18284 books match the query 'United States' and 274 start with j

cover of John O. Meusebach: German Colonizer in Texas

John O. Meusebach

German Colonizer in Texas

By Irene Marschall King

University of Texas Press, 1967

Otfried Hans Freiherr von Meusebach chose a life of hardship and freedom in Texas rather than a life of comfort and influence in his native Germany, where he had lived his formative years within a framework of unconstitutional government.

In 1845 the young liberal relinquished his hereditary German title, left behind his close family ties and his various intellectual and political associations, and arrived in Texas as John O. Meusebach, commissioner-general for the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants. His background enabled him to assume an enlightened leadership of fellow immigrants who were pouring in from Germany. Lacking adequate financial backing, he nevertheless led the settling of some five thousand people in a land that was largely occupied by Indians.

Irene Marschall King presents the full sweep of Meusebach's vigorous life: Meusebach as the young liberal in Germany, as the colonizer in the 1840s, as a Texas senator and, later, an observer of the Civil War, and as a Texan who devoted his later years to bringing the Texas soil to fruition—all set against a background of the immigration movement and frontier life.

"Freedom is not free; it is costly," Meusebach believed. In Texas he found for himself and others freedom worth the price he paid.

Rich in historic detail, King's story recounts the founding of Fredericksburg, the crippling effect of the Mexican War upon the mass of immigrants huddled in illness on the coast, the signing of the Indian Treaty, which opened to settlement over three million acres of land, and the final collapse of the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants. Also depicted is the colonists' influence on the land—the gardens and orchards of south central Texas, the "Easter Fires" that blaze on the hills surrounding Fredericksburg, the mixture of German custom with American necessity that created a unique culture. Throughout the narrative Mrs. King presents a fascinating cast of characters: the noble Prince Solms, who tries to establish a German military outpost in Texas; Henry Fisher, who attempts by devious methods to control the colonists and their land and finally incites a mob which tries to hang Meusebach; Philip Cappes, a special commissioner and Meusebach's assistant, who plots through intriguing correspondence with Count Castell, the executive secretary in Germany, to overthrow Meusebach; and the colorful and courageous Indian fighter and Texas Ranger, Colonel Jack Hays.

Primarily, however, this is the story of a man who found strength in his family's motto, "Perseverance in Purpose," and gave of his energies to build Texas.

[more]
cover of John Prine: In Spite of Himself

John Prine

In Spite of Himself

By Eddie Huffman

University of Texas Press, 2015

With a range that spans the lyrical, heartfelt songs “Angel from Montgomery,” “Sam Stone,” and “Paradise” to the classic country music parody “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” John Prine is a songwriter’s songwriter. Across five decades, Prine has created critically acclaimed albums—John Prine (one of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time), Bruised Orange, and The Missing Years—and earned many honors, including two Grammy Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting from the Americana Music Association, and induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. His songs have been covered by scores of artists, from Johnny Cash and Miranda Lambert to Bette Midler and 10,000 Maniacs, and have influenced everyone from Roger McGuinn to Kacey Musgraves. Hailed in his early years as the “new Dylan,” Prine still counts Bob Dylan among his most enthusiastic fans.

In John Prine, Eddie Huffman traces the long arc of Prine’s musical career, beginning with his early, seemingly effortless successes, which led paradoxically not to stardom but to a rich and varied career writing songs that other people have made famous. He recounts the stories, many of them humorous, behind Prine’s best-known songs and discusses all of Prine’s albums as he explores the brilliant records and the ill-advised side trips, the underappreciated gems and the hard-earned comebacks that led Prine to found his own successful record label, Oh Boy Records. This thorough, entertaining treatment gives John Prine his due as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation.

[more]
cover of John Prine: In Spite of Himself

John Prine

In Spite of Himself

Eddie Huffman

University of Texas Press, 2022

With a range that spans the lyrical, heartfelt songs “Angel from Montgomery,” “Sam Stone,” and “Paradise” to the classic country music parody “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” John Prine is a songwriter’s songwriter. Across five decades, Prine has created critically acclaimed albums—John Prine (one of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time), Bruised Orange, and The Missing Years—and earned many honors, including two Grammy Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting from the Americana Music Association, and induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. His songs have been covered by scores of artists, from Johnny Cash and Miranda Lambert to Bette Midler and 10,000 Maniacs, and have influenced everyone from Roger McGuinn to Kacey Musgraves. Hailed in his early years as the “new Dylan,” Prine still counts Bob Dylan among his most enthusiastic fans.

In John Prine, Eddie Huffman traces the long arc of Prine’s musical career, beginning with his early, seemingly effortless successes, which led paradoxically not to stardom but to a rich and varied career writing songs that other people have made famous. He recounts the stories, many of them humorous, behind Prine’s best-known songs and discusses all of Prine’s albums as he explores the brilliant records and the ill-advised side trips, the underappreciated gems and the hard-earned comebacks that led Prine to found his own successful record label, Oh Boy Records. This thorough, entertaining treatment gives John Prine his due as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation.

[more]
cover of John Reed and the Writing of Revolution

John Reed and the Writing of Revolution

Daniel W. Lehman

Ohio University Press, 2002

John Reed (1887-1920) is best known as the author of Ten Days That Shook the World and as champion of the communist movement in the United States. Still, Reed remains a writer almost systematically ignored by the literary critical establishment, even if alternately vilified and lionized by historians and by films like Warren Beatty’s Reds.

John Reed and the Writing of Revolution examines Reed’s writing from a different critical perspective—one informed by a theoretical and practical understanding of literary nonfiction. In both politics and writing, John Reed defied fashion. In his short career, Reed transcended the traditional creative arts of fiction, poetry, and drama in favor of deeply researched histories composed with the cadence of fiction and the power of fact. Reed thereby alienated literary critics who had idealized timeless artistry against the rough-and-tumble world of historical details and political implications.

Working from a close investigation of rare articles, manuscripts, and the Reed papers at Harvard as well as from Reed’s published work, Daniel W. Lehman offers the first detailed literary study of the man who followed Pancho Villa into battle; wrote literary profiles of such characters as Henry Ford, William Jennings Bryan, and Billy Sunday; explicated the Byzantine factionalism of Eastern Europe; and witnessed the storming of the Winter Palace and the birth of Soviet Russia.

[more]
cover of John Robert Shaw: An Autobiography of Thirty Years, 1777–1807

John Robert Shaw

An Autobiography of Thirty Years, 1777–1807

Oressa M. Teagarden

Ohio University Press, 1992

In the summer of 1807 more than a thousand subscribers from New England to Tennessee paid for the initial printing of The Life and Travels of John Robert Shaw: A Narrative of the Life and Travels of the Well-Digger, now resident of Lexington, Kentucky, Written by Himself. Shaw had come to Rhode Island as a British redcoat to put down the colonial rebellion. Through various quirks of fate, including being taken a prisoner of war, he ended up fighting with the Americans. Shaw was an exuberant spirit whose rowdy drinking bouts and related predicaments alternated with periods of wholehearted efforts at reform. His autobiography, written while he recuperated from injuries from one of several explosions (an occupational hazard for the frontier well-digger), is an articulate and entertaining record of the Revolutionary War era.

A 1930 printing of Shaw’s autobiography was rescued from the trash by an alert librarian in Kentucky in 1950. She passed the tattered copy on to journalist Oressa M. Teagarden, who became intrigued with Shaw’s story and spent much of her free time over the next two decades finding out more about the ebullient American. On Teagarden’s death, co-editor Jeanne Crabtree assumed the task of making Shaw’s authentic and colorful view of early America available to a new generation of readers.

[more]
cover of John Spring's Arizona

John Spring's Arizona

A. M. Gustafson

University of Arizona Press, 1966

John Spring, a Swiss volunteer wounded in Civil War action, was sent to Arizona with the Regular Army of 1866 and became the most versatile and articulate of frontier reporters. A fine education and a broad knowledge of the world combined with an urbane pen to enable this pioneer educator, desert farmer, sutler, and brewer to be also a court translator, a correspondent for metropolitan U.S. newspapers and European periodicals, and a hardy soldier amid Apache perils.

John Spring first saw Arizona from an encampment on the west side of the Colorado River at "a small town called Yuma . . . then called Arizona City . . . it did a thriving fandango and saloon business during the period of continual going and coming of troops and teamsters." Southern Arizona, as Spring first saw and described it, was "a country where every highway, every path, every hamlet, and nearly every rancho could tell (had they the gift of speech) of devilish deeds, of crafty ambuscade, murdered settlers and travellers."

Supported by knowledge of several languages and wide reading, John Spring was able to extend his reporting to geographical and botanical description, to detailed reports of agriculture in the Santa Cruz Valley, and mercantile activity in Tucson. But he returned always to people--an irresistible center of interest for John Spring.

The lively and authentic serial reports of John Spring to the National Tribune in Washington, D.C., have been assembled and edited in this volume by A. M. Gustafson.
[more]
cover of John Steinbeck Goes to War: The Moon is Down as Propaganda

John Steinbeck Goes to War

The Moon is Down as Propaganda

Donald V. Coers

University of Alabama Press, 2005

WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

When words became weapons—Steinbeck’s novel and the underground war for freedom.

In March 1942, a desperate period for the allies in World War II, John Steinbeck published his propaganda novel The Moon is Down­—the story of ruthless invaders who overrun a militarily helpless country.  Throughout the novel, Steinbeck underscored both the fatal weakness of the “invincible” unnamed aggressors and the inherent power of the human values shard by the “conquered” people.

The Moon is Down created an immediate sensation among American literary critics; fierce debate erupted over Steinbeck’s uncommonly sympathetic portrayal of the enemy and the novel’s power as a vehicle for propaganda.  Fifty years later, Coers continues the debate, relying heavily on unpublished letters and personal interviews with the lawyers, book dealers, actors, publishers, and housewives associated with the resistance movements in Western Europe. Clandestine translations of The Moon Is Down quickly appeared and were widely circulated under the noses of the Gestapo. Coers documents the fate of Steinbeck’s novel in the hands of World War II resistance fighters and deepens our appreciation of Steinbeck’s unique ability to express the feelings of oppressed peoples.

[more]
cover of John Tracey Ellis: An American Church Reformer

John Tracey Ellis

An American Church Reformer

Thomas J. Shelley

Catholic University of America Press, 2023

For several decades prior to his death in October1992, Monsignor John Tracy Ellis was the most prominent historian of American Catholicism. His bibliography lists 395 published works, including seventeen books, most famously, American Catholics and the Intellectual Life, a scathing indictment of the mediocrity of Catholic higher education and a clarion call for American Catholics to make a greater contribution to American intellectual life. Ellis’s ecumenically-minded scholarship led to his election in 1969 as the President of both the American Catholic Historical Association and the predominantly Protestant American Society of Church History. As a professor at the Catholic University of America, Ellis trained numerous graduate students, who made their own contributions to American Catholic history, and he also furthered the careers of several talented young church historians. Especially in his later years, during the polarized atmosphere that followed Vatican II, Ellis became an outspoken but balanced advocate of reform in the Church, urging greater transparency and honesty, collegiality on the diocesan level, a role for the laity in the selection of bishops, reassessment of church teaching on birth control, decentralization to provide an enhanced role for the local churches, and an eloquent defense of religious freedom and the American Catholic commitment to separation of church and state. His fellow church historian, Jay P. Dolan, remarked that Ellis “used history as an instrument to promote changes he believed necessary for American Catholicism. . . .No other historian of American Catholicism matched Ellis in this regard.”
[more]
cover of John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain

John Updike and the Cold War

Drawing the Iron Curtain

D. Quentin Miller

University of Missouri Press, 2001

One of the most enduring and prolific American authors of the latter half of the twentieth century, John Updike has long been recognized by critics for his importance as a social commentator. Yet, John Updike and the Cold War is the first work to examine how Updike's views grew out of the defining context of American culture in his time—the Cold War. Quentin Miller argues that because Updike's career began as the Cold War was taking shape in the mid-1950s, the world he creates in his entire literary oeuvre—fiction, poetry, and nonfiction prose—reflects the optimism and the anxiety of that decade.

Miller asserts that Updike's frequent use of Cold War tension as a metaphor for domestic life and as a cultural reality that affects the psychological security of his characters reveals the inherent conflict of his fictional world. Consequently, this conflict helps explain some of the problematic relationships and aimless behavior of Updike's characters, as well as their struggles to attain spiritual meaning.

By examining Updike's entire career in light of the historical events that coincide with it, Miller shows how important the early Cold War mind-set was to Updike's thinking and to the development of his fiction. The changes in Updike's writing after the 1950s confirm the early Cold War era's influence on his ideology and on his celebrated style. By the Cold War's end in the late 1980s, Updike's characters look back fondly to the Eisenhower years, when their national identity seemed so easy to define in contrast to the Soviet Union. This nostalgia begins as early as his writings in the 1960s, when the breakdown of an American consensus disillusions Updike's characters and leaves them yearning for the less divisive 1950s.

While underscoring how essential history is to the study of literature, Miller demonstrates that Updike's writing relies considerably on the growth of the global conflict that defined his time. Cogent and highly readable, John Updike and the Cold War makes an important contribution to Updike scholarship.

[more]
cover of John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion

John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy

Mastered Irony in Motion

Marshall Boswell

University of Missouri Press, 2001

Early in his career, John Updike announced his affinity with the Christian existentialism of Soren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and others. Because of this, many of Updike's critics have interpreted his work from within a Christian existentialist context. Yet Kierkegaard and Barth provide Updike with much more than a mere context, for their dialectical thinking serves as the springboard for Updike's own unique dialectical vision, a complex matrix of ethical precepts, theological beliefs, and aesthetic principles that governs nearly all of his literary output. Nowhere else in his immense corpus is this vision more clearly and thoroughly expressed than in his four Rabbit novels, which were gathered into the single volume Rabbit Angstrom in 1995. However, because Updike's critics have chosen to read the Rabbit novels as discrete, freestanding texts, they have by and large failed to extract the precepts of this private vision.

In John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy, Marshall Boswell redresses this imbalance by treating the Rabbit tetralogy as a single, unified "mega-novel." He demonstrates that, taken together as a single work, the four discrete sections of the tetralogy not only provide a coherent and complete articulation of Updike's unique existential vision but also compose a unified work of remarkable formal complexity. Boswell brings to Updike's work the concept of "mastered irony," a term coined by Kierkegaard to describe the presentation of two legitimate but contradictory sides of an issue. In the Rabbit novels, these issues range from adultery to drug addiction, from race to redemption, with each issue examined through the refracting lens of Updike's own ironic method. Boswell shows that although each of the four individual Rabbit novels confirms this dialectical strategy in a unique way, the completed tetralogy comprises an additional series of dialectical pairs that sustain, rather than resolve, thematic and formal tension. Ultimately, the structure of the finished "mega-novel" echoes the work's thematic rationale.

To help readers who are interested in a particular Rabbit novel, Boswell devotes a chapter to each individual section of the tetralogy. At the same time, he treats each novel as an integral part of the more comprehensive whole. Honoring the full complexity of Updike's provocative thinking without losing sight of the tetralogy's popular appeal, John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy makes a valuable addition to the study of Updike's work.

[more]
cover of John Wayne’s World: Transnational Masculinity in the Fifties

John Wayne’s World

Transnational Masculinity in the Fifties

By Russell Meeuf

University of Texas Press, 2013

In a film career that spanned five decades, John Wayne became a U.S. icon of heroic individualism and rugged masculinity. His widespread popularity, however, was not limited to the United States: he was beloved among moviegoers in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. In John Wayne’s World, Russell Meeuf considers the actor’s global popularity and makes the case that Wayne’s depictions of masculinity in his most popular films of the 1950s reflected the turbulent social disruptions of global capitalism and modernization taking place in that decade.

John Wayne’s World places Wayne at the center of gender- and nation-based ideologies, opening a dialogue between film history, gender studies, political and economic history, and popular culture. Moving chronologically, Meeuf provides new readings of Fort Apache, Red River, Hondo, The Searchers, Rio Bravo, and The Alamo and connects Wayne’s characters with a modern, transnational masculinity being reimagined after World War II. Considering Wayne’s international productions, such as Legend of the Lost and The Barbarian and the Geisha, Meeuf shows how they resonated with U.S. ideological positions about Africa and Asia. Meeuf concludes that, in his later films, Wayne’s star text shifted to one of grandfatherly nostalgia for the past, as his earlier brand of heroic masculinity became incompatible with the changing world of the 1960s and 1970s. The first academic book-length study of John Wayne in more than twenty years, John Wayne’s World reveals a frequently overlooked history behind one of Hollywood’s most iconic stars.

[more]
cover of John Wesley Powell: His Life and Legacy

John Wesley Powell

His Life and Legacy

James M Aton

University of Utah Press, 2010

“John Wesley Powell: explorer, writer, geologist, anthropologist, land planner, bureaucrat. Which one do we focus on?” This is the question author James M. Aton poses at the beginning of his biography of Powell, though he soon decides that it is impossible to ignore any facet of Powell’s life. Powell was a polymath, one whose “divergent interests resemble one of those braided streambeds in his beloved canyon country, branching out in many directions, but ultimately beginning and ending in the same stream."

Aton beautifully tells the multidimensional stories of Powell’s childhood, his military and teaching careers, his famous and exciting explorations of the Colorado River, and the battles he waged from his influential positions within the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology and the United States Geological Survey. This new edition of John Wesley Powell: His Life and Legacy, first printed as an issue of the Boise State University Western Writers Series, includes the original biography, but also features Aton’s new interpretations of Powell’s writings on exploration, land-planning, anthropology, and irrigation, and incorporates the author’s distinguished faculty lecture on Powell and cash-register dams in the Colorado River Basin.

[more]
cover of John Williams Walker: A Study in the Political, Social, and Cultural Life of the Old Southwest

John Williams Walker

A Study in the Political, Social, and Cultural Life of the Old Southwest

Hugh C. Bailey

University of Alabama Press, 1964

    A biography of Alabama’s first Senator, this book is also the fascinating story of Southern frontier life as portrayed in contemporary letters and documents. When Madison County, Alabama, was still wilderness, Walker trekked across the mountains from Georgia with his bride, Matilda Pope, his slaves, and all his household possessions, to build a plantation near Huntsville. Here he began his extraordinary political career: member of the first territorial legislature; speaker of the house in the second; U.S. territorial judge; president of Alabama’s Constitutional Convention; and when statehood was won, first U.S. Senator.

    Though his term in the Senate was cut short by illness, resignation, and death, in the four years he served, he met head-on the most controversial issues of his day—the Missouri Compromise, acquisition of Florida, and land relief legislation. It was in land relief that he made his most significant contribution, for he fathered the 1821 Land Law upon which new public-lands legislation for a decade thereafter was based. His own state wildly acclaimed him upon its passage; other frontier states had good reason to make him the public hero he became. But a year later, at 40, he was dead of tuberculosis.

[more]
cover of John Winthrop's World: History as a Story; The Story as History

John Winthrop's World

History as a Story; The Story as History

James G. Moseley

University of Wisconsin Press, 1992

One of the most famous American journals is that of seventeenth-century Puritan leader John Winthrop. As the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, an office he held with few interruptions for two decades, he worked to establish a society in which he thought true Christianity could flourish, beyond the reach of the unfaithful Church of England. Winthrop recorded the daily events of his life—the political infighting and religious disputes among Puritans, as well as their relations with other colonists, Indians, and England. His journal is a window into a world that, while unfamiliar, continues to influence our sense of the meaning of America.
    In the first in-depth study of Winthrop since 1958, James G. Moseley provides a fascinating new look at this extraordinary man, paying careful attention to the connections between Winthrop’s political activity and his writing. Moseley first examines Winthrop as a writer, using the journal to analyze Winthrop as a man resolving challenges based as much on his acutely pragmatic intelligence as on his deeply felt religious convictions. Second, Moseley traces how historians have responded to Winthrop—how his famous journal has been read and misread by those who have filtered the man and his cultural context through many lenses.
    By examining Winthrop’s ancestors and early life in England, especially the religious changes he experienced, Moseley removes the blinders of modernism, portraying Winthrop as never before. He shows how Winthrop’s successful struggle to accept the deaths of his first two wives led him away from moralistic views of Christianity, himself, and his world to more magnanimous views.
    Arguing that writing was the medium through which Winthrop developed his capacity for leadership, Moseley shows how the journal enabled Winthrop to reflect objectively on his situation and to adjust his behavior. Winthrop was, Moseley suggests, not only a politician but a historian, and his interpretations of foundational events in American history in his journal are an invaluable resource for understanding the nature of leadership and the meaning of liberty in Puritan America.
    Winthrop’s World is a very graceful, well-written, and engaging narrative that provides new insight into the Puritan way of life and into the man who provided a window between our world and his.
[more]
cover of John Xántus: The Fort Tejon Letters, 1857–1859

John Xántus

The Fort Tejon Letters, 1857–1859

Ann Zwinger

University of Arizona Press, 1986

Captures the exploits of one of the Smithsonian's early specimen collectors in the American West.
[more]
cover of John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

John of the Mountains

The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

Edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe

University of Wisconsin Press, 1979

John Muir, America’s pioneer conservationist and father of the national park system, was a man of considerable literary talent. As he explored the wilderness of the western part of the United States for decades, he carried notebooks with him, narrating his wanderings, describing what he saw, and recording his scientific researches. This reprint of his journals, edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe in 1938 and long out of print, offers an intimate picture of Muir and his activities during a long and productive period of his life.
    The sixty extant journals and numerous notes in this volume were written from 1867 to 1911. They start seven years after the time covered in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, Muir’s uncompleted autobiography. The earlier journals capture the essence of the Sierra Nevada and Alaska landscapes. The changing appearance of the Sierras from Sequoia north and beyond the Yosemites enthralled Muir, and the first four years of the journals reveal his dominating concern with glacial action. The later notebooks reflect his changes over the years, showing a mellowing of spirit and a deep concern for human rights.
    Like all his writings, the journals concentrate on his observations in the wilderness. His devotion to his family, his many warm friendships, and his many-sided public life are hardly mentioned. Very little is said about the quarter-century battle for national parks and forest reserves. The notebooks record, in language fuller and freer than his more formal writings, the depth of his love and transcendental feeling for the wilderness. The rich heritage of his native Scotland and the unconscious music of the poetry of Burns, Milton, and the King James Bible permeate the language of his poetic fancy.
    In his later life, Muir attempted to sort out these journals and, at the request of friends, published a few extracts. A year after his death in 1914, his literary executor and biographer, William Frederick Badè, also published episodes from the journals. Linnie Marsh Wolfe set out to salvage the best of his writings still left unpublished in 1938 and has thus added to our understanding of the life and thought of a complex and fascinating American figure.
[more]
cover of Johnny Depp Starts Here

Johnny Depp Starts Here

Pomerance, Murray

Rutgers University Press, 2005

From beloved bad-boy to cool and captivating maverick, Johnny Depp has inspired media intrigue and has been the source of international acclaim since the early 1990s. He has attracted attention for his eccentric image, his accidental acting career, his beguiling good looks, and his quirky charm. In Johnny Depp Starts Here, film scholar Murray Pomerance explores our fascination with Depp, his riddling complexity, and his meaning for our culture. Moving beyond the actor's engaging and inscrutable private life, Pomerance focuses on his enigmatic screen performances from A Nightmare on Elm Street to Secret Window.

The actor's image is studied in terms of its ambiguities and its many strange nuances: Depp's ethnicity, his smoking, his tranquility, his unceasing motion, his links to the Gothic, the Beats, Simone de Beauvoir, the history of rationality, Impressionist painting, and more. In a series of treatments of his key roles, including Rafael in The Brave, Bon Bon in Before Night Falls, Jack Kerouac in The Source, and the long list of acclaimed performances from Gilbert Grape to Cap'n Jack Sparrow, we learn of Johnny onscreen in terms of male sexuality, space travel, optical experience, nineteenth-century American capitalism, Orientalism, the vulnerability of performance, the perils of sleep, comedy, the myth of the West, Scrooge McDuck, Frantois Truffaut, and more.

Johnny's face, Johnny's gaze, Johnny's aging, and Johnny's understatement are shown to be inextricably linked to our own desperate need to plumb performance, style, and screen for a grounding of reality in this ever-accelerating world of fragmentation and insecurity. Both deeply intriguing and perpetually elusive, Depp is revealed as the central screen performer of the contemporary age, the symbol of performance itself.

No thinker has meditated on Johnny Depp this way before-and surely not in a manner worthy of the object of scrutiny.
[more]
cover of Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves

Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves

Small, Melvin

Rutgers University Press, 1988

.
[more]
cover of Joint Libraries

Joint Libraries

Claire B. Gunnels

American Library Association, 2012

[more]
cover of Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition

Jolliet and Marquette

A New History of the 1673 Expedition

Mark Walczynski

University of Illinois Press, 2023

Often viewed in isolation, the Jolliet and Marquette expedition in fact took place against a sprawling backdrop that encompassed everything from ancient Native American cities to French colonial machinations. Mark Walczynski draws on a wealth of original research to place the explorers and their journey within seventeenth-century North America. His account takes readers among the region’s diverse Native American peoples and into a vanished natural world of treacherous waterways and native flora and fauna. Walczynski also charts the little-known exploits of the French-Canadian officials, explorers, traders, soldiers, and missionaries who created the political and religious environment that formed Jolliet and Marquette and shaped European colonization of the heartland.

A multifaceted voyage into the past, Jolliet and Marquette expands and updates the oft-told story of a pivotal event in American history.

[more]
cover of Jonathan Edwards and the Gospel of Love

Jonathan Edwards and the Gospel of Love

Ronald Story

University of Massachusetts Press, 2012

Jonathan Edwards has long epitomized the Puritan preacher as fiery scold, fixated on the inner struggle of the soul and the eternal flames of hell. In this book, Ronald Story offers a fundamentally different view of Edwards, revealing a profoundly social minister who preached a gospel of charity and community bound by love.

The first chapters trace Edwards's life and impact, examine his reputation as an intellectual, Calvinist, and revivalist, and highlight the importance for him of the gentler, more compassionate concepts of light, harmony, beauty, and sweetness. Story then explains what Edwards means by the “Gospel of Love”—a Christian faith that is less individual than interpersonal, and whose central feature is the practice of charity to the poor and the quest for loving community in this world, the chief signs of true salvation. As Edwards preached in his sermon “Heaven Is a World of Love,” the afterlife itself is social in nature because love is social.

Drawing on Edwards's own sermons and notebooks, Story reveals the minister's belief that divine love expressed in the human family should take us beyond tribalism, sectarianism, provincialism, and nationality. Edwards offers hope, in the manner of Walter Rauschenbusch, Karl Barth, Martin Luther King Jr., and other great “improvers,” for the coming of a world without want and war. Gracefully and compellingly written, this book represents a new departure in Edwards studies, revising the long-standing yet misleading stereotype of a man whose lessons of charity, community, and love we need now more than ever.

[more]
cover of Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture, and Community on the Eastern Frontier

Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine

Commerce, Culture, and Community on the Eastern Frontier

Kevin D. Murphy

University of Massachusetts Press, 2010

This book examines the life of Jonathan Fisher (1768–1847), a native of Braintree, Massachusetts, and graduate of Harvard College who moved in his late twenties to Blue Hill, Maine, where he embarked on a multifaceted career as a pioneer minister, farmer, entrepreneur, and artist. Drawing on a vast record of letters, diaries, sermons, drawings, paintings, and buildings, Kevin D. Murphy reconstructs Fisher's story and uses it to explore larger issues of material culture, visual culture, and social history during the early decades of the American republic.

Murphy shows how Fisher, as pastor of the Congregational church in Blue Hill from 1796 to 1837, helped spearhead the transformation of a frontier settlement on the eastern shores of the Penobscot Bay into a thriving port community; how he used his skills as an architect, decorative painter, surveyor, and furniture maker not only to support himself and his family, but to promote the economic growth of his village; and how the fluid professional identity that enabled Fisher to prosper on the eastern frontier could only have existed in early America where economic relations were far less rigidly defined than in Europe.

Among the most important artifacts of Jonathan Fisher's life is the house he designed and built in Blue Hill. The Jonathan Fisher Memorial, as it is now known, serves as a point of departure for an examination of social, religious, and cultural life in a newly established village at the turn of the nineteenth century. Fisher's house provided a variety of spaces for agricultural and domestic work, teaching, socializing, artmaking, and more.

Through the eyes of Jonathan Fisher, we see his family grow and face the challenges of the new century, responding to religious, social, and economic change—sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. We appreciate how an extraordinarily energetic man was able to capitalize on the wide array of opportunities offered by the frontier to give shape to his personal vision of community.
[more]
cover of Jonathan Odell: The Loyalist Poet of the American Revolution

Jonathan Odell

The Loyalist Poet of the American Revolution

Cynthia Dubin Edelberg

Duke University Press, 1987

Jonathan Odell's live and writings give us insight into the American Revolution by revealing Loyalist ideology—the ambitious few have led the gullible multitude to slaughter—and he rails against the British military for fighting a war of containment aimed at bringing the rebel leadership to negotiation. This policy effectually trapped the Loyalists between the British army, which ignored them, and the rebels, who despised them.
One of the best-educated of the colonialists, Odell, a physician turned Anglican minister and then writer, lived the gamut of experience: powerful friends sustained him and the British commanders-in-chief Sir William Howe, Henry Clinton, and Sir Guy Carleton employed him; nevertheless, during the war he was a lonely exile ("Tory hunters" forced him from his home in 1775), and, at the end of the war, when his hope for reconciliation between the Loyalists and the Americans came to nothing, he reluctantly emigrated to Canada.
Here is a voice, all but silenced for over two hundred years, that must now be heard if we are to better understand the American Revolution.
[more]
cover of Jordan Peele's Get Out: Political Horror

Jordan Peele's Get Out

Political Horror

Edited by Dawn Keetley

The Ohio State University Press, 2020

Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror is a collection of sixteen essays devoted to exploring Get Out’s roots in the horror tradition and its complex and timely commentary on twenty-first-century US race relations. The first section, “The Politics of Horror,” traces the influence of the gothic and horror tradition on Peele’s film, from Shakespeare’s Othello, through the female gothic and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, to the modern horror film, including the zombie, rural, suburban, and body-swap subgenres of horror. The second section, “The Horror of Politics,” takes up Get Out’s varied political interventions—notably its portrayal of the continuation of slavery and the deformation of the black body and mind in white, so-called progressive America. Contributors address Peele’s film alongside African American figures such as Nat Turner, W. E. B. Du Bois, and James Baldwin. Taken together, the essays illuminate how Get Out stands as both a groundbreaking intervention in the horror tradition as well as a devastating unmasking of racism in the contemporary United States.
[more]
cover of Joseph Carter Corbin: Educator Extraordinaire and Founder of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff

Joseph Carter Corbin

Educator Extraordinaire and Founder of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff

Gladys Turner Finney

Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2017

Having operated now for more than 140 years, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB) was founded in 1875 as Branch Normal College by Joseph Carter Corbin, a native of Ohio and the son of former slaves. Corbin, who had a classical education, was the first African American superintendent of public education in Arkansas and literally built the school from the ground up. There was a desperate need for teachers in Arkansas, as there was a great desire for education by former slaves who had been prohibited from learning to read and write.

Corbin himself cleared the land that would soon house the college and then set about to create a school that would produce the first African American teachers following the Reconstruction years. For almost three decades, he worked tirelessly on behalf of Arkansas’s black community to meet the need for educators.

In the early days, Corbin worked both as the president and the janitor so that he could control costs and keep the school going. He often waived matriculation fees and other expenses to allow impoverished students the opportunity to graduate and become qualified to teach throughout Arkansas.

Although he might not have realized it at the time, Corbin was a member of the so-called aristocrats of color, the African American elite of national prominence and a group that included such luminaries as Booker T. Washington. Corbin was a true giant in the history of education in Arkansas. His story, told by a former UAPB student, is monumental for the scope of what one man was able to accomplish.

[more]
cover of Joseph Fielding Smith: A Mormon Theologian

Joseph Fielding Smith

A Mormon Theologian

Matthew Bowman

University of Illinois Press, 2024

In the early and mid-twentieth century, Joseph Fielding Smith’s (1876–1972) life as a public historian and theologian shaped the religious worldview of generations of Latter-day Saints. Matthew Bowman examines Smith’s ideas and his place in American religious history. Smith achieved position and influence at a young age, while his theories about the age of the earth and the falseness of evolutionary theory brought fame and controversy. As Bowman shows, Smith’s strong identity as a Saint influenced how he blended Protestant fundamentalist thought into his distinctly LDS theological views. Bowman also goes beyond Smith’s well-known conservatism to reveal him as an important thinker engaged with the major religious questions of his time.

Incisive and illuminating, Joseph Fielding Smith examines the worldview and development of an influential theologian and his place in American religious and intellectual history.

[more]
cover of Joseph Morris: and the Saga of the Morrisites Revisited

Joseph Morris

and the Saga of the Morrisites Revisited

C. Leroy Anderson

Utah State University Press, 2010

LeRoy Anderson in 1981 first published, under the title For Christ Will Come Tomorrow, his definitive study of a charismatic, millenarian prophet and the Church of Jesus Christ of the Most High. He told there of a Mormon posse’s 1862 attack on the Morrisite compound, killing Joseph Morris, and of the continuing Morrisite movement, which survived into the mid-twentieth century. In this newly revised edition, Anderson revisits his subject by referring to more recently discovered documents, considering other scholars’ continuing work on Morris’s sect and related subjects, and examining a 1980s messianic sect that claimed a direct connection to the Morrisites.

New documentary sources include a holograph “History of George Morris,” written by Joseph Morris’s brother, which Anderson quotes at length. What was once a little-studied subject has since received attention from a number of scholars. Anderson references such current work on Mormon schismatic movements and broader subjects, much of which drew on his work. Perhaps the book’s most interesting and unintended influence was on that obscure 1980s messianic sect, in Montana, which learned of Morris through Joseph Morris and the Saga of the Morrisites.

[more]
cover of Joseph Smith III: PRAGMATIC PROPHET

Joseph Smith III

PRAGMATIC PROPHET

Roger D. Launius

University of Illinois Press, 1999

This masterful study charts the extensive common ground and telling differences between two widely separated coal-mining communities: Lanarkshire, in the Clyde Valley of southwest Scotland, and the northern Illinois coalfield that became a prime destination for skilled Scottish migrant miners in the mid-nineteenth century.   Challenging the prevailing exceptionalist paradigm of labor history, John Laslett examines the social, economic, and political context of each of these communities in generous detail. He traces the progressive heightening of class consciousness as the coal industry evolved from skilled hand labor to an increasingly mechanized extraction process and the escalating hostility between miners and mineowners as their interests split along class lines. Examining the rise of militant industrial unionism in both areas, Laslett provides a sophisticated explanation of the American and Scottish miners' divergent approaches to collectivist solutions.   Based on a profound knowledge of both communities, Colliers across the Sea tells a compelling story of industrial transformation's human costs, of conflict and greed, and of democratic aspirations and community.
[more]
cover of Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham: Dances in Literature and Cinema

Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham

Dances in Literature and Cinema

Hannah Durkin

University of Illinois Press, 2019

Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham were the two most acclaimed and commercially successful African American dancers of their era and among the first black women to enjoy international screen careers. Both also produced fascinating memoirs that provided vital insights into their artistic philosophies and choices. However, difficulties in accessing and categorizing their works on the screen and on the page have obscured their contributions to film and literature. Hannah Durkin investigates Baker and Dunham’s films and writings to shed new light on their legacies as transatlantic artists and civil rights figures. Their trailblazing dancing and choreography reflected a belief that they could use film to confront racist assumptions while also imagining—within significant confines—new aesthetic possibilities for black women. Their writings, meanwhile, revealed their creative process, engagement with criticism, and the ways each mediated cultural constructions of black women's identities. Durkin pays particular attention to the ways dancing bodies function as ever-changing signifiers and de-stabilizing transmitters of cultural identity. In addition, she offers an overdue appraisal of Baker and Dunham's places in cinematic and literary history.
[more]
cover of Joseph’s Temples: The Dynamic Relationship between Freemasonry and Mormonism

Joseph’s Temples

The Dynamic Relationship between Freemasonry and Mormonism

Michael W. Homer

University of Utah Press, 2014

The apparent parallels between Mormon ritual and doctrine and those of Freemasonry have long been recognized. That Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and other early church leaders were, at least for a time, Masons, is common knowledge. Yet while early historians of the LDS Church openly acknowledged this connection, the question of influence was later dismissed and almost became taboo among faithful church members. Just as Mormons have tried to downplay any ties to Freemasonry, Masons have sought to distance themselves from Mormonism. In Joseph’s Temples, Michael Homer reveals how deeply the currents of Freemasonry and Mormonism entwined in the early nineteenth century. He goes on to lay out the later declining course of relations between the two movements, until a détente in recent years.
 
There are indications that Freemasonry was a pervasive foundational element in Mormonism and that its rituals and origin legends influenced not just the secret ceremonies of the LDS temples but also such important matters as the organization of the Mormon priesthood, the foundation of the women’s Relief Society, the introduction and concealment of polygamy, and the church’s position on African Americans’ full membership. Freemasonry was also an important facet of Mormons’ relations with broader American society.
 
The two movements intertwined within a historical context of early American intellectual, social, and religious ferment, which influenced each of them and in varying times and situations placed them either in the current or against the flow of mainstream American culture and politics. Joseph’s Temples provides a comprehensive examination of a dynamic relationship and makes a significant contribution to the history of Mormonism, Freemasonry, and their places in American history. 

Recipient of the Meritorious Book Award from the Utah Division of State History
[more]
cover of Josh Gibson: The Power and the Darkness

Josh Gibson

The Power and the Darkness

Mark Ribowsky

University of Illinois Press, 1996

It is said that Josh Gibson is the only man ever to have hit a fair ball out of Yankee Stadium. Some claim he hit as many as seventy-five home runs in a season. All agreed he was a frightening hitter to face.  What Satchel Paige was to pitching in the Negro leagues, Gibson was to hitting: their greatest star, biggest gate attraction, and most important symbol.
 
Though Gibson is best remembered as "the black Babe Ruth," Ruth became a beloved symbol of the national pastime, while Gibson lived a life veiled in the darkness that came both from the shadow world of the Negro leagues and from within his own tortured soul.
 
Mark Ribowsky, the widely acclaimed biographer of Satchel Paige, pulls no punches in his portrait of this magnificent, troubled athlete. This is the most complete, thorough, and authoritative account of the life of black ball's greatest hitter, and one of its most important stars.
[more]
cover of José Martí's Our America: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies

José Martí's Our America

From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies

Jeffrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández, eds.

Duke University Press, 1998

Considerable attention has been given to Cuban poet, essayist, and activist José Martí’s 1891 essay “Nuestra América,” but relatively little has been paid to the rest of the journalistic work that Martí produced during his fourteen-year exile in the United States. In José Martí’s Our America, Jeffrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández present essays from Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S.-based scholars who consider Martí’s rich and underexplored body of work and position Martí as an emblem of New American studies.
A Cuban exile from 1881 to 1895, Martí was a correspondent writing in New York for various Latin American newspapers. Grasping the significance of rising U.S. imperial power, he came to understand the Americas as a complex system of kindred—but not equal—national formations whose cultural and political integrity was threatened by the overbearing aggressiveness of the United States. This collection explores how in his journalistic work Martí critiques U.S. racism, imperialism, and capitalism; warns Latin America of impending U.S. geographical, cultural, and economic annexation; and calls for recognition of the diversity of America’s cultural voices. Reinforcing Martí’s hemispheric vision with essays by a wide range of scholars who investigate his analysis of the United States, his significance as a Latino outsider, and his analyses of Latin American cultural politics, this volume explores the affinities between Martí’s thought and current reexaminations of what it means to study America.
José Martí’s Our America offers a new understanding of Martí’s ambiguous and problematic relation with the United States and will engage scholars and students in American, Latin American, and Latino studies as well as those interested in cultural, postcolonial, gender, and ethnic studies.

Contributors. Jeffrey Belnap, Raúl Fernández, Ada Ferrer, Susan Gillman, George Lipsitz, Oscar Martí, David Noble, Donald E. Pease, Beatrice Pita, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Susana Rotker, José David Saldívar, Rosaura Sánchez, Enrico Mario Santí, Doris Sommer, Brook Thomas

[more]
cover of Journal I, 1945-1955

Journal I, 1945-1955

Mircea Eliade

University of Chicago Press, 1990

Journal I is a story of revewal—of the new life that began for Mircea Eliade in the fall of 1945 when he became an expatriate. Eliade came to Paris virtually empty-handed, following the death of his first wife and the Soviet takeover of Romania, which made him a persona non grata there. He had left half a lifetime in Romania: his parents, whom he never saw again; his library; unpublished and unfinished manuscripts, including the journal notebooks prior to 1940; an academic career; and Zalmoxis, the journal of religious studies he founded.

During the lean years in Paris Eliade lived and worked in small, cold rooms; prepared meals on a Primus stove; pawned his valuables; and asked friends for loans. Eventually he secured a research stipend from the Bollingen Foundation. His ten years in Paris were among his most productive; the books he wrote during this period brought him worldwide acclaim as a historian of religions. He records his first meetings with Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Gershom Scholem, Georges Bataille, André Breton, Raffaele Pettazzoni, and many other scholars and writers.

Eliade also continued to write literary works. Numerous entries describe his five-year struggle with his novel The Forbidden Forest. Spanning the twelve fateful years from 1936 to 1948, it expresses within a fictional framework the central themes of Eliade's work on religions. Writing the novel was a Herculean task in which Eliade summarized and memorialized his old Romanian life.
[more]
cover of Journal II, 1957-1969

Journal II, 1957-1969

Mircea Eliade

University of Chicago Press, 1989

Mircea Eliade's journal of the years 1957-1969, originally published in English under the title No Souvenirs, is the testimony of a "wandering scholar" caught between three worlds: his native Romania, the France he fled to, and his last homeland, the United States. The journal is filled with his work, dreams, memories of his youth, stories of his travels, the reflections of each day.
[more]
cover of Journal III, 1970-1978

Journal III, 1970-1978

Mircea Eliade

University of Chicago Press, 1989

More an eloquent chronicle of the mind's life than a recital of daily routine, this volume of Mircea Eliade's journal offers a remarkably candid portrait of a renowned scholar and his work. The entries—full of marvelous ideas, outlines for works never written, responses to the works of others, and much more—reveal many rarely glimpsed sides of the private, as well as public, man. What did he really think of the students who came to him for instruction in black magic? What were his private reflections on feminism, student drug use, the sexual revolution, the nature of American scholars and scholarship? Who were his best friends, why did he enjoy their company, and why did he shun the company of others?

Quite apart from the personal, biographical interest the journal holds, it is a document of cultural and intellectual significance. Eliade remarks on such colleagues and friends as Jung, Dumézil, Ricoeur, Bellow, and Ionesco. Moreover, the period covered encompasses Eliade's most active years as a teacher, and the journal beautifully reflects his developing views on religion, history, and the nature of academic culture. Bits and pieces of Eliade's past life are juxtaposed with thoughts about ongoing projects and work yet to be undertaken as well as with anecdotes of his travels and comments on world events.

A genuine treat for Eliade readers and those interested in history of religions, Journal III provides new perspectives on many of Eliade's other works—the History of Religious Ideas, Ordeal by Labyrinth, the Autobiography. At the same time the journal is a mature scholar's record of the aftermath of the 1960s, a turbulent period that profoundly affected American university life. As such, these writings hold valuable insights into not only the life and work of one man but also the cultural history of an entire era.
[more]
cover of Journal IV, 1979-1985

Journal IV, 1979-1985

Mircea Eliade

University of Chicago Press, 1989

Journal IV is the first publication, in a translation from the Romanian manuscript, of the journal that Mircea Eliade kept during the last seven years of his life. In this period, Eliade is ensconced as a famous scholar—his works are being translated into many languages and books about him arrive regularly in the mail. His encounters with scholars of like repute are recorded in the journal; after a party in Paris, Eliade shares a taxi with Claude Lévi-Strauss and inadvertently makes off with his raincoat.

Running like a fault line through the peak of his success, however, is Eliade's painful awareness of his physical decline—failing vision, arthritic hands, and continual fatigue. Again and again he repeats how little time he has to finish the projects he is working on—his autobiography, the third and fourth volumes of his History of Religious Ideas, and the duties associated with his editorship of the Encyclopedia of Religion. He poignantly recounts the sharpest blow: the disorganization and eventual destruction by fire of his personal library.

Within the scope of Journal IV Eliade and his world go to ruin. What does not decline is the vivid and persistent voice of Eliade the writer, an unbreaking voice that—with death only months away—plans a reply to critics, plots out an article, and ruminates on characters to people another novella.
[more]
cover of Journal of the American Revolution 2015: Annual Volume

Journal of the American Revolution 2015

Annual Volume

Todd Andrlik

Westholme Publishing, 2015

The Journal of the American Revolution, Annual Volume 2015, presents the journal’s best historical research and writing over the past calendar year. The volume is designed for institutions, scholars, and enthusiasts to provide a convenient overview of the latest research and scholarship in American Revolution studies. The sixty articles in the 2015 edition include:

How Samuel Adams Recruited Sons of Liberty by J. L. Bell
A Patriot–Loyalist: Playing Both Sides by Todd W. Braisted
How Old Were Redcoats? Age and Experience of British Soldiers in America by Don N. Hagist
The Great West Point Chain by Hugh T. Harrington
Raid Across the Ice: The British Operation to Capture Washington by Benjamin Huggins
So Heavy a Trial: The Burning of New York’s First Capital by Jack Kelly
An Elegant Dinner with General Washington at Valley Forge Headquarters by Nancy K. Loane
Mount Vernon: A Landscape for the New Cincinnatus by Joseph Manca
The British Spy Plot to Capture Fort Ticonderoga by John A. Nagy
The Top Ten British Losers by Andrew O’Shaughnessy
Honorable Lords and Pretend Barons: Sorting Out the Noblemen of the American Revolution by Jim Piecuch
Paul Revere’s Other Riders and Rides by Ray Raphael
William Lee and Oney Judge: A Look at George Washington and Slavery by Mary V. Thompson.

[more]
cover of Journal of the American Revolution 2016: Annual Volume

Journal of the American Revolution 2016

Annual Volume

Todd Andrlik

Westholme Publishing, 2016

The Journal of the American Revolution, Annual Volume 2016, presents the journal’s best historical research and writing over the past calendar year. The volume is designed for institutions, scholars, and enthusiasts to provide a convenient overview of the latest research and scholarship in American Revolution studies. The forty-five articles in the 2016 edition include: “Why Did George Washington Become a Revolutionary?” by Ray Raphael; “Governor Franklin Makes His Move” by Thomas Fleming; “Enlisting Lasses: Women Who Aspired to be Soldiers” by Don N. Hagist; “Tides and Tonnage: A Different Take on the Boston Tea Party” by Hugh T. Harrington; “How Was the Revolutionary War Paid For” by John L. Smith, Jr.; “Murder Along the Creek: Taking a Closer Look at the Sugarloaf Massacre” by Thomas Verenna; “The Loyalist Refugee Experience in Canada” by Alexander Cain; “Lafayette’s Second Voyage to America” by Kim Burdick; “How Paul Revere’s Ride was Published and Censored in 1775” by Todd Andrlik; “A Melancholy Accident: The Disastrous Explosion at Charleston” by Joshua Shepherd; “A Spy Wins a Purple Heart” by Todd Braisted; “Faking It: British Counterfeiting During the American Revolution” by Stuart Hatfield.
[more]
cover of Journal of the American Revolution 2017: Annual Volume

Journal of the American Revolution 2017

Annual Volume

Todd Andrlik

Westholme Publishing, 2017

The Journal of the American Revolution, Annual Volume 2017, presents the journal’s best historical research and writing over the past calendar year. The volume is designed for institutions, scholars, and enthusiasts to provide a con­venient overview of the latest research and scholarship in American Revolution studies.
The forty-six articles in the 2017 edition include:
Why the British Lost the Battle of Sullivan’s Island by C. L. Bragg
The Tiger Aids the Eaglet: How India Secured America’s Independence  by Richard Sambasivam
How Yorktown Almost Couldn’t Afford to Happen by John Smith
Was Richard Stockton a Hero? by Christian M. McBurney
The Southern Expedition of 1776: The American Revolution’s Best Kept Secret by Roger Smith
Religious Liberty and Its Virginia Roots by Alex Colvin
Mount Vernon During the American Revolution by Mary V. Thompson
Why God is in the Declaration but not the Constitution by Anthony J. Minna
Colonel Tench Tilghman: George Washington’s Eyes and Ears by Jeff Dacus
The Stockbridge-Mohican Community, 1775–1783  by Bryan Rindfleisch
Two Years Aboard the Welcome: The American Revolution on Lake Huron by Tyler Rudd Putman 
 
[more]
cover of Journal of the American Revolution 2018: Annual Volume

Journal of the American Revolution 2018

Annual Volume

Don N. Hagist

Westholme Publishing, 2018

The Journal of the American Revolution, Annual Volume 2018, presents the journal’s best historical research and writing over the past calendar year. The volume is designed for institutions, scholars, and enthusiasts to provide a convenient overview of the latest research and scholarship in American Revolution studies. The forty-one articles in the 2018 edition include:

Anti-Indian Radicalization in the Early American West, 1774–1795 by Darren R. Reid
The Setauket Raid, December 1777 by Phillip R. Giffin
The 3rd New Jersey Regiment’s Plundering of Johnson Hall by Philip D. Weaver
A Proposed Alliance of the Knights of Malta and the United States of America by Bruce Ware Allen
Country Crowds in Revolutionary Massachusetts: Mobs and Militia by Ray Raphael
Lafayette: An Acerbic Tongue or an Incisive Judge of Character? by Gene Procknow
Admiral Rodney Ousts the Jews from St. Eustatius by Louis Arthur Norton
Preventing Slave Insurrection in South Carolina & Georgia, 1775–1776 by Jim Piecuch
The “P” is for Profit: Revolutionary War Privateers and the Slave Trade by Michael Thomin
The Remarkable Spanish Pilgrimage of John Adams by John L. Smith, Jr.
Thomas Paine, Deism, and the Masonic Fraternity by Shai Afsai
A Fresh Look at Major Patrick Ferguson by Wayne Lynch
Displaced: The Donation People of 1775 by Katie Turner Getty

[more]
cover of Journal of the American Revolution 2019: Annual Volume

Journal of the American Revolution 2019

Annual Volume

Don N. Hagist

Westholme Publishing, 2019

The Year’s Best Articles from the Leading On-Line Source of New Research on the American Revolution and Founding Eras
The Journal of the American Revolution, Annual Volume 2019, presents the journal’s best historical research and writing over the past calendar year. The volume is designed for institutions, scholars, and enthusiasts to provide a convenient overview of the latest research and scholarship in American Revolution and Founding Era studies. The thirty-eight articles in the 2019 edition include: 
Join, or Die: Political and Religious Controversy Over Franklin’s Snake Cartoon by Daniel P. Stone
The Connecticut Captivity of William Franklin, Loyalist by Louis Arthur Norton
Revisiting the Prayer at Valley Forge by Blake McGready
John the Painter: Terrorist for America by Lars Hedbor
Who Picked the Committees at the Constitutional Convention? by David O. Stewart
Norfolk, Virginia, Sacked by North Carolina and Virginia Troops by Patrick H. Hannum
Elias Hasket Derby: The Privateer Who Pioneered the Russian Trade by Nick Deluca
Benedict Arnold’s Master Plan (for British) Victory by John Knight
China and the American Revolution by Simon Hill
Moravians in the Middle: The Gnadenhutten Massacre by Eric Sterner
Slavery Through the Eyes of Revolutionary Generals by Gene Procknow
Our Man in Minorca: Lewis Littlepage, American Volunteer with the Spanish Armed Forces by Larrie D. Ferreiro
Patrick Tonyn: Britain’s Most Effective Revolutionary-Era Royal Governor by Jim Piecuch
Jefferson’s Reckoning: The Sage of Monticello’s Haunting Final Years by Geoff Smock
[more]
cover of Journal of the American Revolution 2020: Annual Volume

Journal of the American Revolution 2020

Annual Volume

Don N. Hagist

Westholme Publishing, 2020

The Year’s Best Articles from the Leading On-Line Source of New Research on the American Revolution and Founding Eras
The Journal of the American Revolution, Annual Volume 2020, presents the journal’s best historical research and writing over the past calendar year. The volume is designed for institutions, scholars, and enthusiasts to provide a convenient overview of the latest research and scholarship in American Revolution and Founding Era studies. The thirty-six articles in the 2020 edition include: 
Bernard E. Griffiths: Trumpeter Barney of the Queen’s Rangers, Chelsea Pensioner—and Freed Slave by Todd W. Braisted
The Declaration of Independence: Did John Hancock Really Say that about his Signature?—and Other Signing Stories by J. L. Bell
Les Habitants: Collaboration and Pro-American Violence in Canada, 1774–1776 by Sebastian van Bastelaer
Misadventures in the Countryside: Escape from a British Prison Ship by Katie Turner Getty
The Revolutionary Memories of New York Loyalists: Thomas Jones and William Smith, Jr. by Cho-Chien Feng
The East India Company and Parliament’s “Fateful Decision” of 1767 by Steven Neill
Massachusetts Privateers During the Siege of Boston by Alexander Cain
The Constitution Counted Free Women and Children—And It Mattered by Andrew M. Schocket, with Kinzey M. McLaren-Czerr and Colin J. Spicer
How Magna Carta Influenced the American Revolution by Jason Yonce
Putting a Price on Loyalty: Mary Loring’s List of Losses by John Knight
[more]
cover of Journal of the American Revolution 2021: Annual Volume

Journal of the American Revolution 2021

Annual Volume

Don N. Hagist

Westholme Publishing, 2021

The Year’s Best Articles from the Leading On-Line Source of New Research on the Revolution and Founding Eras
The Journal of the American Revolution, Annual Volume 2021, presents the journal’s best historical research and writing over the past calendar year. The volume is designed for institutions, scholars, and enthusiasts to provide a convenient overview of the latest research and scholarship in American Revolution and Founding Era studies. The thirty-four articles in the 2021 edition include: 
Alexander Hamilton’s Missing Years: New Discoveries and Insights into the Little Lion’s Caribbean Childhood by Ruud Stelten and Alexandre Hinton
The Lenape Origins of an Independent America: The Catalyst of Pontiac’s War, 1763–1765 by Kevin A. Conn
Impeachment: The Framers Debate and Discuss by Ray Raphael
The First Efforts to Limit the African Slave Trade by Christian M. McBurney
What Killed Prisoners of War?—A Medical Investigation by Brian Patrick O'Malley
The Mysterious March of Horatio Gates by Andrew Waters
Minorcans, New Smyrna, and the American Revolution in East Florida by George Kotlik
Stony Point: The Second Occupation, July–October 1779 by Michael J. F. Sheehan
A Demographic View of North Carolina Militia and State Troops, 1775–1783 by Douglas R. Dorney, Jr.
The Revolutionary War Origin of the Whistleblower Law by Louis Arthur Norton
Mapping the Battle of Eutaw Springs: Modern GIS Solves a Historic Mystery by Stephen John Katzberg
[more]
cover of Journal of the American Revolution 2022: Annual Volume

Journal of the American Revolution 2022

Annual Volume

Don N. Hagist

Westholme Publishing, 2022

The year’s best articles from the leading on-line source of new research on the Revolution and Founding eras
The Journal of the American Revolution, Annual Volume 2022, presents the journal’s best historical research and writing over the past calendar year. The volume is designed for institutions, scholars, and enthusiasts to provide a convenient overview of the latest research and scholarship in American Revolution and Founding Era studies. This year's articles are:
Massachusettensis and Novanglus: The Last Great Debate Prior to the War by James M. Smith
Wampum Belts to Canada: Stockbridge Indian Ambassadors’ Dangerous 1775 Peace Mission by Mark R. Anderson
Ethan Allen’s “Motley Parcel of Soldiery” at Montreal by Mark R. Anderson
The Devil at the Helm: A Quote That Went Astray by Don N. Hagist
Thomas Knowlton’s Revolution by David Price
Major Robert Rogers and the American Revolution by Scott M. Smith
La Petite Guerre and Indian Irregular Manner of War: Siblings, But Not Twins by Brian Gerring
George Washington and the First Mandatory Immunization by Richard J. Werther
French Adventurers, Patriots, and Pretentious Imposters in the Fight for American Independence by Arthur S. Lefkowitz
The Cherokee-American War from the Cherokee Perspective by Jordan Baker
The Numerical Strength of George Washington’s Army During the 1777 Philadelphia Campaign by Gary Ecelbarger and Michael C. Harris
A Reconsideration of Continental Army Numerical Strength at Valley Forge by Gary Ecelbarger and Michael C. Harris
American Indians at Valley Forge by Joseph Lee Boyle
The Discovery of a Letter from a Soldier of the First Rhode Island Regiment by Christian McBurney
“The Predicament We Are In”: How Paperwork Saved the Continental Army by Mike Matheny
Sir Henry Clinton’s Generalship by John Ferling
The Varick Transcripts and the Preservation of the War by Justin McHenry
“A Mere Youth”: James Monroe’s Revolutionary War by John A. Ruddima
Haitian Soldiers at the Siege of Savannah by Robert S. Davis
George Washington’s Culper Spy Ring: Separating Fact from Fiction by Bill Bleyer
Texas, Cattle, Cowboys, Ranchers, Indian Raids, and the American Revolution by George Kotlik
The Odyssey of Loyalist Colonel Samuel Bryan by Douglas R. Dorney, Jr.
“She Had Gone to the Army . . . to Her Husband”: Judith Lines’s Unremarked Life by John U. Rees
The Yorktown Tragedy: George Washington’s Slave Roundup by Gregory J. W. Urwin
Such as are Absolutely Free: Benjamin Thompson’s Black Troopers by Todd W. Braisted
The King of Sweden: Friendly Foe of the United States by Richard Werther
Shifting Indian Policy of the Articles of Confederation by John DeLee
Justice, Mercy, and Treason: John Marshall’s and Mercy Otis Warren’s Treatments of Benedict Arnold by Ray Mirante
A Chance Amiss: George Washington and the Fiasco of Spain’s Gift Diplomacy by Elisa Vargas
The Constitutional Convention Debates the Electoral College by Jason Yonce
Respected Citizen of Washington City: The Mystery of  Will Costin, Freed Mount Vernon Slave by David O. Stewart
The Impeachment of Senator William Blount  by Andrew A. Zellers-Frederick
Instinctive Temporary Unity: Examining Public Opinion During the Whiskey Rebellion by Jonathan Curran
“Good and Sufficient Testimony”: The Development of the Revolutionary War Pension Plan by Michael Barbieri

[more]
cover of Journal of the American Revolution 2023: Annual Volume

Journal of the American Revolution 2023

Annual Volume

Don N. Hagist

Westholme Publishing, 2023

The year’s best articles from the leading on-line source of new research on the American Revolution and Founding Eras

The Journal of the American Revolution, Annual Volume 2023, presents the journal’s best historical research and writing over the past calendar year. The volume is designed for institutions, scholars, and enthusiasts to provide a convenient overview of the latest research and scholarship in American Revolution and Founding Era studies. Chosen by the Journal's editorial board, this year's articles are:

Charles Thomson and the Delaware by James M. Smith
Benjamin Franklin’s Unconventional Marriage to Deborah Read by Nancy Rubin Stuart
Governor William Franklin: Sagorighweyoghsta, “Great Arbiter” or “Doer of Justice” by Joseph E. Wroblewski
One of the “Powers for Good in the World:” Mercy Otis Warren by James M. Deitch
The British Soldiers Who Marched to Concord, April 19, 1775 by Don N. Hagist
Virginian Ned Streater, African American Minute Man by Patrick H. Hannum
The 1775 Duel Between Henry Laurens and John Faucheraud Grimké by Aaron J. Palmer
Washington’s Final Retreat: Asylum? by Alexander Lenarchyk
George III’s (Implicit) Sanction of the American Revolution by M. Andrew Holowchak
Edward Hand’s American Journey by David Price
Jemima Howe, Frontier Pioneer to Wealthy Widow by Jane Strachan
Hell’s Half-Acre: The Fall of Loyalist Crean Brush by Eric Wiser
Thomas Plumb, British Soldier, Writes Home from Rhode Island by Don N. Hagist
Unraveling the Beginning and Final Phasesin the Emergence of the French Alliance by Marvin L. Simner
Marinus Willett: The Exploits of an Unheralded War Hero by Richard J. Werther
Point/Counterpoint, 1777 Style: Dueling Proclamations from Israel Putnam and William Tryon by Todd W. Braisted
Did George Washington Swear at Charles Lee During the Battle of Monmouth? by Christian McBurney
Black Drummers in a Redcoat Regiment by Don N. Hagist
Under the Banner of War: Frontier Militia and Uncontrolled Violence by Timothy C. Hemmis
Rhode Island Acts to Prevent an Enslaved Family from Being Transported to the South by Christian McBurney
British Soldier John Ward Wins Back His Pocketbook by Don N. Hagist
Anthony Wayne’s Repulse at Bull’s Ferry, July 21, 1780 by Jim Piecuch
Two Hurricanes One Week Apart in 1780 by Bob Ruppert
Top Ten Weather Interventions by Don N. Hagist
The Fruits of Victory: Loyalist Prisoners in the Aftermath of Kings Mountain by William Caldwell
Top Ten Quotes by Francis Lord Rawdon by Todd W. Braisted
Russia and the Armed Neutrality of 1780 by Eric Sterner
Prelude to Yorktown: Washington and Rochambeau in New York by Benjamin Huggins
The Abdication(s) of King George III by Bob Ruppert
Jemima Howe: Two Competing Captivity Narratives by Jane Strachan
The Articles of Confederation—A Silver Lining by Richard J. Werther
Undeceived: Who Would Write the Political Story of the Revolution? by James M. Smith
Partisan Politics and the Laws Which Shaped the First Congress by Samuel T. Lair
“Characters Pre-eminent for Virtue and Ability”: The First Partisan Application of the Electoral College by Shawn David McGhee
Weaponizing Impeachment: Justice Samuel Chase and President Thomas Jefferson’s Battle Over the Process by Al Dickenson
Insurrection and Speculation: A Farmer, Financier, and a Surprising “Sharper” Seeded the Constitution by Scott M. Smith
Natural History in Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary America by Matteo Giuliani
A Great Englishman? British Views of George Washington, from Revolution to Rapprochement by Sam Edwards

 

[more]
cover of Journal of the American Revolution 2024: Annual Volume

Journal of the American Revolution 2024

Annual Volume

Don N. Hagist

Westholme Publishing, 2024

The year’s best articles from the leading on-line source of new research on the Revolution and Founding eras

The Journal of the American Revolution, Annual Volume 2024, presents the journal’s best historical research and writing over the past calendar year. The volume is designed for institutions, scholars, and enthusiasts to provide a convenient overview of the latest research and scholarship in American Revolution and Founding Era studies. 

Contents
By Stratagem and Hard Fighting: The Improbable Capture of Eleven British Ships by Mark R. Anderson
Remember Baker: A Green Mountain Boy’s Controversial Death and Its Consequences by Mark R. Anderson
John Hancock’s Politics and Personality in Ten Quotes by Brooke Barbie
The Return of Samuel Dyer: An Attempted Assassination in Revolutionary Boston by J. L. Bell
The Secrets of Samuel Dyer by J. L. Bell
Two Encounters: Captain Abraham Van Dyck, the ”Negro Man,” and Prince Pitkin by Benjamin L. Carp
The French Army in Williamsburg, Virginia, 1781–1782 by Michael Cecere
The Delcastle Cannonball by Walter A. Chiquione
Thomas Paine on Popular Government in America: Evolution of a Radical’s Thinking by Jett Conner
How the (First) West Was Won: Federalist Treaties that Reshaped the Frontier by Brady J. Crytzer
George Washington’s Information War by Benjamin George
British Soldiers Wounded at Eutaw Springs by Don N. Hagist
Emily Geiger’s Fabulous Ride by C. Leon, Harris, Harriet Imrey, Conner Runyan
Thomas Jefferson and the Conditions of Good History: Writing About the American Revolution by Andrew M. Holowchak
Mercy Otis Warren: Revolutionary Propagandist by Jonathan House
Captain James Morris of the Connecticut Light Infantry by Chip Langston
Danger at the Breach by Doug MacIntyre
Attended with Disagreeable Consequences: Cross-Border Shopping for Loyalist Provisions, 1783–1784by Stuart Lyall Manson
Smallpox Threatens an American Privateer at Sea by Christian McBurney
“The Modern American Wallace:” Relics, Revolutions, and Revolutionaries by Shawn David McGhee
“Those Noble Qualities”: Classical Pseudonyms as Reflections of Divergent Republican Value Systems by Shawn David McGhee
George Washington’s “Rules of Civility”: An Early American Literary Mystery by Shawn David McGhee
Reframing George Washington’s Clothing at the Second Continental Congress by Shawn David McGhee
John Adams and Nathanael Greene Debate the Role of the Military by Curtis F. Morgan, Jr.
The Perfidious Benjamin Church and Paul Revere by Louis Arthur Norton
Algernon Sidney and the American Revolution by David Otersen
Eutaw Springs and the Ambiguity of Victory by David Price
Charles Lee—The Continental Army’s Most Prolific Essayist General by Gene Procknow
Charles Lee’s First Inklings of Fractious American Political Battles by Gene Procknow
The Highs and Lows of Ethan Allen’s Reputation as Reported by Revolutionary-Era Newspapers by Gene Procknow
“Earned By Veteran Intrepidity”: Spencer’s Ordinary, June 26, 1781 by Conor Robison
William Walker Crosses Kings Ferry by Michael J. F. Sheehan
Early Presidential Elections: The Questionable Use of Electors to Correct Voter Imbalances by Marvin L. Simner
The Purpose of the Electoral College: A Seemingly Endless Controversy by Marvin L. Simner
Captain Luke Day: A Forgotten Leader of ”Shays’s Rebellion” by Scott M. Smith
Engaging the Glasgow by Eric Sterner
Smallpox by Inoculation: The Tragedy of New York’s Rosewell Beebe by Philip D. Weaver
The “Western Forts” of the 1783 Treaty of Paris by Richard J. Werther
Clark versus Livingston: Pettiness, Paper Money, and Elections by Eric Wise
Burlington 1776: The Forgotten Opportunity by Colin Zimmerman
[more]
cover of Journal of the American Revolution 2025: Annual Volume

Journal of the American Revolution 2025

Annual Volume

Don N. Hagist

Westholme Publishing, 2025

The year’s best articles from the leading on-line source of new research on the Revolution and Founding eras

The Journal of the American Revolution, Annual Volume 2025, presents the journal’s best historical research and writing over the past calendar year. The volume of thirty-five articles is designed for institutions, scholars, and enthusiasts to provide a convenient overview of the latest research and scholarship in American Revolution and Founding Era studies.
[more]
cover of Journalism 1908: Birth of a Profession

Journalism 1908

Birth of a Profession

Edited by Betty Houchin Winfield

University of Missouri Press, 2008

The year 1908 was not remarkable by most accounts, but it was an auspicious year for journalism. As newspapers sought to recover from big-city yellow journalism and circulation wars that reached their boiling point a few years earlier during the Spanish-American War, press clubs began to champion higher education. And schools dedicated to journalism education, led by the University of Missouri, began to emerge. Now sanctioned by universities, journalism could teach acceptable behavior and establish credentials. It was nothing less than the birth of a profession.

Journalism—1908 opens a window on mass communication a century ago. It tells how the news media in the United States were fundamentally changed by the creation of academic departments and schools of journalism, by the founding of the National Press Club, and by exciting advances that included early newsreels, the introduction of halftones to print, and even changes in newspaper design.

Journalism educator Betty Houchin Winfield has gathered a team of well-known media scholars, all specialists in particular areas of journalism history, to examine the status of their profession in 1908: news organizations, business practices, media law, advertising, forms of coverage from sports to arts, and more. Various facets of journalism are explored and situated within the country’s history and the movement toward reform and professionalism—not only formalized standards and ethics but also labor issues concerning pay, hours, and job differentiation that came with the emergence of new technologies.

This overview of a watershed year is national in scope, examining early journalism education programs not only at Missouri but also at such schools as Colgate, Washington and Lee, Wisconsin, and Columbia. It also reviews the status of women in the profession and looks beyond big-city papers to Progressive Era magazines, the immigrant press, and African American publications.

Journalism—1908 commemorates a century of progress in the media and, given the place of Missouri’s School of Journalism in that history, is an appropriate celebration of that school’s centennial. It is a lode of information about journalism education history that will surprise even many of those in the field and marks a seminal year with lasting significance for the profession.
[more]
cover of Journalism and Realism: Rendering American Life

Journalism and Realism

Rendering American Life

Thomas B Connery

Northwestern University Press, 2011

Both newspaper and magazine journalism in the nineteenth century fully participated in the development and emergence of American Realism in the arts, which attempted to accurately portray everyday life, especially in fiction. Magazines and newspapers provided the raw material for American Realism, but were also its early and vocal advocates. This symbiotic relationship reached its peak from 1890 to 1910, when writers who might be called the first literary journalists (or, much later, “new journalists”) closed the circle by more fully adopting the fiction writer’s style of attempting to “show the reader real life,” as their literary progeny Tom Wolfe would put it many years later. Journalism and Realism fills a much-needed gap in the scholarship of American Realism.
[more]
cover of Journalism and Truth: Strange Bedfellows

Journalism and Truth

Strange Bedfellows

Tom Goldstein

Northwestern University Press, 2007

The complaint is all too common: I know something about that, and the news got it wrong.  Why this should be, and what it says about the relationship between journalism and truth, is exactly the question that is at the core of Tom Goldstein’s very timely book. 

Other disciplines, Goldstein tells us, have clear protocols for gathering evidence and searching for truth.  Journalism, however, has some curious conventions that may actually work against such a goal.  Looking at how journalism has changed over time--and with it, notions about accuracy and truth in reporting—Goldstein explores how these long-standing and ultimately untrustworthy conventions developed.  He also examines why reliable standards of objectivity and accuracy are critical not just to a free press but to the democratic society it informs and serves.  From a historical overview to a reconsideration of a misunderstood book about journalism (The Journalist and the Murderer) to a reflection on the coverage of the war in Iraq, his book offers a remarkably wide-ranging and thought-provoking account of how journalism and truth work—or fail to work—together, and why it matters.
[more]