Results by title
18284 books match the query 'United States' and 1653 start with a
A Paler Shade of Red
The 2008 Presidential Election in the SouthBranwell DuBose Kapeluck
University of Arkansas Press, 2009
A Pan-American Life
Selected Poetry and Prose of Muna LeeMuna Lee; Edited and with biography by Jonathan M. Cohen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
A Paradise of Blood
The Creek War of 1813–14Howard T. Weir, III
Westholme Publishing, 2016
In 1811, a portion of the Creek Indians who inhabited a vast area across Georgia, Alabama, and parts of Florida and Mississippi, interpreted an earth tremor as a sign that they had to return to their traditional way of life. What was an internal Indian dispute soon became engulfed in the greater War of 1812 to become perhaps the most consequential campaign of that conflict. At immediate stake in what became known as the Creek War of 1813–14 was whether the Creeks and their inconstant British and Spanish allies or the young United States would control millions of acres of highly fertile Native American land. The conflict’s larger issue was whether the Indian nations of the lower American South—the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw—would be able to remain in their ancestral homes.
Beginning with conquistador Ferdinand DeSoto’s fateful encounter with Indians of the southeast in the 1500s, A Paradise of Blood: The Creek War of 1813–14 by Howard T. Weir, III, narrates the complete story of the cultural clash and centuries-long struggle for this landscape of stunning beauty. Using contemporary letters, military reports, and other primary sources, the author places the Creek War in the context of Tecumseh’s fight for Native American independence and the ongoing war between the United States and European powers for control of North America. The Creek War was marked by savagery, such as the murder of hundreds of settlers at Fort Mims, Alabama—the largest massacre of its kind in United States history—and fierce battles, including Horseshoe Bend, where more Indian warriors were confirmed killed than in any other single engagement in the long wars against the Indians. Many notable personalities fought during the conflict, including Andrew Jackson, who gained national prominence for his service, Sam Houston, War Chief William Weatherford, and Davy Crockett. When the war was over, more than twenty million acres had been added to the United States, thousands of Indians were dead or homeless, and Jackson was on his way to the presidency. The war also eliminated the last effective Native American resistance to westward expansion east of the Mississippi, and by giving the United States land that was ideal for large-scale cotton planting, it laid the foundation for the Civil War a generation later. A Paradise of Blood is a comprehensive and masterful history of one of America’s most important and influential early wars.
A Part of the Heart Can't Be Eaten
A MemoirTristan Taormino
Duke University Press, 2023
Tristan’s world began to fall apart when her dad was diagnosed with AIDS. After a series of devastating events, she moved to the messy, glorious world of 1990s New York City. In the midst of grief and depression, she helped change queer sexual subculture with her zine Pucker Up, her infamous The Village Voice column, and her editorship of legendary lesbian porn magazine On Our Backs. After the publication of her first book, The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women, Tristan followed her own path that marked the beginning of her work as a trailblazing feminist pornographer.
After a lifetime of outrageous adventures, Tristan reflects on the bonds, loss, and mental-health struggles that shaped her. She weaves together history from her father’s unpublished memoir, exploring the surprising ways their personal patterns converge and diverge. Bracingly emotional and erotically charged, A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten reveals the transformative power of queer pleasure and defiance.
A Partisan Church
Todd Scribner
Catholic University of America Press, 2015
A Passion For Gold
An AutobiographyRalph J. Roberts
University of Nevada Press, 2002
Ralph J. Roberts is not a household name in Nevada, but it should be—it was he who discovered the Carlin Belt gold deposits that created a major mining boom in the state in the last four decades of the twentieth century. But this discovery was only one episode of his remarkably eventful life. This colorful and personal account of the author's search for his passion—gold—is a story as adventurous as that of any fictional character.
A Passion for Consumption
The Gothic Novel in AmericaAnna Sonser
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001
A Passion for Cooperation
Adventures of a Wide-Ranging ScientistRobert Axelrod
University of Michigan Press, 2023
Yet Axelrod’s autobiography is not just an account of his wide-ranging passion for cooperation. It reveals his struggles to overcome failures and experience the joys of gaining new insights into how to achieve cooperation. A Passion for Cooperation recounts Robert Axelrod’s adventures talking with the leader of the organization Hamas, the Prime Minister of Israel, and the Foreign Minister of Syria. Axelrod also shares stories of being hosted in Kazakhstan by senior Soviet retired generals and visiting China with well-connected policy advisors on issues of military aspects of cyber conflict. Through stories of the difficulties and rewards of interdisciplinary collaborations, readers will discover how Axelrod’s academic and practical work have enriched each other and demonstrated that opportunities for cooperation are much greater than generally thought.
A Passion for the True and Just
Felix and Lucy Kramer Cohen and the Indian New DealAlice Beck Kehoe
University of Arizona Press, 2014
Kehoe argues that, due to anti-Semitism in 1930s America, Cohen could not speak for his legislation before Congress, and that Collier, an upper-class WASP, became the spokesman as well as the administrator. According to the author, historians of the Indian New Deal have not given due weight to Cohen’s work, nor have they recognized its foundation in his liberal secular Jewish culture. Both Felix and Lucy Cohen shared a belief in the moral duty of mitzvah, creating a commitment to the “true and the just” that was rooted in their Jewish intellectual and moral heritage, and their Social Democrat principles.
A Passion for the True and Just takes a fresh look at the Indian New Deal and the radical reversal of US Indian policies it caused, moving from ethnocide to retention of Indian homelands. Shifting attention to the Jewish tradition of moral obligation that served as a foundation for Felix and Lucy Kramer Cohen (and her professor Franz Boas), the book discusses Cohen’s landmark contributions to the principle of sovereignty that so significantly influenced American legal philosophy.
A Passion to Preserve
Gay Men as Keepers of CultureWill Fellows
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005
From large cities to rural communities, gay men have long been impassioned pioneers as keepers of culture: rescuing and restoring decrepit buildings, revitalizing blighted neighborhoods, saving artifacts and documents of historical significance. A Passion to Preserve explores this authentic and complex dimension of gay men’s lives by profiling early and contemporary preservationists from throughout the United States, highlighting contributions to the larger culture that gays are exceptionally inclined to make.
A Patchwork Shawl
Chronicles of South Asian Women in AmericaDas Dasgupta, Shamita
Rutgers University Press, 1998
A Patchwork Shawl sheds light on the lives of a segment of the U.S. immigrant population that has long been relegated to the margins. It focuses on women's lives that span different worlds: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and the United States. This collection of essays by and about South Asian women in America challenges stereotypes by allowing women to speak in their own words. Together they provide discerning insights into the reconstruction of immigrant patriarchy in a new world, and the development of women's resistance to that reconstruction. Shamita Das DasGupta's introduction also acquaints readers with the psychological topography of the South Asian community.
A Patchwork Shawl considers topics from re-negotiation of identity to sexuality, violence to intimacy, occupations to organizing within the community. The essays bear witness to women's negotiations for independent identities, their claim to their own bodies, and the right to choose relationships based on their own histories and truths. They bring new understanding to the intersection of gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and class.
A Peaceful Conquest
Woodrow Wilson, Religion, and the New World OrderCara Lea Burnidge
University of Chicago Press, 2016
With A Peaceful Conquest, Cara Lea Burnidge presents the most detailed analysis yet of how Wilson’s religious beliefs affected his vision of American foreign policy, with repercussions that lasted into the Cold War and beyond. Framing Wilson’s intellectual development in relationship to the national religious landscape, and paying greater attention to the role of religion than in previous scholarship, Burnidge shows how Wilson’s blend of Southern evangelicalism and social Christianity became a central part of how America saw itself in the world, influencing seemingly secular policy decisions in subtle, lasting ways. Ultimately, Burnidge makes a case for Wilson’s religiosity as one of the key drivers of the emergence of the public conception of America’s unique, indispensable role in international relations.
As the presidential election cycle once again raises questions of America’s place in the world, A Peaceful Conquest offers a fascinating excavation of its little-known roots.
A Peculiar Imbalance
The Fall and Rise of Racial Equality in Minnesota, 1837–1869William D. Green
University of Minnesota Press, 2015
A Peculiar Imbalance is the little-known history of the black experience in Minnesota in the mid-1800s, a time of dramatic change in the region. William D. Green explains how, as white progressive politicians pushed for statehood, black men who had been integrated members of the community, owning businesses and maintaining good relationships with their neighbors, found themselves denied the right to vote or to run for office in those same communities.
As Minnesota was transformed from a wilderness territory to a state, the concepts of race and ethnicity and the distinctions among them made by Anglo-Americans grew more rigid and arbitrary. A black man might enjoy economic success and a middle-class lifestyle but was not considered a citizen under the law. In contrast, an Irish Catholic man was able to vote—as could a mixed-blood Indian—but might find himself struggling to build a business because of the ethnic and religious prejudices of the Anglo-American community. A Peculiar Imbalance examines these disparities, reflecting on the political, social, and legal experiences of black men from 1837 to 1869, the year of black suffrage.
A Peculiar Paradise
A History of Blacks in Oregon, 1788-1940Elizabeth McLagan
Oregon State University Press, 2022
A Peculiar Paradise: A History of Blacks in Oregon 1788–1940 remains the most comprehensive chronology of Black life in Oregon more than forty years after its original publication in 1980. The book has long been a resource for those seeking information on the legal and social barriers faced by people of African descent in Oregon. Elizabeth McLagan’s work reveals how in spite of those barriers, Black individuals and families made Oregon their home, and helped create the state’s modern Black communities. Long out of print, the book is available again through this co-publication with Oregon Black Pioneers, Oregon’s statewide African American historical society. The revised second edition includes additional details for students and scholars, an expanded reading list, a new selection of historic images, and a new foreword by Gwen Carr and an afterword by Elizabeth McLagan.
A Peculiar People
Iowa's Old Order AmishElmer Schwieder
University of Iowa Press, 1975
A Peculiar People explores the origin and growth of the Old Order Amish in Iowa, their religious practices, economic organization, family life, the formation of new communities, and the vital issue of education. Included also are appendixes giving the 1967 “Act Relating to Compulsory School Attendance and Educational Standards”; a sample “Church Organization Financial Agreement,” demonstrating the group’s unusual but advantageous mutual financial system; and the 1632 Dortrecht Confession of Faith, whose eighteen articles cover all the basic religious tenets of the Old Order Amish.
Thomas Morain’s new essay describes external and internal issues for the Iowa Amish from the 1970s to today. The growth of utopian Amish communities across the nation, changes in occupation (although The Amish Directory still lists buggy shop operators, wheelwrights, and one lone horse dentist), the current state of education and health care, and the conscious balance between modern and traditional ways are reflected in an essay that describes how the Old Order dedication to Gelassenheit—the yielding of self to the interests of the larger community—has served its members well into the twenty-first century.
A Penny's Worth of Minced Ham
Another Look at the Great DepressionRobert J. Hastings
Southern Illinois University Press, 1986
Hastings experienced the rural and small town side of an event that touched all who weathered it—the economic crash of 1929 and its 10-year aftermath.
The author grew up in Marion, Illinois, entering the first grade in 1930, the start of the Great Depression. This book, which recalls memorable episodes in the life of that boy, is a sequel to the popular ANickel’s Worth of Skim Milk.
What Hastings experienced as a child was typical of depression-era life. Those who were young then can relive lost youth in Hastings’ books. And there were moments worth reliving: Hastings tells of “laughter and love and tears in the midst of hunger and cold and deprivation.” Those too young to have experienced the economic devastation can see those hard days through the eyes of a trained storyteller reporting from the point of view of a child.
A People Divided
Judaism in Contemporary AmericaJack Wertheimer
Brandeis University Press, 1997
A People Numerous and Armed
Reflections on the Military Struggle for American IndependenceJohn Shy
University of Michigan Press, 1990
A People's History of Baseball
Mitchell Nathanson
University of Illinois Press, 2012
A People's History of Detroit
Mark Jay and Philip Conklin
Duke University Press, 2020
A People's History of the New Boston
Jim Vrabel
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
Credit for the city's turnaround since that time is often given to a select group of people, all of them men, all of them white, and most of them well off. In fact, a large group of community activists, many of them women, people of color, and not very well off, were also responsible for creating the Boston so many enjoy today. This book provides a grassroots perspective on the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, when residents of the city's neighborhoods engaged in an era of activism and protest unprecedented in Boston since the American Revolution.
Using interviews with many of those activists, contemporary news accounts, and historical sources, Jim Vrabel describes the demonstrations, sit-ins, picket lines, boycotts, and contentious negotiations through which residents exerted their influence on the city that was being rebuilt around them. He includes case histories of the fights against urban renewal, highway construction, and airport expansion; for civil rights, school desegregation, and welfare reform; and over Vietnam and busing. He also profiles a diverse group of activists from all over the city, including Ruth Batson, Anna DeFronzo, Moe Gillen, Mel King, Henry Lee, and Paula Oyola. Vrabel tallies the wins and losses of these neighborhood Davids as they took on the Goliaths of the time, including Boston's mayors. He shows how much of the legacy of that activism remains in Boston today.
A People’s Green New Deal
Max Ajl
Pluto Press, 2021
'Hands-down the best book yet on the Green New Deal' - Jason Hickel
The idea of a Green New Deal was launched into popular consciousness by US Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018. It has become a watchword in the current era of global climate crisis. But what - and for whom - is the Green New Deal?
In this concise and urgent book, Max Ajl provides an overview of the various mainstream Green New Deals. Critically engaging with their proponents, ideological underpinnings and limitations, he goes on to sketch out a radical alternative: a 'People's Green New Deal' committed to decommodification, working-class power, anti-imperialism and agro-ecology.
Ajl diagnoses the roots of the current socio-ecological crisis as emerging from a world-system dominated by the logics of capitalism and imperialism. Resolving this crisis, he argues, requires nothing less than an infrastructural and agricultural transformation in the Global North, and the industrial convergence between North and South. As the climate crisis deepens and the literature on the subject grows, A People's Green New Deal contributes a distinctive perspective to the debate.
A Peregrine Ethnography
Reinterpreting Francisco Garcés’s Diary of Native Arizona and the Californias, 1775–1776Translated and Edited by Peter M. Whiteley
University of Arizona Press, 2026
In 1775–1776, Francisco Garcés, O.F.M., undertook a remarkable three-thousand-kilometer journey through modern Arizona and the Californias. As a participant in a side-branch of Juan Bautista de Anza’s colonizing expedition to San Francisco, Garcés recorded a diary that provides a fascinating glimpse of Native peoples, several who had minimal or no prior contact with the Spanish empire. Garcés described customs, detailed alliances and enmities, and offered recommendations, both missionary and military. When he reached Hopi from the west (the first European to do so), Garcés completed a route between Monterey and Santa Fe, in effect completing a road across North America a generation before Lewis and Clark. The Hopi leaders, who clearly understood the implications, expelled him, declaring their independence on July 4, 1776.
Garcés’s diary remains vital for the Indigenous history of western North America. Yet the standard translation is flawed, not least owing to the state of ethnographic knowledge when it was made (1900), resulting in more than a century of reiterated misinterpretations of Indigenous history by anthropologists and historians. Peter M. Whiteley identifies the ur-version of Garcés's diary—a previously unknown copy written up by Pedro Font—and offers a new translation focusing on ethnographic significance in geographic context. Presenting also the Spanish text, Whiteley engages directly with Garcés’s account and provides readers with new interpretation and context.
Garcés was a genuine ethnographer and his accounts of Hopi, River Yumans, Takic, Yokuts, Numic, and Pai peoples, contain unparalleled and foundational insights.
A Perfect Mess
The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher EducationDavid F. Labaree
University of Chicago Press, 2017
And the best it is: today America’s universities and colleges produce the most scholarship, earn the most Nobel prizes, hold the largest endowments, and attract the most esteemed students and scholars from around the world. But this was not an inevitability. Weakly funded by the state, American schools in their early years had to rely on student tuition and alumni donations in order to survive. This gave them tremendous autonomy to seek out sources of financial support and pursue unconventional opportunities to ensure their success. As Labaree shows, by striving as much as possible to meet social needs and fulfill individual ambitions, they developed a broad base of political and financial support that, grounded by large undergraduate programs, allowed for the most cutting-edge research and advanced graduate study ever conducted. As a result, American higher education eventually managed to combine a unique mix of the populist, the practical, and the elite in a single complex system.
The answers to today’s problems in higher education are not easy, but as this book shows, they shouldn’t be: no single person or institution can determine higher education’s future. It is something that faculty, administrators, and students—adapting to society’s needs—will determine together, just as they have always done.
A Perfect Mess
The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher EducationDavid F. Labaree
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Read the news about America’s colleges and universities—rising student debt, affirmative action debates, and conflicts between faculty and administrators—and it’s clear that higher education in this country is a total mess. But as David F. Labaree reminds us in this book, it’s always been that way. And that’s exactly why it has become the most successful and sought-after source of learning in the world. Detailing American higher education’s unusual struggle for survival in a free market that never guaranteed its place in society—a fact that seemed to doom it in its early days in the nineteenth century—he tells a lively story of the entrepreneurial spirit that drove American higher education to become the best.
And the best it is: today America’s universities and colleges produce the most scholarship, earn the most Nobel prizes, hold the largest endowments, and attract the most esteemed students and scholars from around the world. But this was not an inevitability. Weakly funded by the state, American schools in their early years had to rely on student tuition and alumni donations in order to survive. This gave them tremendous autonomy to seek out sources of financial support and pursue unconventional opportunities to ensure their success. As Labaree shows, by striving as much as possible to meet social needs and fulfill individual ambitions, they developed a broad base of political and financial support that, grounded by large undergraduate programs, allowed for the most cutting-edge research and advanced graduate study ever conducted. As a result, American higher education eventually managed to combine a unique mix of the populist, the practical, and the elite in a single complex system.
The answers to today’s problems in higher education are not easy, but as this book shows, they shouldn’t be: no single person or institution can determine higher education’s future. It is something that faculty, administrators, and students—adapting to society’s needs—will determine together, just as they have always done.
A Perfect Picture Of Hell
Eyewitness Accounts By Civil War Prisoners From 12Th IoTed Genoways
University of Iowa Press, 2000
From the shooting of an unarmed prisoner at Montgomery, Alabama, to a successful escape from Belle Isle, from the swelling floodwaters overtaking Cahaba Prison to the inferno that finally engulfed Andersonville, A Perfect Picture of Hell is a collection of harrowing narratives by soldiers from the 12th Iowa Infantry who survived imprisonment in the South during the Civil War.
Editors Ted Genoways and Hugh Genoways have collected the soldiers' startling accounts from diaries, letters, speeches, newspaper articles, and remembrances. Arranged chronologically, the eyewitness descriptions of the battles of Shiloh, Corinth, Jackson, and Tupelo, together with accompanying accounts of nearly every famous Confederate prison, create a shared vision
A Perfect Pint's Beer Guide to the Heartland
Michael Agnew
University of Illinois Press, 2014
- Agnew's exclusive choices on which beers to try at each location
- Entries on every brewery's history and philosophy
- Information on tours, tasting rooms and attached pubs, and dining options and other amenities
- A survey of each brewery's brands, including its flagship beer plus seasonal brews and special releases
- Brewery equipment and capacity
- Nearby attractions
In addition, Agnew sets the stage with a history of Midwestern beer spanning the origins of the immigrant brewers who arrived in the 1800s to the homebrewers-made-good who have built a new kind of brewing culture founded on creativity, dedication to quality, and attention to customer feedback.
Informed and unique, A Perfect Pint's Beer Guide to the Heartland is the essential companion for beer aficionados and curious others determined to drink the best the Midwest has to offer.
Includes more than 150 full color images, including the region's most distinctive beer labels, trademarks, and company logos.
A Perfectly Good Guitar
Musicians on Their Favorite InstrumentsBy Chuck Holley
University of Texas Press, 2017
Ask guitar players about their instruments, and you’re likely to get a story—where the guitar came from, or what makes it unique, or why the player will never part with it. Most guitarists have strong feelings about their primary tool, and some are downright passionate about their axes. Chuck Holley is a professional photographer and writer who loves music and listening to musicians talk about their trade. For several years, he has been photographing guitarists with their prized instruments and collecting their stories. This beautifully illustrated book presents these stories in revelatory photographs and words.
The guitarists included in this book range from high-profile performers, including Rosanne Cash, Guy Clark, Laurence Juber, Jorma Kaukonen, JD Souther, Bill Frisell, Dave Alvin, and Kelly Willis, to renowned studio musicians and band members. Holley’s beautifully composed photographs portray them with their favorite guitar, including detail shots of the instrument. Accompanying the photographs are the musicians’ stories about the Gibsons, Fenders, Martins, and others that have become the guitar in their lives, the one that has a special lineage or intangible qualities of sustain, tone, clarity, and comfort that make it irreplaceable. Several musicians talk about how the guitar chose them, while others recount stories of guitars lost or stolen and then serendipitously recovered. Together, these photographs and stories underscore the great pleasure of performing with an instrument that’s become a trusted friend with a personality all its own.
A Phone of Our Own
The Deaf Insurrection Against Ma BellHarry G. Lang
Gallaudet University Press, 2000
In 1964, of the more than 85 million telephones in the United States and Canada, less than one percent were used regularly by deaf people. If they didn’t ask their hearing neighbors for help, they depended upon their hearing children, some as young as three years old, to act as intermediaries for business calls or medical consultations. In that same year, three enterprising deaf men, Robert H. Weitbrecht, James C. Marsters, and Andrew Saks, started the process that led to deaf people around the world having an affordable phone system that they could use.
Weitbrecht, a successful physicist with the Stanford Research Institute, had been experimenting with a teletypewriter (TTY) used with shortwave radios. When Marsters, a prominent deaf orthodontist, met Weitbrecht and saw his TTY, he immediately suggested the possibility of resolving deaf people’s decades-long struggle to have access to telecommunications without relying totally upon hearing people as go-betweens. Andrew Saks brought his business acumen to the group, which soon set to work overcoming the daunting problems they faced.
Harry G. Lang’s A Phone of Our Own: The Deaf Insurrection Against Ma Bell tells how these three men collaborated to solve the technical difficulties of developing a coupling device for TTYs that would translate sounds into discernible letters. More remarkably, and with the help of an expanding corps of Deaf advocates, they successfully assaulted the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), which in its efforts to protect its monopoly, smashed old TTYs to keep them from being used for potentially competitive purposes. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) also resisted efforts to build a telephone system for deaf people that was available, affordable, portable, and fully accessible. Lang recounts in vivid terms how many other Deaf individuals and groups from all walks of life joined Weitbrecht, Marsters, and Saks against these forces. A Phone of Our Own is an entertaining and engrossing story of how they fought and won, and changed the world for the better for deaf people everywhere.
A Photographer’s Guide to Ohio
Ian Adams
Ohio University Press, 2011
A Pictorial History of Arkansas's Old State House
Celebrating 175 YearsMary L. Kwas
University of Arkansas Press, 2011
A Pictorial History of the University of Iowa
An Expanded EditionJohn C. Gerber
University of Iowa Press, 1988
A Place Apart
A Pictorial History of Hot Springs, ArkansasRay Hanley
University of Arkansas Press, 2011
A Place Called Appomattox
William Marvel
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
In A Place Called Appomattox, William Marvel turns his extensive Civil War scholarship toward Appomattox County, Virginia, and the village of Appomattox Court House, which became synonymous with the end of the Civil War when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant there in 1865. Marvel presents a formidably researched and elegantly written analysis of the county from 1848 to 1877, using it as a microcosm of Southern attitudes, class issues, and shifting cultural mores that shaped the Civil War and its denouement.
With an eye toward correcting cultural myths and enriching the historical record, Marvel analyzes the rise and fall of the village and county from 1848 to 1877, detailing the domestic economic and social vicissitudes of the village, and setting the stage for the flight of Lee’s Army toward Appomattox and the climactic surrender that still resonates today.
Now available for the first time in paperback, A Place Called Appomattox reveals a new view of the Civil War, tackling some of the thorniest issues often overlooked by the nostalgic exaggerations and historical misconceptions that surround Lee’s surrender.
A Place Called Paradise
Culture and Community in Northampton, Massachusetts, 1654-2004Kerry W. Buckley
University of Massachusetts Press, 2004
Northampton evoked equally powerful visions in others. To minister Jonathan Edwards it was a stage for the enactment of God's drama of saving grace and redemption, while to Swedish soprano Jenny Lind it was simply a "paradise." During the 1920s Northampton became Main Street USA—a reassuring backdrop for the presidency of the city's former mayor, Calvin Coolidge. But for Smith College professor Newton Arvin, it was the dark side of small-town America that surfaced during the early decades of the Cold War. From witchcraft trials to Shays' Rebellion, from Sojourner Truth and the utopian abolitionists to Sylvester Graham and diet reform, many of the main currents of American life have flowed through this New England river town.
To commemorate the 350th anniversary of the founding of Northampton, A Place Called Paradise brings together a broad range of writing on the city's rich heritage. Edited with an introduction by Kerry W. Buckley, the volume includes essays by John Demos, Christopher Clark, Nell Irvin Painter, David W. Blight, and other distinguished scholars who have found this region fertile ground for research. Together their writings not only chronicle the history of a place but illustrate, in microcosm, the dynamics at work in the larger sweep of America's past.
A Place at the Multicultural Table
The Development of an American HinduismKurien, Prema
Rutgers University Press, 2007
In A Place at the Multicultural Table, Prema A. Kurien shows how various Hindu American organizations--religious, cultural, and political--are attempting to answer the puzzling questions of identity outside their homeland. Drawing on the experiences of both immigrant and American-born Hindu Americans, Kurien demonstrates how religious ideas and practices are being imported, exported, and reshaped in the process. The result of this transnational movement is an American Hinduism--an organized, politicized, and standardized version of that which is found in India.
This first in-depth look at Hinduism in the United States and the Hindu Indian American community helps readers to understand the private devotions, practices, and beliefs of Hindu Indian Americans as well as their political mobilization and activism. It explains the differences between immigrant and American-born Hindu Americans, how both understand their religion and their identity, and it emphasizes the importance of the social and cultural context of the United States in influencing the development of an American Hinduism.
A Place at the Table
Kathleen de la Peña McCook
American Library Association, 2000
A Place for Us
“West Side Story” and New YorkJulia L. Foulkes
University of Chicago Press, 2016
That vision of postwar New York is at the heart of Julia L. Foulkes’s A Place for Us. A lifelong fan of the show, Foulkes became interested in its history when she made an unexpected discovery: scenes for the iconic film version were shot on the demolition site destined to become part of the Lincoln Center redevelopment area—a crowning jewel of postwar urban renewal. Foulkes interweaves the story of the creation of the musical and film with the remaking of the Upper West Side and the larger tale of New York’s postwar aspirations. Making unprecedented use of director and choreographer Jerome Robbins’s revelatory papers, she shows the crucial role played by the political commitments of Robbins and his fellow gay, Jewish collaborators, Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents. Their determination to evoke life in New York as it was actually lived helped give West Side Story its unshakable sense of place even as it put forward a vision of a new, vigorous, determinedly multicultural American city.
Beautifully written and full of surprises for even the most dedicated West Side Story fan, A Place for Us is a revelatory new exploration of an American classic.
A Place in Common
Rethinking the History of Early DetroitKaren L. Marrero
Michigan State University Press, 2025
A Place of Darkness
The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American CinemaBy Kendall R. Phillips
University of Texas Press, 2018
Horror is one of the most enduringly popular genres in cinema. The term “horror film” was coined in 1931 between the premiere of Dracula and the release of Frankenstein, but monsters, ghosts, demons, and supernatural and horrific themes have been popular with American audiences since the emergence of novelty kinematographic attractions in the late 1890s. A Place of Darkness illuminates the prehistory of the horror genre by tracing the way horrific elements and stories were portrayed in films prior to the introduction of the term “horror film.”
Using a rhetorical approach that examines not only early films but also the promotional materials for them and critical responses to them, Kendall R. Phillips argues that the portrayal of horrific elements was enmeshed in broader social tensions around the emergence of American identity and, in turn, American cinema. He shows how early cinema linked monsters, ghosts, witches, and magicians with Old World superstitions and beliefs, in contrast to an American way of thinking that was pragmatic, reasonable, scientific, and progressive. Throughout the teens and twenties, Phillips finds, supernatural elements were almost always explained away as some hysterical mistake, humorous prank, or nefarious plot. The Great Depression of the 1930s, however, constituted a substantial upheaval in the system of American certainty and opened a space for the reemergence of Old World gothic within American popular discourse in the form of the horror genre, which has terrified and thrilled fans ever since.
A Place of Our Own
The Rise of Reform Jewish CampingEdited by Michael M. Lorge and Gary P. Zola
University of Alabama Press, 2006
The history of educational summer camps in American Reform Judaism. Reform Judaism is not the only religious community in America to make the summer camp experience a vital part of a faith community's effort to impart its values and beliefs to its adolescents, but perhaps no group relied more on summer camp as an adjunct to home and community for this purpose. Summer camp became an important part of Reform group identity, a bulwark against the attraction of assimilation into the greater society and mere nominal Judaism.
These essays, which commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the first Reform Jewish educational camp in the United States (Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute [OSRUI], in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin) cover a wide range of topics related to both the Reform Judaism movement and the development of the Reform Jewish camping system in the United States. Donald M. Splansky’s chapter on “Prayer at Reform Jewish Camps” documents changes in prayer services that took place both at OSRUI and in the Reform movement in general; Michael Zeldin’s “Making the Magic in Reform Jewish Summer Camps” describes the educational philosophies employed at many camps and analyzes their effectiveness; and Jonathan D. Sarna’s “The Crucial Decade in Jewish
A Place of Their Own
Creating the Deaf Community in AmericaJohn Vickrey Van Cleve
Gallaudet University Press, 1989
Using original sources, this unique book focuses on the Deaf community during the 19th century. Largely through schools for the deaf, deaf people began to develop a common language and a sense of community.
A Place of Their Own brings the perspective of history to bear on the reality of deafness and provides fresh and important insight into the lives of deaf Americans.
A Player and a Gentleman
The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century U.S. American ActorEdited by Amy E. Hughes and Naomi J. Stubbs
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Hardworking actor, playwright, and stage manager Harry Watkins (1825–94) was also a prolific diarist. For fifteen years Watkins regularly recorded the plays he saw, the roles he performed, the books he read, and his impressions of current events. Performing across the U.S., Watkins collaborated with preeminent performers and producers, recording his successes and failures as well as his encounters with celebrities such as P. T. Barnum, Junius Brutus Booth, Edwin Forrest, Anna Cora Mowatt, and Lucy Stone. His is the only known diary of substantial length and scope written by a U.S. actor before the Civil War—making Watkins, essentially, the antebellum equivalent of Samuel Pepys. Theater historians Amy E. Hughes and Naomi J. Stubbs have selected, edited, and annotated excerpts from the diary in an edition that offers a vivid glimpse of how ordinary people like Watkins lived, loved, struggled, and triumphed during one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history. The selections in A Player and a Gentleman are drawn from a more expansive digital archive of the complete diary. The book, like its digital counterpart, will richly enhance our knowledge of antebellum theater culture and daily life in the U.S. during this period.
A Poet's Truth
Conversations with Latino/Latina PoetsBruce Allen Dick
University of Arizona Press, 2003
As Bruce Dick's insightful questions reveal, the key threads linking these writers are their connections to their families and communities and their concern for civil rights—believing like Chicana writer Pat Mora that "the work of the poet is for the people." The interviews also reveal diversity among and within the three communities, from Victor Hernández Cruz, who traces Latino collective identity to Africa and claims that all Latinos are "swimming in olive oil," to Cuban writer Gustavo Perez Firmat, who considers nationality more important than ethnicity and says that "the term Latino erases [his] nationality."
The dialogues also offer new insights on the place of Chicano/a writings in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, on the Puerto Rican/Nuyorican establishment, and on the anti-Castro stand of Cuban-born poets. As these writers answer questions about their work, background, ethnic identity, and political ideology, they provide a wealth of biographical, intellectual, and literary material collected here for the first time. A Poet's Truth is a provocative and revealing book that not only conveys the fire of these writers' passions but also sheds important light on a whole literary movement.Interviews with:
Miguel Algarín
Martín Espada
Sandra María Esteves
Victor Hernández Cruz
Carolina Hospital and Carlos Medina
Demetria Martínez
Pat Mora
Judith Ortiz Cofer
Ricardo Pau-Llosa
Gustavo Pérez Firmat
Leroy Quintana
Aleida Rodríguez
Luis Rodríguez
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Virgil Suárez
A Poetics of Resistance
Women Writing in El Salvador, South Africa, and the United StatesMary DeShazer
University of Michigan Press, 1994
Engaging the works of critics such as Chandra Mohanty, Barbara Harlow, Claribel Alegria, Albie Sachs, and Audre Lorde, among others, Mary DeShazer reconceptualizes traditional notions of resistance and literature and the relationship between them. She argues that women’s voices have been underrepresented in previous analyses of Third World resistance poetry, and that when examined collectively, their work reveals overtly gendered concerns that distinguish it from that of their male counterparts.
DeShazer defines resistance as an active quest for justice and a means of collective empowerment. She looks at the diasporic consciousness of exiled and dislocated women, examines the tensions between claims of identity and claims of difference, and explores the ways in which gender and struggle connect women across nationalities and historical imperatives. Her analysis of Salvadoran and South African women’s poetry reveal the ways in which poetic conventions can be seen as “political declarations of privilege,” casting a new light on women’s resistance poetry in the United States.
A Police State
Politics and Public Safety in Minneapolis, 1945–2020Michael J. Lansing
University of Chicago Press, 2027
How the police in Minneapolis used electoral politics to accrue power and avoid accountability.
The 2020 murder of George Floyd made Minneapolis synonymous with unjust policing and the pain and outrage left in its wake. The city became ground zero for police reform in the United States—even though liberal politicians in Minnesota had promised, and delivered, police reforms for decades. Centered on professionalization, these changes inadvertently exacerbated injustice. Better training and higher standards broadened the influence of the police, who then claimed expertise in public safety. They deployed it to bargain for governmental support, even when they treated residents unfairly. Though Black, Indigenous, and gay residents resisted, the political power amassed by the police rendered real change almost impossible.
In A Police State, historian and fourth-generation Minneapolis resident Michael J. Lansing chronicles how the police became a political force in one of the nation’s most liberal cities. Lansing shows how, in the years after World War II, public safety policies that appealed to voters in the overwhelmingly white city protected and expanded police discretion. As union members, administrators, and citizens, officers shaped these policies to shield themselves and their violent actions from scrutiny. They campaigned for better wages, secured legal safeguards, resisted race-neutral policing, and elected one of their own to the mayor’s office. Ultimately, they used democratic institutions to cultivate and sustain a police state that protected white people and harmed people of color. Lansing uncovers this dysfunctional relationship between a city and its cops while illuminating a larger American story about reform, resistance, and democracy.
A significant exploration of policing politics, this book helps us understand the history that led to George Floyd’s murder—and insists that the future of community safety depends on reenvisioning the role of police in our society.
A Political Economy of Justice
Edited by Danielle Allen, Yochai Benkler, Leah Downey, Rebecca Henderson, and Josh Simons
University of Chicago Press, 2022
If we can agree that our current social-political moment is tenuous and unsustainable—and indeed, that may be the only thing we can agree on right now—then how do markets, governments, and people interact in this next era of the world? A Political Economy of Justice considers the strained state of our political economy in terms of where it can go from here. The contributors to this timely and essential volume look squarely at how normative and positive questions about political economy interact with each other—and from that beginning, how to chart a way forward to a just economy.
A Political Economy of Justice collects fourteen essays from prominent scholars across the social sciences, each writing in one of three lanes: the measures of a just political economy; the role of firms; and the roles of institutions and governments. The result is a wholly original and urgent new benchmark for the next stage of our democracy.
A Political Education
A Washington MemoirBy Harry McPherson
University of Texas Press, 1995
This insider's view of Washington in the 1950s and 1960s, of the tumultuous presidency of Lyndon Johnson, and of the conflicts and factions of the president's staff has become a political classic since its original publication in 1972. In this reissue, Harry McPherson adds a new preface in which he reflects on changes in Washington since the Johnson era and on the lessons Bill Clinton could learn from the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.
A Political History of the Texas Republic, 1836-1845
By Stanley Siegel
University of Texas Press, 1956
This book is unique among the histories of the Texas Republic: it is the first to examine the fledgling nation from the point of view of its dynamic political life. Policies with far-reaching results were formulated in the nine years of Texas' independence, and the author clearly presents the many thorny issues that were to plague Texas for generations.
The political history of the Republic is one of strong figures vying with each other for popular support of their divergent policies. The author details the personal feuds and animosities that resulted and shows the effects of these differences on the governing of the nation. Thoughtful use of diaries, memoirs, and other contemporary sources gives the reader an excellent understanding of the sense of personal concern the citizens of the Republic felt toward the political issues of the day.
A Portal to Paradise
Alden C. Hayes
University of Arizona Press, 1999
From his vantage point near the tiny twin communities of Portal and Paradise on the eastern slopes of the Chiricahuas, Hayes brings the famous and the not-so-famous together in a profile of this striking landscape, showing how place can be a powerful formative influence on people's lives. When Hayes first arrived in 1941 to manage his new father-in-law's apple orchard, he met folks who had been born in Arizona before it became a state. Even if most had never personally worried about Indian attacks, they had known people who had. Over the years, Hayes heard the handed-down stories about the area's early days of Anglo settlement. He also researched census records, newspaper archives, and the files of the Arizona Historical Society to uncover the area's natural history, prehistory, Spanish and Mexican regimes, and particularly its Anglo history from the mid nineteenth century to the beginning of World War II. His book is a rich account of the region and more, a celebration of rural life, brimming with tales of people whose stories were shaped by the landscape.
Today the Chiricahuas are a magnet for outdoor enthusiasts and the site of the American Museum of Natural History's Southwestern Research Station—and still a rugged area that remains off the beaten track. Hayes brings his straightforward and articulate style to this captivating account of earlier days in southeastern Arizona and opens up a portal to paradise for readers everywhere.