18284 books match the query 'United States' and 1181 start with s

cover of Sinking Chicago: Climate Change and the Remaking of a Flood-Prone Environment

Sinking Chicago

Climate Change and the Remaking of a Flood-Prone Environment

Harold L. Platt

Temple University Press, 2018

In Sinking Chicago, Harold Platt shows how people responded to climate change in one American city over a hundred-and-fifty-year period. During a long dry spell before 1945, city residents lost sight of the connections between land use, flood control, and water quality. Then, a combination of suburban sprawl and a wet period of extreme weather events created damaging runoff surges that sank Chicago and contaminated drinking supplies with raw sewage. 

Chicagoans had to learn how to remake a city built on a prairie wetland. They organized a grassroots movement to protect the six river watersheds in the semi-sacred forest preserves from being turned into open sewers, like the Chicago River. The politics of outdoor recreation clashed with the politics of water management. Platt charts a growing constituency of citizens who fought a corrupt political machine to reclaim the region’s waterways and Lake Michigan as a single eco-system. Environmentalists contested policymakers’ heroic, big-technology approaches with small-scale solutions for a flood-prone environment. Sinking Chicago lays out a roadmap to future planning outcomes.

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cover of Sins Of The Parents: Politics Of National Apologies In The U.S.

Sins Of The Parents

Politics Of National Apologies In The U.S.

Brian A. Weiner

Temple University Press, 2005

Debates have swirled around the question of national forgiveness for the past fifty years. Using two examples—the land claims of the Oneida Indians and the claims for reparations to Japanese Americans interned during World War II—Brian Weiner suggests a way of thinking about national misdeeds. Arguing beyond collective "innocence" or "guilt," Sins of the Parents offers a model of collective responsibility to deal with past wrongs in such a way as to reinvigorate our notion of citizenship. Drawing upon the writings of Abraham Lincoln and Hannah Arendt, Weiner offers a definition of political responsibility that at once defines citizenship and sidesteps the familial, racial, and ethnic questions that often ensnare debates about national apologies. An original contribution to political theory and practice, Sins of the Parents will become a much discussed contribution in the debate about what it is to be an American.
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cover of Sins of the Shovel: Looting, Murder, and the Evolution of American Archaeology

Sins of the Shovel

Looting, Murder, and the Evolution of American Archaeology

Rachel Morgan

University of Chicago Press, 2023

An incisive history of early American archaeology—from reckless looting to professional science—and the field’s unfinished efforts to make amends today, told "with passion, indignation, and a dash of suspense" (New York Times).

American archaeology was forever scarred by an 1893 business proposition between cowboy-turned-excavator Richard Wetherill and socialites-turned-antiquarians Fred and Talbot Hyde. Wetherill had stumbled upon Mesa Verde’s spectacular cliff dwellings and started selling artifacts, but with the Hydes’ money behind him, well—there’s no telling what they might discover. Thus begins the Hyde Exploring Expedition, a nine-year venture into Utah’s Grand Gulch and New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon that—coupled with other less-restrained looters—so devastates Indigenous cultural sites across the American Southwest that Congress passes first-of-their-kind regulations to stop the carnage. As the money dries up, tensions rise, and a once-profitable enterprise disintegrates, setting the stage for a tragic murder.

Sins of the Shovel is a story of adventure and business gone wrong and how archaeologists today grapple with this complex heritage. Through the story of the Hyde Exploring Expedition, practicing archaeologist Rachel Morgan uncovers the uncomfortable links between commodity culture, contemporary ethics, and the broader political forces that perpetuate destructive behavior today. The result is an unsparing and even-handed assessment of American archaeology’s sins, past and present, and how the field is working toward atonement.
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cover of Sioux War Dispatches: Reports from the Field, 1876-1877

Sioux War Dispatches

Reports from the Field, 1876-1877

Marc H. Abrams

Westholme Publishing, 2012

Rare, First-Hand Accounts from Newspaper Correspondents Describing the Course of America’s Largest Indian War, Compiled and Edited for the First Time in One Volume

“No one commands better the story of the Great Sioux War of 1876–1877 as presented in the nation’s newspapers than does Marc Abrams. Here is Abrams’s story of America’s greatest Indian war woven from those timely reports, augmented with insightful introductions and annotations. Abrams has produced a significant addition to the historiography of this endlessly fascinating struggle and its colorful personalities.” —Paul L. Hedren, author of After Custer: Loss and Transformation in Sioux Country

“Marc Abrams has provided an invaluable service to both scholars and lay readers in compiling this treasure trove of primary information. Like the correspondents he has come to know through his research, Marc has done the hard work; we need only read in comfort and benefit from his efforts.” —Douglas W. Ellison, author of Sole Survivor: An Examination of the Frank Finkel Narrative

“Marc Abrams’s book is an exciting and innovative approach that brings immediacy to the campaigns of Custer, Crook, and Miles, and teems with fascinating new detail. Sioux War Dispatches not only offers a gripping contemporary window into those times, it fills an important reference need as well.” —Jerome A. Greene, author of Stricken Field: The Little Bighorn Since 1876

Sioux War Dispatches: Reports from the Field, 1876-1877, tells the story of the Great Sioux War, including the battle of the Little Big Horn, primarily through the eyes of contemporary newspaper correspondents, both civilian and military. The volume begins with the Black Hills dilemma and the issue of the unceded territory (the disputed lands that were adjacent to the Great Sioux Reservation) and continues through to the spring of 1877 with the surrender of the legendary Sioux leader Crazy Horse. Along the way readers will learn about the Reynolds battle, the skirmish at Tongue River Heights, the battle of the Rosebud, the battle of the Little Big Horn, the skirmish at Warbonnet Creek, the fight at Slim Buttes, and more. In addition to numerous annotated excerpts from those who were there, are rare original dispatches, reprinted in full, that will take readers on a wild ride through several battles.
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cover of Sir John Templeton: Supporting Scientific Research For Spiritual Discoveries

Sir John Templeton

Supporting Scientific Research For Spiritual Discoveries

Robert Herrmann

Templeton Press, 2004

The biography of the "Wizard of Wall Street" who has dedicated his life to advancing the scientific study of spiritual realities has been revised and updated. Sir John Templeton was an inspiring and motivational force both through his personal example and through the foundation that bears his name and is dedicated to his mission.
 
This volume reviews the life of this man of vision, from his childhood in rural Tennessee, to his education at Yale and Oxford, to his legendary years on Wall Street, the birth of his children, and the development and growth of "humility theology science." Interwoven with the stories and facts are the roots of his faith and the values that he credits for his financial success and are the catalyst for his lifelong mission.
 
Sir John's biography updates the growth of the many and varied programs of the John Templeton Foundation that support this mission. It also introduces some of the scientists, theologians, philosophers, writers, and fellow investors who now serve as staff and advisors to the John Templeton Foundation, striving toward Sir John's goal of one-hundred-fold more spiritual information gained through the application of scientific methodology and analysis.
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cover of Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness

Sissy Insurgencies

A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness

Marlon B. Ross

Duke University Press, 2022

In Sissy Insurgencies Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how sissiness constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Whether examining Washington’s practice of cleaning as an iteration of sissiness, Baldwin’s self-fashioned sissy deportment, or sissiphobia in professional sports and black nationalism, Ross demonstrates that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy. In this way, sissiness constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender.
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cover of Sissy!: The Effeminate Paradox in Postwar US Literature and Culture

Sissy!

The Effeminate Paradox in Postwar US Literature and Culture

Harry Thomas Jr.

University of Alabama Press, 2017

Winner of the Elizabeth Agee Prize in American Literature

Sissy!: The Effeminate Paradox in Postwar US Literature and Culture is a fascinating work of cultural criticism that focuses on the ways men and boys deemed to be feminine have been—and continue to be—condemned for their personalities and behavior. Critic Harry Thomas Jr. does not dismiss this approach, but rather identifies it as merely one side of a coin. On the other side, he asserts, the opposite exists: an American artistic tradition that celebrates and affirms effeminate masculinity.
 
The author argues that effeminate men and boys are generally portrayed using the grotesque, an artistic mode concerned with the depictions of hybrid bodies. Thomas argues that the often grotesque imagery used to depict effeminate men evokes a complicated array of emotions, a mix of revulsion and fascination that cannot be completely separated from one another.
 
Thomas looks to the sissies in the 1940s novels of Truman Capote and Carson McCullers; the truth-telling flaming princesses of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room; the superstardom of pop culture icon Liberace; the prophetic queens of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America; and many others to demonstrate how effeminate men have often been adored because they are seen as the promise of a different world, one free from the bounds of heteronormativity.

Sissy! offers an unprecedented and counterintuitive overview of cultural and artistic attitudes toward male effeminacy in post–World War II America and provides a unique and contemporary reinterpretation of the “sissy” figure in modern art and literature. 
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cover of Sista, Speak!: Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy

Sista, Speak!

Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy

By Sonja L. Lanehart

University of Texas Press, 2002

2003 — Honorable Mention, Myers Outstanding Book Award – The Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America

The demand of white, affluent society that all Americans should speak, read, and write "proper" English causes many people who are not white and/or middle class to attempt to "talk in a way that feel peculiar to [their] mind," as a character in Alice Walker's The Color Purple puts it. In this book, Sonja Lanehart explores how this valorization of "proper" English has affected the language, literacy, educational achievements, and self-image of five African American women—her grandmother, mother, aunt, sister, and herself.

Through interviews and written statements by each woman, Lanehart draws out the life stories of these women and their attitudes toward and use of language. Making comparisons and contrasts among them, she shows how, even within a single family, differences in age, educational opportunities, and social circumstances can lead to widely different abilities and comfort in using language to navigate daily life. Her research also adds a new dimension to our understanding of African American English, which has been little studied in relation to women.

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cover of Sister City Diplomacy: Community Engagement in U.S.–Russian Relations from the Cold War to Today

Sister City Diplomacy

Community Engagement in U.S.–Russian Relations from the Cold War to Today

Douglas C. Nord

University of Wisconsin Press, 2025

In 1987, Duluth, Minnesota, and Petrozavodsk, in what is now Russia, officially joined hands as sister cities. Douglas C. Nord tells the stories of their collaboration in the context of the late Cold War, covering in substantial detail the lived experiences of city officials, community leaders, academics, and average citizens who worked to bridge the divide between the United States and the Soviet Union. What circumstances supported or undermined efforts to conduct people-to-people diplomacy? What internal difficulties emerged, and how were they overcome? And what were the short-term effects and long-term consequences of the relationships forged in these postindustrial cities, across an ideological divide as deep and wide as the ocean that separated them?

Sister City Diplomacy offers a historical account of citizen diplomacy set in a unique political and social environment. But in its theoretical grounding and informed arguments, this study speaks to much broader and contemporary concerns, both in terms of United States–Russian relations today and with regard to the challenges and opportunities of community-based diplomacy in general. Lessons learned along the shores of Lakes Superior and Onega in the last days of the Cold War hold great value given the heightened tensions of current geopolitics.
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cover of Sister: An African American Life in Search of Justice

Sister

An African American Life in Search of Justice

Sylvia Bell White and Jody LePage

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

Raised with twelve brothers in a part of the segregated South that provided no school for African American children through the 1940s, Sylvia Bell White went North as a teenager, dreaming of a nursing career and a freedom defined in part by wartime rhetoric about American ideals. In Milwaukee she and her brothers persevered through racial rebuffs and discrimination to find work. Barred by both her gender and color from employment in the city’s factories, Sylvia scrubbed floors, worked as a nurse’s aide, and took adult education courses.
            When a Milwaukee police officer killed her younger brother Daniel Bell in 1958, the Bell family suspected a racial murder but could do nothing to prove it—until twenty years later, when one of the two officers involved in the incident unexpectedly came forward. Daniel’s siblings filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city and ultimately won that four-year legal battle. Sylvia was the driving force behind their quest for justice.
            Telling her whole life story in these pages, Sylvia emerges as a buoyant spirit, a sparkling narrator, and, above all, a powerful witness to racial injustice. Jody LePage’s chapter introductions frame the narrative in a historical span that reaches from Sylvia’s own enslaved grandparents to the nation’s first African American president. Giving depth to that wide sweep, this oral history brings us into the presence of an extraordinary individual. Rarely does such a voice receive a hearing.

Winner, Wisconsin Historical Society Book Award of Merit
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cover of Sisters in the Faith: Shaker Women and Equality of the Sexes

Sisters in the Faith

Shaker Women and Equality of the Sexes

Glendyne R. Wergland

University of Massachusetts Press, 2011

In 1788, following the death of charismatic founder Mother Ann Lee, the celibate religious group known as the Shakers set out to institutionalize equality of the sexes in their theology, government, and daily practice. In this book, Glendyne Wergland evaluates how well they succeeded in that mission by examining the experiences of women within Shaker communities over more than a century. 

Drawing on an extensive archive of primary documents, Wergland discusses topics ranging from girlhood, health, and dress to why women joined the Shakers and how they were viewed by those outside their community. She analyzes the division of labor between men and women, showing that there was considerable cooperation and reciprocity in carrying out most tasks—from food production to laundering to gathering firewood—even as gendered conflicts remained. 

In her conclusion, Wergland draws together all of these threads to show that Shaker communities achieved a remarkable degree of gender equality at a time when women elsewhere still suffered under the legal and social strictures of the traditional patriarchal order. In so doing, she argues, the experience of Shaker women served as a model for promoting women's rights in American political culture.

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cover of Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making

Sisters in the Life

A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making

Yvonne Welbon and Alexandra Juhasz, editors

Duke University Press, 2018

From experimental shorts and web series to Hollywood blockbusters and feminist porn, the work of African American lesbian filmmakers has made a powerful contribution to film history. But despite its importance, this work has gone largely unacknowledged by cinema historians and cultural critics. Assembling a range of interviews, essays, and conversations, Sisters in the Life tells a full story of African American lesbian media-making spanning three decades. In essays on filmmakers including Angela Robinson, Tina Mabry and Dee Rees; on the making of Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman (1996); and in interviews with Coquie Hughes, Pamela Jennings, and others, the contributors center the voices of black lesbian media makers while underscoring their artistic influence and reach as well as the communities that support them. Sisters in the Life marks a crucial first step in narrating the history and importance of these compelling yet unsung artists.

Contributors. Jennifer DeVere Brody, Jennifer DeClue, Raul Ferrera-Balanquet, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Thomas Allen Harris, Devorah Heitner, Pamela L. Jennings, Alexandra Juhasz, Kara Keeling, Candace Moore, Marlon Moore, Michelle Parkerson, Roya Rastegar, L. H. Stallings, Yvonne Welbon, Patricia White, Karin D. Wimbley
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cover of Sisters of Influence: A Biography of Zina, Amy, and Rose Fay

Sisters of Influence

A Biography of Zina, Amy, and Rose Fay

Andrea Friederici Ross

Southern Illinois University Press, 2025

WINNER, Certificate of Excellence in “Scholarly Publications” from the Illinois State Historical Society’s 2026 Best of Illinois History Awards!

Three sisters who forged intertwined paths to empowerment

A real-life Little Women, Sisters of Influence is the untold story of three extraordinary sisters who defied Victorian-era expectations to leave their marks on history. Andrea Friederici Ross breathes new life into the fascinating stories of Zina, Amy, and Rose Fay, intertwining their narratives into a captivating family biography.

Born into modest circumstances as daughters of an Episcopal rector and a poet, the seven Fay siblings’ upbringing in small-town Vermont was shaped by financial struggles, rare educational opportunities, and the early loss of their mother. While their sisters pursued traditional paths and their brother Norman helped them all, Zina, Amy, and Rose boldly charted their own courses, becoming trailblazers in music, writing, and women’s advocacy.

Zina Fay Peirce envisioned a life of intellectual partnership with her husband, philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, only to find her dreams frustrated by domestic expectations. Undeterred, she became a writer and a conservative feminist, championing improved education for women and pioneering cooperative housekeeping initiatives. Despite challenges, Zina’s vision for women’s empowerment laid a foundation for future reform.

Amy Fay, a gifted pianist, pursued music studies abroad, including under the tutelage of Franz Liszt. Her letters home, filled with vivid accounts of her experiences in Europe, were edited into a memoir by Zina and published to critical acclaim. As a concert pianist, music teacher, and advocate for women in music, Amy inspired generations of women to follow their artistic passions.

Rose Fay Thomas, initially a quiet supporter of her sisters, emerged as a formidable force in her own right, becoming a founder of the Anti-Cruelty Society. Her leadership in Chicago’s Amateur Musical Club and the National Federation of Music Clubs helped shape the American classical music scene. As the wife of conductor Theodore Thomas, Rose played a pivotal role in establishing the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Her later writings on gardening and her husband’s life further solidified her legacy.

Through her exploration of the Fay sisters’ lives, Ross illuminates the shifting roles of women during a transformative era. From advocating for women’s education to advancing the arts and social reform, Zina, Amy, and Rose exemplify the resilience and determination that bridged the restrictive norms of the Victorian age and the activism of the Progressive Era. Their remarkable journeys will inspire readers to reimagine the possibilities of women’s contributions to history and culture.

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cover of Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937

Sit-Down

The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937

Sidney Fine

University of Michigan Press, 1969

In the first documented book-length study of this violent confrontation, Sidney Fine portrays the dramatic events of the 1936-37 strike that catapulted the UAW into prominence and touched off a wave of sit-down strikes across the land. Basing his account on an impressive variety of manuscript sources, the author analyzes the strategy and tactics of GM and the UAW, describes the life of the workers in the occupied plants, and examines the troubled governmental and public reaction to the alleged breakdown of law and order in the strikes. In addition, Dr. Fine provides vivid portraits of Governor Frank Murphy and the major figures on both sides of the conflict: Alfred Sloan, Jr., William Knudson, Robert Travis, Roy Victor, and Walter Reuther, Homer Martin, and Wyndham Mortimer. Of particular interest today are the author's concluding remarks regarding the similarities between the sit-down strike movement of the 1930's and the civil rights movement and the college sit-ins of our own era.

The GM sit-down strike marks the close of one era of labor-management relations in the United States and the beginning of another. Professor Fine has provided us with the definitive account of that momentous conflict.

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cover of Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937

Sit-Down

The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937

Sidney Fine

University of Michigan Press, 2020

In this classic study, Sidney Fine portrays the dramatic events of the 1936–37 Flint Sit-down Strike against General Motors, which catapulted the UAW into prominence and touched off a wave of sit-down strikes across the United States. Basing his account on an impressive variety of manuscript sources, Fine analyzes the strategy and tactics of GM and the UAW, describes the life of the workers in the occupied plants, and examines the troubled governmental and public reaction to the alleged breakdown of law and order in the strikes. In addition, Fine provides vivid portraits of the major figures on both sides of the conflict: Governor Frank Murphy; Alfred Sloan, Jr.; William Knudsen; Robert Travis; Roy, Victor, and Walter Reuther; Homer Martin; and Wyndham Mortimer. The GM sit-down strike marks the close of one era of labor-management relations in the United States and the beginning of another. A half century after its initial publication, Fine’s work remains the definitive account of that momentous conflict. A new foreword by Kim Moody’s revisits Sit-Down in order to demonstrate its continued relevance to today’s unions, workers, and activists.
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cover of Sites Unseen: Uncovering Hidden Hazards in American Cities

Sites Unseen

Uncovering Hidden Hazards in American Cities

Scott Frickel

Russell Sage Foundation, 2018

Winner of the 2020 Robert E. Park Award for Best Book from the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association

From a dive bar in New Orleans to a leafy residential street in Minneapolis, many establishments and homes in cities across the nation share a troubling and largely invisible past: they were once sites of industrial manufacturers, such as plastics factories or machine shops, that likely left behind carcinogens and other hazardous industrial byproducts. In Sites Unseen, sociologists Scott Frickel and James Elliott uncover the hidden histories of these sites to show how they are regularly produced and reincorporated into urban landscapes with limited or no regulatory oversight. By revealing this legacy of our industrial past, Sites Unseen spotlights how city-making has become an ongoing process of social and environmental transformation and risk containment.
 
To demonstrate these dynamics, Frickel and Elliott investigate four very different cities—New Orleans, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Portland, Oregon. Using original data assembled and mapped for thousands of former manufacturers’ locations dating back to the 1950s, they find that more than 90 percent of such sites have now been converted to urban amenities such as parks, homes, and storefronts with almost no environmental review. And because manufacturers tend to open plants on new, non-industrial lots rather than on lots previously occupied by other manufacturers, associated hazards continue to spread relatively unabated. As they do, residential turnover driven by gentrification and the rising costs of urban living further obscure these sites from residents and regulatory agencies alike.
 
Frickel and Elliott show that these hidden processes have serious consequences for city-dwellers. While minority and working class neighborhoods are still more likely to attract hazardous manufacturers, rapid turnover in cities means that whites and middle-income groups also face increased risk.  Since government agencies prioritize managing polluted sites that are highly visible or politically expedient, many former manufacturing sites that now have other uses remain invisible. To address these oversights, the authors advocate creating new municipal databases that identify previously undocumented manufacturing sites as potential environmental hazards. They also suggest that legislation limiting urban sprawl might reduce the flow of hazardous materials beyond certain boundaries.
 
A wide-ranging synthesis of urban and environmental scholarship, Sites Unseen shows that creating sustainable cities requires deep engagement with industrial history as well as with the social and regulatory processes that continue to remake urban areas through time.
 
A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology.
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cover of Sites of Insight: A Guide to Colorado Sacred Places

Sites of Insight

A Guide to Colorado Sacred Places

James Lough

University Press of Colorado, 2003

Co-Winner of the 2004 Colorado Endowment for the Humanities Publication Prize. In these eighteen illuminating essays, some of Colorado's most accomplished novelists, essayists, and poets write in intimate detail about their most poignant experiences in the Colorado wilderness. Readers are given access - both physically and spiritually - to settings that inspire reverence for and contemplation about one's relationship to the land. From above tree line in the Rawah Mountains down into the broad San Luis Valley, from the Western Slope to the high plains in the east, the reader is taken on a vivid journey through a rich assortment of Colorado's awe-inspiring landscapes. Essays by Tom Noel, Fred Baca, Kristen Iversen, and Reyes Garcia are historical in makeup, while those by Sangeeta Reddy, Merrill Gilfillan, and Amy England feature engaging spiritual and philosophical explorations, even epiphanies. Reg Saner and Nick Sutcliffe share experiences of pitting themselves against nature. And in the tradition of Thoreau, John Muir, and Annie Dillard, all of these essayists explore the intense and vibrant relationships people have with the wilderness. Sites of Insight belongs on the bookshelves of tourists, outdoor enthusiasts, and Coloradoans - both longtime residents and newcomers - who seek to apprehend something in nature that is larger than themselves.
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cover of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination

Sites of Slavery

Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination

Salamishah Tillet

Duke University Press, 2012

More than forty years after the major victories of the civil rights movement, African Americans have a vexed relation to the civic myth of the United States as the land of equal opportunity and justice for all. In Sites of Slavery Salamishah Tillet examines how contemporary African American artists and intellectuals—including Annette Gordon-Reed, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Bill T. Jones, Carrie Mae Weems, and Kara Walker—turn to the subject of slavery in order to understand and challenge the ongoing exclusion of African Americans from the founding narratives of the United States. She explains how they reconstruct "sites of slavery"—contested figures, events, memories, locations, and experiences related to chattel slavery—such as the allegations of a sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the characters Uncle Tom and Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, African American tourism to slave forts in Ghana and Senegal, and the legal challenges posed by reparations movements. By claiming and recasting these sites of slavery, contemporary artists and intellectuals provide slaves with an interiority and subjectivity denied them in American history, register the civic estrangement experienced by African Americans in the post–civil rights era, and envision a more fully realized American democracy.
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cover of Sites: A Third Memoir

Sites

A Third Memoir

Wallace Fowlie

Duke University Press, 1987

Wallace Fowlie here gives us his third book of memoirs—the best yet. Sites is thematically focused on places that marked Fowlie's life and affected his way of looking at the world. This brilliantly written book exhibits great clarity and elegant simplicity, virtues that only an experienced—and good—writer can achieve. Although Sites has a strong unfolding narrative pattern that encourages you to read it from beginning to end, it can be browsed in to good purpose, for you can read any chapter out of sequence and still relish it.
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cover of Sitting Bull

Sitting Bull

Bill Yenne

Westholme Publishing, 2008

An Acclaimed Biography of the Greatest American Indian Leader
Sitting Bull's name is still the best known of any American Indian leader, but his life and legacy remain shrouded with misinformation and half-truths. Sitting Bull's life spanned the entire clash of cultures and ultimate destruction of the Plains Indian way of life. He was a powerful leader and a respected shaman, but neither fully captures the enigma of Sitting Bull. He was a good friend of Buffalo Bill and skillful negotiator with the American government, yet erroneously credited with both murdering Custer at the Little Big Horn and with being the chief instigator of the Ghost Dance movement. The reality of his life, as Bill Yenne reveals in his absorbing new portrait, Sitting Bull, is far more intricate and compelling. Tracing Sitting Bull's history from a headstrong youth and his first contact with encroaching settlers, through his ascension as the spiritual and military leader of the Lakota, friendship with a Swiss-American widow from New York, and death at the hands of the Indian police on the eve of the massacre at Wounded Knee, Yenne scoured rare contemporary records and consulted Sitting Bull's own "Hieroglyphic Autobiography" in the course of his research. While Sitting Bull was the leading figure of Plains Indian resistance his message, as Yenne explains, was of self-reliance, not violence. At the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull was not confronting Custer as popular myth would have it, but riding through the Lakota camp making sure the most defenseless of his tribe--the children--were safe. In Sitting Bull we find a man who, in the face of an uncertain future, helped ensure the survival of his people.

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cover of Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location

Situating Composition

Composition Studies and the Politics of Location

Lisa Ede

Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

Responding to a growing pedagogical paralysis in debates over the nature and status of composition studies as an academic discipline, Lisa Ede offers a provocative inquiry into the politics of composition’s place in the academy. The result is a timely and engaging reflection on the rhetoric, ideology, and ethics of scholarship and instruction in composition studies today.

Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location delves into some of the most vexing issues presently facing the field: its status in relation to English studies, the nature and consequences of the writing process movement, the uneven professionalization of composition teachers, and the widening chasm between theory and practice. Ede interrogates key moments and texts in composition’s evolution, from the writing process movement to Susan Miller’s Textual Carnivals, through the interpretive lenses of historical analysis, theoretical critique, feminist and cultural theory, and Ede’s own two decades of experiences as a teacher and writing program administrator.

Questioning the narratives of progress and paradigm shifts that inform the field’s highly regarded recent theoretical studies, Ede urges scholars to carefully reconsider these claims, to honor the roles of teachers and students as more than dupes of ideology, and to more fully acknowledge—and utilize—the differences between the practice of theory and the practice of teaching. As academic hierarchies of knowledge increasingly privilege scholarship over instruction, Ede warns researchers to be cognizant of the politics and power inherent in their own location in the academy, particularly when professing to speak for teachers and students. To that end, the volume’s conclusion advocates pragmatic avenues for change and proffers topics for future discussion and debate.

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cover of Situating Portfolios

Situating Portfolios

edited by Kathleen Blake Yancey & Irwin Weiser

Utah State University Press, 1997

Yancey and Weiser bring together thirty-one writing teachers from diverse levels of instruction, institutional settings, and regions to create a stimulating volume on the current practice in portfolio writing assessment. Contributors reflect on the explosion in portfolio practice over the last decade, why it happened, what comes next; discuss portfolios in hypertext, the web, and other electronic spaces; and consider emerging trends and issues that are involving portfolios in teacher assessment, faculty development, and graduate student experience.

Contributors: Peter Elbow, Pat Belanoff, Gail Hawisher, Cynthia Selfe, Brian Huot, Sandra Murphy, William Condon

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cover of Situation Critical: Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies

Situation Critical

Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies

Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly, editors

Duke University Press, 2024

The contributors to Situation Critical argue for the continued importance of critique to early American studies, pushing back against both reductivist neo-empiricism and so-called postcritique. Bringing together essays by a diverse group of historians and literary scholars, editors Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly demonstrate that critique is about acknowledging that we are never simply writing better or worse accounts of the past, but accounts of the present as well. The contributors examine topics ranging from the indeterminacy of knowledge and history to Black speculative writing and nineteenth-century epistemology, the role of the unconscious in settler colonialism, and early American writing about masturbation, repression, religion, and secularism and their respective influence on morality. The contributors also offer vital new interpretations of major lines of thought in the history of critique—especially those relating to Freud and Foucault—that will be valuable both for scholars of early American studies and for scholars of the humanities and interpretive social sciences more broadly.

Contributors. Max Cavitch, Brian Connolly, Matthew Crow, John J. Garcia, Christopher Looby, Michael Meranze, Mark J. Miller, Justine S. Murison, Britt Rusert, Ana Schwartz, Joan W. Scott, Jordan Alexander Stein
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cover of Six Generations Here: A Farm Family Remembers

Six Generations Here

A Farm Family Remembers

Marjorie McLellan

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1997

Six Generations Here: A Farm Family Remembers
by Marjorie L. McLellan, with an essay by Kathleen Neils Conzen and a foreword by Dan Freas

Discover the story of the Krueger family, as images of farm, family, and landscape reveal the struggles of rural immigrant life in Wisconsin. Drawing on snapshots, memorabilia, and interviews, Six Generations Here brings together the voices of the past and the present to create a distinctive portrait of Wisconsin farm life.
Leaving their German home in 1851, the Kruegers came to America for economic opportunity. But like other immigrant families, they struggled to make ends meet. Only with the whole family helping out did they manage to get their Watertown farm up and running. By the turn of the century, they had achieved a life of middle-class comfort in the midst of the rigors of dairy farming. Over the generations, the Kruegers incorporated their past traditions with the needs of the present, adapting to the challenges of rural American life and, when necessary, breaking from the past. Despite these changes, their commitment to hard work and family persisted, shaped their identity, and ensured their success.
Through photographs, documents, and family stories, the Kruegers left a deep history of who they were and how they sought to be remembered. Follow their family through six generations as they compile a rich and varied record of Wisconsin life.

[more]
cover of Six Women Who Shaped What Americans Eat: Food Choice in an Age of Abundance

Six Women Who Shaped What Americans Eat

Food Choice in an Age of Abundance

Michelle Mart, Foreword by Mark D. Hersey

University of Alabama Press, 2025

How six groundbreaking women redefined American food—what we eat, how we eat it, and why it matters.

From wartime nutrition science to modern food activism, Six Women Who Shaped What Americans Eat examines the pivotal roles six women played in rewriting the rules of American cuisine. Michelle Mart offers a rich and accessible narrative that connects dietary trends, food marketing, and public health movements to the voices of the women who helped drive them.

Part one highlights Hazel Stiebeling’s development of dietary guidelines and RDAs, Poppy Cannon’s promotion of processed foods for convenience and gourmet meals, and Julia Child’s introduction of French cuisine with an emphasis on fresh ingredients and culinary techniques. Part two shifts the focus to women who challenged the food system itself: Frances Moore Lappé’s advocacy for vegetarianism and sustainable practices, Marion Nestle’s exposure of food corporations’ manipulative practices, and Alice Waters’s emphasis on locally sourced, organic ingredients and sustainable food systems. Thoughtful and timely, this book explores how culture, politics, and personal vision collided in the kitchens and campaigns of six food pioneers—leaving a lasting imprint on what America eats today.

[more]
cover of Sixteen and Counting: The National Championships of Alabama Football

Sixteen and Counting

The National Championships of Alabama Football

Edited and with an Introduction by Kenneth Gaddy; Foreword by Bill Battle

University of Alabama Press, 2017

Dramatic accounts of every University of Alabama National Championship football season recounted by noted sports writers, players, and Alabamians.

Dating back to 1925, when Wallace Wade coached the Crimson Tide to an undefeated season and earned a spot in the Rose Bowl, the driving goal of every University of Alabama football season has been a national championship. A winning team surfaced that very next year, when Hoyt “Wu” Winslett’s squad sealed the national championship at the Rose Bowl for a second time. Winning seasons and bowl games culminating in the coveted crown followed again in 1930, 1934, 1941, 1961, 1964, 1965, 1973, 1978, 1979, 1992, 2009, 2011, 2012, and 2015—more championships than any other college team in the nation.

Sixteen and Counting features a chapter highlighting each of these championship seasons and collects the legendary stories of many of the outstanding coaches and players on the University of Alabama’s championship teams. College football legends such as Wallace Wade, Wu Winslett, Johnny Mack Brown, Pooley Herbert, Frank Thomas, Dixie Howell, Don Hutson, Jimmy Nelson, Holt Rast, Pat Trammel, Sam Bailey, Lee Roy Jordan, Harry Gilmer, Bill Lee, Ken Stabler, Joe Namath, Gary Rutledge, Randy Billingsley, Barry Krauss, Clem Gryska, Gene Stallings, Paul “Bear” Bryant, and, of course, Nick Saban all make prominent appearances.

A seventeenth chapter is included that looks at the uncrowned teams commonly referred to as “the other five,” who were considered national champions by at least one national ranking service at the end of the season. Every glorious milestone and high point in Alabama football history is included here: “Mama called,” the wishbone formation, “The Goal Line Stand,” the Million Dollar Band, the coaching tower, the Davis kicking dynasty, the Notre Dame box, Coach of the Year, Team of the Decade, and two Heisman trophy winners.

[more]
cover of Sixteenth President-in-Waiting: Abraham Lincoln and the Springfield Dispatches of Henry Villard, 1860–1861

Sixteenth President-in-Waiting

Abraham Lincoln and the Springfield Dispatches of Henry Villard, 1860–1861

Edited by Michael Burlingame

Southern Illinois University Press, 2018

Winner, ISHS Best of Illinois History Award, 2019

Between Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and his departure for Washington three months later, journalist Henry Villard sent scores of dispatches from Springfield, Illinois, to various newspapers describing the president-elect’s doings, quoting or paraphrasing his statements, chronicling events in the Illinois capital, and analyzing the city’s mood. With Sixteenth President-in-Waiting Michael Burlingame has collected all of these dispatches in one insightful and informative volume.
 
Best known as a successful nineteenth-century railroad promoter and financier, German-born Henry Villard (1835–1900) was also among the most conscientious and able journalists of the 1860s. The dispatches gathered in this volume constitute the most intensive journalistic coverage that Lincoln ever received, for Villard filed stories from the Illinois capital almost daily to the New York Herald, slightly less often to the Cincinnati Commercial, and occasionally to the San Francisco Bulletin.
 
Lincoln welcomed Villard and encouraged him to ask questions, as he was the only full-time correspondent for out-of-town papers. He spoke with inside sources, such as Lincoln’s private secretaries John G. Nicolay and John Hay, devoted friends like Jesse K. Dubois and Stephen T. Logan, political leaders like Governor Richard Yates, and journalists like William M. Springer and Robert R. Hitt.
 
Villard boasted that he did Lincoln a service by scaring off would-be office seekers who, fearing to see their names published in newspapers, gave up plans to visit the Illinois capital to badger the president-elect. Villard may have done an even greater service by publicizing Lincoln’s views on the secession crisis.
 
His little-known coverage of the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas Senate race, translated from the German for the first time, is included as an appendix. At the time Villard was an ardent Douglas supporter, and his reports criticized Lincoln.
Not only informative but also highly readable, Villard’s vivid descriptions of Lincoln’s appearance, daily routine, and visitors, combined with fresh information about Springfielders, state political leaders, and the capital, constitute an invaluable resource. 
[more]
cover of Sixties Going on Seventies

Sixties Going on Seventies

Sayre, Nora

Rutgers University Press, 1996

Nora Sayre guides us through our nation’s transformation during an explosive decade. She explores the landscapes of the era--student strikes at Harvard and Yale, anti-war veterans, John Birchers, Timothy Leary, Yippies and Aquarians, utopias gone wrong, George McGovern, Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon, George Wallace, black anger in Watts, the media at work, policemen in college, off-off Broadway, the 1972 Democratic and Republican Conventions, and the rebirth of feminism. Sixties Going on Seventies, nominated for a 1974 National Book Award, is also a chronicle of the shattering of cities, the problems of the left, the momentum of the right--and above all, the authentic voices of the people concerned. Sayre recorded all of these events and personalities in exhilarating prose; her witty observations are remarkably fresh today.

Now back in print, this revised edition contains the best of the original volume and brings the commentary up to date, allowing us to view the period with hindsight from the nineties.

[more]
cover of Sixties Sandstorm: The Fight over Establishment of a Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, 1961-1970

Sixties Sandstorm

The Fight over Establishment of a Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, 1961-1970

Brian C. Kalt

Michigan State University Press, 2001

In 1961, Senator Philip Hart of Michigan introduced legislation to add Michigan's Sleeping Bear Dunes and 77,000 surrounding acres to America's National Park system. The 1,600 people who lived in the proposed park area feared not only that the federal government would confiscate their homes, but that a wave of tourists would ensue and destroy their beloved and fragile lands. In response, they organized citizen action groups and fought a nine-year battle against the legislation.
     Sixties Sandstorm is not a book about dunes as much as it is a book about people and their government. It chronicles the public meetings, bills, protests, and congressional interactions that led to the signing of the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes Act in 1970. The Dunes park fight is a case study of the politics, the legislative process, citizen response to the expanded role of government in the 1960s, and the rise of the environmental movement in America during that decade. Since Hart's legislation was made law, millions of Americans have traveled to the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes National Lakeshore. Few imagine what the area would look like today if not for the efforts of people like Senator Hart. On the other hand, few appreciate the sacrifice of the landowners who-not always willingly-gave up their property in this place where, as one resident put it, "stars are closer to the earth than anywhere else in the world."
[more]
cover of Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814

Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814

David Curtis Skaggs

Michigan State University Press, 2001

The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes contains twenty essays concerning not only military and naval operations, but also the political, economic, social, and cultural interactions of individuals and groups during the struggle to control the great freshwater lakes and rivers between the Ohio Valley and the Canadian Shield. Contributing scholars represent a wide variety of disciplines and institutional affiliations from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.
Collectively, these important essays delineate the common thread, weaving together the series of wars for the North American heartland that stretched from 1754 to 1814. The war for the Great Lakes was not merely a sideshow in a broader, worldwide struggle for empire, independence, self-determination, and territory. Rather, it was a single war, a regional conflict waged to establish hegemony within the area, forcing interactions that divided the Great Lakes nationally and ethnically for the two centuries that followed.

[more]
cover of Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation

Sizing Up the Senate

The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation

Frances E. Lee and Bruce I. Oppenheimer

University of Chicago Press, 1999

We take it for granted that every state has two representatives in the United States Senate. Apply the "one person, one vote" standard, however, and the Senate is the most malapportioned legislature in the democratic world.

But does it matter that California's 32 million people have the same number of Senate votes as Wyoming's 480,000? Frances Lee and Bruce Oppenheimer systematically show that the Senate's unique apportionment scheme profoundly shapes legislation and representation. The size of a state's population affects the senator-constituent relationship, fund-raising and elections, strategic behavior within the Senate, and, ultimately, policy decisions. They also show that less populous states consistently receive more federal funding than states with more people. In sum, Lee and Oppenheimer reveal that Senate apportionment leaves no aspect of the institution untouched.

This groundbreaking book raises new questions about one of the key institutions of American government and will interest anyone concerned with issues of representation.
[more]
cover of Skate Life: Re-Imagining White Masculinity

Skate Life

Re-Imagining White Masculinity

Emily Chivers Yochim

University of Michigan Press, 2009

"Intellectually deft and lively to read, Skate Life is an important addition to the literature on youth cultures, contemporary masculinity, and the role of media in identity formation."
---Janice A. Radway, Northwestern University, author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature

"With her elegant research design and sophisticated array of anthropological and media studies approaches, Emily Chivers Yochim has produced one of the best books about race, gender, and class that I have read in the last ten years. In a moment where celebratory studies of youth, youth subcultures, and their relationship to media abound, this book stands as a brilliantly argued analysis of the limitations of youth subcultures and their ambiguous relationship to mainstream commercial culture."
---Ellen Seiter, University of Southern California

"Yochim has made a valuable contribution to media and cultural studies as well as youth and American studies by conducting this research and by coining the phrase 'corresponding cultures,' which conceptualizes the complex and dynamic processes skateboarders employ to negotiate their identities as part of both mainstream and counter-cultures."
---JoEllen Fisherkeller, New York University

Skate Life examines how young male skateboarders use skate culture media in the production of their identities. Emily Chivers Yochim offers a comprehensive ethnographic analysis of an Ann Arbor, Michigan, skateboarding community, situating it within a larger historical examination of skateboarding's portrayal in mainstream media and a critique of mainstream, niche, and locally produced media texts (such as, for example, Jackass, Viva La Bam, and Dogtown and Z-Boys). The book uses these elements to argue that adolescent boys can both critique dominant norms of masculinity and maintain the power that white heterosexual masculinity offers. Additionally, Yochim uses these analyses to introduce the notion of "corresponding cultures," conceptualizing the ways in which media audiences both argue with and incorporate mediated images into their own ideas about identity. In a strong combination of anthropological and media studies approaches, Skate Life asks important questions of the literature on youth and provides new ways of assessing how young people create their identities.

Emily Chivers Yochim is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Arts, Allegheny College.

Cover design by Brian V. Smith

[more]
cover of Skeptical Visionary: A Seymour Sarason Educational Reader

Skeptical Visionary

A Seymour Sarason Educational Reader

Robert Fried

Temple University Press, 2002

Seymour Sarason, in the words of Carl Glickman, is "one of America's seminal thinkers about public education." For over four decades his has been a voice of much-needed skepticism about our plans for school reform, teacher training, and educational psychology. Now, for the first time, Sarason's essential writings on these and other issues are collected together, offering student and researcher alike with the range, depth, and originality of Sarason's contributions to American thinking on schooling.As we go from debate to debate on issues such as school choice, charter schools, inclusive education, national standards, and other problems that seem to drag on without solution, Sarason's critical stance on the folly of many of our attempts to fix schools has always had at the center a concern for the main players in our educational institutions: the students, the teachers and the parents. Any plans that cannot account for their well-being are doomed to failure. And in the face of such failure, the clarity of Sarason's vision for real educational success is a much-needed antidote to much of the rhetoric that currently passes for substantial debate.A wide-ranging and comprehensive selection of Sarason's most significant writings, The Skeptical Visionary should find a prized space on any student's or teacher's bookshelf.
[more]
cover of Sketches of Alabama

Sketches of Alabama

Mary Duffee, edited by Jane Porter Nabers and Virginia Pounds Brown

University of Alabama Press, 1970

Rediscover the spirit, stories, and landscapes of Alabama through a timeless collection of observations and historical reflections.

In Sketches of Alabama, Mary Duffee offers a richly detailed portrait of a state shaped by diverse communities, enduring traditions, and a deeply rooted cultural identity. Through a series of engaging sketches, Duffee captures the essence of Alabama’s towns, people, and everyday life, preserving moments that might otherwise be lost to time.

Blending historical insight with narrative charm, this collection explores the character of Alabama from multiple perspectives—rural and urban, past and present. Readers encounter vivid depictions of local customs, notable figures, and the evolving social fabric of the region. Duffee’s work not only chronicles the state’s development but also reflects the broader story of the American South, illuminating its complexities, resilience, and sense of place.

This collection contains typescripts of some of Mary Gordon Duffee's Iron Age columns "Sketches of Alabama," manuscripts of seven of Duffee's poems, a typed biographical sketch of Duffee, undated, and Duffee's obituary from the Birmingham Age-Herald. Ideal for students, historians, and general readers alike, Sketches of Alabama serves as both a literary work and a cultural record. Its accessible style makes it an excellent introduction to Alabama’s heritage, while its thoughtful observations reward those seeking deeper understanding of Southern history and identity.

Whether you are drawn to regional storytelling, historical narrative, or the rich traditions of the Deep South, this work offers a compelling journey into Alabama’s past—one sketch at a time.

[more]
cover of Sketches of Early Texas and Louisiana

Sketches of Early Texas and Louisiana

By Frédéric Gaillardet

University of Texas Press, 1966

A lively report of travels in early nineteenth-century Texas and Louisiana and a fascinating account of the discovery, exploration, and settlement of those areas is presented in the work of this ebullient young French dramatist and journalist who traveled to Louisiana in 1837 and to Texas in 1839.

Frédéric Gaillardet, an alert and talented writer of the romantic school, was lured away for a decade from a successful career in Paris to satisfy his wanderlust and to seek inspiration on the American frontier. During that time he visited the American Southwest, and he talked with many personages there—men like Sam Houston, Mirabeau B. Lamar, and Achille Murat. His character sketches of these men add zest to the book, as do the facets of Gaillardet's own personality and life displayed in these pages.

Gaillardet's reports of his travels were published in various French-language newspapers of the time; a few were incorporated into the author's posthumous memoirs. His opinions, as recorded in his writings, exerted undeniable influence in the French decision to recognize Texas; one of his theses was that the Republic of Texas might become a curb, rather than a stepping stone, to an expanding United States. Despite Gaillardet's historical importance, however, none of these chapters has ever appeared before in English translation.

This collection was gathered from several sources: the Journal des Débats, the Constitutionnel, the Courrier des États-Unis, and Gaillardet's memoirs, entitled L'Aristocratie en Amérique.

The latter chapters concentrate on the career of a prominent Louisiana lawyer, politician, and diplomat, Pierre Soulé, whose much maligned name Gaillardet repeatedly and stoutly defended. A less favorable treatment of Soulé, contained in Fanny Calderón de la Barca's Attaché in Madrid, is reprinted in the appendix to aid the reader in judging the accuracy of Gaillardet's analysis of this arresting figure.

Copious footnotes to clarify the text have been added by the translator. His introduction presents a biographical sketch of Gaillardet, together with a careful analysis of the book, which has been translated lucidly and vividly.

[more]
cover of Sketches of Slave Life and From Slave Cabin to Pulpit

Sketches of Slave Life and From Slave Cabin to Pulpit

Katherine Clay Bassard

University of Delaware Press, 0

This book is the first anthology of the autobiographical writings of Peter Randolph, a prominent nineteenth-century former slave who became a Black abolitionist, pastor, and community leader. Randolph’s story is unique because he was freed and relocated from Virginia to Boston, along with his entire plantation cohort. A lawsuit launched by Randolph against his former master’s estate left legal documents that corroborate his autobiographies.

Randolph's writings give us a window into a different experience of slavery and freedom than other narratives currently available and will be of interest to students and scholars of African American literature, history, and religious studies, as well as those with an interest in Virginia history and mid-Atlantic slavery.

[more]
cover of Sketches of Slave Life and From and From Slave Cabin to the Pulpit

Sketches of Slave Life and From and From Slave Cabin to the Pulpit

Peter Randolph

West Virginia University Press, 2016

This book is the first anthology of the autobiographical writings of Peter Randolph, a prominent nineteenth-century former slave who became a black abolitionist, pastor, and community leader.

Randolph’s story is unique because he was freed and relocated from Virginia to Boston, along with his entire plantation cohort. A lawsuit launched by Randolph against his former master’s estate left legal documents that corroborate his autobiographies.

Randolph's writings give us a window into a different experience of slavery and freedom than other narratives currently available and will be of interest to students and scholars of African American literature, history, and religious studies, as well as those with an interest in Virginia history and mid-Atlantic slavery. 

 
[more]
cover of Skidoo: A Journey through the Ghost Towns of the American West

Skidoo

A Journey through the Ghost Towns of the American West

Alex Capus

Haus Publishing, 2013

Decades after westward expansion swept over it, settled it, and domesticated it, the Wild West remains a potent source of American myth and mystery. But the actual history, and the traces of it that remain, are at least as interesting as the fiction, and in Skidoo, writer and novelist Alex Capus takes us on a fascinating tour of the skeleton of the American West—the ghost towns and collapsing mines that lie far from interstates and airports, lost in history.

Walking in the footsteps of bank robbers and grave diggers, desperadoes and Native Americans, beer brewers and child brides, Capus uncovers story after story of adventure, violence, and exploration. Near Salt Wells, Nevada, he learns the story of a luckless inventor whose corpse was discovered frozen in the desert, an icicle hanging from its nose. In Skidoo, California, he tells us of a brawling bartender, Hootch Simpson, who was hanged twice—once by a mob, once by the law—before being beheaded during his autopsy. And in Flagstaff, Arizona, Capus traces the long-lost origins of Route 66, as a narrow, isolated trail for Edward Fitzgerald Beale’s Camel Corps.

Packed with period detail, and told with a verve and enthusiasm to rival Pecos Bill, the stories in Skidoo are sure to enchant any lover of Western tales or America’s wild history.
[more]
cover of Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer

Skin Acts

Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer

Michelle Ann Stephens

Duke University Press, 2014

In Skin Acts, Michelle Ann Stephens explores the work of four iconic twentieth-century black male performers—Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte, and Bob Marley—to reveal how racial and sexual difference is both marked by and experienced in the skin. She situates each figure within his cultural moment, examining his performance in the context of contemporary race relations and visual regimes. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis and performance theory, Stephens contends that while black skin is subject to what Frantz Fanon called the epidermalizing and hardening effects of the gaze, it is in the flesh that other—intersubjective, pre-discursive, and sensuous—forms of knowing take place between artist and audience. Analyzing a wide range of visual, musical, and textual sources, Stephens shows that black subjectivity and performativity are structured by the tension between skin and flesh, sight and touch, difference and sameness.
[more]
cover of Skin Color, Power, and Politics in America

Skin Color, Power, and Politics in America

Mara Cecilia Ostfeld

Russell Sage Foundation, 2022

A person’s skin color affects their life experiences including income, educational attainment, health outcomes, exposure to discrimination, interactions with the criminal justice system and one’s sense of ethnoracial group belonging. But, do these disparate experiences affect the relationship between skin color and political views? In Skin Color, Power, and Politics in America, political scientists Mara Ostfeld and Nicole Yadon explore the relationship between skin color and political views in the U.S. among Latino, Black, and White Americans. They examine how skin color influences an individual’s politics and whether a person’s political views influence how they assess their own skin color.
 
Ostfeld and Yadon surveyed over 1,300 people about their political views, including party affiliation, their opinions on welfare, and the importance of speaking English in the U.S. The authors created a matrix grounded in their “Roots of Race” framework, which predicts the relationship between skin color and political attitudes for each ethnoracial group based on the blurriness of the group’s boundaries and historical levels of privilege. They draw upon three distinct measures of skin color to conceptualize the relationship between skin color and political views: “Machine-Rated Skin Color,” measured with a light-reflectance meter; “Self-Assessed Skin Color,” using the Yadon-Ostfeld Skin Color Scale; and “Skin Color Discrepancy,” the difference between one’s Machine-Rated and Self-Assessed Skin Color. 
 
Ostfeld and Yadon examine patterns that emerge among these measures, and their relationships with life experiences and political stances. Among Latinos, a group with relatively blurry group boundaries and low levels of historical privilege, the authors find a robust relationship between political views and Self-Assessed Skin Color. Latinos who overestimate the lightness of their skin color are more likely to hold conservative views on current racialized political issues, such as policing. Latinos who overestimate the darkness of their skin color, on the other hand, are more likely to hold liberal political views. As America’s major political parties remain divided on issues of race, this suggests that for Latinos, self-reported skin color is used as a means of aligning oneself with valued political coalitions. 
 
African Americans, another group with low levels of historical privilege but with more clearly defined group boundaries, demonstrated no significant relationship between skin color and political attitudes. Thus, the lived experiences associated with being African American appeared to supersede the differences in life experiences due to skin color.
 
Whites, a group with more historical privilege and increasingly blurry group boundaries, showed a clear relationship between machine-assessed skin color and attitudes on political issues. Those with darker Machine-Rated Skin Color are more likely to hold conservative views, suggesting that they are responding to the threat of losing their privilege in a multicultural society.
 
At a time when the U.S. is both more diverse and politically divided, Skin Color, Power, and Politics in Americais a timely account of the ways in which skin color and politics are intertwined.
 
 
[more]
cover of Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture

Skin Deep, Spirit Strong

The Black Female Body in American Culture

Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2002

The essays in Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture chart the ways that the simultaneous interrogation of gender, race, and corporeality shape the construction of black female representation. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders has enlisted a wide variety of scholarly perspectives and critical approaches about the place of black women's bodies within the American cultural consciousness. An impressive gathering of essays and visual art by feminist scholars and artists, the book presents a persuasive argument for broadening the ongoing scholarly conversations about the body. It makes clear that the most salient discourses in poststructuralist and feminist theory are made richer and more complex when the black female body is considered.
The collection blends original and classic essays to reveal the interconnections among art, literature, public policy, the history of medicine, and theories about sexuality with regard to bodies that are both black and female. Contributors include Rachel Adams, Elizabeth Alexander, Lisa Collins, Bridgette Davis, Lisa E.Farrington, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Evelynn Hammonds, Terri Kapsalis, Jennifer L. Morgan, Siobhan B. Somerville, Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Carla Williams, and Doris Witt.
Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture will appeal to both the academic reader attempting to integrate race into discussion about the female body and to the general reader curious about the history of black female representation.
Kimberly Wallace-Sanders is Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts and Institute of Women's Studies, Emory University.
[more]
cover of Skinheads Shaved For Battle: A Cultural History of American Skinheads

Skinheads Shaved For Battle

A Cultural History of American Skinheads

Jack Moore

University of Wisconsin Press, 1993

This book describes who American skinheads are, how they have developed within larger youth group scenes, their ideas and activities, the role of music in their formation and development, how they have been perceived by the media in America, and what damage they have done in American society. Jack B. Moore focuses on the cultural history of this group in America during the 1980s and suggests that while they were originally a minor distraction on the punk scene, they have grown into a dangerous and far more politically engaged source of hate thought and crime.

[more]
cover of Skookum: An Oregon Pioneer Family’s History and Lore

Skookum

An Oregon Pioneer Family’s History and Lore

Shannon Applegate

Oregon State University Press, 1988

[more]
cover of Skunk Hill: A Native Ceremonial Community in Wisconsin

Skunk Hill

A Native Ceremonial Community in Wisconsin

Robert A. Birmingham

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2015

Rising above the countryside of Wood County, Wisconsin, Powers Bluff is a large outcrop of quartzite rock that resisted the glaciers that flattened the surrounding countryside. It is an appropriate symbol for the Native people who once lived on its slopes, quietly resisting social forces that would have crushed and eroded their culture. A large band of Potawatomi, many returnees from the Kansas Prairie Band Potawatomi reservation, established the village of Tah-qua-kik or Skunk Hill in 1905 on the 300-foot-high bluff, up against the oddly shaped rocks that topped the hill and protected the community from the cold winter winds.
 
In Skunk Hill, archeologist Robert A. Birmingham traces the largely unknown story of this community, detailing the role it played in preserving Native culture through a harsh period of US Indian policy from the 1880s to 1930s. The story’s central focus is the Drum Dance, also known as the Dream Dance or Big Drum, a pan-tribal cultural revitalization movement that swept the Upper Midwest during the Great Suppression, emphasizing Native values and rejecting the vices of the white world. Though the community disbanded by the 1930s, the site, now on the National Register of Historic
Places with two dance circles still visible on the grounds, stands as testimony to the efforts of its members to resist cultural assimilation. 
[more]
cover of Sky Pilots: The Yankee Division Chaplains in World War I

Sky Pilots

The Yankee Division Chaplains in World War I

Michael E. Shay

University of Missouri Press, 2014

This exploration of the noncombatants who earned the love and respect of the doughboys should appeal to armchair historians and scholars alike. Enhanced with photographs and an appendix summarizing the biographical information for each man, Sky Pilots is the first comprehensive look at the role of the Army chaplaincy at the divisional level. In August 1917, the U.S. 26th “Yankee” Division was formally activated for service in World War I. When the soldiers arrived in France, they were accompanied by more than three dozen volunteer chaplains. These clergymen experienced all the horrors of war, shared all the privations of the common soldier, and earned the love and affection of their “boys.” Two died, several were gassed or wounded, and many were decorated by France and the United States for their heroism, yet their stories have been lost to history. Through extensive research in published and archival sources, as well as firsthand materials obtained from the families of several chaplains, Michael E. Shay brings to life the story of these valiant men—a story of courage in the face of the horrors of war and of extreme devotion to the men they served.
 
Just as important, Sky Pilots follows the chaplains home and on to their subsequent careers. For many, their war experiences shaped their ministries, particularly in the area of ecumenism and the Social Gospel. Others left the ministry altogether. To fill in the chaplains’ stories, Shay also examines the evolution of the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps, the education of the newly appointed chaplains, and the birth of the Yankee Division.
[more]
cover of Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in American Film

Skyscraper Cinema

Architecture and Gender in American Film

Merrill Schleier

University of Minnesota Press, 2008

Whether tall office buildings, high-rise apartments, or lofty hotels, skyscrapers have been stars in American cinema since the silent era. Cinema’s tall buildings have been variously represented as unbridled aspiration, dens of iniquity and eroticism, beacons of democracy, and well-oiled corporate machines. Considering their intriguing diversity, Merrill Schleier establishes and explains the impact of actual skyscrapers on America’s ideologies about work, leisure, romance, sexual identity, and politics as seen in Hollywood movies.

Schleier analyzes cinematic works in which skyscrapers are an integral component, interpreting the iconography and spatial practices in these often fictional modern buildings, especially on concepts of gender. Organized chronologically and thematically, she offers close readings of films including Safety Last, Skyscraper Souls, Wife vs. Secretary, Baby Face, The Fountainhead, and Desk Set. Opening with the humorous antics of Harold Lloyd, the premier skyscraper actor of the silent era, the book moves through the disillusionment of the Depression era, in which skyscrapers are employed as players in moralistic, class-conscious stories, to post–World War II and its reimagining of American political and economic values and ends with the complicated prosperity of the 1950s and the lives of white-collar workers and their spouses.

Taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, among works of other critical theorists, Schleier creates in this book a model for understanding architecture as a purveyor of desire and class values and, ultimately, contributes broadly to thinking on the rich intersection of the built environment, cinema, and gender.
[more]
cover of Slapstick Modernism: Chaplin to Kerouac to Iggy Pop

Slapstick Modernism

Chaplin to Kerouac to Iggy Pop

William Solomon

University of Illinois Press, 2018

Slapstick comedy landed like a pie in the face of twentieth-century culture. Pratfalls percolated alongside literary modernism throughout the 1920s and 1930s before slapstick found explosive expression in postwar literature, experimental film, and popular music.

William Solomon charts the origins and evolution of what he calls slapstick modernism--a merging of artistic experimentation with the socially disruptive lunacy made by the likes of Charlie Chaplin. Romping through texts, films, and theory, Solomon embarks on an intellectual odyssey from the high modernism of Dos Passos and Williams to the late modernism of the Beats and Burroughs before a head-on crash into the raw power of punk rock. Throughout, he shows the links between the experimental writers and silent screen performers of the early century, and explores the potent cultural undertaking that drew inspiration from anarchical comedy after World War II.

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cover of Slaughterhouse: Chicago's Union Stock Yard and the World It Made

Slaughterhouse

Chicago's Union Stock Yard and the World It Made

Dominic A. Pacyga

University of Chicago Press, 2015

From the minute it opened—on Christmas Day in 1865—it was Chicago’s must-see tourist attraction, drawing more than half a million visitors each year. Families, visiting dignitaries, even school groups all made trips to the South Side to tour the Union Stock Yard. There they got a firsthand look at the city’s industrial prowess as they witnessed cattle, hogs, and sheep disassembled with breathtaking efficiency. At their height, the kill floors employed 50,000 workers and processed six hundred animals an hour, an astonishing spectacle of industrialized death.
Slaughterhouse tells the story of the Union Stock Yard, chronicling the rise and fall of an industrial district that, for better or worse, served as the public face of Chicago for decades. Dominic A. Pacyga is a guide like no other—he grew up in the shadow of the stockyards, spent summers in their hog house and cattle yards, and maintains a long-standing connection with the working-class neighborhoods around them. Pacyga takes readers through the packinghouses as only an insider can, covering the rough and toxic life inside the plants and their lasting effects on the world outside. He shows how the yards shaped the surrounding neighborhoods and controlled the livelihoods of thousands of families. He looks at the Union Stock Yard’s political and economic power and its sometimes volatile role in the city’s race and labor relations. And he traces its decades of mechanized innovations, which introduced millions of consumers across the country to an industrialized food system.
Once the pride and signature stench of a city, the neighborhood is now home to Chicago’s most successful green agriculture companies. Slaughterhouse is the engrossing story of the creation and transformation of one of the most important—and deadliest—square miles in American history.
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cover of Slave of Allah: Zacarias Moussaoui Vs the USA

Slave of Allah

Zacarias Moussaoui Vs the USA

Katherine C. Donahue

Pluto Press, 2007

In 2006, Zacarias Moussaoui became the first person to stand trial for the events of September 11, 2001. This timely book provides a close insight into the Moussaoui trial from an anthropological perspective. Katherine C. Donahue was present at the trial. Based on first-hand evidence, this book provides a unique picture of an al Quaeda convert in the process of forming his identity just when he is calling the death sentence upon himself. It is the story of an extra-national opposition to western democracy, seen through the experience of a man who calls himself a "slave of Allah."



The book begins with his arrest and moves to the courtroom, telling the tale of Moussaoui's struggle with his defense lawyers and raising questions about his ability to be "represented" given his national and personal identity. Donahue explores his background in France as the son of Moroccan immigrants and follows him to London, Afghanistan, and Malaysia as he joins the growing fraternity of an Islam without borders. He acquires an extra-national identity in which his loyalty is no longer constituted by his national identity, but by his allegiance to fundamental Islam.

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cover of Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania

Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania

Beverly C. Tomek

Temple University Press, 2021

In her concise history Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania, Beverly Tomek corrects the long-held notion that slavery in the North was “not so bad” as, or somehow “more humane” than, in the South due to the presence of abolitionists. While the Quaker presence focused on moral and practical opposition to bondage, slavery was ubiquitous. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania was the first state to pass an abolition law in the United States.

Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania traces this movement from its beginning to the years immediately following the American Civil War. Discussions of the complexities of the state’s antislavery movement illustrate how different groups of Pennsylvanians followed different paths in an effort to achieve their goal. Tomek also examines the backlash abolitionists and Black Americans faced. In addition, she considers the civil rights movement from the period of state reconstruction through the national reconstruction that occurred after the Civil War.

While the past few decades have shed light on enslavement and slavery in the South, much of the story of northern slavery remains hidden. Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania tells the full and inclusive story of this history, bringing the realities of slavery, abolition, and Pennsylvania's attempt to reconstruct its post-emancipation society.

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