Does Thoreau belong to the past or to the future? Instead of canonizing him as a celebrant of "pure" nature apart from the corruption of civilization, the essays in Thoreauvian Modernities reveal edgier facets of his work - how Thoreau is able to unsettle as well as inspire and how he is able to focus on both the timeless and the timely.
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg claims to run the city like a business. In Bloomberg's New York, Julian Brash applies methods from anthropology, geography, and other social science disciplines to examine what that means.
Smollett's translation of Gil Blas remains true to its style, spirit, and ideas, chronicling a merry, philosophical young man whose adventures lead him into all levels of society from the highest to the lowest. After two and a half centuries, his remains the finest translation of this humorous, satiric, and classic French novel.
While much has been written about the impact of Darwin's theories on US culture, and scholarly collections have been devoted to the science of evolution, few have addressed Darwin's theories as a cultural force affecting US writers. This book fills this gap, featuring critical approaches that examine US textual responses to Darwin's works.
This collection of twelve short stories and one essay by Vietnamese writers reveals the tragic legacy of Agent Orange and raises troubling moral questions about the physical, spiritual, and environmental consequences of war.
Explores loyalty in the era of the Civil War, focusing on Robert E. Lee, Stephen Dodson Ramseur, and Jubal A. Early. Looking at levels of allegiance to their native state, the slaveholding South, to the US, and the Confederacy, Gallagher shows how these men represent responses to the mid-nineteenth century crisis.
Follows the soldiers of the Fifty-seventh as they push far into Unionist Kentucky, starve at the siege of Vicksburg, guard Union prisoners at the Andersonville stockade, defend Atlanta from Sherman, and more.
This volume contains some 50 diverse and unusual accounts of serpents from cultures across time and around the globe. Many selections are drawn from the rich oral traditions of peoples in every clime that supports reptiles, from North America to Africa to Australia.
Our focus on the relative handful of countries with nuclear weapons keeps us from asking the question: Why do so many more states not have such weapons? This book argues that in addition to understanding a state's security environment, we must appreciate the social forces that influence how states conceptualize the value of nuclear weapons.
Contrary to the attitudes that have been marketed and taught to us, says C. A. Bowers, the fact is that computers operate on a set of Western cultural assumptions and a market economy that drives consumption. Our indoctrination includes the view of global computing innovations as inevitable and on a par with social progress.
This collection of essays explores the role of child characters in horror, fantasy, and science fiction literature and films from a variety of critical approaches - from textual analyses to psychological, historical, and gender- and ethnicity-based interpretations.
In Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly, Jeffrey J. Lange examines the 1940s and early 1950s as the most crucial period in country music's transformation from a rural, southern folk art form to a national phenomenon.
The biographies and essays in this collection illustrate an uncommon diversity among Texas women, reflecting experiences ranging from those of dispossessed enslaved women to wealthy patrons of the arts. That history also captures the ways in which women's lives reflect both personal autonomy and opportunities to engage in the public sphere.
A survey of the remarkable story of southern identity and its persistence in the face of sweeping changes in the South's economy, society and political structure. It examines southern identity in all its forms, including history, literature, blues and country music, and consumer culture.
An exploration of the roots of our attitudes toward nature, this text first appeared in 1967. It was among the first books of a new genre that has elucidated the ideas, beliefs and images that lie behind our modern destruction and conservation of the natural world.
Takes up a wide range of issues in urban life, including highway construction, gentrification, and the role of public architecture in sustaining collective memory. Equally sensitive both to black-white relations and to differences within the African American community, it is a vivid evocation of one of America's most distinctive places.
Embraces the very qualities that have moved others to accord the essay second-class citizenship in the world of letters. Drawing from the work of Montaigne and Bacon and recent practitioners such as E B White and Cynthia Ozick, the author shows what the essay means and how it comes to mean, and offers a fresh look at this resurgent literary form.
An accessible and popular introduction to post-structuralist and postmodernist theory. This title examines key concepts such as modernity, postmodernity, modernism and postmodernism with sections on feminist criticism of the work of Lacan and Foucault. Chapters on French feminist theory and a section of the work of Jean Baudrillard have been added to the second edition.
Demonstrates the persistence of racial inequalities and the importance of race as a factor in politics. This book concludes that a deep-seated culture of corruption compromises the ability of public officials to tackle intransigent problems of urban poverty and inadequate schools.
The decade following the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision saw white southerners mobilize in massive resistance to racial integration. This title turns traditional top-down models of massive resistance on their head by telling the story of five far-right activists who led grassroots rebellions.
On the Boston Common stands one of the great Civil War memorials, a magnificent bronze sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. It depicts the black soldiers of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry marching alongside their young white commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. When the philosopher William James dedicated the memorial in May 1897, he stirred the assembled crowd with these words: There they march, warm-blooded champions of a better day for man. There on horseback among them, in the very habit as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune.In this book Shaw speaks for himself with equal eloquence through nearly two hundred letters he wrote to his family and friends during the Civil War. The portrait that emerges is of a man more divided and complexthough no less heroicthan the Shaw depicted in the celebrated film Glory. The pampered son of wealthy Boston abolitionists, Shaw was no abolitionist himself, but he was among the first patriots to respond to Lincolns call for troops after the attack on Fort Sumter. After Cedar Mountain and Antietam, Shaw knew the carnage of war firsthand. Describing nightfall on the Antietam battlefield, he wrote, the crickets chirped, and the frogs croaked, just as if nothing unusual had happened all day long, and presently the stars came out bright, and we lay down among the dead, and slept soundly until daylight. There were twenty dead bodies within a rod of me.When Federal war aims shifted from an emphasis on restoring the Union to the higher goal of emancipation for four million slaves, Shaws mother pressured her son into accepting the command of the Norths vanguard black regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts. A paternalist who never fully reconciled his own prejudices about black inferiority, Shaw assumed the command with great reluctance. Yet, as he trained his recruits in Readville, Massachusetts, during the early months of 1963, he came to respect their pluck and dedication. There is not the least doubt, he wrote his mother, that we shall leave the state, with as good a regiment, as any that has marched.Despite such expressions of confidence, Shaw in fact continued to worry about how well his troops would perform under fire. The ultimate test came in South Carolina in July 1863, when the Fifty-fourth led a brave but ill-fated charge on Fort Wagner, at the approach to Charleston Harbor. As Shaw waved his sword and urged his men forward, an enemy bullet felled him on the forts parapet. A few hours later the Confederates dumped his body into a mass grave with the bodies of twenty of his men. Although the assault was a failure from a military standpoint, it proved the proposition to which Shaw had reluctantly dedicated himself when he took command of the Fifty-fourth: that black soldiers could indeed be fighting men. By years end, sixty new black regiments were being organized.A previous selection of Shaws correspondence was privately published by his family in 1864. For this volume, Russell Duncan has restored many passages omitted from the earlier edition and has provided detailed explanatory notes to the letters. In addition he has written a lengthy biographical essay that places the young colonel and his regiment in historical context.
Comprising nearly 690 selections, this thoroughly annotated and indexed collection is a treasure for anyone who performs, composes, studies, collects, or simply enjoys folk music. It is valuable as an outstanding record of Irish folk songs before World War II, demonstrating the historical ties between Irish and Southern folk culture and the tremendous Irish influence on American folk music.
An accomplished professional boxer, musician, club manager, and impresario of Parisian nightlife between the World Wars, Eugene Bullard found in Europe a degree of respect and freedom unknown to blacks in America. This book presents a biography of the African American fighter pilot, Georgia native Eugene J Bullard (1895-1961).
Covers Nobel Peace Prize winner, Jimmy Carter's achievements and setbacks in light of what has been at once his greatest asset and flaw: his stubborn, faith-driven integrity. This book includes the energy crisis, the Iran hostage situation, the Camp David Accords, the Panama Canal and other treaties, and the diplomatic emphasis on human rights.
Focuses on four of these refugees: Jacob Magot, Peter Anyang, Daniel Khoch, and Marko Ayii. This is the story of how Jacob, Peter, Daniel, and Marko faced the countless challenges of making it in a strange new place after years on the run in Sudan or in refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia.
The movement for civil rights in America peaked in the 1950s and 1960s. This book discusses how the civil rights movement is remembered in American politics and culture - and why it matters. Among other things, it looks at how civil rights memories become established as fact through museum exhibits, street naming, and courtroom decisions.
These essays--from scholars in history, sociology, film, and media studies--interrogate Roots, assessing the ways that the book and its dramatization recast representations of slavery, labor, and the black family; reflected on the promise of freedom and civil rights; and engaged discourses of race, gender, violence, and power.
Presents a study of region, race, and gender that reveals how we underestimate the South's influence on the formation of black masculinity at the national level. This work is filled with insights into the region's role in producing hierarchies of race and gender in and beyond their African American contexts.
Whether used on its own or in conjunction with Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, this reader is a theoretical, analytical, and historical introduction to the study of popular culture within cultural studies. The readings cover the culture and civilization tradition, culturalism, structuralism and poststructuralism, Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism, as well as current debates in the study of popular culture. New to this edition: Four new readings by Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Judith Butler, and Savoj ZizekFully revised general and section introductions that contextualize and link the readings with key issues in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An IntroductionFully updated bibliography Ideal for courses in: cultural studiesmedia studiescommunication studiessociology of culturepopular culturevisual studiescultural criticism
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