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234 books match the query 'Families' and 5 start with o

cover of On The Man Question: Gender and Civic Virtue in America

On The Man Question

Gender and Civic Virtue in America

Mark E. Kann

Temple University Press, 1991

Focusing on Seventeenth-Century English political philosophy and Nineteenth-Century American culture, Mark Kann challenges the widely-held view that American political institutions are grounded in the primacy of individualism. Liberal thinkers have long been concerned that men are too passionate and selfish to exercise individual rights without causing social chaos. Kann demonstrates how a desperate search to answer the man question began to revolutionize gender relations He examines "the other liberal tradition in America" which downplays the value of individualism, elevates the ongoing significance of an "engendered civic virtue," and incorporates classical republicanism into the fabric of modern political discourse.

The author traces the cultural conditioning of the white middle class that produced the ideal of self-sacrificing wives whose lives were devoted to creating a haven for their husbands and a school of virtue for their sons. Upon leaving home, these young men were to be schooled in manliness in the military in order to be capable of assuming positions of power as they were vacated by their fathers’ generation. Thus, in the norms of fatherhood, fraternity, womanhood, and militarism, the male’s individualism was conditioned with a strong dose of civic virtue.

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cover of One Poor Scruple

One Poor Scruple

Josephine Ward

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

The Catholic University of America Press is pleased to continue to present new volumes in our Catholic Women Writers series, which will shed new light on prose work of Catholic women writers from the 19th and 20th centuries. Josephine Ward is one of Catholicism’s greatest literary treasures and a foremost contributor to English literary history – except that she has all but completely fallen from the historical record. She spent her life in close companionship with the most active minds working in the late 19th century to restore to the Catholic Church in England the intellectual, sacramental and theological integrity it had once enjoyed before three hundred years of persecution. All seven of her novels are out of print, despite their once high acclaim in the fin de siècle literary world. First published in 1899, One Poor Scruple follows the recusant Riversdale family who have survived the long penal years by observing a quiet aristocratic life of sport and agriculture, never stepping into the public sphere from which Catholics in Britain had been barred for so long. But at the start of the twentieth century, a new generation has emerged. The novel’s younger characters are now legally able to go to Oxford and Cambridge and to enter the public life of letters. Emboldened by the confident work of John Henry Newman, this younger generation of Catholics are nonetheless cautioned not to trust the Protestant establishment. One Poor Scruple is a coming-of-age story in which the new generation of more worldly Catholics search for love, friendship and intellectual emancipation in the decadent social world of Edwardian London. Decades before Evelyn Waugh examined in Brideshead Revisited the human struggle to distinguish between true and false beauty, Ward’s novel examined the challenge of discerning between conflicting desires and of living a life that is as truthful and good as it is beautiful.
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cover of One Winter Up North

One Winter Up North

John Owens

University of Minnesota Press, 2022

A picture-book journey through the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in winter, snowshoeing the frozen lakes and silent forest with family, encountering the wonders of northern wildlife in the cold season
 

In winter the Boundary Waters, way up north in Minnesota, is not the same place you canoed last summer—but still it beckons and welcomes you. Grab a pack, strap on snowshoes, make a path (Oh! they take some getting used to!), and venture out across the frozen lakes and through the snowy woods. The vast wintery world here is so still and quiet, you might think you’re all alone—but no! Who made these tracks? A deer? A hare? A fox? And far off there’s a musher, making tracks with his sled dogs.

It’s a magical place. The bright sun brilliant on the snow, the sparkling silence—wait, is that a wolf calling? Try to answer! And when the dark descends, the stars and pine trees holding up the night, your nose gets cold and it’s back to camp, to your warm winter tent, where Father feeds the stove with wood you gathered, Mother snuggles into her big sleeping bag, and you curl up in the fire’s glow and know that in your dreams and memories you will return again and again to this one winter up north. 

A wintery adventure that unfolds in pictures, John Owens’s delightful book gives readers a chance to discover—or rediscover—another season full of wonder in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

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cover of Our Blood: The Social Experience of Heritas

Our Blood

The Social Experience of Heritas

Michael M. Bell, Loka Ashwood and Jay Orne

University of Chicago Press, 2026

Who are we, where do we come from, and why does it matter?
 
 From whom do I come? Our Blood describes the central importance of our sense not just of our heritage, but our embodied heritage: that our past is in our bodies and runs in our blood, and that our embodied past is central to our futures. Deeply felt heritas, as Michael M. Bell, Loka Ashwood, and Jay Orne call it, can be a source of great love and kindness for one another. But it can also be a beautiful horror, the source of some of our greatest hate and meanness towards one another. We think of our embodied heritage as natural and historical facts, beyond our choice, and therefore free of manipulation for social gain. We think of it as spirited presences in our bodies that we did not choose. We think of its origins as external to us, whether we are talking about family, class, caste, places, things, ethnoraciality, or our professions. We think of it as legitimate and rightful, therefore. But we do choose. We do select. Bell, Ashwood, and Orne argue that greater awareness of heritas’s social origins and social selectivity can help us cultivate a wider sense of mutual care and ease the divisiveness of our time. Ultimately, Our Blood asks us all to consider heritas, and in doing so, to perhaps even reconsider our very selves. 


 
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cover of Out of Peel Tree

Out of Peel Tree

Laura Long

West Virginia University Press, 2014

Moving through time and space, Out of Peel Tree unfolds the patterns of an Appalachian sensibility that reverberate everywhere: a fatalism balanced by humor and flinty, hard-won hope, an appreciation for the surprises of the everyday, and a search for love and home amid strange and familiar places and people.

This innovative debut novel reveals the lives of a far-flung contemporary Appalachian family through a web of delicate turning points. A child discovers a grandmother she never knew has died. A runaway teen schemes to start a new life in Texas. A man on parole falls hopelessly in love with a shoplifter. A woman receives a letter about her husband’s other wife. An old woman confronts a burglar with the help of her ghost-husband.

United by a connection to their matriarch, these characters search at home and beyond to make a fresh sense of their changing lives. As a novel in stories, Out of Peel Tree brings a new lyricism to the page and a new voice to American and Appalachian literature—a voice deeply inflected by the beauty of the natural world and by working-class grit.


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