Results by title

A foundational archive of Gilman’s early feminist, sociological, and philosophical thought, revealing the origins of a major American intellectual tradition.

The last decades have seen a resurgence of interest in Charlotte Perkins Gilman, now considered among the most important thinkers in US history. She is best known for fiction—such as the classic short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892)—and nonfiction, including her manifesto Women and Economics (1898), a work of intersectional sociology avant la lettre. Nevertheless, as a young writer, Gilman made her living delivering lectures. One cannot know Gilman without some knowledge of this body of lectures; this book fills that critical gap in Gilman scholarship.

Since the recovery of Charlotte Perkins Gilman began in the late 1960s and continued with the republication of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” in the 1970s, her image in cultural memory has been increasingly celebrated. Andrew J. Ball presents here fifty previously unpublished texts. They trace the development of Gilman’s thoughts on diverse subjects like gender, education, labor, science, theology, and politics—forming an intellectual diary of her growth.

These lectures are not just a testament to Gilman’s personal evolution, but also a crucial contribution to the foundations of American sociology and philosophy. The Essential Lectures of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1890–1894 marks a historic moment, unveiling the hidden genius of Gilman's oratory legacy.

    In The Eternal Paddy, Michael de Nie examines anti-Irish prejudice, Anglo-Irish relations, and the construction of Irish and British identities in nineteenth-century Britain. This book provides a new, more inclusive approach to the study of Irish identity as perceived by Britons and demonstrates that ideas of race were inextricably connected with class concerns and religious prejudice in popular views of both peoples. De Nie suggests that while traditional anti-Irish stereotypes were fundamental to British views of Ireland, equally important were a collection of sympathetic discourses and a self-awareness of British prejudice. In the pages of the British newspaper press, this dialogue created a deep ambivalence about the Irish people, an ambivalence that allowed most Britons to assume that the root of Ireland’s difficulties lay in its Irishness.
    Drawing on more than ninety newspapers published in England, Scotland, and Wales, The Eternal Paddy offers the first major detailed analysis of British press coverage of Ireland over the course of the nineteenth century. This book traces the evolution of popular understandings and proposed solutions to the "Irish question," focusing particularly on the interrelationship between the press, the public, and the politicians. The work also engages with ongoing studies of imperialism and British identity, exploring the role of Catholic Ireland in British perceptions of their own identity and their empire.

To address this oversight, Loureiro draws from his own experiences as well as from a wide range of previous theoretical works on autobiography, especially from the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, who believed that the self does not begin as a self-positing consciousness but as a response to an address from the other. On this basis, Loureiro then brilliantly traces the complex interplays between the political, discursive, rhetorical, and ethical dimensions of autobiography.

After laying out these theoretical foundations, Loureiro puts them to work in analyzing four of the most fascinating autobiographies written by Spanish exiles: The Life of Joseph Blanco White, who lived from 1775 to 1841, Memoria de la Melancolia by Maria Teresa Leon (1904-1988), Coto vedado and En los reinos de taifa by Juan Goytisolo (born 1931), and Literature or Life by Jorge Semprun (born 1923). The lives of these authors, all of whom were exiled for political reasons, were disrupted by some of the most crucial events in Spain's tortuous road to modernity and democracy.

The book closes with a discussion of why there have been so few critical examinations of autobiographies written in modern Spain. Loureiro proposes that, even in today's Spain, stifling social and political forces smother ethical responsibility, which is an essential ingredient in creating autobiographies that dare to be more than a humdrum inventory of personal recollections. Only in exile have Spanish authors seemed able to find the conditions to write their lives in a truly responsible manner. This answer to a call that grounds the subject in an other is ultimately the only form of truth available in autobiography.

The romance genre was a popular literary form among writers and readers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but since then it has often been dismissed as juvenile, unmodern, improper, or subversive. In this study, William J. Scheick seeks to recover the place of romance in fin-de-siècle England and America; to distinguish among its subgenres of eventuary, aesthetic, and ethical romance; and to reinstate ethical romance as a major mode of artistic expression.

Scheick argues that the narrative maneuvers of ethical romance dissolve the boundary between fiction and fact. In contrast to eventuary romances, which offer easily consumed entertainment, or aesthetic romances, which urge upon readers a passive appreciation of a wondrous work of art, ethical romances potentially disorient and reorient their readers concerning some metaphysical insight hidden within the commonplace. They prompt readers to question what is real and what is true, and to ponder the wonder of life and the text of the self, there to detect what the reader might do in the art of his or her own life

The authors whose works Scheick discusses are Nathaniel Hawthorne, H. Rider Haggard, Henry James, C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, H. G. Wells, John Kendrick Bangs, Gilbert K. Chesterton, Richard Harding Davis, Stephen Crane, Mary Austin, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Cholmondeley, and Rudyard Kipling. This wide selection expands the canon to include writers and works that highly merit re-reading by a new generation.

An in-depth study of non-elite white families in Alabama—from the state’s creation through the end of the Civil War

The Failure of Our Fathers: Family, Gender, and Power in Confederate Alabama examines the evolving position of non-elite white families in Alabama during one of the most pivotal epochs in the state’s history. Drawing on a wide range of personal and public documents reflecting the state’s varied regions and economies, Victoria E. Ott uses gender and family as a lens to examine the yeomanry and poor whites, a constituency that she collectively defines as “common whites,” who identified with the Confederate cause.

Ott provides a nuanced examination of how these Alabamians fit within the antebellum era’s paternalistic social order, eventually identifying with and supporting the Confederate mission to leave the Union and create an independent, slaveholding state. But as the reality of the war slowly set in and the Confederacy began to fray, the increasing dangers families faced led Alabama’s common white men and women to find new avenues to power as a distinct socioeconomic class.

Ott argues that family provided the conceptual framework necessary to understand why common whites supported a war to protect slavery despite having little or no investment in the institution. Going to war meant protecting their families from outsiders who threatened to turn their worlds upside down. Despite class differences, common whites envisioned the Confederacy as a larger family and the state as paternal figures who promised to protect its loyal dependents throughout the conflict. Yet, as the war ravaged many Alabama communities, devotion to the Confederacy seemed less a priority as families faced continued separations, threats of death, and the potential for starvation. The construct of a familial structure that once created a sense of loyalty to the Confederacy now gave them cause to question its leadership. Ott shows how these domestic values rooted in highly gendered concepts ultimately redefined Alabama’s social structure and increased class distinctions after the war.
 

"A terrifically engaging collection of essays, which exemplifies the very best recent work in the history of reading and affect. The distinguished contributors explore ‘the feeling of reading' throughout Victorian literature, showing how a broad range of works---novels, lyrics, critical essays---not only represent but also analyze and evoke the surprisingly varied experience of immersing oneself in a book. It's rare to encounter a collection of such consistently high quality: the feeling of reading it is one of rich and manifold pleasure."
---James Eli Adams, Columbia University

"This gathering of state-of-the-art work generates a convincing and compelling vision of the emerging state of the field."
---Daniel Hack, University of Michigan

The Feeling of Reading is the first collection to address how we think of reading today through a focus on Victorian reading practices and the individual experience of reading in the nineteenth century. It brings together essays from some of the most established writers in the field with contributions from younger scholars to provide new ways of thinking about this definitive moment. The collection moves from the general to the particular: from excavations of the material and intellectual conditions of Victorian reading to the consequences of such excavations in readings of individual texts. All of the contributors engage the crucial critical question of the shaping of readerly feeling. In addition, they address a set of interlocking issues central to understanding Victorian reading: Kate Flint explores the material and social settings of reading; Nicholas Dames and Leah Price consider the concrete realities of books and periodicals; and the consequences of the mass circulation of texts are explored by Flint, John Plotz, and Rachel Ablow. The temporality of consumption appears in the contribution of Dames as well as those of Catherine Robson and Herbert F. Tucker, who also address the implications of meter; and Ablow, Plotz, Stephen Arata, and Garrett Stewart investigate the notion of identification.

Rachel Ablow is Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

Cover design and art by Julian Montague

One of the first new interpretations of West Virginia’s origins in over a century—and one that corrects previous histories’ tendency to minimize support for slavery in the state’s founding.

Every history of West Virginia’s creation in 1863 explains the event in similar ways: at the start of the Civil War, political, social, cultural, and economic differences with eastern Virginia motivated the northwestern counties to resist secession from the Union and seek their independence from the rest of the state. In The Fifth Border State, Scott A. MacKenzie offers the first new interpretation of the topic in over a century—one that corrects earlier histories’ tendency to minimize support for slavery in the state’s founding.

Employing previously unused sources and reexamining existing ones, MacKenzie argues that West Virginia experienced the Civil War in the same ways as the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. Like these northernmost slave states, northwestern Virginia supported the institution of slavery out of proportion to the actual presence of enslavement there. The people who became West Virginians built a new state first to protect slavery, but radical Unionists and escaping slaves forced emancipation on the statehood movement. MacKenzie shows how conservatives and radicals clashed over Black freedom, correcting many myths about West Virginia’s origins and making The Fifth Border State an important addition to the literature in Appalachian and Civil War history.

Newspaper publishers played a crucial role in transforming Texas into a modern state. By promoting expanded industrialization and urbanization, as well as a more modern image of Texas as a southwestern, rather than southern, state, news barons in the early decades of the twentieth century laid the groundwork for the enormous economic growth and social changes that followed World War II. Yet their contribution to the modernization of Texas is largely unrecognized.

This book investigates how newspaper owners such as A. H. Belo and George B. Dealey of the Dallas Morning News, Edwin Kiest of the Dallas Times Herald, William P. Hobby and Oveta Culp Hobby of the Houston Post, Jesse H. Jones and Marcellus Foster of the Houston Chronicle, and Amon G. Carter Sr. of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram paved the way for the modern state of Texas. Patrick Cox explores how these news barons identified the needs of the state and set out to attract the private investors and public funding that would boost the state's civic and military infrastructure, oil and gas industries, real estate market, and agricultural production. He shows how newspaper owners used events such as the Texas Centennial to promote tourism and create a uniquely Texan identity for the state. To balance the record, Cox also demonstrates that the news barons downplayed the interests of significant groups of Texans, including minorities, the poor and underemployed, union members, and a majority of women.

The most thorough history of Alabama’s Madison County region, widely available for the first time

The 1956 dissertation by Frances Cabaniss Roberts is a classic text on Alabama history that continues to be cited by southern historians. Roberts was the first woman to earn a PhD from the University of Alabama’s history department. In the 1950s, she was the only full-time faculty member at what is now the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she was appointed chair of the history department in 1966.

Roberts’s dissertation, “Background and Formative Period in the Great Bend and Madison County,” remains the most thorough history of the region yet produced. While certainly a product of its era, Roberts work is visionary in its own way and offers a useful look at Alabama’s rise to statehood. Thomas Reidy, editor of this edition, has kept Roberts’s words intact except for correction of minor typographical errors and helpful additions to the notes and citations. His introduction describes both the value of Roberts’s decades of service to UAH and the importance of her dissertation over time. While highlighting the great intrinsic value of Roberts’s research and writing, Reidy also notes its significance in demonstrating how the practice of history—its methods, priorities, and values—has evolved over the intervening decades.

In her examination of Madison County, Roberts spotlights exemplars of civic performance and good community behavior, giving readers one of the earliest accountings of the antebellum southern middle class. Unlike many historians of her time, Roberts displays an interest in both the “common folks” and leaders who built the region—rural and urban—and created the institutions that shaped Madison County. She examines the contributions of merchants, shopkeepers, lawyers, doctors, architects, craftsmen, planters, farmers, elected and appointed officials, board members, and entrepreneurs.
 

The Fugitive's Gibraltar is a richly researched work of social and cultural history that examines the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts as one of the most important and welcoming refuges for freedom-seeking enslaved people in antebellum America. The book's title derives from the phrase used by Frederick Douglass—himself among the most famous of New Bedford's many fugitive residents—to describe the city's reputation as a place of relative safety and freedom for Black Americans fleeing enslavement in the South.

Grover draws on an extraordinary breadth of primary sources to reconstruct the lives of fugitive slaves who came to New Bedford before the Civil War, as well as the city's larger African American community and the white and Black abolitionists who worked alongside them. The book explores how New Bedford's booming whaling economy—which depended heavily on Black labor and offered Black sailors wages equal to those of white sailors—created economic and social conditions unusually hospitable to free and freedom-seeking Black people. New Bedford's maritime character is thus deeply intertwined with its abolitionist identity.

The work examines the networks of people and organizations that sheltered, employed, and advocated for fugitives; traces individual stories of escape and resettlement; and situates New Bedford's experience within the broader national struggle over slavery, the Fugitive Slave Acts, and the abolitionist movement. Notable figures discussed include Frederick Douglass and Henry "Box" Brown. The book also sheds light on the daily lives, livelihoods, and community institutions of New Bedford's African American population—their churches, mutual aid societies, and social networks—providing a nuanced portrait of Black life in a northern city during this turbulent era.

The Genius of Place examines how, after the War of 1812, concerns about the scale of the nation resulted in a fundamental reorientation of American identity away from the Atlantic or global ties that held sway in the early republic and toward more localized forms of identification. Instead of addressing the sweep of the nation, American authors, artists, geographers, and politicians shifted from the larger reach of the globe to the more manageable scope of the local and sectional. Paradoxically, that local representation became the primary mode through which early Americans construed their emerging national identity. This newfound cultural obsession with locality impacted the literary consolidation and representation of key American imagined places—New England, the plantation, the West—in the decades between 1816 and 1836.

Apap's examination of the intersections between local and national representations and exploration of the myths of space and place that shaped U.S. identity through the nineteenth century will appeal to a broad, interdisciplinary readership.