in code, adventurers’ narratives, lists of Africans in Bermuda, and the minutes of committees in London. Biographical details of mariners, diplomats, spies, Indians, Africans, and English colonists also enrich the narrative. While there are common stories about both colonies, Bernhard shakes myth free from truth and illuminates what is known—as well as what we may never know—about the first English colonies in the New World.

A Taste for Brown Sugar boldly takes on representations of black women's sexuality in the porn industry. It is based on Mireille Miller-Young's extensive archival research and her interviews with dozens of women who have worked in the adult entertainment industry since the 1980s. The women share their thoughts about desire and eroticism, black women's sexuality and representation, and ambition and the need to make ends meet. Miller-Young documents their interventions into the complicated history of black women's sexuality, looking at individual choices, however small—a costume, a gesture, an improvised line—as small acts of resistance, of what she calls "illicit eroticism." Building on the work of other black feminist theorists, and contributing to the field of sex work studies, she seeks to expand discussion of black women's sexuality to include their eroticism and desires, as well as their participation and representation in the adult entertainment industry. Miller-Young wants the voices of black women sex workers heard, and the decisions they make, albeit often within material and industrial constraints, recognized as their own.

Provence today is a state of mind as much as a region of France, promising clear skies and bright sun, gentle breezes scented with lavender and wild herbs, scenery alternately bold and intricate, and delicious foods served alongside heady wines. Yet in the mid-twentieth century, a travel guide called the region a “mostly dry, scrubby, rocky, arid land.” How, then, did Provence become a land of desire—an alluring landscape for the American holiday?

In A Taste for Provence, historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz digs into this question and spins a wonderfully appealing tale of how Provence became Provence. The region had previously been regarded as a backwater and known only for its Roman ruins, but in the postwar era authors, chefs, food writers, visual artists, purveyors of goods, and travel magazines crafted a new, alluring image for Provence. Soon, the travel industry learned that there were many ways to roam—and some even involved sitting still. The promise of longer stays where one cooked fresh food from storied outdoor markets became desirable as American travelers sought new tastes and unadulterated ingredients.

Even as she revels in its atmospheric, cultural, and culinary attractions, Horowitz demystifies Provence and the perpetuation of its image today. Guiding readers through books, magazines, and cookbooks, she takes us on a tour of Provence pitched as a new Eden, and she dives into the records of a wide range of visual media—paintings, photographs, television, and film—demonstrating what fueled American enthusiasm for the region. Beginning in the 1970s, Provence—for a summer, a month, or even just a week or two—became a dream for many Americans. Even today as a road well traveled, Provence continues to enchant travelers, armchair and actual alike.

When chef Matt Rapposelli left the National Park Service to attend culinary school in New England, he was moving from one passion to another. What later brought those passions together was a job in the Hocking Hills, southeast Ohio’s stunning, wild landscape, where the restaurants he helmed—at Hocking Hills Lodge and Lake Hope Lodge—gained a resounding reputation for classic dishes that, driven by the regional vernacular and the natural seasonal abundance of Appalachia, were impeccably fresh and flavorful.

A Taste of the Hocking Hills intermingles delicious recipes with striking photographs of a region to which thousands trek each year. Rapposelli presents dishes by the season, noting the specialties that appear on his menus in a given time of year. Whether enjoying a winter evening or a summer morning, cooks will be able to bring a bit of the Hocking Hills home.

A Telescope on Society seeks to convey the development of social science in the twentieth century through its interaction with a major new instrument for gathering data about society-survey research. The story of survey research and social science is largely told by social scientists affiliated with the Survey Research Center (SRC) and Institute for Social Research (IRS) at the University of Michigan about work done there. But the book also places this story in the broader context of survey-based social science in the United States and the world, to which many individuals and institutions beyond SRC, ISR, and Michigan have also contributed.

The chapters of this volume illustrate the impact that developments in survey research have had and continue to have on a broad range of social science disciplines and interdisciplinary areas ranging from political behavior and electoral systems to macroeconomics and individual income dynamics, mental and physical health, human development and aging, and racial/ethnic diversity and relationships.

The volume will speak to a wide audience of social science and survey research professionals and students interested in learning more about the broad history of survey-based social science and its contributions to understanding ourselves as social beings. It also seeks to convey how crucial institutional and public support are to the development of social science and survey research, as they have been to development in the natural, biomedical, and life sciences.

The five editors of this book are longtime research professors and colleagues in the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. James S. House is also Professor in the Department of Sociology; F. Thomas Juster is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics; Robert L. Kahn is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology and Department of Health Management and Policy; and Howard Schuman is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology; Eleanor Singer is Research Professor in the Survey Research Center, all at the University of Michigan. Professors House (1991-2001), Kahn (1970-76), and Schuman (1982-90) have each served as Director of the Survey Research Center; Professor Juster served (1976-86) as Director of the Institute for Social Research; and Professor Singer served (1999-2002) as Associate Director of the Survey Research Center.

Winner of the Illinois State Historical Society Book Award for Superior Achievement

A Theater of Our Own is a fascinating, fast-paced, and fact-filled chronicle of Chicago's legendary theater scene by the long-time chief critic for the Chicago Tribune. Who produced the first stage adaptation of "The Wizard of Oz" in 1902-nearly forty years before the movie classic? What entertainment juggernaut began in a converted Chinese laundry on Wells Street in 1959? Where did Louis (Studs) Terkel make his stage debut? When did the original production of "Grease" open at Kingston Mines Theater? Richard Christiansen, former chief critic for the Chicago Tribune, answers these and many more questions about the rich role of the theater in Chicago, from its earliest days in 1837 to its present state as a diverse community of artists with international stature.

In A Theater of Our Own, he draws upon his exclusive interviews, insights, and memories gathered over a period of more than forty years of reviewing the arts. This history and memoir traces the evolution of the Chicago theater scene from small theaters to major institutions such as the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, the Goodman Theater, and The Second City. Along the way, Richard Christiansen relates his behind-the-scenes conversations with some of Chicago's most acclaimed writers, directors, and actors--David Mamet, Frank Galati, Mary Zimmerman, John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, Harold Ramis, Gary Sinise, and Joe Mantegna--all a part of Chicago's theater renaissance from the 1970s onward. To this day, Chicago remains a city known for its imaginative, innovative, and influential theaters and artists. A Theater of Our Own, a valuable contribution to the history of theater, is a book written for anyone who enjoys the theater and its people as well as the story of Chicago.

A Thousand Pieces of Paradise is an ecological history of property and a cultural history of rural ecosystems set in one of the Midwest’s most historically significant regions, the Kickapoo River Valley. Whether examining the national war on soil erosion, Amish migration, a Corps of Engineers dam project, or Native American land claims, Lynne Heasley traces the history of modern American property debates. Her book holds powerful lessons for rural communities seeking to reconcile competing values about land and their place in it.

This Civil War memoir of Capt. Dennis E. Haynes is both unique and rare. Not only did few southern unionists write of their experiences after the war, Haynes’s is the only publication by a Louisiana unionist. Furthermore, it is the only account by a member of the First Louisiana Battalion Cavalry Scouts, a unit that existed for less than three months and saw its only real action during the Red River Campaign of 1864. Haynes’s memoir is a historic collection of his wartime experiences as a unionist in the Confederate South. Among his writings, Haynes describes how he opposed the secession of Texas and thus became a hunted man. He also tells of his harrowing odyssey to reach Union troops in Louisiana. Every step of the way, Haynes provides details, sometimes graphic, of the harassment and cruelty he and many others like him suffered at the hands of his Confederate neighbors.

In this lively and fascinating book, noted writer and Auburn alum Paul Hemphill tells the story of the progress of Auburn from that first game coached by Auburn legend George Petrie through the team’s growth and development into the national force it is today. Hemphill records the many highs and occasional lows, and the heartbreak and jubilation each caused, noting the standouts great and small on the way.

A Tiger Walk through History contains 172 photographs, many of them rare and surprising. The text and photos capture the many great players and coaches in the Auburn football experience: Auburn’s first bowl appearance in 1936; coaching eras of innovative football genius John Heisman, after whom the Heisman trophy is named;  “Iron Mike” Donahue; Ralph “Shug” Jordan, who brought Auburn its first national championship in 1957; Pat Dye, Terry Bowden, and present coach Tommy Tuberville; Auburn’s two Heisman trophy winners Pat Sullivan and Bo Jackson; and victories over rivals Alabama and Georgia. The 2007-2008 season is highlighted, including the sixth straight win over Alabama and a bowl victory over Clemson. As the game has grown, Auburn and its team have grown with it, and Auburn now ranks as a perennial power both in its conference and in the nation.

Vince Dooley states in his foreword that “beyond the famous coaches and players and their heroics on behalf of the Orange and Blue, A Tiger Walk through History is also about time-honored traditions—rallying cries like ‘Sullivan-to-Beasley’ and ‘Punt Bama Punt’ and ‘Rolling Toomer’s Corner’—that echo in resounding fashion from the pages of Paul Hemphill’s remarkable book.”

No fan, whether casual or devoted, can afford to miss this riveting account of the Plainsmen’s journey from the very beginning to today, which is the record of a great university as well as the story of the development of a great football team.

An internationally known dancer, choreographer, and gifted anthropologist, Katherine Dunham was born to a black American tailor and a well-to-do French Canadian woman twenty years his senior. This book is Dunham's story of the chaos and conflict that entered her childhood after her mother's early death.

In stark prose, she tells of growing up in both black and white households and of the divisions of race and class in Chicago that become the harsh realities of her young life. A riveting narrative of one girl's struggle to transcend the painful confusions of a family and culture in turmoil, Dunham's story is full of the clarity, candor, and intelligence that lifted her above her troubled beginnings.

"A Touch of Innocence is an absorbing family chronicle written with a gift for physical detail sometimes too real for comfort. In quietly graphic prose the growing girl, the slightly older brother, the ambitious father and the kind stepmother are pictured in such human terms that when their lives get tied into harder and harder knots beyond their undoing, one can only continue to read helplessly as doom closes in upon the household."—Langston Hughes, New York Herald Tribune

"A Touch of Innocence is one of the most extraordinary life stories I have ever read . . . . The content of this book is so heartbreaking that only the strongest artistic skills can keep it from leaking out into sobbing self-pity, but Katherine Dunham's art contains it, understands it and refuses to be overwhelmed by its terrors."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times

"The first eighteen years of the famous dancer and choreographer's life are brought vividly to the reader in this first volume of her autobiography. She writes of what it is like to be a special, gifted young woman growing up in a racially mixed family in the American Middle West. A beautiful, touching and sometimes discomforting book."—Publishers Weekly

"As writing it is honest, searing, graphic and touching, giving us a rather heartbreaking early view of the young American Negro who was later to make a name for herself as a dancer and choreographer."—Arthur Todd, Saturday Review

More than seventy-five years after its publication, Gone with the Wind remains thoroughly embedded in American culture. Margaret Mitchell’s novel and the film produced by David O. Selznick have melded with the broader forces of southern history, southern mythology, and marketing to become, and remain, a cultural phenomenon.

A Tough Little Patch of History (the phrase was coined by a journalist in 1996 to describe the Margaret Mitchell home after it was spared from destruction by fire) explores how Gone with the Wind has remained an important component of public memory in Atlanta through an analysis of museums and historic sites that focus on this famous work of fiction. Jennifer W. Dickey explores how the book and film threw a spotlight on Atlanta, which found itself simultaneously presented as an emblem of both the Old South and the New South. Exhibitions produced by the Atlanta History Center related to Gone with the Wind are explored, along with nearby Clayton County’s claim to fame as “the Home of Gone with the Wind,” a moniker bestowed on the county by Margaret Mitchell’s estate in 1969. There’s a recounting of the saga of “the Dump,” the tiny apartment in midtown Atlanta where Margaret Mitchell wrote the book, and how this place became a symbol for all that was right and all that was wrong with Mitchell’s writing.

A Trauma Artist examines how O'Brien's works variously rewrite his own traumatization during the war in Vietnam as a never-ending fiction that paradoxically "recovers" personal experience by both recapturing and (re)disguising it. Mark Heberle considers O'Brien's career as a writer through the prisms of post-traumatic stress disorder, postmodernist metafiction, and post-World War II American political uncertainties and public violence.

Based on recent conversations with O'Brien, previously published interviews, and new readings of all his works through 1999, this book is the first study to concentrate on the role and representation of trauma as the central focus of all O'Brien's works, whether situated in Vietnam, in post-Vietnam America, or in the imagination of protagonists suspended between the two. By doing so, Heberle redefines O'Brien as a major U.S. writer of the late twentieth century whose representations of self-damaging experiences and narratives of recovery characterize not only the war in Vietnam but also relationships between fathers and sons and men and women in the post-traumatic culture of the contemporary United States.

A Travel Guide to Basque America—the first-ever guide to America’s Basque-American communities, their history, culture, and festivals—has been a best-seller since it first appeared in 1998. This new edition lists dozens of new restaurants, Basque cultural clubs and cultural events, and hundreds of Basque-related Internet sites that have appeared since 1998. It also includes new information about recent events in the Basque Country, their impact on Basque-Americans, and new cultural and community efforts to preserve Basque culture in America. This is the essential guide for Basque-Americans seeking links to their ancient culture and its homeland and their counterparts in the U.S., as well as for any traveler interested in exploring one of this country’s most vibrant and fascinating ethnic minorities.

A University Turns to the World examines the growth of Michigan State University’s pacesetting International program beginning in 1956, when President John Hannah named the nation’s first international dean, Glen Taggart, to head a university-wide effort. In the years that followed, MSU’s technical assistance projects in Asia, Africa, and Latin America were an important contribution to economic growth and development, and they were integral to broad efforts to strengthen the international dimension at home. The faculty members who went to Okinawa, Colombia, Brazil, South Vietnam, and Pakistan in the early years defined important goals and they learned much. As the years passed, their experiences led to increased sensitivity to the complexities of development activity and the need for patience.
     Smuckler’s leadership of the international program and intimate involvement in MSU’s work at home and abroad enable him to recapture the dreams and disappointments of the development promise. Ultimately, Smuckler demonstrates that the development programs of the mid-twentieth century paved the way for valuable new research activities and long-term mutually beneficial ties between MSU faculty and institutions and colleagues overseas.

A very dangerous woman is what Martha Coffin Wright's conservative neighbors considered her, because of her work in the women's rights and abolition movements. In 1848, Wright and her older sister Lucretia Mott were among the five brave women who organized the historic Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention. Wright remained a prominent figure in the women's movement until her death in 1875 at age sixty-eight, when she was president of the National Woman Suffrage Association. At age twenty-six, she attended the 1833 founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society and later presided over numerous antislavery meetings, including two in 1861 that were disrupted by angry antiabolitionist mobs. Active in the Underground Railroad, she sheltered fugitive slaves and was a close friend and supporter of Harriet Tubman.

In telling Wright's story, the authors make good use of her lively letters to her family, friends, and colleagues, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. These letters reveal Wright's engaging wit and offer an insider's view of nineteenth-century reform and family life. Her correspondence with slaveholding relatives in the South grew increasingly contentious with the approach of the Civil War. One nephew became a hero of the Confederacy with his exploits at the Battle of Fredericksburg, and her son in the Union artillery was seriously wounded at Gettysburg while repelling Pickett's Charge.

Wright's life never lacked for drama. She survived a shipwreck, spent time at a frontier fort, experienced the trauma of the deaths of a fiancé, her first husband, and three of her seven children, and navigated intense conflicts within the women's rights and abolition movements. Throughout her tumultuous career, she drew on a reservoir of humor to promote her ideas and overcome the many challenges she faced. This accessible biography, written with the general reader in mind, does justice to her remarkable life.

A Very Serious Thing was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

"It is a very serious thing to be a funny woman." –Frances Miriam Berry Whitcher

A Very Serious Thing is the first book-length study of a part of American literature that has been consistently neglected by scholars and underrepresented in anthologies—American women's humorous writing. Nancy Walker proposes that the American humorous tradition to be redefined to include women's humor as well as men's, because, contrary to popular opinion, women do have a sense of humor.

Her book draws on history, sociology, anthropology, literature, and psychology to posit that the reasons for neglect of women's humorous expression are rooted in a male-dominated culture that has officially denied women the freedom and self-confidence essential to the humorist. Rather than a study of individual writers, the book is an exploration of relationships between cultural realities—including expectations of "true womanhood"—and women's humorous response to those realities.

Humorous expression, Walker maintains, is at odds with the culturally sanctioned ideal of the "lady," and much of women's humor seems to accept, while actually denying, this ideal. In fact, most of American women's humorous writing has been a feminist critique of American culture and its attitudes toward women, according to the author.

A View from the Bottom offers a major critical reassessment of male effeminacy and its racialization in visual culture. Examining portrayals of Asian and Asian American men in Hollywood cinema, European art film, gay pornography, and experimental documentary, Nguyen Tan Hoang explores the cultural meanings that accrue to sexual positions. He shows how cultural fantasies around the position of the sexual "bottom" overdetermine and refract the meanings of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality in American culture in ways that both enable and constrain Asian masculinity. Challenging the association of bottoming with passivity and abjection, Nguyen suggests ways of thinking about the bottom position that afford agency and pleasure. A more capacious conception of bottomhood—as a sexual position, a social alliance, an affective bond, and an aesthetic form—has the potential to destabilize sexual, gender, and racial norms, suggesting an ethical mode of relation organized not around dominance and mastery but around the risk of vulnerability and shame. Thus reconceived, bottomhood as a critical category creates new possibilities for arousal, receptiveness, and recognition, and offers a new framework for analyzing sexual representations in cinema as well as understanding their relation to oppositional political projects.

In this ambitious and imaginative study, Margaretta M. Lovell analyzes the large body of accomplished, sometimes startling, often brilliant work of American artists drawn to Venice's ragged splendor in the last century. Including major works by such diverse and talented painters as James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and Maurice Prendergast, these richly varied paintings portray sleepy canals, architectural monuments, and scenes of picturesque everyday life while they also reveal surprising aspects of American culture.

Homeopathy, as a medical system, presented a significant institutional and economic challenge to conventional medicine in the nineteenth century. Although contemporary critics portrayed homeopathic physicians as part of a sect whose treatment of disease was beyond the pale of acceptable medical practice, homeopathy was in many ways similar to established medicine. Anne Taylor Kirschmann explores the strategic choices and consequences for women practitioners. Not only were female homeopaths respected within their communities, they also enjoyed considerable professional advantages not available to women within regular medicine.

A Vital Force: Women in American Homeopathy offers a new interpretation of women’s roles in modern medicine. Kirschmann strengthens and clarifies the history of homeopathic women physicians and creates a framework of comparison to “regular,” or orthodox, physicians. Women medical practitioners chose homeopathy in dramatic numbers from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, although the reasons for this preference varied over time. Linked to social reform movements in the nineteenth century, anti-modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth, and countercultural ideals of the 1960s and 1970s, women's advocacy of homeopathy has been intertwined with broad social and cultural issues in American society.

Using experimental style as a framework for close readings of writings produced by late twentieth-century North American women, Deborah Mix places Gertrude Stein at the center of a feminist and multicultural account of twentieth-century innovative writing. Her meticulously argued work maps literary affiliations that connect Stein to the work of Harryette Mullen, Daphne Marlatt, Betsy Warland, Lyn Hejinian, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. By distinguishing a vocabulary-which is flexible, evolving, and simultaneously individual and communal--from a lexicon-which is recorded, fixed, and carries the burden of masculine authority--Mix argues that Stein's experimentalism both enables and demands the complex responses of these authors.
    Arguing that these authors have received relatively little attention because of the difficulty in categorizing them, Mix brings the writing of women of color, lesbians, and collaborative writers into the discussion of experimental writing. Thus, rather than exploring conventional lines of influence, she departs from earlier scholarship by using Stein and her work as a lens through which to read the ways these authors have renegotiated tradition, authority, and innovation.
    Building on the tradition of experimental or avant-garde writing in the United States, Mix questions the politics of the canon and literary influence, offers close readings of previously neglected contemporary writers whose work doesn't fit within conventional categories, and by linking genres not typically associated with experimentalism-lyric, epic, and autobiography-challenges ongoing reevaluations of innovative writing.