18284 books match the query 'United States' and 783 start with f

cover of Frank Blair: Lincoln's Conservative

Frank Blair

Lincoln's Conservative

William E. Parrish

University of Missouri Press, 1998

Known for his fearlessness in both the political arena and the battlefield, Frank Blair is a Missouri legend. As a member of one of the most prominent and powerful political families in America during the nineteenth century, possibly the equivalent of the twentieth-century Kennedys, Frank was steeped in politics at an early age. The youngest son of Francis Preston Blair, editor of Andrew Jackson's Washington Globe and adviser to Presidents Andrew Jackson through Andrew Johnson, Frank Blair was greatly influenced by his father, who had high political expectations of him.

Volatile and combative, Blair was either strongly admired or hated by the public figures of his day. He held adamantly to his opinions and fought hard for his political causes. He was an ardent supporter of Abraham Lincoln and championed the president's program in Congress and in Missouri against the frequent assaults of the Radicals. Credited with being the principal leader in saving Missouri for the Union in 1861, Blair later served with great distinction at Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and in the Sherman campaigns throughout Georgia and the Carolinas. He is one of only two Missourians ever honored by his state in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol.

Frank Blair: Lincoln's Conservative reveals the full extent of Blair's importance as a national political figure. Specialists in nineteenth-century America, students of Missouri history, and Civil War buffs will welcome this study, which will long stand as the definitive work on this influential and colorful character.

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cover of Frank J. Cannon: Saint, Senator, Scoundrel

Frank J. Cannon

Saint, Senator, Scoundrel

Val Holley

University of Utah Press, 2020

Utah’s path to statehood was the most tortuous in U.S. history, due in no small part to the Mormon practice of polygamy. Frank J. Cannon, newspaperman, Congressional delegate, and senator, guided Utah toward becoming the forty-fifth state in the Union in 1896. But when he lost favor with the LDS Church, his contributions fell into obscurity. In the 1880s, Congress dealt with the intransigence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints over polygamy by enacting punitive new laws. Mormon lobbyists who pleaded for relief in Washington came home empty-handed before Cannon finally broke the logjam. He persuaded President Grover Cleveland to appoint judges who would deal mercifully with convicted polygamists and dissuaded Congress from disenfranchising all members by pledging that the church would abandon polygamy. But when Utah elected Mormon apostle Reed Smoot to the U.S. Senate in 1903, Cannon condemned what he called the reneging of LDS Church pledges to stay out of politics. He wrote scathing denunciations of Smoot and Mormon president Joseph F. Smith, co-authored the exposé Under the Prophet in Utah, and spearheaded the National Reform Association’s anti-Mormon crusade. Utah’s subsequent displeasure with Cannon ensured that his critical role in its statehood would be buried by omission.
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cover of Frank Lloyd Wright and His Manner of Thought

Frank Lloyd Wright and His Manner of Thought

Jerome Klinkowitz

University of Wisconsin Press, 2014

An iconic figure in American culture, Frank Lloyd Wright is famous throughout the world. Although his achievements in architecture are stunning, it is his importance in cultural history, Jerome Klinkowitz contends, that makes Wright the object of such avid and continuing interest. Designing more than just buildings, Wright offered a concept for living that still influences how people conduct their lives today. Wright's innovations in architecture have been widely studied, but this is the most comprehensive and sustained treatment of his thought.
            Klinkowitz presents a critical biography driven by the architect's own work and intellectual growth, focusing on the evolution of Wright's thinking and writings from his first public addresses in 1894 to his last essay in 1959. Did Wright reject all of Victorian thinking about the home, or do his attentions to a minister's sermon on "the house beautiful" deserve closer attention? Was Wright echoing the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, or was he more in step with the philosophy of William James? Did he reject the Arts and Crafts movement, or repurpose its beliefs and practices for new times? And, what can be said of his deep dissatisfaction with architectural concepts of his own era, the dominant modernism that became the International Style? Even the strongest advocates of Frank Lloyd Wright have been puzzled by his objections to so much that characterized the twentieth century, from ideas for building to styles of living.
            In Frank Lloyd Wright and His Manner of Thought, Klinkowitz, a widely published authority on twentieth-century literature, thought, and culture, examines the full extent of Wright's books, essays, and lectures to show how he emerged from the nineteenth century to anticipate the twenty-first.

Outstanding Book, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers
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cover of Frank Lloyd Wright and His New American Architecture

Frank Lloyd Wright and His New American Architecture

Bob Kann

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2010

From boyhood adventures to the creation of visionary buildings like the Guggenheim Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright and His New American Architecture chronicles the vibrant life of one of the world's most famous architects.

Wright's love of architecture was nurtured early on-from paintings of European cathedrals hung in his childhood room; to "Froebel Gifts" building blocks, which he crafted into crude structures; to long walks near the Wisconsin River, where his mother pointed out patterns and colors in nature. Wright also learned, from summers spent on his uncle's Spring Green farm, that adversity is part of life. And perhaps this helped him weather a life beset with both tragedy and triumph.

Wright's prolific career spanned more than 70 years, and he created more than 1,100 designs. Author Bob Kann brings readers into the eccentric stories behind some of Wright's landmark buildings. Find out about Wright's Oak Park home, known to locals as "the house with a tree growing through it;" the Robie House, which is shaped like a battleship; and Fallingwater, which is built on a waterfall. Learn how Wright successfully built the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo to withstand earthquakes, and how the Johnson Wax Building and Guggenheim Museum set new standards in institutional architecture.

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cover of Frank Lloyd Wright's Forgotten House: How an Omission Transformed the Architect's Legacy

Frank Lloyd Wright's Forgotten House

How an Omission Transformed the Architect's Legacy

Nicholas D. Hayes

University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

While the grandiosity of Fallingwater and elegance of Taliesin are recognized universally, Frank Lloyd Wright’s first foray into affordable housing is frequently overlooked. Although Wright began work on his American System-Built Homes (ASBH, 1911–17) with great energy, the project fell apart following wartime shortages and disputes between the architect and his developer. While continuing to advocate for the design of affordable small homes, Wright never spoke publicly of ASBH. As a result, the heritage of many Wright-designed homes was forgotten.
 
When Nicholas and Angela Hayes became stewards of the unassuming Elizabeth Murphy House near Milwaukee, they began to unearth evidence that ultimately revealed a one-hundred-year-old fiasco fueled by competing ambitions and conflicting visions of America. The couple’s forensic pursuit of the truth untangled the ways Wright’s ASBH experiment led to the architect’s most productive, creative period. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Forgotten House includes a wealth of drawings and photographs, many of which have never been previously published. Historians, architecture buffs, and Wrightophiles alike will be fascinated by this untold history that fills a crucial gap in the architect’s oeuvre.
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cover of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography

Frank Lloyd Wright

A Biography

Meryle Secrest

University of Chicago Press, 1998

A biography of the master architect that Time said was “the best so far” and Library Journal called "a spellbinding portrait
 
Meryle Secrest's Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography focuses on Wright's family history, personal adventures, and colorful friends and family. Secrest had unprecedented access to an archive of over one hundred thousand of Wright's letters, photographs, drawings, and books. She also interviewed surviving devotees, students, and relatives. The result is an explicit portrait of both the genius architect and the provocative con-man.

The result is the most engaging and thorough account ever of Wright's life, work, and professional and personal circle, a gripping account of a complicated, challenging genius.
 
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cover of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Penwern: A Summer Estate

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Penwern

A Summer Estate

Mark Hertzberg

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2019

Frank Lloyd Wright is best known for his urban and suburban houses. Lesser known are the more than 40 summer “cottages” he designed in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ontario. Many of the early summer cottages have a rustic feel and are not as easily recognized as Wright’s prolific year-round domestic designs. Among them is a stunning estate on Delavan Lake in southern Wisconsin called Penwern. Commissioned by Chicago capitalist Fred B. Jones around 1900, Penwern has received both national and state recognition. The home’s current stewards have dedicated themselves to restoring the estate to Wright’s vision, ensuring its future. Featuring beautiful color photographs, plus vintage black and white pictures and original Wright drawings, this book transports readers back to the glory days of gracious living and entertaining on the lake.
 
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cover of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin: Illustrated by Vintage Postcards

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin

Illustrated by Vintage Postcards

Randolph C. Henning

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

The Wisconsin-born Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) is recognized worldwide as an iconic architectural genius. In 1911 he designed Taliesin to use as his personal residence, architectural studio, and working farm. A century later Randolph C. Henning has assembled a splendid collection of rare vintage postcards, some never before published, that provides a revealing and visually unique journey through Wright’s work at Taliesin. Included are intimate images of Taliesin at various stages and views of the building just after the tragic 1914 fire. The postcards also depict nearby buildings designed by Wright, including the Romeo and Juliet windmill and two buildings for the Hillside Home School. Henning provides useful explanations that highlight relevant details and accompany each image. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin documents and celebrates Wright’s 100-year-old masterpiece.

Finalist, Midwest Book Awards for Cover Design and for Regional Interest Illustrated Book

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers
 
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cover of Frank Miller's Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism

Frank Miller's Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism

Young, Paul

Rutgers University Press, 2016

2017 EISNER AWARD NOMINEE for Best Academic/Scholarly Work

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, writer-artist Frank Miller turned Daredevil from a tepid-selling comic into an industry-wide success story, doubling its sales within three years. Lawyer by day and costumed vigilante by night, the character of Daredevil was the perfect vehicle for the explorations of heroic ideals and violence that would come to define Miller’s work.   
 
Frank Miller’s Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism is both a rigorous study of Miller’s artistic influences and innovations and a reflection on how his visionary work on Daredevil impacted generations of comics publishers, creators, and fans. Paul Young explores the accomplishments of Miller the writer, who fused hardboiled crime stories with superhero comics, while reimagining Kingpin (a classic Spider-Man nemesis), recuperating the half-baked villain Bullseye, and inventing a completely new kind of Daredevil villain in Elektra. Yet, he also offers a vivid appreciation of the indelible panels drawn by Miller the artist, taking a fresh look at his distinctive page layouts and lines.  
 
A childhood fan of Miller’s Daredevil, Young takes readers on a personal journey as he seeks to reconcile his love for the comic with his distaste for the fascistic overtones of Miller’s controversial later work. What he finds will resonate not only with Daredevil fans, but with anyone who has contemplated what it means to be a hero in a heartless world.   
 
Other titles in the Comics Culture series include Twelve-Cent Archie, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948, and Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics.
 
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cover of Frank Murphy: The Detroit Years

Frank Murphy

The Detroit Years

Sidney Fine

University of Michigan Press, 1975

The second son of a close-knit Irish-American family, a charismatic politician who championed the underdog yet enjoyed the company of the rich, Frank Murphy was for thirty years an influential figure on the American scene. As Recorder’s Court judge, mayor of Detroit during the Great Depression, governor-general of and high commissioner to the Philippines, governor of Michigan, United States attorney general, and justice of the United States Supreme Court, he played a dramatic role in some of the most significant events of our era. This first volume of what will surely be the definitive account of the life and times of Frank Murphy focuses on the Detroit years, when Murphy brought his courtroom skills to bear on landmark legal battles of the period, forged a New Deal type of coalition that altered the structure of political power in Detroit, and led the city through the darkest days of the Depression. By stressing the interaction between the man and his times, the book presents not only a fully rounded portrait of a fascinating personality but also provides the first detailed coverage of the work of the Detroit Recorder’s Court and an unequaled account of the Depression years in Detroit and the state of Michigan.
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cover of Frank Norris Remembered

Frank Norris Remembered

Edited by Jesse S. Crisler and Joseph R. McElrath Jr.

University of Alabama Press, 2013

Frank Norris Remembered is a collection of reminiscences by Norris’s contemporaries, friends, and family that illuminate the life of a popular American novelist.

Considering his undergraduate education spent studying art at Académie Julian in Paris and creative writing at Harvard and his journalism career reporting from the far reaches of South Africa and Cuba, it is difficult to fathom how Frank Norris also found time to compose seven novels during the course of his brief life. But despite his adventures abroad, Norris turned out novels at a dizzying pace. He published Moran of the Lady Letty in 1898, McTeague early in 1899, Blix later that year, A Man’s Woman in February 1900, and The Octopus, the first in his ultimately unfinished “Epic of the Wheat” trilogy, in 1901. By informing his novels with his own experiences abroad, Norris composed works that were politically charged and culturally relevant and that made considerable contributions to the character of American literature in the twentieth century.

Frank Norris died at the age of thirty-two in 1902 from peritonitis resulting from a burst appendix, leaving behind a wife, a daughter, and an unfinished series of novels (two of which, The Pit and Vandover and the Brute, were published posthumously). The aim of Frank Norris Remembered, edited by Jesse S. Crisler and Joseph R. McElrath Jr., is to re-create the short, spectacular life of this American author through the eyes of those who knew him best. The fifty reminiscences included in this book feature the voices of Frank N. Doubleday; William Dean Howells; Hamlin Garland; Norris’s wife, Jeannette; and many others who were lucky enough to form a relationship with this vital twentieth-century American author, artist, and adventurer.


 

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cover of Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters

Frank O'Hara

Poet Among Painters

Marjorie Perloff

University of Chicago Press, 1997

Drawing extensively upon the poet's unpublished manuscripts—poems, journals, essays, and letters—as well as all his published works, Marjorie Perloff presents Frank O'Hara as one of the central poets of the postwar period and an important critic of the visual arts. Perloff traces the poet's development through his early years at Harvard and his interest in French Dadaism and Surrealism to his later poems that fuse literary influence with elements from Abstract Expressionist painting, atonal music, and contemporary film. This edition contains a new Introduction addressing O'Hara's homosexuality, his attitudes toward racism, and changes in poetic climate cover the past few decades.

"A groundbreaking study. [This book] is a genuine work of criticism. . . . Through Marjorie Perloff's book we see an O'Hara perhaps only his closer associates saw before: a poet fully aware of the traditions and techniques of his craft who, in a life tragically foreshortened, produced an adventurous if somewhat erratic body of American verse."—David Lenson, Chronicle of Higher Education

"Perloff is a reliable, well-informed, discreet, sensitive . . . guide. . . . She is impressive in the way she deals with O'Hara's relationship to painters and paintings, and she does give first-rate readings of four major poems."—Jonathan Cott, New York Times Book Review
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cover of Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie

Frank O'Hara

The Poetics of Coterie

Lytle Shaw

University of Iowa Press, 2006

In this stimulating and innovative synthesis of New York's artistic and literary worlds, Lytle Shaw uses the social and philosophical problems involved in “reading” a coterie to propose a new language for understanding the poet, art critic, and Museum of Modern Art curator Frank O'Hara (1926-1966). O'Hara's poems are famously filled with proper names---from those of his immediate friends and colleagues in the New York writing and art worlds (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Grace Hartigan, Willem de Kooning, and many musicians, dancers, and filmmakers) to a broad range of popular cultural and literary heroes (Apollinaire to Jackie O). But rather than understand O'Hara's most commonly referenced names as a fixed and insular audience, Shaw argues that he uses the ambiguities of reference associated with the names to invent a fluid and shifting kinship structure---one that opened up radical possibilities for a gay writer operating outside the structure of the family. As Shaw demonstrates, this commitment to an experimental model of association also guides O'Hara's art writing. Like his poetry, O'Hara's art writing too has been condemned as insular, coterie writing. In fact, though, he was alone among 1950s critics in his willingness to consider abstract expressionism not only within the dominant languages of existentialism and formalism but also within the cold war political and popular cultural frameworks that anticipate many of the concerns of contemporary art historians. Situating O'Hara within a range of debates about art's possible relations to its audience, Shaw demonstrates that his interest in coterie is less a symptomatic offshoot of his biography than a radical literary and artistic invention.
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cover of Frankie Manning: Ambassador of Lindy Hop

Frankie Manning

Ambassador of Lindy Hop

Frankie Manning

Temple University Press, 2008

In the early days of swing dancing, Frankie Manning stood out for his moves and his innovative routines; he created the "air step" in the Lindy hop, a dance that took the U.S. and then the world by storm. In this fascinating autobiography, the choreographer and Tony Award winner (Black and Blue) Frankie Manning recalls how his first years of dancing as a teenager at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom led to his becoming chief choreographer and a lead dancer for Whitey's Lindy Hoppers, a group that appeared on Broadway, in Hollywood musicals, and on stages around the globe. Manning brings the Swing Era vividly back to life with his recollections of the crowded ballrooms, and of Lindy hoppers trying to outdo each other in spectacular performances. His memories of the many headliners and film stars, as well as uncelebrated dancers with whom he shared the stage, create a unique portrait of an era in which African American performers enjoyed the spotlight if not a star's prerogatives and salary.

With collaborator Cynthia Millman, Manning traces the evolution of swing dancing from its early days in Harlem through the post-World War II period, until it was eclipsed by rock 'n' roll and then disco. When swing made a comeback, Manning's 30-year hiatus ended. He has been performing, choreographing, and teaching ever since.

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cover of Frankie and Johnny: Race, Gender, and the Work of African American Folklore in 1930s America

Frankie and Johnny

Race, Gender, and the Work of African American Folklore in 1930s America

By Stacy I. Morgan

University of Texas Press, 2017

Winner, Wayland D. Hand Prize, American Folklore Society, 2018

Originating in a homicide in St. Louis in 1899, the ballad of “Frankie and Johnny” became one of America’s most familiar songs during the first half of the twentieth century. It crossed lines of race, class, and artistic genres, taking form in such varied expressions as a folk song performed by Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly); a ballet choreographed by Ruth Page and Bentley Stone under New Deal sponsorship; a mural in the Missouri State Capitol by Thomas Hart Benton; a play by John Huston; a motion picture, She Done Him Wrong, that made Mae West a national celebrity; and an anti-lynching poem by Sterling Brown.

In this innovative book, Stacy I. Morgan explores why African American folklore—and “Frankie and Johnny” in particular—became prized source material for artists of diverse political and aesthetic sensibilities. He looks at a confluence of factors, including the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, and resurgent nationalism, that led those creators to engage with this ubiquitous song. Morgan’s research uncovers the wide range of work that artists called upon African American folklore to perform in the 1930s, as it alternately reinforced and challenged norms of race, gender, and appropriate subjects for artistic expression. He demonstrates that the folklorists and creative artists of that generation forged a new national culture in which African American folk songs featured centrally not only in folk and popular culture but in the fine arts as well.

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cover of Franklin D. Israel: A Life in Architecture

Franklin D. Israel

A Life in Architecture

Todd Gannon

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024

This book examines the life and legacy of Franklin D. Israel, an influential member of the Los Angeles school of architects.

Acclaimed Los Angeles architect Franklin D. Israel (1945–1996) created innovative residential projects and office interiors that made him one of the most talked-about designers of his generation. In this vivid account, architectural historian Todd Gannon draws on archival resources, analyses of Israel’s buildings, and recent interviews with the architect’s colleagues, clients, and contemporaries, including Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, and Robert A. M. Stern. Gannon traces Israel’s development from his early years and career on the East Coast to his formative world travels and residence at the American Academy in Rome. The author guides readers through the Los Angeles architectural context, Israel’s influential teaching at UCLA, his dalliance with Hollywood, and the personal motivations behind his architecture and design work—all aspects of an influential career that was cut short by his death from AIDS-related complications at the age of fifty.

Franklin D. Israel is a compelling work of architectural history and biography, chronicling one gay man’s engagement with the largely heteronormative world of American architectural culture. It explores the achievement of this central figure in the still largely unstudied history of late twentieth-century avant-garde Los Angeles architecture.
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cover of Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal, 1882-1939

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Road to the New Deal, 1882-1939

Roger Daniels

University of Illinois Press, 2015

Franklin D. Roosevelt, consensus choice as one of three great presidents, led the American people through the two major crises of modern times. The first volume of an epic two-part biography, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal, 1882-1939 presents FDR from a privileged Hyde Park childhood through his leadership in the Great Depression to the ominous buildup to global war. Roger Daniels revisits the sources and closely examines Roosevelt's own words and deeds to create a twenty-first century analysis of how Roosevelt forged the modern presidency. Daniels's close analysis yields new insights into the expansion of Roosevelt's economic views; FDR's steady mastery of the complexities of federal administrative practices and possibilities; the ways the press and presidential handlers treated questions surrounding his health; and his genius for channeling the lessons learned from an unprecedented collection of scholars and experts into bold political action. Revelatory and nuanced, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal, 1882-1939 reappraises the rise of a political titan and his impact on the country he remade.
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cover of Franklin D. Roosevelt: The War Years, 1939-1945

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The War Years, 1939-1945

Roger Daniels

University of Illinois Press, 2016

Having guided the nation through the worst economic crisis in its history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt by 1939 was turning his attention to a world on the brink of war. The second part of Roger Daniels's biography focuses on FDR's growing mastery in foreign affairs. Relying on FDR's own words to the American people and eyewitness accounts of the man and his accomplishments, Daniels reveals a chief executive orchestrating an immense wartime effort. Roosevelt had effective command of military and diplomatic information and unprecedented power over strategic military and diplomatic affairs. He simultaneously created an arsenal of democracy that armed the Allies while inventing the United Nations intended to ensure a lasting postwar peace. FDR achieved these aims while expanding general prosperity, limiting inflation, and continuing liberal reform despite an increasingly conservative and often hostile Congress. Although fate robbed him of the chance to see the victory he had never doubted, events in 1944 assured him that the victory he had done so much to bring about would not be long delayed. A compelling reconsideration of Roosevelt the president and campaigner, The War Years, 1939-1945 provides new views and vivid insights about a towering figure--and six years that changed the world.
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cover of Franklin Furnace and the Spirit of the Avant-Garde: A History of the Future

Franklin Furnace and the Spirit of the Avant-Garde

A History of the Future

Toni Sant

Intellect Books, 2011

Franklin Furnace is a renowned New York–based artsorganization whose mission is to preserve, document, and present works of avant-garde art by emerging artists—particularly those whose works may be vulnerable due to institutional neglect or politically unpopular content. Over more than thirty years, Franklin Furnace has exhibited works by hundreds of avant-garde artists, some of whom—Laurie Anderson, Vito Acconci, Karen Finley, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Jenny Holzer, and the Blue Man Group, to name a few—are now established names in contemporary art.

Here, for the first time, is a comprehensive history of this remarkable organization from its conception to the present. Organized around the major art genres that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, this book intersperses first-person narratives with readings by artists and scholars on issues critical to the organization's success as well as Franklin Furnace's many contributions to avant-garde art.

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cover of Franklin in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Franklin in His Own Time

A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Kevin J. Hayes

University of Iowa Press, 2011

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In his time Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was the most famous American in the world. Even those personally unacquainted with the man knew him as the author of Poor Richard’s Almanack, as a pioneer in the study of electricity and a major figure in the American Enlightenment, as the creator of such life-changing innovations as the lightning rod and America’s first circulating library, and as a leader of the American Revolution. His friends also knew him as a brilliant conversationalist, a great wit, an intellectual filled with curiosity, and most of all a master anecdotist whose vast store of knowledge complemented his conversational skills. In Franklin in His Own Time, by reprinting the original documents in which those anecdotes occur, Kevin Hayes and Isabelle Bour restore those oft-told stories to their cultural contexts to create a comprehensive narrative of his life and work.

The thirty-five recollections gathered in Franklin in His Own Time form an animated, collaborative biography designed to provide a multitude of perspectives on the “First American.” Opening with an account by botanist Peter Kalm showing that Franklin was doing all he could to encourage the development of science in North America, it includes on-the-spot impressions from Daniel Fisher’s diary, the earliest surviving interview with Franklin, recollections from James Madison and Abigail Adams, Manasseh Cutler’s detailed description of the library at Franklin Court, and extracts from Alexander Hamilton’s unvarnished Minutes of the Tuesday Club. Franklin’s political missions to Great Britain and France, where he took full advantage of rich social and intellectual opportunities, are a source of many reminiscences, some published here in new translations. Genuine memories from such old friends as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, as opposed to memories influenced by the Autobiography, clarify Franklin’s reputation. Robert Carr may have been the last remaining person who knew Franklin personally, and thus his recollections are particularly signific

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cover of Franklin's Thrift: The Lost History of an American Virtue

Franklin's Thrift

The Lost History of an American Virtue

David Blankenhorn

Templeton Press, 2009

Americans today often think of thrift as a negative value—a miserly hoarding of resources and a denial of pleasure. Even more telling, many Americans don’t even think of thrift at all anymore. Franklin’s Thrift challenges this state of mind by recovering the rich history of thrift as a quintessentially American virtue.

The contributors to this volume trace how the idea and practice of thrift have been a vital part of the American vision of economic freedom and social abundance. For Benjamin Franklin, who personified and promoted the idea, thrift meant working productively, consuming wisely, saving proportionally, and giving generously. Franklin’s thrift became the cornerstone of a new kind of secular faith in the ordinary person’s capacity to shape his lot and fortune in life. Later chapters document how thrift moved into new domains in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It became the animating idea behind social movements to promote children’s school savings, create mutual savings banks and credit unions for working men and women, establish a federal savings bond program, and galvanize the nation to conserve resources during two world wars.

Historians, enthusiasts of Americana or traditional American virtues, and anyone interested in resolving our society’s current financial woes will find much to treasure in this diverse collection, with topics ranging from the inspirational lessons we can learn from the film It’s a Wonderful Life to a history of the roles played by mutual savings banks, credit unions, and thrift stores in America’s national thrift movement. It also includes actual policy recommendations for our present situation.

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cover of Frankly Speaking: The Extraordinary Life of United States Senator Frank R. Lautenberg

Frankly Speaking

The Extraordinary Life of United States Senator Frank R. Lautenberg

Bonnie Lautenberg

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Frank Lautenberg was the embodiment of the American dream. The son of Eastern European immigrants who toiled in the factories of northern New Jersey, he rose to become a Fortune 500 CEO and eventually a five-term US senator. Yet his is not a simple rags-to-riches tale, but is rather the story of someone who used his newfound affluence and influence to improve the lives of ordinary Americans.
 
Told by one of the people who knew him best, his widow Bonnie, Frankly Speaking reveals the political strategies that made Lautenberg one of the Senate’s most powerful advocates for the health and safety of America’s citizens. He championed seemingly minor, unglamorous reforms that made a big difference to everyday lives, from raising the national drinking age to preventing domestic abusers from purchasing guns. These campaigns earned him powerful enemies in the alcohol, tobacco, and firearms industries, and he was subjected to some of the most brutal campaign mudslinging in American history.  Yet, as this inspiring biography reveals, New Jersey’s longest-serving senator was not afraid to take big political risks if it meant standing up for his principles, whether that meant opposing the Iraq War or protecting LGBTQ and women’s rights. 
 
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cover of Fray: Art and Textile Politics

Fray

Art and Textile Politics

Julia Bryan-Wilson

University of Chicago Press, 2017

In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of “craftivism”—the politics and social practices associated with handmaking—Fray explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval.

Closely examining how amateurs and fine artists in the United States and Chile turned to sewing, braiding, knotting, and quilting amid the rise of global manufacturing, Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that textiles unravel the high/low divide and urges us to think flexibly about what the politics of textiles might be. Her case studies from the 1970s through the 1990s—including the improvised costumes of the theater troupe the Cockettes, the braided rag rugs of US artist Harmony Hammond, the thread-based sculptures of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, the small hand-sewn tapestries depicting Pinochet’s torture, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt—are often taken as evidence of the inherently progressive nature of handcrafted textiles. Fray, however, shows that such methods are recruited to often ambivalent ends, leaving textiles very much “in the fray” of debates about feminized labor, protest cultures, and queer identities; the malleability of cloth and fiber means that textiles can be activated, or stretched, in many ideological directions.

The first contemporary art history book to discuss both fine art and amateur registers of handmaking at such an expansive scale, Fray unveils crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles—high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.
 
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cover of Fraying Fabric: How Trade Policy and Industrial Decline Transformed America

Fraying Fabric

How Trade Policy and Industrial Decline Transformed America

James C. Benton

University of Illinois Press, 2022

The decline of the U.S. textile and apparel industries between the 1940s and 1970s helped lay the groundwork for the twenty-first century's potent economic populism in America. James C. Benton looks at how shortsighted trade and economic policy by labor, business, and government undermined an employment sector that once employed millions and supported countless communities. Starting in the 1930s, Benton examines how the New Deal combined promoting trade with weakening worker rights. He then moves to the ineffective attempts to aid textile and apparel workers even as imports surged, the 1974 pivot by policymakers and big business to institute lowered trade barriers, and the deindustrialization and economic devastation that followed. Throughout, Benton provides the often-overlooked views of workers, executives, and federal officials who instituted the United States’ policy framework in the 1930s and guided it through the ensuing decades. Compelling and comprehensive, Fraying Fabric explains what happened to textile and apparel manufacturing and how it played a role in today's politics of anger.
[more]
cover of Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit

Freak Show

Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit

Robert Bogdan

University of Chicago Press, 1990

From 1840 until 1940, freak shows by the hundreds crisscrossed the United States, from the smallest towns to the largest cities, exhibiting their casts of dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, savages, snake charmers, fire eaters, and other oddities. By today's standards such displays would be considered cruel and exploitative—the pornography of disability. Yet for one hundred years the freak show was widely accepted as one of America's most popular forms of entertainment.

Robert Bogdan's fascinating social history brings to life the world of the freak show and explores the culture that nurtured and, later, abandoned it. In uncovering this neglected chapter of show business, he describes in detail the flimflam artistry behind the shows, the promoters and the audiences, and the gradual evolution of public opinion from awe to embarrassment. Freaks were not born, Bogdan reveals; they were manufactured by the amusement world, usually with the active participation of the freaks themselves. Many of the "human curiosities" found fame and fortune, becoming the celebrities of their time, until the ascent of professional medicine transformed them from marvels into pathological specimans.
[more]
cover of Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity

Freaks Talk Back

Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity

Joshua Gamson

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Using extensive interviews, hundreds of transcripts, focus-group discussions with viewers, and his own experiences as an audience member, Joshua Gamson argues that talk shows give much-needed, high-impact public visibility to sexual nonconformists while also exacerbating all sorts of political tensions among those becoming visible. With wit and passion, Freaks Talk Back illuminates the joys, dilemmas, and practicalities of media visibility.

"This entertaining, accessible, sobering discussion should make every viewer sit up and ponder the effects and possibilities of America's daily talk-fest with newly sharpened eyes."—Publishers Weekly

"Bold, witty. . . . There's a lot of empirical work behind this deceptively easy read, then, and it allows for the most sophisticated and complex analysis of talk shows yet."—Elayne Rapping, Women's Review of Books

"Funny, well-researched, fully theorized. . . . Engaged and humane scholarship. . . . A pretty inspiring example of what talking back to the mass media can be."—Jesse Berrett, Village Voice

"An extraordinarily well-researched volume, one of the most comprehensive studies of popular media to appear in this decade."—James Ledbetter, Newsday
[more]
cover of Fred Allen's Radio Comedy

Fred Allen's Radio Comedy

Alan Havig

Temple University Press, 1991

"A notable example of radio at its best." --Back Stage/SHOOT In 1954, James Thurber wrote: "You can count on the thumb of one hand the American who is at once a comedian, a humorist, a wit, and a satirist, and his name is Fred Allen." Several decades after his death and more than forty years since his radio program left the air, Fred Allen's reputation as a respected humorist remains intact. In this book, Alan Havig explores the roots of his comedy, the themes it exploited, the problems and challenges that faced the radio comedy writer, and Allen's unique success with the one-dimensional medium of radio. Tracing a career that lasted from 1912 into the 1950s and encompassed vaudeville, Broadway revues, movies, radio, and television, Havig describes the "verbal slapstick" style that was Fred Allen's hallmark and legacy to American comedy. More than a biography of Fred Allen, this is a study of the development of the radio industry, a discussion of American humor, and the story of how one relates to the other. Using a wide variety of published and unpublished sources, including the Allen Papers, Havig analyzes Allen's radio comedy of the 1930s and 40s within the context of the peculiar advantages and limitations of radio as a medium for comedy. He argues that Allen did not merely transfer vaudeville routines to a non-visual medium as did Eddie Cantor, Ed Wynn, and others. Allen developed a comedic style that depended on word play, sound effects, and on his audience's ability and readiness to imagine a visual world in which his eccentric characters operated. Havig illustrates his story with numerous examples of Allen's humor, with fascinating anecdotes, and excerpts from radio broadcasts. In accounting for the comedian's success, he deals with vaudeville, comedy writing, sponsor's demands and censorship of material, and the organizational world of radio broadcasting companies. Describing radio as "an instrument of wit," Fred Allen wrote: "on radio you could do subtle writing because you had access to the imagination...that was why I liked radio. we had some fun." Readers will also have some fun remembering or discovering for the first time Allen's Alley and the magic of radio comedy in its prime. "Fred was one of the greatest of vaudeville and radio comedians. Anyone even casually concerned with the state of American humor will be well advised to give his work, as Mr. Havig presents it, careful study." --Steve Allen "Alan Havig has done an intelligent, careful and exhaustive research job. This is a well-written, solid performance-biography." --J. Fred MacDonald, Curator of the Museum of Broadcast Communication, Chicago
[more]
cover of Fred in Love

Fred in Love

Felice Picano

University of Wisconsin Press, 2005

    In the early 1970s, when he was still an aspiring, unpublished writer, Felice Picano began a remarkable relationship with an extraordinary animal: a days-old kitten slated for euthanasia who refused to perish.  Rescued, named, and trained, Fred became an extraordinarily intelligent companion, ally, teacher, and constant wonder to the author as he began his ascent through the Bohemian circles of Greenwich Village, among musicians, actors, curious characters, and even the famous British actress in hiding right next door.
    But when an acquaintance brought his female cat to be serviced by Fred, an entire new set of experiences opened up for the cat-and for Picano, who'd never had the nerve to befriend her owner, his ideal man.  The course of love seldom runs straight for cats or for men, and this time would prove (hilariously) no different.
    This is another of Picano's distinguished portraits of a vanished era, when a new gay domain was solidifying only a few years after the Stonewall Riots, and the still nascent gay literary world that Picano would help invent was just a conception. Fred in Love is a charming, nostalgic, funny, gossipy, involving, and ultimately enlightening story about how we learn and grow, and how we love-whether the object of our affection is a cat or another human being.  It's sure to take its place next to Picano's now classic literary memoirs Ambidextrous, Men Who Loved Me, and A House on the Ocean, a House on the Bay.
[more]
cover of Freddie Steinmark: Faith, Family, Football

Freddie Steinmark

Faith, Family, Football

By Bower Yousse and Thomas J. Cryan

University of Texas Press, 2015

Freddie Steinmark tells the story of a legendary University of Texas football player whose courage on the field and in battling cancer still inspires the Longhorn nation.

Freddie Steinmark started at safety for the undefeated University of Texas Longhorns in 1969. In the thrilling “Game of the Century,” a come-from-behind victory against Arkansas that ensured Texas the national championship, Steinmark played with pain in his left leg. Two days later, X-rays revealed a bone tumor so large that it seemed a miracle Steinmark could walk, let alone play football. Within a week of the Arkansas game, his leg was amputated.

A gritty, undersized player, Steinmark had quickly become a fan favorite at Texas. What he endured during the Longhorns’ memorable 1969 season, and what he encountered afterward, captivated not only Texans but the country at large. Americans watched closely as Steinmark confronted life’s ultimate challenge, and his openness during his battle against savage odds helped reframe the national conversation surrounding cancer and the ongoing race for a cure.

Written with unfettered access to the Steinmark family and archives, Freddie Steinmark: Faith, Family, Football is the exploration of a brief but full life, one that began humbly but ended on a grand stage. It is a fitting tribute to a legendary Longhorn whose photograph, emblazoned with the word “Heart,” flashes on the Freddie Steinmark Scoreboard’s Jumbotron prior to each home football game in UT’s Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium at Joe Jamail Field.

[more]
cover of Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice, 1818-1845

Frederick Douglass

Freedom's Voice, 1818-1845

Gregory P. Lampe

Michigan State University Press, 1998

This work in the MSU Press Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series chronicles Frederick Douglass's preparation for a career in oratory, his emergence as an abolitionist lecturer in 1841, and his development and activities as a public speaker and reformer from 1841 to 1845. Lampe's meticulous scholarship overturns much of the conventional wisdom about this phase of Douglass's life and career uncovering new information about his experiences as a slave and as a fugitive; it provokes a deeper and richer understanding of this renowned orator's emergence as an important voice in the crusade to end slavery. 
     Contrary to conventional wisdom, Douglass was well prepared to become a full-time lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1841. His emergence as an eloquent voice from slavery was not as miraculous as scholars have led us to believe. Lampe begins by tracing Douglass's life as slave in Maryland and as fugitive in New Bedford, showing that experiences gained at this time in his life contributed powerfully to his understanding of rhetoric and to his development as an orator. An examination of his daily oratorical activities from the time of his emergence in Nantucket in 1841 until his departure for England in 1845 dispels many conventional beliefs surrounding this period, especially the belief that Douglass was under the wing of William Lloyd Garrison. Lampe's research shows that Douglass was much more outspoken and independent than previously thought and that at times he was in conflict with white abolitionists. 
     Included in this work is a complete itinerary of Douglass's oratorical activities, correcting errors and omissions in previously published works, as well as two newly discovered complete speech texts, never before published.

[more]
cover of Frederick Jackson Turner: Wisconsin’s Historian of the Frontier

Frederick Jackson Turner

Wisconsin’s Historian of the Frontier

Martin Ridge

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1986

This book contains four essays by and about Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), the Wisconsin-born historian whose ideas and writings have had such a profound impact upon the way Americans view their past, and their place in the world. It is a book not only for the scholar and teacher (who will find it both useful and incisive), but also for the mythic "general reader" who wants to broaden and enrich his aquaintanceship with Turner and the celebrated Frontier Thesis. In addition to essays by Turner and by Martin Ridge of The Huntington Library and the late Ray Allen Billington, the book is illustrated with photos from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
[more]
cover of Fredric Jameson and Film Theory: Marxism, Allegory, and Geopolitics in World Cinema

Fredric Jameson and Film Theory

Marxism, Allegory, and Geopolitics in World Cinema

Keith B. Wagner

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Frederic Jameson and Film Theory is the first collection of its kind, it assesses and critically responds to Fredric Jameson’s remarkable contribution to film theory. The essays assembled explore key Jamesonian concepts—such as totality, national allegory, geopolitics, globalization, representation, and pastiche—and his historical schema of realism, modernism, and postmodernism, considering, in both cases, how these can be applied, revised, expanded and challenged within film studies. Featuring essays by leading and emerging voices in the field, the volume probes the contours and complexities of neoliberal capitalism across the globe and explores world cinema's situation within these forces by deploying and adapting Jamesonian concepts, and placing them in dialogue with other theoretical paradigms. The result is an innovative and rigorously analytical effort that offers a range of Marxist-inspired approaches towards cinemas from Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America in the spirit of Jameson's famous rallying cry: 'always historicize!'.  
[more]
cover of Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance

Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad

The Geography of Resistance

Cheryl Janifer LaRoche

University of Illinois Press, 2013

This enlightening study employs the tools of archaeology to uncover a new historical perspective on the Underground Railroad. Unlike previous histories of the Underground Railroad, which have focused on frightened fugitive slaves and their benevolent abolitionist accomplices, Cheryl LaRoche focuses instead on free African American communities, the crucial help they provided to individuals fleeing slavery, and the terrain where those flights to freedom occurred.
 
This study foregrounds several small, rural hamlets on the treacherous southern edge of the free North in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. LaRoche demonstrates how landscape features such as waterways, iron forges, and caves played a key role in the conduct and effectiveness of the Underground Railroad. Rich in oral histories, maps, memoirs, and archaeological investigations, this examination of the "geography of resistance" tells the new powerful and inspiring story of African Americans ensuring their own liberation in the midst of oppression.
[more]
cover of Free Burma: Transnational Legal Action and Corporate Accountability

Free Burma

Transnational Legal Action and Corporate Accountability

John G. Dale

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

When the military’s ruling party violently quashed Burma’s pro-democracy movement, diplomatic condemnation quickly followed—to little effect. But when Burma’s activists began linking the movement to others around the world, the result was dramatically different. This book is the first to explain how Burma’s pro-democracy movement became a transnational social movement for human rights.

Through the experience of the Free Burma movement, John G. Dale demonstrates how social movements create and appropriate legal mechanisms for generating new transnational political opportunities. He presents three corporate accountability campaigns waged by the Free Burma movement. The cases focus on the legislation of “Free Burma” laws in local governments throughout the United States; the effort to force the state of California to de-charter Unocal Oil Corporation for its flagrant abuse of human rights; and the first-ever use of the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act to sue a corporation in a U.S. court for human rights abuses committed abroad. Dale’s work also raises the issue of how foreign policies of so-called constructive engagement actually pose a threat to the hope of Burma’s activists—and others worldwide—for more democratic economic development.
[more]
cover of Free Expression and Democracy in America: A History

Free Expression and Democracy in America

A History

Stephen M. Feldman

University of Chicago Press, 2008

From the 1798 Sedition Act to the war on terror, numerous presidents, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and local officials have endorsed the silencing of free expression.  If the connection between democracy and the freedom of speech is such a vital one, why would so many governmental leaders seek to quiet their citizens? Free Expression and Democracy in America traces two rival traditions in American culture—suppression of speech and dissent as a form of speech—to provide an unparalleled overview of the law, history, and politics of individual rights in the United States.

Charting the course of free expression alongside the nation’s political evolution, from the birth of the Constitution to the quagmire of the Vietnam War, Stephen M. Feldman argues that our level of freedom is determined not only by the Supreme Court, but also by cultural, social, and economic forces. Along the way, he pinpoints the struggles of excluded groups—women, African Americans, and laborers—to participate in democratic government as pivotal to the development of free expression.  In an age when our freedom of speech is once again at risk, this momentous book will be essential reading for legal historians, political scientists, and history buffs alike.
[more]
cover of Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class

Free Labor

The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class

Mark A. Lause

University of Illinois Press, 2015

Monumental and revelatory, Free Labor explores labor activism throughout the country during a period of incredible diversity and fluidity: the American Civil War.

Mark A. Lause describes how the working class radicalized during the war as a response to economic crisis, the political opportunity created by the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the ideology of free labor and abolition. His account moves from battlefield and picket line to the negotiating table, as he discusses how leaders and the rank-and-file alike adapted tactics and modes of operation to specific circumstances. His close attention to women and African Americans, meanwhile, dismantles notions of the working class as synonymous with whiteness and maleness.

In addition, Lause offers a nuanced consideration of race's role in the politics of national labor organizations, in segregated industries in the border North and South, and in black resistance in the secessionist South, creatively reading self-emancipation as the largest general strike in U.S. history.

[more]
cover of Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America

Free Spaces

The Sources of Democratic Change in America

Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte

University of Chicago Press, 1992

What are the environments, the public spaces, in which ordinary people become participants in the complex, ambiguous, engaging conversation about democracy: participators in governance rather than spectators or complainers, victims or accomplices? What are the roots, not simply of movements against oppression, but also of those democratic social movements which both enlarge the opportunities for participation and enhance people's ability to participate in the public world?

In Free Spaces, Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte argue for a new understanding of the foundations for democratic politics by analyzing the settings in which people learn to participate in democracy. In their new Introduction, the authors link the concept of free spaces to recent theoretical discussions about community, public life, civil society, and social movements.
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cover of Free Speech On Trial: Communication Perspectives on Landmark Supreme Court Decisions

Free Speech On Trial

Communication Perspectives on Landmark Supreme Court Decisions

Edited by Richard A. Parker

University of Alabama Press, 2008

Describes landmark free speech decisions of the Supreme Court while highlighting the issues of language, rhetoric, and communication that underlie them.

At the intersection of communication and First Amendment law reside two significant questions: What is the speech we ought to protect, and why should we protect it? The 20 scholars of legal communication whose essays are gathered in this volume propose various answers to these questions, but their essays share an abiding concern with a constitutional guarantee of free speech and its symbiotic relationship with communication practices.

Free Speech on Trial fills a gap between textbooks that summarize First Amendment law and books that analyze case law and legal theory. These essays explore questions regarding the significance of unregulated speech in a marketplace of goods and ideas, the limits of offensive language and obscenity as expression, the power of symbols, and consequences of restraint prior to publication versus the subsequent punishment of sources. As one example, Craig Smith cites Buckley vs. Valeo to examine how the context of corruption in the 1974 elections shaped the Court's view of the constitutionality of campaign contributions and expenditures.

Collectively, the essays in this volume suggest that the life of free speech law is communication. The contributors reveal how the Court's free speech opinions constitute discursive performances that fashion, deconstruct, and reformulate the contours and parameters of the Constitution’s guarantee of free expression and that, ultimately, reconstitute our government, our culture, and our society.

[more]
cover of Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War

Free Speech and Koch Money

Manufacturing a Campus Culture War

Ralph Wilson

Pluto Press, 2021

In recent years hundreds of high-profile ‘free speech’ incidents have rocked US college campuses. Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter and other right-wing speakers have faced considerable protest, with many being disinvited from speaking. These incidents are widely circulated as examples of the academy’s intolerance towards conservative views.

But this response is not the spontaneous outrage of the liberal colleges. There is a darker element manufacturing the crisis, funded by political operatives, and designed to achieve specific political outcomes. If you follow the money, at the heart of the issue lies the infamous and ultra-libertarian Koch donor network.

Grooming extremist celebrities, funding media platforms that promote these controversies, developing legal organzations to sue universities and corrupting legislators, the influence of the Koch network runs deep. We need to abandon the ‘campus free speech’ narrative and instead follow the money if we ever want to root out this dangerous network from our universities.

[more]
cover of Free Speech, The People's Darling Privilege: Struggles for Freedom of Expression in American History

Free Speech, The People's Darling Privilege

Struggles for Freedom of Expression in American History

Michael Kent Curtis

Duke University Press, 2000

Modern ideas about the protection of free speech in the United States did not originate in twentieth-century Supreme Court cases, as many have thought. Free Speech, “The People’s Darling Privilege” refutes this misconception by examining popular struggles for free speech that stretch back through American history. Michael Kent Curtis focuses on struggles in which ordinary and extraordinary people, men and women, black and white, demanded and fought for freedom of speech during the period from 1791—when the Bill of Rights and its First Amendment bound only the federal government to protect free expression—to 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment sought to extend this mandate to the states. A review chapter is also included to bring the story up to date.

Curtis analyzes three crucial political struggles: the controversy that surrounded the 1798 Sedition Act, which raised the question of whether criticism of elected officials would be protected speech; the battle against slavery, which raised the question of whether Americans would be free to criticize a great moral, social, and political evil; and the controversy over anti-war speech during the Civil War. Many speech issues raised by these controversies were ultimately decided outside the judicial arena—in Congress, in state legislatures, and, perhaps most importantly, in public discussion and debate. Curtis maintains that modern proposals for changing free speech doctrine can usefully be examined in the light of this often ignored history. This broader history shows the crucial effect that politicians, activists, ordinary citizens—and later the courts—have had on the American understanding of free speech.

Filling a gap in legal history, this enlightening, richly researched historical investigation will be valuable for students and scholars of law, U.S. history, and political science, as well as for general readers interested in civil liberties and free speech.

 

 

[more]
cover of Free Spirit: A Biography of Mason Welch Gross

Free Spirit

A Biography of Mason Welch Gross

Thomas W. Gross

Rutgers University Press, 2022

The Mason Gross School of the Arts in New Brunswick, New Jersey, stands as a memorial to one of Rutgers University’s most influential leaders. Gross started teaching at Rutgers as an assistant professor of philosophy in 1946, but quickly rose through the ranks to become the university’s provost in 1949 and finally its president from 1959 to 1971. He led the university through an era when it experienced both some of its greatest growth and most intense controversies. 
 
Free Spirit explores how Gross helped reshape Rutgers from a sleepy college into a world-renowned public research university. It also reveals how he steered the university through the tumult of the Red Scare, civil rights era, and the Vietnam War by taking principled stands in favor of both racial equality and academic freedom. This biography tells the story of how, from an early age, Gross came to believe in the importance of doing what was right, even when the backlash took a toll on his own health.
 
Written by his youngest son Thomas, this book offers a uniquely well-rounded portrait of Gross as both a public figure and a private person. Covering everything from his service in World War II to his stints as a game-show personality, Free Spirit introduces the reader to a remarkable academic leader.
[more]
cover of Free Spirits: Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era

Free Spirits

Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era

Mark A. Lause

University of Illinois Press, 2016

Often dismissed as a nineteenth-century curiosity, spiritualism influenced the radical social and political movements of its time. Believers filled the ranks of the Free Democrats, agitated for land and monetary reform, fought for abolition, and held egalitarian leanings that found powerful expression in campaigns for gender and racial equality. In Free Spirits , Mark A. Lause considers spiritualism as a political and cultural force in Civil War-era America. Lause reveals the scope, spread, and influence of the movement, both in its links to reformist causes and its ability to amplify previously marginalized voices. Rooting spiritualism's appeal in the crises of the time, Lause considers how spiritualist influences, through the distillation of the war, forced reassessments of the question of Radical Republicanism and radicalism in general. He also delves into unexplored areas such as the movement's role in Lincoln's reelection and the relationship between Native Americans and spiritualists.
[more]
cover of Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream

Free Time

The Forgotten American Dream

Benjamin Hunnicutt

Temple University Press, 2013

Has the "American Dream" become an unrealistic utopian fantasy, or have we simply forgotten what we are working for? In his topical book, Free Time, Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt examines the way that progress, once defined as more of the good things in life as well as more free time to enjoy them, has come to be understood only as economic growth and more work, forevermore.

Hunnicutt provides an incisive intellectual, cultural, and political history of the original "American Dream" from the colonial days to the present. Taking his cue from Walt Whitman's "higher progress," he follows the traces of that dream, cataloging the myriad voices that prepared for and lived in an opening "realm of freedom."

Free Time reminds Americans of the forgotten, best part of the "American Dream"-that more and more of our lives might be lived freely, with an enriching family life, with more time to enjoy nature, friendship, and the adventures of the mind and of the spirit.

[more]
cover of Free Women: Ethics and Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction

Free Women

Ethics and Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction

Kate Fullbrook

Temple University Press, 1990

"In her lucid and persuasive study, Kate Fullbrook shows bow women writers from Edith Wharton to Toni Morrison have used their fiction to help restructure our ethical landscape. Her book insists on the useful truth that feminism, with its moral centre, has still much to offer the late twentieth century." --Janet Todd, University of East Anglia In this sensitive and incisive study of eleven major twentieth-century women novelists, Kate Fullbrook traces the ethical and aesthetic impulses that have shaped their fiction. The result is a profoundly important way of reading women writers in the light of a new ethics for women. This book captures the sweep of women's literary achievement in the modern period and the impact of the radical new moral principles outlined in their fiction. The novelists included here are Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Djuna Barnes, Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Toni Morrison. Fullbrook treats them not only as major literary figures in their own right but also as part of a tradition of women's writing that has as its project nothing less than an attempt to shift the moral ideas of the modern world. "This is an exciting, original, and informative study of twentieth-century women's fiction. It brings a vast amount of material together, yet manages never to lose or confuse the reader--always there is a clear line of argument. The approach is genuinely interdisciplinary in the best spirit of feminist inquiry and [Fullbrook's] readings are fresh and illuminating. Fullbrook's argument that these women writers restructure the ethical landscape by devising new patterns for measuring moral success or failure is persuasive. Her discussion of the way they rebuild from the philosophical rubble of relativism, the way they intervene at a moment of cultural disjunction to propose alternative futures, is convincing and important." --Gayle Green, Scripps College
[more]
cover of Free to All: Carnegie Libraries & American Culture, 1890-1920

Free to All

Carnegie Libraries & American Culture, 1890-1920

Abigail A. Van Slyck

University of Chicago Press, 1996

Familiar landmarks in hundreds of American towns, Carnegie libraries today seem far from controversial. In Free to All, however, Abigail A. Van Slyck shows that the classical façades and symmetrical plans of these buildings often mask a complex and contentious history.

"The whole story is told here in this book. Carnegie's wishes, the conflicts among local groups, the architecture, development of female librarians. It's a rich and marvelous story, lovingly told."—Alicia Browne, Journal of American Culture

"This well-written and extensively researched work is a welcome addition to the history of architecture, librarianship, and philanthropy."—Joanne Passet, Journal of American History

"Van Slyck's book is a tremendous contribution for its keenness of scholarship and good writing and also for its perceptive look at a familiar but misunderstood icon of the American townscape."—Howard Wight Marshall, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

"[Van Slyck's] reading of the cultural coding implicit in the architectural design of the library makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the limitations of the doctrine 'free to all.'"—Virginia Quarterly Review
[more]
cover of Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II

Free to Die for Their Country

The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II

Eric L. Muller

University of Chicago Press, 2001

One of the Washington Post's Top Nonfiction Titles of 2001

In the spring of 1942, the federal government forced West Coast Japanese Americans into detainment camps on suspicion of disloyalty. Two years later, the government demanded even more, drafting them into the same military that had been guarding them as subversives. Most of these Americans complied, but Free to Die for Their Country is the first book to tell the powerful story of those who refused. Based on years of research and personal interviews, Eric L. Muller re-creates the emotions and events that followed the arrival of those draft notices, revealing a dark and complex chapter of America's history.
[more]
cover of Free-Market Socialists: European Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918–1968

Free-Market Socialists

European Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918–1968

Joseph Malherek

Central European University Press, 2022

The Hungarian artist-designer László Moholy-Nagy, the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, and his fellow Viennese Victor Gruen—an architect and urban planner—made careers in different fields. Yet they shared common socialist politics, Jewish backgrounds, and experience as refugees from the Nazis. This book tells the story of their intellectual migration from Central Europe to the United States, beginning with the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, and moving through the heady years of newly independent social-democratic republics before the descent into fascism. It follows their experience of exile and adaptation in a new country, and culminates with a surprising outcome of socialist thinking: the opening of the first fully enclosed, air-conditioned suburban shopping center in the United States. Although the American culture they encountered ostensibly celebrated entrepreneurial individualism and capitalistic “free enterprise,” Moholy-Nagy, Lazarsfeld, and Gruen arrived at a time of the progressive economic reforms of the New Deal and an extraordinary open-mindedness about social democracy. This period of unprecedented economic experimentation nurtured a business climate that, for the most part, did not stifle the émigrés’ socialist idealism but rather channeled it as the source of creative solutions to the practical problems of industrial design, urban planning, and consumer behavior.

Based on a vast array of original sources, Malherek interweaves the biographies of these three remarkable personalities and those of their wives, colleagues, and friends with whom they collaborated on innovative projects that would shape the material environment and consumer culture of their adopted home. The result is a narrative of immigration and adaptation that challenges the crude binary of capitalism and socialism with a story of creative economic hybridization.

[more]
cover of Freebooters and Smugglers: The Foreign Slave Trade in the United States after 1808

Freebooters and Smugglers

The Foreign Slave Trade in the United States after 1808

Ernest Obadele-Starks

University of Arkansas Press, 2007

In 1891 a young W. E. B. DuBois addressed the annual American Historical Association on the enforcement of slave trade laws: “Northern greed joined to Southern credulity was a combination calculated to circumvent any law, human or divine.” One law in particular he was referring to was the Abolition Act of 1808. It was specifically passed to end the foreign slave trade. However, as Ernest Obadele-Starks shows, thanks to profiteering smugglers like the Lafitte brothers and the Bowie brothers, the slave trade persisted throughout the south for a number of years after the law was passed. Freebooters and Smugglers examines the tactics and strategies that the adherents of the foreign slave trade used to challenge the law. It reassesses the role that Americans played in the continuation of foreign slave transshipments into the country right up to the Civil War, shedding light on an important topic that has been largely overlooked in the historiography of the slave trade.
[more]
cover of Freedom Beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal Individualism

Freedom Beyond Sovereignty

Reconstructing Liberal Individualism

Sharon R. Krause

University of Chicago Press, 2015

What does it mean to be free? We invoke the word frequently, yet the freedom of countless Americans is compromised by social inequalities that systematically undercut what they are able to do and to become. If we are to remedy these failures of freedom, we must move beyond the common assumption, prevalent in political theory and American public life, that individual agency is best conceived as a kind of personal sovereignty, or as self-determination or control over one’s actions.

In Freedom Beyond Sovereignty, Sharon R. Krause shows that individual agency is best conceived as a non-sovereign experience because our ability to act and affect the world depends on how other people interpret and respond to what we do. The intersubjective character of agency makes it vulnerable to the effects of social inequality, but it is never in a strict sense socially determined. The agency of the oppressed sometimes surprises us with its vitality. Only by understanding the deep dynamics of agency as simultaneously non-sovereign and robust can we remediate the failed freedom of those on the losing end of persistent inequalities and grasp the scope of our own responsibility for social change. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty brings the experiences of the oppressed to the center of political theory and the study of freedom. It fundamentally reconstructs liberal individualism and enables us to see human action, personal responsibility, and the meaning of liberty in a totally new light.
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cover of Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow

Freedom Colonies

Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow

By Thad Sitton and James H. Conrad

University of Texas Press, 2005

Friends of the Dallas Public Library Award, 2006
Best Book on East Texas, East Texas Historical Association, 2007

In the decades following the Civil War, nearly a quarter of African Americans achieved a remarkable victory—they got their own land. While other ex-slaves and many poor whites became trapped in the exploitative sharecropping system, these independence-seeking individuals settled on pockets of unclaimed land that had been deemed too poor for farming and turned them into successful family farms. In these self-sufficient rural communities, often known as "freedom colonies," African Americans created a refuge from the discrimination and violence that routinely limited the opportunities of blacks in the Jim Crow South.

Freedom Colonies is the first book to tell the story of these independent African American settlements. Thad Sitton and James Conrad focus on communities in Texas, where blacks achieved a higher percentage of land ownership than in any other state of the Deep South. The authors draw on a vast reservoir of ex-slave narratives, oral histories, written memoirs, and public records to describe how the freedom colonies formed and to recreate the lifeways of African Americans who made their living by farming or in skilled trades such as milling and blacksmithing. They also uncover the forces that led to the decline of the communities from the 1930s onward, including economic hard times and the greed of whites who found legal and illegal means of taking black-owned land. And they visit some of the remaining communities to discover how their independent way of life endures into the twenty-first century.

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