Böcker av Matthew Pratt Guterl

What is a hotel? As Caroline Field Levander and Matthew Pratt Guterl show us in this thought-provoking book, even though hotels are everywhere around us, we rarely consider their essential role in our modern existence and how they help frame our sense of who and what we are. They are, in fact, as centrally important as other powerful places like prisons, hospitals, or universities.

Her performing days numbered, Josephine Baker did something outrageous: she transformed her chateau into a theme park whose main attraction was her Rainbow Tribe--12 children from around the globe, adopted as the family of the future. Matthew Pratt Guterl concludes that Baker was a serious activist, determined to make a positive difference.

Guterl details how white and black people thought about race and how both groups understood and attempted to control the demographic transformation. An account of the roiling environment that witnessed a shift from the multiplicity of white races to biracialism's arrival, this book focuses on four representative spokesmen for the transforming age.

How did slave-owning Southerners make sense of the transformation of their world in the Civil War era? Guterl shows that they looked beyond their borders for answers and examines how the Southern elite connected-by travel, print culture, even the prospect of future conquest-with communities of New World slaveholders as they redefined their world.