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A study of beard motifs in medieval German poetry.
 
Beards make frequent appearances in medieval German poetry—as esteemed markers of majestic wisdom or as hilarious props for undignified manhandling. In Beards and Texts, Sebastian Coxon traces this preeminent symbol of masculinity through four major poetic traditions across the twelfth and sixteenth centuries—Pfaffe Konrad’s Rolandslied, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm, ‘Sangspruchdichtung’, and Heinrich Wittenwiler’s Ring. By attending to this hairy trope, Beards and Texts sheds new light on the construction of both poetic form and masculinity in the Middle Ages.
 

It is difficult to piece together existing records that describe the migrations of African Americans in the nineteenth-century American West. Efforts to assemble collections of oral histories, images, diaries, and other written documents on the black experience in the Western United States and Canada have proven surprisingly fruitful, however, and the rewarding culmination of such research flourished in the archival images found in this second edition of John Ravage’s Black Pioneers.

Using public and private collections in every western state and in Canada, Ravage has gathered more than three hundred photographs, line drawings, lithographs, stereoviews, and other images. This new edition also adds sections on black entertainers and ranchers, a chapter on the dating of historic photographs and their genealogical significance, as well as an expanded bibliography. All aid understanding of the black frontier experience.

Ravage goes beyond the stereotypical photography of the era, which often reflected white fears and prejudices, to present the works of frontier photographers. Galveston’s Lucius Harper, Denver’s John Green, and the Northwest’s nomadic James Presley Ball all bring life to their subjects and meaning to their presence in the American West. Black Pioneers is a vibrant visual document of the profound influence blacks had on communal and frontier history.