Böcker utgivna av The University of North Carolina Press

This is what it is to survive. You find what floats and you hold on. Even if it is smaller than you. Holding on is all fourteen-year-old Stephanie Clare Smith can do when she's left home alone in New Orleans during the summer of 1973. As she seeks to ease her solitude through her summer school algebra class, her wandering in the city, and her friendship with a streetcar operator, adults?particularly men?fail her again and again, with devastating consequences. Dreamlike and beautifully paced, this lyrical debut memoir traces the events of one harrowing summer and its repercussions throughout Stephanie's life, including her work with families in crisis and as a caregiver for the mother who abandoned her all those years ago. Through a mosaic of trauma and transcendence, memory and metaphor, scarcity and neglect, Stephanie reveals how she built connections in and to a world that had largely left her behind. Her hard-won survival echoes that of countless other survivors whose stories are never told, and her strength stands as a testament to the power of creativity.

Born into a distinguished military family, Fitz John Porter (1822-1901) was educated at West Point and breveted for bravery in the war with Mexico. Already a well-respected officer at the outset of the Civil War, as a general in the Union army he became a favorite of George B. McClellan, who chose him to command the Fifth Corps of the Army of the Potomac. Porter and his troops fought heroically and well at Gaines's Mill and Malvern Hill. His devotion to the Union cause seemed unquestionable until fellow Union generals John Pope and Irvin McDowell blamed him for their own battlefield failures at Second Bull Run. As a confidant of the Democrat and limited-war proponent McClellan, Porter found himself targeted by Radical Republicans intent on turning the conflict to the cause of emancipation. He made the perfect scapegoat, and a court-martial packed with compliant officers dismissed him for disobedience of orders and misconduct before the enemy. Porter tenaciously pursued vindication after the war, and in 1879 an army commission finally reviewed his case, completely exonerating him. Obstinately partisan resistance from old Republican enemies still denied him even nominal reinstatement for six more years. This revealing new biography by William Marvel cuts through received wisdom to show Fitz John Porter as he was: a respected commander whose distinguished career was ruined by political machinations within Lincoln's administration. Marvel lifts the cloud that shadowed Porter over the last four decades of his life, exposing the spiteful Radical Republicans who refused to restore his rank long after his exoneration and never restored his benefits. Reexamining the relevant primary evidence from the full arc of Porter's life and career, Marvel offers significant insights into the intersections of politics, war, and memory.

In this richly illustrated study, the first book-length exploration of illusionistic art in the early United States, Wendy Bellion investigates Americans' experiences with material forms of visual deception and argues that encounters with illusory art shaped their understanding of knowledge, representation, and subjectivity between 1790 and 1825. Focusing on the work of the well-known Peale family and their Philadelphia Museum, as well as other Philadelphians, Bellion explores the range of illusions encountered in public spaces, from trompe l'oeil paintings and drawings at art exhibitions to ephemeral displays of phantasmagoria, "Invisible Ladies," and other spectacles of deception. Bellion reconstructs the elite and vernacular sites where such art and objects appeared and argues that early national exhibitions doubled as spaces of citizen formation. Within a post-Revolutionary culture troubled by the social and political consequences of deception, keen perception signified able citizenship. Setting illusions into dialogue with Enlightenment cultures of science, print, politics, and the senses, Citizen Spectator demonstrates that pictorial and optical illusions functioned to cultivate but also to confound discernment. Bellion reveals the equivocal nature of illusion during the early republic, mapping its changing forms and functions, and uncovers surprising links between early American art, culture, and citizenship.

The War of 1812 was one of a cluster of events that left unsettled what is often referred to as the Revolutionary settlement. At once postcolonial and neoimperial, the America of 1812 was still in need of definition. As the imminence of war intensified the political, economic, and social tensions endemic to the new nation, Americans of all kinds fought for country on the battleground of culture. The War of 1812 increased interest in the American democratic project and elicited calls for national unity, yet the essays collected in this volume suggest that the United States did not emerge from war in 1815 having resolved the Revolution's fundamental challenges or achieved a stable national identity. The cultural rifts of the early republican period remained vast and unbridged.Contributors: Brian Connolly, University of South FloridaAnna Mae Duane, University of ConnecticutDuncan Faherty, Queens College, CUNYJames M. Greene, Pittsburg State UniversityMatthew Rainbow Hale, Goucher CollegeJonathan Hancock, Hendrix CollegeTim Lanzendoerfer, University of MainzKaren Marrero, Wayne State UniversityNathaniel Millett, St. Louis UniversityChristen Mucher, Smith CollegeDawn Peterson, Emory UniversityCarroll Smith-Rosenberg, University of MichiganDavid Waldstreicher, The Graduate Center, CUNYEric Wertheimer, Arizona State University

France's involvement in the American Civil War was critical to its unfolding, but the details of the European power's role remain little understood. Here, Steve Sainlaude offers the first comprehensive history of French diplomatic engagement with the Union and the Confederate States of America during the conflict.

Between the end of May and the beginning of August 1864, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Gen. Robert E. Lee oversaw the transition between the Overland campaign-a remarkable saga of maneuvering and brutal combat-and what became a grueling siege of Petersburg that many months later compelled Confederates to abandon Richmond. Although many historians have marked Grant's crossing of the James River on June 12-15 as the close of the Overland campaign, this volume interprets the fighting from Cold Harbor on June 1-3 through the battle of the Crater on July 30 as the last phase of an operation that could have ended without a prolonged siege. The contributors assess the campaign from a variety of perspectives, examining strategy and tactics, the performances of key commanders on each side, the centrality of field fortifications, political repercussions in the United States and the Confederacy, the experiences of civilians caught in the path of the armies, and how the famous battle of the Crater has resonated in historical memory. As a group, the essays highlight the important connections between the home front and the battlefield, showing some of the ways in which military and nonmilitary affairs played off and influenced one another.Contributors include Keith S. Bohannon, Stephen Cushman, M. Keith Harris, Robert E. L. Krick, Kevin M. Levin, Kathryn Shively Meier, Gordon C. Rhea, and Joan Waugh.

Conventional narratives of the Cold War revolve around high-level diplomats and state leaders in Washington, Beijing, and Moscow, but this anthology challenges those narratives by revealing how ordinary people across Asia experienced the era. Heavily rooted in oral history, this study takes readers to the villages of rural Java; the jungles of northern Thailand; the indigenous tribal communities of Kerala, India; and many other places in this vast region.The essays in this collection demonstrate how the world took shape far away from the voluminously analyzed epicenters of the Soviet Union, the United States, and China. Masuda organizes each chapter around the theme of "many Cold Wars," or, more precisely, many local and social wars that were imagined as part of the global Cold War. These histories raise fundamental questions about standard Cold War narratives, encouraging readers to rethink why the Cold War still matters. Contributors are Mary Grace Concepcion, Simon Creak, Cui Feng, David Engerman, Prasit Leepreecha, Luong Thi Hong, Muhammad Kunhi Mahin Udma, Masuda Hajimu, Alan McPherson, Imam Muhtarom, Sim Chi Yin, Kisho Tsuchiva, Odd Arne Westad, Matthew Woolgar, Kinuko Maehara Yamazato, Bin Yang, and Taomo Zhou.

"Georgann Eubanks offers readers a tour of the seasonal joys of ecosystems in the Southeast. The ordinary destinations and events she explores are scattered across seven states and include such wonders as a half-million purple martins roosting on an island in a South Carolina lake, the bloom of thirty acres of dimpled trout lilies in a remote Georgia forest, gnat larvae that glow like stars on the rock walls of an obscure Alabama canyon, and the overnight accumulation of elaborately patterned moths on the side of a North Carolina mountain cabin. These phenomena and others reveal how plants, mammals, amphibians, and insects are managing to persevere despite pressures from human invasion, habitat destruction, and climate change. Their stories also shine a light on the efforts of dedicated scientists, volunteers, and aspiring young naturalists who are working to reverse losses and preserve the fabulous ordinary that's still alive in the fields, forests, rivers, and coastal estuaries of this essential and biodiverse region"--

Este ensayo constituye el primer estudio de la imagen de las joyas en la obra de Miguel de Cervantes. A partir de un enfoque multidisciplinario, en el que se tienen en cuenta factores literarios, filologicos e historicos, asi como conceptos teoricos procedentes de los campos de los estudios de genero y de la cultura material, la autora analiza la multiplicidad de significados adscritos a las imagenes de las joyas y las piedras preciosas en textos poeticos y narrativos de Cervantes, en concreto, Don Quijote, las Novelas ejemplares y Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. En el estudio se investigan fuentes textuales e imagenes visuales, entre las que se incluyen discursos humanistas sobre la mujer, obras historiograficas, descripciones geograficas, normativa juridica, asi como retratos de corte de reinas del Renacimiento y el Barroco. En los textos de Cervantes, gemas y alhajas actuan como signos polisemicos, esenciales no solo para la construccion de la imagen iconografica de las reinas historicas sino como senales de la especial alianza que una gran senora establece con una mujer de estatus inferior a la que promueve. Las joyas constituyen simbolos multifaceticos que denotan la formacion de redes de solidaridad que traspasan las barreras estamentales, asi como subrayan la importancia de dichos limites para afirmar el impacto de la diferencia social en la diversidad de la experiencia de la mujer. Asi mismo, incorporados a la descripcion de damas, cristianas o moras, vestidas a la morisca, los valiosos ornamentos provocan que sus portadoras sean identificadas por la mirada masculina como objetos de deseo erotico y colonial, al tiempo que senalan la dificultad de crear categorias estables de identidad en la peninsula Iberica y en el Mediterraneo. Por ultimo, la apropiacion masculina de las joyas, por razon de su alto precio en el mercado, aun planteada como una demostracion del dominio patriarcal, expresa las ansiedades del varon sometido a la autoridad de una dama poderosa. Mediante las representaciones de hombres portando alhajas, Cervantes expresa la corrupcion de los personajes masculinos y anticipa la denuncia de autores barrocos de la crisis de masculinidad que marca el declive economico y la decadencia politica de la nacion.

Looking at a century of struggle, liberation and gutsy play, this title chronicles women's basketball in the US. Offering portraits of heroes and contemporary stars, it provides a perspective on the history of the sport, exploring its relationship to concepts of womanhood, race, and sexuality, and to efforts to expand women's rights.