8642 books match the query '20th Century' and 251 start with l

cover of Lone Stars III: A Legacy of Texas Quilts, 1986-2011

Lone Stars III

A Legacy of Texas Quilts, 1986-2011

By Karoline Patterson Bresenhan and Nancy O'Bryant Puentes

University of Texas Press, 2011

From frontier times in the Republic of Texas until today, Texans have been making gorgeous quilts. Karoline Patterson Bresenhan and Nancy O'Bryant Puentes documented the first 150 years of the state's rich heritage of quilt art in Lone Stars: A Legacy of Texas Quilts, 1836–1936 and Lone Stars II: A Legacy of Texas Quilts, 1936–1986. Now in Lone Stars III, they bring the Texas quilt story into the twenty-first century, presenting two hundred traditional and art quilts that represent "the best of the best" quilts created since 1986.

The quilts in Lone Stars III display the explosion of creativity that has transformed quilting over the last quarter century. Some of the quilts tell stories, create landscapes, record events, and memorialize people. Others present abstract designs that celebrate form and color. Their makers have embraced machine quilting, as well as hand sewing, and they often embellish their quilts with buttons, beads, lace, ribbon, and even more exotic items. Each quilt is pictured in its entirely, and some entries also include photographs of quilt details. The accompanying text describes the quilt's creation, its maker, and its physical details.

With 16.3 million American quilters who spend $3.6 billion annually on their pastime, the quilting community has truly become a force to reckon with both artistically and socially. Lone Stars III is the perfect introduction to this world of creativity.

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cover of Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-Tonk Angels: The Women of Barn Dance Radio

Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-Tonk Angels

The Women of Barn Dance Radio

Kristine M. McCusker

University of Illinois Press, 2007

American barn dance radio of the 1920s-1940s evoked comforting images of a nostalgic and stable past for listeners beset by economic problems at home and worried about totalitarian governments abroad. Sentimental images such as the mountain mother and the chaste everybody's-little-sister "girl singer" helped to sell a new consumer culture and move commercial country music from regional fare to national treasure.

Drawing on personal interviews and rich archival material from the Grand Ole Opry, Kristine M. McCusker examines the gendered politics of the images through the lives and careers of six women performers: Linda Parker, the Girls of the Golden West (Milly and Dolly Good), Lily May Ledford, Minnie Pearl, and Rose Lee Maphis.

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cover of Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and '40s

Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams

Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and '40s

Andrew S. Berish

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Any listener knows the power of music to define a place, but few can describe the how or why of this phenomenon. In Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ’40s, Andrew Berish attempts to right this wrong, showcasing how American jazz defined a culture particularly preoccupied with place. By analyzing both the performances and cultural context of leading jazz figures, including the many famous venues where they played, Berish bridges two dominant scholarly approaches to the genre, offering not only a new reading of swing era jazz but an entirely new framework for musical analysis in general, one that examines how the geographical realities of daily life can be transformed into musical sound.
 
Focusing on white bandleader Jan Garber, black bandleader Duke Ellington, white saxophonist Charlie Barnet, and black guitarist Charlie Christian, as well as traveling from Catalina Island to Manhattan to Oklahoma City, Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams depicts not only a geography of race but how this geography was disrupted, how these musicians crossed physical and racial boundaries—from black to white, South to North, and rural to urban—and how they found expression for these movements in the insistent music they were creating.  

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cover of Long Is the Way and Hard: One Hundred Years of the NAACP

Long Is the Way and Hard

One Hundred Years of the NAACP

Kevern Verney

University of Arkansas Press, 2009

Celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary in February 2009, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has been the leading and best-known African American civil rights organization in the United States. It has played a major, and at times decisive, role in most of the important developments in the twentieth century civil rights struggle. Drawing on original and previously unpublished scholarship from leading researchers in the United States, Britain, and Europe, this important collection of sixteen original essays offers new and invaluable insights into the work and achievements of the association. The first part of the book offers challenging reappraisals of two of the NAACP’s best-known national spokespersons, Walter White and Roy Wilkins. Other essays analyze the association’s cultural initiatives and the key role played by its public-relations campaigns in the mid 1950s to counter segregationist propaganda and win over the hearts and minds of American public opinion in the wake of the NAACP’s landmark legal victory in Brown v. Board of Education. Others provide thought-provoking accounts of the association’s complex and difficult relationship with Martin Luther King, the post–World War II Civil Rights movement, and Black Power radicals of the 1960s. The second part of the collection focuses on the work of the NAACP at state, city, and local levels, examining its grassroots organization throughout the nation from Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit in the North, to California in the West, as well as states across the South including Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. Providing detailed and fascinating information on hitherto little explored aspects of the association’s work, these studies complement the previous essays by demonstrating the impact national initiatives had on local activists and analyzing the often-strained relations between the NAACP national office in New York and its regional branches.
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cover of Long Live the Counter-Revolution: Hawa Hawa' and Other Stories

Long Live the Counter-Revolution

Hawa Hawa' and Other Stories

Nabarun Bhattacharya

Seagull Books, 2022

A collection of inventive and surprising short stories from one of India’s most prominent countercultural writers.
 
In this wildly inventive collection of Nabarun Bhattacharya’s stories, we meet characters such as a trigger-happy cop in an authoritarian police state, a man who holds on to a piece of rope from a deadly noose, a retired revolutionary thrilled by delusions of grandeur, and people working for a corporation that arranges lavish suicides for a price. Ranging from scathing satires of society to surreal investigations of violence and love, these stories are also a window onto the political and social climate in Bengal, tracing both pan-Indian developments like the 1975 Emergency and local ones like militant-leftist Naxalism and the decades-long Communist reign in the state. Expertly translated from the Bengali, Hawa Hawa and Other Stories is a journey through the mind of one of the most daring countercultural writers of India, one with particular resonance in these chaotic times.
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cover of Long March Ahead: African American Churches and Public Policy in Post-Civil Rights America

Long March Ahead

African American Churches and Public Policy in Post-Civil Rights America

R. Drew Smith ed.

Duke University Press, 2004

Analyzing the extensive data gathered by the Public Influences of African American Churches project, which surveyed nearly two thousand churches across the country, Long March Ahead assesses the public policy activism of black churches since the civil rights movement. Social scientists and clergy consider the churches’ work on a range of policy matters over the past four decades: affirmative action, welfare reform, health care, women’s rights, education, and anti-apartheid activism. Some essays consider advocacy trends broadly. Others focus on specific cases, such as the role of African American churches in defeating the “One Florida” plan to end affirmative action in college admissions and state contracting or the partnership forged between police and inner-city black ministers to reduce crime in Boston during the 1990s.

Long March Ahead emphasizes the need for African American churches to complement the excellent work they do in implementing policies set by others by getting more involved in shaping public policy. The contributors explore the efficacy of different means of public policy advocacy and social service delivery, including faith-based initiatives. At the same time, they draw attention to trends that have constrained political involvement by African American churches: the increased professionalization of policy advocacy and lobbying, the underdevelopment of church organizational structures devoted to policy work, and tensions between religious imperatives and political activism. Long March Ahead takes an important look at the political role of African American churches after the great policy achievements of the civil rights era.

Contributors
Cathy J. Cohen
Megan McLaughlin
Columba Aham Nnorum
Michael Leo Owens
Desiree Pedescleaux
Barbara D. Savage
R. Drew Smith
Emilie Townes
Christopher Winship

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cover of Long Shadows: The Second World War in British Fiction and Film

Long Shadows

The Second World War in British Fiction and Film

Edited by Petra Rau

Northwestern University Press, 2016

Few countries attribute as much importance to the Second World War and its memory as Britain; arguably nowhere else has this conflict developed such longevity in cultural memory and retained such presence in contemporary culture. Long Shadows is about how literature and film have helped shape this process in Britain. More precisely, the essays collected here suggest that this is a continuous work in progress, subject to transgenerational revisions, political expediencies, commercial considerations, and the vicissitudes of popular taste. It would indeed be more accurate to speak of the meanings (plural) that the war has been given at various moments in British cultural life. These semantic variations and fluctuations in cultural import are rooted in the specificity of the British war experience, in the political aftermath of the war in Europe, and in its significance for Britain’s postwar position on the global stage. In other words, the books and films discussed in these essays respond to how the war has been interpreted and remembered; what is at stake is the way in which the war has been emplotted as a hegemonic cultural narrative about Britain.
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cover of Looking Back on the Vietnam War: Twenty-first-Century Perspectives

Looking Back on the Vietnam War

Twenty-first-Century Perspectives

Boyle, Brenda M

Rutgers University Press, 2016

More than forty years have passed since the official end of the Vietnam War, yet the war’s legacies endure. Its history and iconography still provide fodder for film and fiction, communities of war refugees have spawned a wide Vietnamese diaspora, and the United States military remains embroiled in unwinnable wars with eerie echoes of Vietnam. 
 
Looking Back on the Vietnam War brings together scholars from a broad variety of disciplines, who offer fresh insights on the war’s psychological, economic, artistic, political, and environmental impacts. Each essay examines a different facet of the war, from its representation in Marvel comic books to the experiences of Vietnamese soldiers exposed to Agent Orange. By putting these pieces together, the contributors assemble an expansive yet nuanced composite portrait of the war and its global legacies.
 
Though they come from diverse scholarly backgrounds, ranging from anthropology to film studies, the contributors are united in their commitment to original research. Whether exploring rare archives or engaging in extensive interviews, they voice perspectives that have been excluded from standard historical accounts. Looking Back on the Vietnam War thus embarks on an interdisciplinary and international investigation to discover what we remember about the war, how we remember it, and why.
 
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cover of Looking East: William Howard Taft and the 1905 U.S. Diplomatic Mission to Asia: the Photographs of Harry Fowler Woods

Looking East

William Howard Taft and the 1905 U.S. Diplomatic Mission to Asia: the Photographs of Harry Fowler Woods

Margo Taft Stever, James Taft Stever, and Hong Shen

University of Minnesota Press, 2015

Since the mid-19th century, relations between the United States in the West and Asian countries in the East have been an aggregate of diplomatic miscues and achievements, of trade policy successes and failures, and of cultural chasms and bridges. From the Treaty of Wangxia in 1844 that provided America with trading rights in China on a par with European countries to the contemporary political debates and educational partnerships in nations like Japan, Vietnam, India, and China, the element of understanding and appreciating differences has been paramount.

A singular event in this heritage of almost 150 years in the 1905 mission that sent William Howard Taft on a combination trade and culture junket to Asian countries. Occurring just a few years after U.S. Secretary of State's John Hay's 1899 Open Door Note that sought to keep China open to equitable trade with all countries, the Taft delegation primarily visited China, Japan, and the Philippines to shore up America's interests and to learn more about their emerging partners in the new century.

In Looking East, authors Margo Taft Stever, James Taft Stever, and Hong Shen explore this journey not only by an assiduous use of archives and historical analyses, but especially through the extraordinary images captured by photographer Harry Fowler Woods. Both Taft and Woods are ancestors of two of the authors so there is a particular interest on their part. With scholar Shen, they uncovered these photos and created exhibitions and published the initial Chinese-language edition of this volume by Zhejiang University Press in 2012. In this new, English-language edition, William Howard Taft's 1905 endeavors in Asia are freshly accorded the insight and appreciation they deserve in American diplomatic history.

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cover of Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America

Looking Forward

Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America

Jamie L. Pietruska

University of Chicago Press, 2017

In the decades after the Civil War, the world experienced monumental changes in industry, trade, and governance. As Americans faced this uncertain future, public debate sprang up over the accuracy and value of predictions, asking whether it was possible to look into the future with any degree of certainty. In Looking Forward, Jamie L. Pietruska uncovers a culture of prediction in the modern era, where forecasts became commonplace as crop forecasters, “weather prophets,” business forecasters, utopian novelists, and fortune-tellers produced and sold their visions of the future. Private and government forecasters competed for authority—as well as for an audience—and a single prediction could make or break a forecaster’s reputation. 

Pietruska argues that this late nineteenth-century quest for future certainty had an especially ironic consequence: it led Americans to accept uncertainty as an inescapable part of both forecasting and twentieth-century economic and cultural life. Drawing together histories of science, technology, capitalism, environment, and culture, Looking Forward explores how forecasts functioned as new forms of knowledge and risk management tools that sometimes mitigated, but at other times exacerbated, the very uncertainties they were designed to conquer. Ultimately Pietruska shows how Americans came to understand the future itself as predictable, yet still uncertain.
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cover of Looking Like the Enemy: Japanese Mexicans, the Mexican State, and US Hegemony, 1897–1945

Looking Like the Enemy

Japanese Mexicans, the Mexican State, and US Hegemony, 1897–1945

Jerry García

University of Arizona Press, 2014

At the beginning of the twentieth century, thousands of Japanese citizens sought new opportunities abroad. By 1910, nearly ten thousand had settled in Mexico. Over time, they found work, put down roots, and raised families. But until now, very little has been written about their lives. Looking Like the Enemy is the first English-language history of the Japanese experience in Mexico.
 
Japanese citizens were initially lured to Mexico with promises of cheap and productive land in Chiapas. Many of the promises were false, and the immigrants were forced to fan out across the country, especially to the lands along the US border. As Jerry García reveals, they were victims of discrimination based on “difference,” but they also displayed “markers of whiteness” that linked them positively to Europeans and Americans, who were perceived as powerful and socially advanced. And, García reports, many Mexicans looked favorably on the Japanese as hardworking and family-centered.
 
The book delves deeply into the experiences of the Japanese on both sides of the border during World War II, illuminating the similarities and differences in their treatment. Although some Japanese Mexicans were eventually interned (at the urging of the US government), in general the fear and vitriol that Japanese Americans encountered never reached the same levels in Mexico.
 
Looking Like the Enemy is an ambitious study of a tumultuous half-century in Mexico. It is a significant contribution to our understanding of the immigrant experience in the Western Hemisphere and to the burgeoning field of borderlands studies.
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cover of Looking South: The Evolution of Latin Americanist Scholarship in the United States, 1850-1975

Looking South

The Evolution of Latin Americanist Scholarship in the United States, 1850-1975

Helen Delpar

University of Alabama Press, 2007

The definitive history of how Latin American studies became a major field in American scholarship.

Looking South: The Evolution of Latin Americanist Scholarship in the United States, 1850-1975 is the first comprehensive history of the development of Latin American studies as a field of academic inquiry in the United States. In this ambitious and insightful work, historian Helen Delpar traces more than a century of intellectual engagement with Latin America, revealing how generations of historians, anthropologists, geographers, economists, sociologists, and political scientists shaped American understandings of the region and transformed Latin American studies into a recognized academic discipline.

A central contribution of the book lies in its exploration of the relationship between scholarship and historical context. Delpar demonstrates that academic interest in Latin America was never isolated from larger political, economic, and cultural developments in the United States. The expansion of hemispheric trade, the Good Neighbor era, World War II, the Cold War, and the Cuban Revolution all influenced how American scholars approached the region and what questions they considered important. By examining these intersections, she reveals how academic knowledge is shaped by changing national priorities, international events, and institutional support networks.

Beyond its contributions to Latin American history, Looking South is a major work of intellectual and academic history. It offers a compelling account of how scholarly fields are created, how academic communities develop, and how knowledge about world regions is produced, organized, and disseminated. Delpar's careful attention to both individual scholars and larger institutional structures makes the book an essential resource for understanding the history of area studies, the social sciences, and higher education in the United States.

Looking South remains an indispensable guide to the origins and evolution of Latin Americanist scholarship. It is essential reading for historians, Latin Americanists, anthropologists, political scientists, educators, and anyone interested in the intellectual history of the Americas and the development of knowledge across national and cultural boundaries.

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cover of Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and its Critics, 1945-1965

Looking for God in the Suburbs

The Religion of the American Dream and its Critics, 1945-1965

Hudnut-Beumler, James

Rutgers University Press, 1994

In the 1950s, 99 percent of adult Americans said they believed in God. How, James Hudnut-Beumler asks, did this consensus about religion turn into the confrontational debates over religion in the 1960s? He argues that post-World War II suburban conformity made church-going so much a part of middle-class values and life that religion and culture became virtually synonymous. Secular critics like David Riesman, William Whyte, C. Wright Mills, and Dwight Macdonald, who blamed American culture for its conformism and lack of class consciousness, and religious critics like Will Herberg, Gibson Winter, and Peter Berger, who argued that religion had lost its true roots  by incorporating only the middle class,  converged in their attacks on popular religion.

Although most Americans continued to live and worship as before, a significant number of young people followed the critics' call for a faith that led to social action, but they turned away from organized religion and toward the counterculture of the sixties. The critics of the 1950s deserve credit for asking questions about the value of religion as it was being practiced and the responsibilities of the affluent to the poor—and for putting these issues on the social and cultural agenda of the next generation.

                                                           

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cover of Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August: African-Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1870-1930

Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August

African-Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1870-1930

Myra B. Young Armstead

University of Illinois Press, 1999

The lives built by Black Americans in a pair of summer resort towns

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, northern resort towns were in their heyday as celebrated retreats for America's wealthy. Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August documents the experiences of African Americans in Saratoga Springs, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island--towns that provided a recurring season of expanded employment opportunities, enhanced social life, cosmopolitan experience, and, in a good year, enough money to last through the winter.

Affirming that the decision to live in their tiny resort communities was conscious and deliberate, Myra B. Young Armstead shows how Afro-Saratogians and Afro-Newporters organized their rhythms, their routines, and their communities to create meaningful identities for themselves. Living on streets close to their churches, developing social organizations that promoted their standards of gentility and respectability, and lobbying for wider opportunities, these African Americans actively shaped their lives within the structures and limitations imposed on them.

Armstead situates the resort town between the poles of the rural South and the large industrial cities of the North. She shows how these small northern towns, with their seasonal economic rhythms and domestic wage work, permitted an important continuity between rural and urban lifestyles and a path from rural South to urban North besides the jarring, disruptive journey that often ended in the ghetto.

"Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August" tells a story that is at once American and uniquely African American: a story of economic imperatives and enlarged social aspirations culminating in a season--June, July, and August--that brought Blacks as close as they could get to the American Dream.

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cover of Lords of the Ring: The Triumph and Tragedy of College Boxing's Greatest Team

Lords of the Ring

The Triumph and Tragedy of College Boxing's Greatest Team

Doug Moe

University of Wisconsin Press, 2005

    Lords of the Ring revives the exciting era—now largely forgotten—when college boxing attracted huge crowds and flashy headlines, outdrawing the professional bouts. On the same night in 1940 when Joe Louis defended his heavyweight crown before 11,000 fans in New York's Madison Square Garden, collegiate boxers battled before 15,000 fans in Madison . . . Wisconsin.
    Under legendary and beloved coach John Walsh, the most successful coach in the history of American collegiate boxing, University of Wisconsin boxers won eight NCAA team championships and thirty-eight individual titles from 1933 to 1960. Badger boxers included heroes like Woody Swancutt, who later helped initiate the Strategic Air Command, and rogues like Sidney Korshak, later the most feared mob attorney in the United States. A young fighter from Louisville named Cassius Clay also boxed in the Wisconsin Field House during this dazzling era.
    But in April 1960, collegiate boxing was forever changed when Charlie Mohr— Wisconsin’s finest and most popular boxer, an Olympic team prospect—slipped into a coma after an NCAA tournament bout in Madison. Suddenly, not just Mohr’s life but the entire sport of college boxing was in peril. It was to be the last NCAA boxing tournament ever held. Lords of the Ring tells the whole extraordinary story of boxing at the University of Wisconsin, based on dozens of interviews and extensive examination of newspaper microfilm, boxing records and memorabilia.
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cover of Lorine Niedecker: A Poet’s Life

Lorine Niedecker

A Poet’s Life

Margot Peters

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

Lorine Niedecker (1903–70) was a poet of extraordinary talent whose life and work were long enveloped in obscurity. After her death in 1970, poet Basil Bunting wrote that she was “the most interesting woman poet America has yet produced . . . only beginning to be appreciated when she died.” Her poverty and arduous family life, the isolated home in Wisconsin that provided rich imagery for her work, and her unusual acquaintances have all contributed to Niedecker’s enigmatic reputation.
    Margot Peters brings Lorine Niedecker’s life out of the shadows in this first full biography of the poet. She depicts Niedecker’s watery world on Blackhawk Island (near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin), where she was born and spent most of her life. A brief college career cut short by family obligations and an equally brief marriage were followed in 1931 by the start of a life-changing correspondence and complicated thirty-five-year friendship with modernist poet Louis Zukofsky, who connected Niedecker to a literary lifeline of distant poets and magazines. Supporting herself by turns as a hospital scrubwoman and proofreader for a dairy journal, Niedecker made a late marriage to an industrial painter, which gave her time to write and publish her work in the final decades of her life.
    During her lifetime, Niedecker’s poetry was praised by a relatively small literary circle, including Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Denise Levetov, and Allen Ginsberg. Since her death much more of her surviving writings have been published, including a comprehensive edition of collected works and two volumes of correspondence. Through Margot Peters’s compelling biography, readers will discover Lorine Niedecker as a poet of spare and brilliant verse and a woman whose talent and grit carried her through periods of desperation and despair.


Best Special Interest Books, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

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cover of Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century

Losing Control

Global Security in the 21st Century

Paul Rogers

Pluto Press, 2010

When Losing Control was first published a decade ago it was years ahead of its time. Its argument was simple - the real causes of global insecurity were the widening socio-economic divide, global marginalisation and environmental limitations, especially climate change and conflict over energy resources.

Paul Rogers, one of the most original thinkers on international security, pointed to a world in which irregular warfare from the margins would prevent powerful states from maintaining their position. He even predicted accurately how the United States would respond to a catastrophic attack.

The new edition brings the whole analysis right up to date, arguing persuasively that the world’s elite cannot maintain control and that a far more emancipatory and sustainable approach to global security has to be developed.

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cover of Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel

Losing the Plot

Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel

Pardis Dabashi

University of Chicago Press, 2023

An examination of the relationship between literature and classical Hollywood cinema reveals a profound longing for plot in modernist fiction.

The modernist novel sought to escape what Virginia Woolf called the “tyranny” of plot. Yet even as twentieth-century writers pushed against the constraints of plot-driven Victorian novels, plot kept its hold on them through the influence of another medium: the cinema. Focusing on the novels of Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner—writers known for their affinities and connections to classical Hollywood—Pardis Dabashi links the moviegoing practices of these writers to the tensions between the formal properties of their novels and the characters in them. Even when they did not feature outright happy endings, classical Hollywood films often provided satisfying formal resolutions and promoted normative social and political values. Watching these films, modernist authors were reminded of what they were leaving behind—both formally and in the name of aesthetic experimentalism—by losing the plot.
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cover of Loss and Redemption at St. Vith: The 7th Armored Division in the Battle of the Bulge

Loss and Redemption at St. Vith

The 7th Armored Division in the Battle of the Bulge

Gregory Fontenot, Colonel, US Army, Retired

University of Missouri Press, 2020

Loss and Redemption at St Vith closes a gap in the record of the Battle of the Bulge by recounting the exploits of the 7th Armored Division in a way that no other study has. Most accounts of the Battle of the Bulge give short-shrift to the interval during which the German forward progress stopped and the American counterattack began. This narrative centers on the 7th Armored Division for the entire length of the campaign, in so doing reconsidering the story of the whole battle through the lens of a single division and accounting for the reconstitution of the Division while in combat.
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cover of Loss within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS

Loss within Loss

Artists in the Age of AIDS

Edited by Edmund White; In Cooperation with the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, a project of the Alliance for the Arts

University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

When an artist dies we face two great losses: the person and the work he did not live to do. Loss within Loss  is a moving collaboration by some of America's most eloquent writers, who supply wry, raging, sorrowful, and buoyant accounts of artist friends and lovers struck down by AIDS. These essayists include Maya Angelou, Alan Gurganus, Brad Gooch, John Berendt, Craig Lucas, Robert Rosenblum, and eighteen others. Many of the subjects of the essays were already prominent—James Merrill, Paul Monette, David Wojnarowicz—but many others died young, before they were able to fulfil the promise of their lives and art. Loss within Loss spans all of the arts and includes portraits of choreographers, painters, poets, actors, playwrights, sculptors, editors, composers, and architects.

This landmark book is published in association with the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, a national organization that preserves art works created by artists living with HIV or lost to AIDS. Loss within Loss stands as a powerful reminder of the devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic on the arts community and as the first real survey of that devastation. Though these accounts are often intensely sad, Loss within Loss is an invigorating, sometimes even exuberant, testimony to the sheer joy of being an artist . . . and being alive.

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cover of Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942

Lost Delta Found

Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942

John W. Work

Vanderbilt University Press, 2005

Blues Hall of Fame Inductee—Named a "Classic of Blues Literature" by the Blues Foundation, 2019

This remarkable book recovers three invaluable perspectives, long thought to have been lost, on the culture and music of the Mississippi Delta.

In 1941 and ’42 African American schol-ars from Fisk University—among them the noted composer and musicologist John W. Work III, sociologist Lewis Wade Jones, and graduate student Samuel C. Adams Jr.—joined folklorist Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress on research trips to Coahoma County, Mississippi. Their mis­sion was “to document adequately the cul­tural and social backgrounds for music in the community.” Among the fruits of the project were the earliest recordings by the legendary blues singer and guitar­ist Muddy Waters.

The hallmark of the study was to have been a joint publica­tion of its findings by Fisk and the Library of Congress. While this publication was never completed, Lost Delta Found is com­posed of the writings, interviews, notes, and musical transcriptions produced by Work, Jones, and Adams in the Coahoma County study. Their work captures, with compelling immediacy, a place, a people, a way of life, and a set of rich musical tra­ditions as they existed in the 1940s.


Illustrated with photos and more than 160 musical transcriptions.
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cover of Lost Eagles: One Man's Mission to Find Missing Airmen in Two World Wars

Lost Eagles

One Man's Mission to Find Missing Airmen in Two World Wars

Blaine Pardoe

University of Michigan Press, 2010

Praise for Lost Eagles

"The pilot and observer stories selected have not previously seen much exposure. Not only are they interesting, but I found myself relishing getting to the next chapter to find out what Frederick Zinn was doing during the next stage of his life."
---Alan Roesler, founding member, League of World War I Aviation Historians, and former Managing Editor, Over the Front

Praise for Blaine Pardoe's previous military histories (which average 4.5-star customer reviews on Amazon.com):

Terror of the Autumn Skies: The True Story of Frank Luke, America's Rogue Ace of World War I

"This painstaking biography of World War I ace Frank Luke will earn Pardoe kudos . . . Pardoe has flown a very straight course in researching and recounting Luke's myth-ridden life. . . . Thorough annotation makes the book that much more valuable to WWI aviation scholars as well as for more casual air-combat buffs."
---Booklist

The Cruise of the Sea Eagle: The Amazing True Story of Imperial Germany's Gentleman Pirate

"This is a gem of a story, well told, and nicely laid out with photos, maps, and charts that cleverly illuminate the lost era of ‘gentlemen pirates' at sea . . . [German commerce raider Felix von Luckner's] legend lives on in this lively and readable biography."
---Admiral James Stavridis, U.S. Navy, Naval History

Few people have ever heard of Frederick Zinn, yet even today airmen's families are touched by this man and the work he performed in both world wars. Zinn created the techniques still in use to determine the final fate of airmen missing in action. The last line of the Air Force Creed reads, "We will leave no airman behind." Zinn made that promise possible.

Blaine Pardoe weaves together the complex story of a man who brought peace and closure to countless families who lost airmen during both world wars. His lasting contribution to warfare was a combination of his methodology for locating the remains of missing pilots (known as the Zinn system) and his innovation of imprinting all aircraft parts with the same serial number so that if a wreck was located, the crewman could be identified. The tradition he established for seeking and recovering airmen is carried on to this day.

Blaine Pardoe is an accomplished author who has published dozens of military fiction novels and other books, including the widely acclaimed Cubicle Warfare: Self-Defense Tactics for Today's Hypercompetitive Workplace; Terror of the Autumn Skies: The True Story of Frank Luke, America's Rogue Ace of World War I; and The Cruise of the Sea Eagle: The Amazing True Story of Imperial Germany's Gentleman Pirate.

Jacket photo: Frederick Zinn's Sopwith aircraft, which crashed during World War I. National Museum of the United States Air Force Archives. 

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cover of Lost Homelands: Ruin and Reconstruction in the 20th-Century Southwest

Lost Homelands

Ruin and Reconstruction in the 20th-Century Southwest

Audrey Goodman

University of Arizona Press, 2010

Before the 1930s, landscapes of the American Southwest represented the migrant’s dream of a stable and bountiful homeland. Around the time of the Great Depression, however, the Southwest suddenly became integrated into a much larger economic and cultural system. Audrey Goodman examines how—since that time—these southwestern landscapes have come to reveal the resulting fragmentation of identity and community.

Through analyzing a variety of texts and images, Goodman illuminates the ways that modern forces such as militarization, environmental degradation, internal migration, and an increased border patrol presence have shattered the perception of a secure homeland in the Southwest. The deceptive natural beauty of the Southwest deserts shields a dark history of trauma and decimation that has remained as a shadow on the region’s psyche. The first to really synthesize such wide-ranging material about the effects of the atomic age in the Southwest, Goodman realizes the value of combined visual and verbal art and uses it to put forth her own original ideas about reconstructing a new sense of homeland.

Lost Homelands reminds us of the adversity and dislocation suffered by people of the Southwest by looking at the ways that artists, photographers, filmmakers, and writers have grappled with these problems for decades. In assessing the ruination of the region, however, Goodman argues that those same artists and writers have begun to reassemble a new sense of homeland from these fragments.
[more]
cover of Lost Wonderland: The Brief and Brilliant Life of Boston's Million Dollar Amusement Park

Lost Wonderland

The Brief and Brilliant Life of Boston's Million Dollar Amusement Park

Stephen R. Wilk

University of Massachusetts Press, 2020

If you take Boston's Blue Line to its northern end, you'll reach the Wonderland stop. Few realize that a twenty-three-acre amusement park once sat nearby—the largest in New England, and grander than any of the Coney Island parks that inspired it. Opened in Revere on Memorial Day in 1906 to great fanfare, Wonderland offered hundreds of thousands of visitors recreation by the sea, just a short distance from downtown Boston.

The story of the park's creation and wild, but brief, success is full of larger-than-life characters who hoped to thrill attendees and rake in profits. Stephen R. Wilk describes the planning and history of the park, which featured early roller coasters, a scenic railway, a central lagoon in which a Shoot-the-Chutes boat plunged, an aerial swing, a funhouse, and more. Performances ran throughout the day, including a daring Fires and Flames show; a Wild West show; a children's theater; and numerous circus acts. While nothing remains of what was once called “Boston's Regal Home of Pleasure” and the park would close in 1910, this book resurrects Wonderland by transporting readers through its magical gates.

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cover of Lost in Time: Locating the Stranger in German Modernity

Lost in Time

Locating the Stranger in German Modernity

June J. Hwang

Northwestern University Press, 2014

June J. Hwang’s provocative Lost in Time explores discourses of timelessness in the works of central figures of German modernity such as Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Helmuth Plessner, as well as those of Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth, and Hugo Bettauer. Hwang argues that in the Weimar Republic the move toward ahistoricization is itself a historical phenomenon, one that can be understood by exploring the intersections of discourses about urban modernity, the stranger, and German Jewish identity.
 
These intersections shed light on conceptions of German Jewish identity that rely on a negation of the specific and temporal as a way to legitimize a historical outsider position, creating a dynamic position that simultaneously challenges and acknowledges the limitations of an outsider’s agency. She reads these texts as attempts to transcend the particular, attempts that paradoxically reveal the entanglement of the particular and the universal.
[more]
cover of Lost in the Shadow of the Word: Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe

Lost in the Shadow of the Word

Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe

Benjamin Paloff

Northwestern University Press, 2016

2018 AATSEEL Prize for Best Book in Literary Scholarship

Scholars of modernism have long addressed how literature, painting, and music reflected the radical reconceptualization of space and time in the early twentieth century—a veritable revolution in both physics and philosophy that has been characterized as precipitating an “epistemic trauma” around the world. In this wide-ranging study, Benjamin Paloff contends that writers in Central and Eastern Europe felt this impact quite distinctly from their counterparts in Western Europe. For the latter, the destabilization of traditional notions of space and time inspired works that saw in it a new kind of freedom. However, for many Central and Eastern European authors, who were writing from within public discourses about how to construct new social realities, the need for escape met the realization that there was both nowhere to escape to and no stable delineation of what to escape from. In reading the prose and poetry of Czech, Polish, and Russian writers, Paloff imbues the term “Kafkaesque” with a complexity so far missing from our understanding of this moment in literary history.
[more]
cover of Lost in the USA: American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March

Lost in the USA

American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March

Deborah Gray White

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Remembered as an era of peace and prosperity, turn-of-the-millennium America was also a time of mass protest. But the political demands of the marchers seemed secondary to an urgent desire for renewal and restoration felt by people from all walks of life. Drawing on thousands of personal testimonies, Deborah Gray White explores how Americans sought better ways of living in, and dealing with, a rapidly changing world. From the Million Man, Million Woman, and Million Mom Marches to the Promise Keepers and LGBT protests, White reveals a people lost in their own country. Mass gatherings offered a chance to bond with like-minded others against a relentless tide of loneliness and isolation. By participating, individuals opened a door to self-discovery that energized their quests for order, autonomy, personal meaning, and fellowship in a society that seemed hostile to such deeper human needs. Moving forward in time, White also shows what marchers found out about themselves and those gathered around them. The result is an eye-opening reconsideration of a defining time in contemporary America.
[more]
cover of Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston

Lost on the Freedom Trail

The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston

Seth C. Bruggeman

University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

Winner of the 2023 Society for History in the Federal Government Book Prize

Boston National Historical Park is one of America's most popular heritage destinations, drawing in millions of visitors annually. Tourists flock there to see the site of the Boston Massacre, to relive Paul Revere's midnight ride, and to board Old Ironsides—all of these bound together by the iconic Freedom Trail, which traces the city's revolutionary saga.

Making sense of the Revolution, however, was never the primary aim for the planners who reimagined Boston's heritage landscape after the Second World War. Seth C. Bruggeman demonstrates that the Freedom Trail was always largely a tourist gimmick, devised to lure affluent white Americans into downtown revival schemes, its success hinging on a narrow vision of the city's history run through with old stories about heroic white men. When Congress pressured the National Park Service to create this historical park for the nation's bicentennial celebration in 1976, these ideas seeped into its organizational logic, precluding the possibility that history might prevail over gentrification and profit.
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cover of Louis Bamberger: Department Store Innovator and Philanthropist

Louis Bamberger

Department Store Innovator and Philanthropist

Linda B. Forgosh

Brandeis University Press, 2016

Louis Bamberger (1855–1944) was the epitome of the merchant prince as public benefactor. Born in Baltimore, this son of German immigrants built his business—the great, glamorous L. Bamberger & Co. department store in Newark, N.J.—into the sixth-largest department store in the country. A multimillionaire by middle age, he joined the elite circle of German Jews who owned Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Filene’s. Despite his vast wealth and local prominence, Bamberger was a reclusive figure who shunned the limelight, left no business records, and kept no diaries. He remained a bachelor and kept his private life and the rationale for his business decisions to himself. Yet his achievements are manifold. He was a merchandising genius whose innovations, including newspaper and radio ads and brilliant use of window and in-store displays, established the culture of consumption in twentieth-century America. His generous giving, both within the Jewish community and beyond it, created institutions that still stand today: the Newark YM-YWHA, Beth Israel Hospital, and the Newark Museum. Toward the end of his career, he financed and directed the creation of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, which led to a friendship with Albert Einstein. Despite his significance as business innovator and philanthropist, historians of the great department stores have paid scant attention to Bamberger. This full-length biography will interest historians as well as general readers of Jewish history nationally, New Jerseyans fascinated by local history, and the Newarkers for whom Bamberger’s was a beloved local institution.
[more]
cover of Louis I. Kahn’s Jewish Architecture: Mikveh Israel and the Midcentury American Synagogue

Louis I. Kahn’s Jewish Architecture

Mikveh Israel and the Midcentury American Synagogue

Susan G. Solomon

University Press of New England, 2009

In 1961, famed architect Louis I. Kahn (1901–1974) received a commission to design a new synagogue. His client was one of the oldest Sephardic Orthodox congregations in the United States: Philadelphia’s Mikveh Israel. Due to the loss of financial backing, Kahn’s plans were never realized. Nevertheless, the haunting and imaginative schemes for Mikveh Israel remain among Kahn’s most revered designs. Susan G. Solomon uses Kahn’s designs for Mikveh Israel as a lens through which to examine the transformation of the American synagogue from 1955 to 1970. She shows how Kahn wrestled with issues that challenged postwar Jewish institutions and evaluates his creative attempts to bridge modernism and Judaism. She argues that Kahn provided a fresh paradigm for synagogues, one that offered innovations in planning, decoration, and the incorporation of light and nature into building design.
[more]
cover of Louise Thompson Patterson: A Life of Struggle for Justice

Louise Thompson Patterson

A Life of Struggle for Justice

Keith Gilyard

Duke University Press, 2017

Born in 1901, Louise Thompson Patterson was a leading and transformative figure in radical African American politics. Throughout most of the twentieth century she embodied a dedicated resistance to racial, economic, and gender exploitation. In this, the first biography of Patterson, Keith Gilyard tells her compelling story, from her childhood on the West Coast, where she suffered isolation and persecution, to her participation in the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. In the 1930s and 1940s she became central, along with Paul Robeson, to the labor movement, and later, in the 1950s, she steered proto-black-feminist activities. Patterson was also crucial to the efforts in the 1970s to free political prisoners, most notably Angela Davis. In the 1980s and 1990s she continued to work as a progressive activist and public intellectual. To read her story is to witness the courage, sacrifice, vision, and discipline of someone who spent decades working to achieve justice and liberation for all.
[more]
cover of Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979

Love Saves the Day

A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979

Tim Lawrence

Duke University Press, 2003

Opening with David Mancuso's seminal “Love Saves the Day” Valentine's party, Tim Lawrence tells the definitive story of American dance music culture in the 1970s—from its subterranean roots in NoHo and Hell’s Kitchen to its gaudy blossoming in midtown Manhattan to its wildfire transmission through America’s suburbs and urban hotspots such as Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Newark, and Miami.

Tales of nocturnal journeys, radical music making, and polymorphous sexuality flow through the arteries of Love Saves the Day like hot liquid vinyl. They are interspersed with a detailed examination of the era’s most powerful djs, the venues in which they played, and the records they loved to spin—as well as the labels, musicians, vocalists, producers, remixers, party promoters, journalists, and dance crowds that fueled dance music’s tireless engine.

Love Saves the Day includes material from over three hundred original interviews with the scene's most influential players, including David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Tom Moulton, Loleatta Holloway, Giorgio Moroder, Francis Grasso, Frankie Knuckles, and Earl Young. It incorporates more than twenty special dj discographies—listing the favorite records of the most important spinners of the disco decade—and a more general discography cataloging some six hundred releases. Love Saves the Day also contains a unique collection of more than seventy rare photos.

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cover of Love Valley: An American Utopia

Love Valley

An American Utopia

Conrad Ostwalt

University of Wisconsin Press, 1998

Love Valley is a small town in rural North Carolina. Its genesis in 1954 marked the fulfillment of a dream for founder Andy Barker. Barker cultivated two visions as a young man—he wanted to build a Christian community, and he wanted to be a cowboy. The result of his vision is Barker’s utopian experiment.
    The town boasts a saloon, general store, hitching posts, and rodeos. Yet, above all of this stands a little church—the heart of what Barker conceived as his Christian utopia. This unique combination has led to more than forty years of philanthropic ventures, controversial events such as the Love Valley Rock Festival, stories and legends, and political ambition. Love Valley: An American Utopia captures the history of this town in narrative form while arguing that Love Valley’s founders were motivated by utopian goals.
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cover of Love and Loss: The Short Life of Ray Chapman

Love and Loss

The Short Life of Ray Chapman

Scott H. Longert

Ohio University Press, 2024

The son of a coal miner from a small Illinois town, Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman lived the American dream until his untimely death at age twenty-nine. In his brief life, he reached the pinnacle of baseball success as the best shortstop in the American League. While many professional ballplayers struggled with meager salaries, the handsome Chapman had married heiress Kathleen Daly, one of Cleveland’s wealthiest women. With a child on the way and an executive job in the offseason, Chapman was moving toward a privileged place in society until an errant fastball fractured his skull and ended his life the next day. Late in the 1920 pennant race, the Indians were in New York for a key series against the Yankees. New York pitcher Carl Mays threw a high hard one that Chapman could not evade. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where doctors tried in vain to save his life. The tragedy did not end there. His widow took her own life eight years later, and their daughter, Rae, subsequently died from meningitis. Today, people visit Chapman’s impressive grave in Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery, leaving baseballs and gloves in his memory. Though gone over a hundred years, he is well remembered as a Cleveland icon. This book goes far beyond the well-worn accounts of Chapman’s untimely death to illustrate the fullness of his short life.

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cover of Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel

Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel

By Aníbal González

University of Texas Press, 2010

The Latin American Literary Boom was marked by complex novels steeped in magical realism and questions of nationalism, often with themes of surreal violence. In recent years, however, those revolutionary projects of the sixties and seventies have given way to quite a different narrative vision and ideology. Dubbed the new sentimentalism, this trend is now keenly elucidated in Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel.

Offering a rich account of the rise of this new mode, as well as its political and cultural implications, Aníbal González delivers a close reading of novels by Miguel Barnet, Elena Poniatowska, Isabel Allende, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Gabriel García Márquez, Antonio Skármeta, Luis Rafael Sánchez, and others. González proposes that new sentimental novels are inspired principally by a desire to heal the division, rancor, and fear produced by decades of social and political upheaval. Valuing pop culture above the avant-garde, such works also tend to celebrate agape—the love of one's neighbor—while denouncing the negative effects of passion (eros). Illuminating these and other aspects of post-Boom prose, Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel takes a fresh look at contemporary works.

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cover of Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972

Love in the Lav

A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972

Averill Earls

Temple University Press, 2025

Love in the Lav uncovers Ireland’s queer lives of the past. Averill Earls investigates how same-sex-desiring men lived and loved in a country where their sexuality was illegal and seen as unnatural. Across seven social biographical chapters, each highlighting individuals at the nexus of these histories, Earls constructs a narrative of experiences through the larger contexts in which they are embedded.

Earls uses courtroom testimonies, police records, and family history archives as well as “educated speculation” to show how structures governing male same-sex desire in Ireland played out on the bodies of the men who desired men, the teen boys who sold sex to men, and the way the Catholic-nationalist ethos shaped the Gardaí who policed them.

Love in the Lav examines the experiences of people such as cabbie James Hand, who was put on trial for gross indecency, to provide a window into the queer working-class subculture of 1930s Dublin. Earls also focuses on issues of consent, especially with teens, and the unregulated queer Irish world of public figures, including Micheál Mac Liammóir, Hilton Edwards, Ronald Brown, and John Broderick.
By examining twentieth-century Ireland through the lived experiences of ordinary same-sex-desiring Irish men who were relegated to obscurity by Irish society, Earls reveals the contradictions, possibilities, and magnitude of postcolonial Irish Catholic nationalism.

In the series Sexuality Studies

 
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cover of Love, Anarchy, & Emma Goldman: A Biography

Love, Anarchy, & Emma Goldman

A Biography

Falk, Candace

Rutgers University Press, 1990

Candace Falk's biography captures Goldman's colorful life as a social and labor reformer, revolutionary, anarchist, feminist, agitator for free love and free speech, and advocate of birth control. And it gives the reader a rare glimpse into Goldman as a woman, alone, searching for the intimacy of a love relationship to match her radiant social vision. Falk explores the clash between Goldman's public vision and private life, focusing on her intimate relationship with Ben Reitman, Chicago's celebrated social reformer, hobo king, and red-light district gynecologist. During this passionate and stormy relationship, Goldman lectured in public about free love and women's independence, while in private she struggled with intense jealousy and longed for the comfort of a secure relationship. Falk's account draws upon a serendipitous discovery of a cache of intimate letters between Goldman and Reitman. Falk then goes beyond Goldman's ten-year relationship with Reitman, following Goldman's inner passions through her years of exile and later life. Written with a literary sensitivity, Falk tells a riveting story, consistently placing Goldman in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century radicalism.
[more]
cover of Love, Anarchy, & Emma Goldman: A Biography

Love, Anarchy, & Emma Goldman

A Biography

Candace Serena Falk

Rutgers University Press, 2019

“What this remarkable book does . . . is to remind us of that passion, that revolutionary fervor, that camaraderie, that persistence in the face of political defeat and personal despair so needed in our time as in theirs.” —Howard Zinn

“Fascinating …With marvelous clarity and depth, Candace Falk illuminates for us an Emma Goldman shaped by her time yet presaging in her life the situation and conflicts of women in our time.” —Tillie Olsen

One of the most famous political activists of all time, Emma Goldman was also infamous for her radical anarchist views and her “scandalous” personal life. In public, Goldman was a firebrand, confidently agitating for labor reform, anarchism, birth control, and women’s independence. But behind closed doors she was more vulnerable, especially when it came to the love of her life. 

Love, Anarchy, & Emma Goldman is an account of Goldman’s legendary career as a political activist. But it is more than that—it is a biography that offers an intimate look at how Goldman’s passion for social reform dovetailed with her passion for one man: Chicago activist, hobo king, and red-light district gynecologist Ben Reitman. Candace Falk takes us into the heart of their tumultuous love affair, finding that even as Goldman lectured on free love, she confronted her own intense jealousy. 
 
As director of the Emma Goldman papers, Falk had access to over 40,000 writings by Goldman—including her private letters and notes—and she draws upon these archives to give us a rare insight into this brilliant, complex woman’s thoughts. The result is both a riveting love story and a primer on an exciting, explosive era in American politics and intellectual life.  
[more]
cover of Love, H: The Letters of Helene Dorn and Hettie Jones

Love, H

The Letters of Helene Dorn and Hettie Jones

Hettie Jones

Duke University Press, 2016

"It works, we're in business, yeah Babe!" So begins this remarkable selection from a forty-year correspondence between two artists who survived their time as wives in the Beat bohemia of the 1960s and went on to successful artistic careers of their own.
 
From their first meeting in 1960, writer Hettie Jones—then married to LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)—and painter and sculptor Helene Dorn (1927–2004), wife of poet Ed Dorn, found in each other more than friendship. They were each other's confidant, emotional support, and unflagging partner through difficulties, defeats, and victories, from surviving divorce and struggling as single mothers, to finding artistic success in their own right. 
 
Revealing the intimacy of lifelong friends, these letters tell two stories from the shared point of view of women who refused to go along with society’s expectations. Jones frames her and Helene's story, adding details and explanations while filling in gaps in the narrative. As she writes, "we'd fled the norm for women then, because to live it would have been a kind of death."
 
Apart from these two personal stories, there are, as well, reports from the battlegrounds of women's rights and tenant's rights, reflections on marriage and motherhood, and contemplation of the past to which these two had remained irrevocably connected. Prominent figures such as Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary appear as well, making Love, H an important addition to literature on the Beats. 
 
Above all, this book is a record of the changing lives of women artists as the twentieth century became the twenty-first, and what it has meant for women considering such a life today. It's worth a try, Jones and Dorn show us, offering their lives as proof that it can be done.
[more]
cover of Loving Before Loving: A Marriage in Black and White

Loving Before Loving

A Marriage in Black and White

Joan Steinau Lester

University of Wisconsin Press, 2026

Committed to the struggle for civil rights, in the late 1950s Joan Steinau marched and protested as a white ally and young woman coming to terms with her own racism. She fell in love and married a fellow activist, the Black writer Julius Lester, establishing a partnership that was long and multifaceted but not free of the politics of race and gender. As the women’s movement dawned, feminism helped Lester find her voice, her pansexuality, and the courage to be herself.
 
Braiding intellectual, personal, and political history, Lester tells the story of a writer and activist fighting for love and justice before, during, and after the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision striking down bans on interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia. She describes her own shifts in consciousness, from an activist climbing police barricades by day and reading and writing late into the night to a woman navigating the coming-out process in midlife, before finding the publishing success she had dreamed of. Speaking candidly about every facet of her life, Lester illuminates her journey to fulfillment and healing.
[more]
cover of Loving Faster than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein's Universe

Loving Faster than Light

Romance and Readers in Einstein's Universe

Katy Price

University of Chicago Press, 2012

In November 1919, newspapers around the world alerted readers to a sensational new theory of the universe: Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Coming at a time of social, political, and economic upheaval, Einstein’s theory quickly became a rich cultural resource with many uses beyond physical theory. Media coverage of relativity in Britain took on qualities of pastiche and parody, as serious attempts to evaluate Einstein’s theory jostled with jokes and satires linking relativity to everything from railway budgets to religion. The image of a befuddled newspaper reader attempting to explain Einstein’s theory to his companions became a set piece in the popular press.
           
Loving Faster than Light focuses on the popular reception of relativity in Britain, demonstrating how abstract science came to be entangled with class politics, new media technology, changing sex relations, crime, cricket, and cinematography in the British imagination during the 1920s. Blending literary analysis with insights from the history of science, Katy Price reveals how cultural meanings for Einstein’s relativity were negotiated in newspapers with differing political agendas, popular science magazines, pulp fiction adventure and romance stories, detective plots, and esoteric love poetry. Loving Faster than Light is an essential read for anyone interested in popular science, the intersection of science and literature, and the social and cultural history of physics.
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cover of Loving Mountains, Loving Men: Memoirs of a Gay Appalachian

Loving Mountains, Loving Men

Memoirs of a Gay Appalachian

Jeff Mann

Ohio University Press, 2005

Loving Mountains, Loving Men is the first book-length treatment of a topic rarely discussed or examined: gay life in Appalachia. Appalachians are known for their love of place, yet many gays and lesbians from the mountains flee to urban areas. Jeff Mann tells the story of one who left and then returned, who insists on claiming and celebrating both regional and erotic identities. In memoir and poetry, Mann describes his life as an openly gay man who has remained true to his mountain roots. Mann recounts his upbringing in Hinton, a small town in southern West Virginia, as well as his realization of his homosexuality, his early encounters with homophobia, his coterie of supportive lesbian friends, and his initial attempts to escape his native region in hopes of finding a freer life in urban gay communities. Mann depicts his difficult search for a romantic relationship, the family members who have given him the strength to defy convention, his anger against religious intolerance and the violence of homophobia, and his love for the rich folk culture of the Highland South. His character and values shaped by the mountains, Mann has reconciled his homosexuality with both traditional definitions of Appalachian manhood and his own attachment to home and kin. Loving Mountains, Loving Men is a compelling, universal story of making peace with oneself and the wider world.
[more]
cover of Lowest White Boy

Lowest White Boy

Greg Bottoms

West Virginia University Press, 2019

An innovative, hybrid work of literary nonfiction, Lowest White Boy takes its title from Lyndon Johnson’s observation during the civil rights era: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.”

Greg Bottoms writes about growing up white and working class in Tidewater, Virginia, during school desegregation in the 1970s. He offers brief stories that accumulate to reveal the everyday experience of living inside complex, systematic racism that is often invisible to economically and politically disenfranchised white southerners—people who have benefitted from racism in material ways while being damaged by it, he suggests, psychologically and spiritually. Placing personal memories against a backdrop of documentary photography, social history, and cultural critique, Lowest White Boy explores normalized racial animus and reactionary white identity politics, particularly as these are collected and processed in the mind of a child.

[more]
cover of Loyalty and Liberty: American Countersubversion from World War 1 to the McCarthy Era

Loyalty and Liberty

American Countersubversion from World War 1 to the McCarthy Era

Alex Goodall

University of Illinois Press, 2013

Loyalty and Liberty offers the first comprehensive account of the politics of countersubversion in the United States prior to the McCarthy era. Beginning with the loyalty politics of World War I, Alex Goodall traces the course of American countersubversion as it ebbed and flowed throughout the first half of the twentieth century, culminating in the rise of McCarthyism and the Cold War. This sweeping study explores how antisubversive fervor was dampened in the 1920s in response to the excesses of World War I, transformed by the politics of antifascism in the Depression era, and rekindled in opposition to Roosevelt's ambitious New Deal policies in the later 1930s and 1940s.

Identifying varied interest groups such as business tycoons, Christian denominations, and Southern Democrats, Goodall demonstrates how countersubversive politics was far from unified: groups often pursued clashing aims while struggling to balance the competing pulls of loyalty to the nation and liberty of thought, speech, and action. Meanwhile, the federal government pursued its own course, which alternately converged with and diverged from the paths followed by private organizations. By the end of World War II, alliances on the left and right had largely consolidated into the form they would keep during the Cold War. Anticommunists on the right worked to rein in the supposedly dictatorial ambitions of the Roosevelt administration, while New Deal liberals divided into several camps: the Popular Front, civil liberties activists, and embryonic Cold Warriors who struggled with how to respond to communist espionage in Washington and communist influence in politics more broadly.

Rigorous in its scholarship yet accessible to a wide audience, Goodall's masterful study shows how opposition to radicalism became a defining ideological question of American life.

[more]
cover of Lunch on a Beam: The Making of an American Photograph

Lunch on a Beam

The Making of an American Photograph

Christine Roussel

Brandeis University Press, 2026

The untold story of the many people behind one of America’s most iconic photographs.
 
Lunch on a Beam, also known as Lunch Atop a Skyscraper, shows ironworkers eating lunch on a steel beam during the construction of Rockefeller Center’s RCA Building in 1932. It’s a photo so famous you can likely picture it in your mind: seated in a row, eleven men chat and break bread 850 feet above the ground, the dense cityscape behind them. While the scene may look spontaneous, the photo was taken during a publicity shoot to promote Rockefeller Center’s new skyscraper. And despite the image’s renown, for years, little information was available about its subjects or its photographer.
 
In Lunch on a Beam, Rockefeller Center archivist Christine Roussel interweaves the art, architectural, and social history behind the photograph with her personal experience as a confidante to the financiers who developed Rockefeller Center. She tells the stories of the fearless photographers, brazen publicity men, the ironworkers, and their immigrant and Indigenous communities. This portrait of eleven construction workers, she points out, is also a celebration of the nation’s richest man. She examines how, in the depths of the Great Depression, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., took it upon himself to build a monument to American industry and sell it to the public.
 
Featuring striking images from the Rockefeller Center Archives, Lunch on a Beam calls attention to the fascinating paradoxes contained in a single photo and celebrates the men who built an architectural marvel at great personal risk. This is a story of art and commerce, and the role of a photograph in the mythmaking of New York City.
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cover of Lured by the American Dream: Filipino Servants in the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, 1952-1970

Lured by the American Dream

Filipino Servants in the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, 1952-1970

P. James Paligutan

University of Illinois Press, 2022

Starting in 1952, the United States Navy and Coast Guard actively recruited Filipino men to serve as stewards--domestic servants for officers. Oral histories and detailed archival research inform P. James Paligutan's story of the critical role played by Filipino sailors in putting an end to race-based military policies. Constrained by systemic exploitation, Filipino stewards responded with direct complaints to flag officers and chaplains, rating transfer requests that flooded the bureaucracy, and refusals to work. Their actions had a decisive impact on seagoing military’s elimination of the antiquated steward position. Paligutan looks at these Filipino sailors as agents of change while examining the military system through the lens of white supremacy, racist perceptions of Asian males, and the motives of Filipinos who joined the armed forces of the power that had colonized their nation.

Insightful and dramatic, Lured by the American Dream is the untold story of how Filipino servicepersons overcame tradition and hierarchy in their quest for dignity.

[more]
cover of Lviv – Wroclaw, Cities in Parallel?: Myth, Memory and Migration, c. 1890-Present

Lviv – Wroclaw, Cities in Parallel?

Myth, Memory and Migration, c. 1890-Present

Jan Fellerer

Central European University Press, 2020

After World War II, Europe witnessed the massive redrawing of national borders and the efforts to make the population fit those new borders. As a consequence of these forced changes, both Lviv and Wrocław went through cataclysmic changes in population and culture. Assertively Polish prewar Lwów became Soviet Lvov, and then, after 1991, it became assertively Ukrainian Lviv. Breslau, the third largest city in Germany before 1945, was in turn "recovered" by communist Poland as Wrocław. Practically the entire population of Breslau was replaced, and Lwów's demography too was dramatically restructured: many Polish inhabitants migrated to Wrocław and most Jews perished or went into exile. The forced migration of these groups incorporated new myths and the construction of official memory projects.

The chapters in this edited book compare the two cities by focusing on lived experiences and "bottom-up" historical processes. Their sources and methods are those of micro-history and include oral testimonies, memoirs, direct observation and questionnaires, examples of popular culture, and media pieces. The essays explore many manifestations of the two sides of the same coin—loss on the one hand, gain on the other—in two cities that, as a result of the political reality of the time, are complementary.

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cover of Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas

Lynching and Leisure

Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas

Terry Anne Scott

University of Arkansas Press, 2022

Winner, 2022 Ottis Lock Endowment “Best Book” Award from the East Texas Historical Association

In Lynching and Leisure, Terry Anne Scott examines how white Texans transformed lynching from a largely clandestine strategy of extralegal punishment into a form of racialized recreation in which crowd involvement was integral to the mode and methods of the violence. Scott powerfully documents how lynchings came to function not only as tools for debasing the status of Black people but also as highly anticipated occasions for entertainment, making memories with friends and neighbors, and reifying whiteness. In focusing on the sense of pleasure and normality that prevailed among the white spectatorship, this comprehensive study of Texas lynchings sheds new light on the practice understood as one of the chief strategies of racial domination in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South.

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cover of Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930

Lynching in the New South

Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930

W. Fitzhugh Brundage

University of Illinois Press, 1993

Lynching was a national crime. But it obsessed the South. W. Fitzhugh Brundage's multidisciplinary approach to the complex nature of lynching delves into the such extrajudicial murders in two states: Virginia, the southern state with the fewest lynchings; and Georgia, where 460 lynchings made the state a measure of race relations in the Deep South. Brundage's analysis addresses three central questions: How can we explain variations in lynching over regions and time periods? To what extent was lynching a social ritual that affirmed traditional white values and white supremacy? And, what were the causes of the decline of lynching at the end of the 1920s?

A groundbreaking study, Lynching in the New South is a classic portrait of the tradition of violence that poisoned American life.

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cover of Lyric Trade: Reading the Subject in the Postwar Long Poem

Lyric Trade

Reading the Subject in the Postwar Long Poem

Julia Bloch

University of Iowa Press, 2024

Sometimes the word “lyric” seems to appear everywhere: either it’s used interchangeably with the word “poetry” or it attaches to descriptions of literature, art, film, and even ordinary objects in order to capture some quality of aesthetic appeal or meaning. Lyric Trade is not yet another attempt to define the lyric, but instead it digs into how poems use lyric in relation to race, gender, nation, and empire.

Engaging with poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, H.D., Lorine Niedecker, Alice Notley, and Myung Mi Kim, this book asks: What does lyric mean, and why should it matter to poets and readers? Lyric Trade argues that lyric in the postwar long poem not only registers the ideological contradictions of modernism’s insistence on new forms, but that it also maps spaces for formal reimaginings of the subject.
 
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