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5 books match the query 'This Place'

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The Human in This Place

Jennifer D. Ryan-Bryant

University of Massachusetts Press, 2027

Tracing how resistance to lynching violence generated some of the most innovative writing in American literature

On March 9, 1892, three Black men were murdered in Memphis. The violence moved Ida B. Wells to begin writing against lynching; in doing so, she helped ignite a literary tradition that would transform American literature. The dual presence of lynching violence and activist resistance gave rise to a dynamic body of African American writing that grapples with the contradictions inherent to a democracy whose citizens enslaved others.

In The Human in This Place, Jennifer Ryan-Bryant ties central moments in the history of American lynching to the emergence of new literary genres. Focusing on Jim Crow segregation, anti-lynching activism, the murder of Emmett Till, Civil Rights and Black Power organizing, and modern police brutality, Ryan-Bryant identifies the unique formal elements and themes that characterize literary responses to sustained social violence and political resistance. The new genres she identifies—including the socialist novel, the Emmett Till poem, and the anti-epic catalogue—reveal art's resistance and response to unchecked mob violence.

The Human in This Place recognizes that lynchings occupy a uniquely disturbing space in American life: simultaneously legal and extralegal, public and private, individual and communal. The literatures of lynching investigate the ethical slippage endemic to American national identity and articulate the joyous expression that resistance makes possible.

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The Spirit of This Place

How Music Illuminates the Human Spirit

Patrick Summers

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Artists today are at a crossroads. With funding for the arts and humanities endowments perpetually under attack, and school districts all over the United States scrapping their art curricula altogether, the place of the arts in our civic future is uncertain to say the least. At the same time, faced with the problems of the modern world—from water shortages and grave health concerns to global climate change and the now constant threat of terrorism—one might question the urgency of this waning support for the arts. In the politically fraught world we live in, is the “felt” experience even something worth fighting for?

In this soul-searching collection of vignettes, Patrick Summers gives us an adamant, impassioned affirmative. Art, he argues, nurtures freedom of thought, and is more necessary now than ever before.

As artistic director of the Houston Grand Opera, Summers is well positioned to take stock of the limitations of the professional arts world—a world where the conversation revolves almost entirely around financial questions and whose reputation tends toward elitism—and to remind us of art’s fundamental relationship to joy and meaning. Offering a vehement defense of long-form arts in a world with a short attention span, Summers argues that art is spiritual, and that music in particular has the ability to ask spiritual questions, to inspire cathartic pathos, and to express spiritual truths. Summers guides us through his personal encounters with art and music in disparate places, from Houston’s Rothko Chapel to a music classroom in rural China, and reflects on musical works he has conducted all over the world. Assessing the growing canon of new operas performed in American opera houses today, he calls for musical artists to be innovative and brave as opera continues to reinvent itself.

This book is a moving credo elucidating Summers’s belief that the arts, especially music, help us to understand our own humanity as intellectual, aesthetic, and ultimately spiritual.

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This Place of Promise

A Historian's Perspective on 200 Years of Missouri History

Gary R. Kremer

University of Missouri Press, 2023

Conceived of as a way to commemorate Missouri’s bicentennial of statehood, this unique work presents the perspective of Gary Kremer, one of the Show-Me State’s foremost historians, as he ponders why history played out as it did over the course of the two centuries since Missouri’s admittance to the Union. In the writing of what is much more than a survey history, Kremer, himself a fifth-generation Missourian, infuses the narrative with his vast knowledge and personal experiences, even as he considers what being a Missourian has meant—across the many years and to this day—to all of the state’s people, and how the forces of history—time, place, race, gender, religion, and class—shaped people and determined their opportunities and choices, in turn creating collective experiences that draw upon the past in an attempt to make sense of the present and plan for the future.

Key elements of the book include the centrality of race to the Missouri experience—from the time Missourians began to seek statehood in 1817 all the way up to the Black Lives Matter movement of the 21st century—as well as ongoing tensions created by the urban-rural divide and struggle to define the proper role of government in society.

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This Place of Silence

Ohio's Cemeteries and Burial Grounds

Ian Adams; Randall Lee Schieber; Robin L. Smith

Ohio University Press, 2024

This Place of Silence is a photographic portrait of Ohio’s cemeteries and burial grounds by Ohio photographers Ian Adams and Randall Lee Schieber. The text and photo captions by Robin L. Smith provide an overview of the history of burial grounds, from prehistoric mounds through modern “green” cemeteries—and many fascinating details about gravestones, mausoleums, statuary, and cemetery landscapes. The introduction provides an overview of the historical place of burial grounds in our society and of their value today not only as rich sources of history but also as repositories of art, architecture, and nature. Cemeteries record the history of their communities in their names and dates, but they also tell us how a community wanted its history recorded: How did this community see itself? What was important to that community? Who were the prominent people, and what did they accomplish? Graveyards, especially older ones, are also full of quirky names and mysteries. Who would name a child Nimrod, and where did that name come from? Why would two families build identical side-by-side mausoleums? Who would want a grave marker that looks like a pile of stones? Chapters cover prehistoric mounds and early European American burial grounds; the evolution from rural cemeteries in the nineteenth century to modern green burials; art, architecture, and symbolism in cemeteries; cemeteries and nature; military and institutional burial grounds; and distinctive ethnic cemeteries. The authors highlight and showcase these often beautiful but sometimes neglected pieces of history. Cemeteries are not dark, morbid places to be avoided, but historic landscapes that are full of beauty, hope, and honor for those Ohioans who came before us.

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We Gotta Get Out of This Place

The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War

Doug Bradley

University of Massachusetts Press, 2015

Rolling Stone's #1 Music Book of 2015

For a Kentucky rifleman who spent his tour trudging through Vietnam's Central Highlands, it was Nancy Sinatra's “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'.” For a “tunnel rat” who blew smoke into the Viet Cong's underground tunnels, it was Jimi Hendrix's “Purple Haze.” For a Black Marine distraught over the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., it was Aretha Franklin's “Chain of Fools.” And for countless other Vietnam vets, it was “I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die,” “Who'll Stop the Rain,” or the song that gives this book its title.

In We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner place popular music at the heart of the American experience in Vietnam. They explore how and why U.S. troops turned to music as a way of connecting to each other and the World back home and of coping with the complexities of the war they had been sent to fight. They also demonstrate that music was important for every group of Vietnam veterans—black and white, Latino and Native American, men and women, officers and “grunts”—whose personal reflections drive the book's narrative. Many of the voices are those of ordinary soldiers, airmen, seamen, and marines. But there are also “solo” pieces by veterans whose writings have shaped our understanding of the war—Karl Marlantes, Alfredo Vea, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bill Ehrhart, Arthur Flowers—as well as songwriters and performers whose music influenced soldiers' lives, including Eric Burdon, James Brown, Bruce Springsteen, Country Joe McDonald, and John Fogerty. Together their testimony taps into memories—individual and cultural—that capture a central if often overlooked component of the American war in Vietnam.

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