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The First Infantry Division and the U.S. Army Transformed
Road to Victory in Desert Storm, 1970-1991
Gregory Fontenot
University of Missouri Press, 2017
This fast-paced and compelling read closes a significant gap in the historiography of the late Cold War U.S. Army and is crucial for understanding the current situation in the Middle East.

From the author's introduction:
“My purpose is a narrative history of the 1st Infantry Division from 1970 through the Operation Desert Storm celebration held 4th of July 1991. This story is an account of the revolutionary changes in the late Cold War. The Army that overran Saddam Hussein’s Legions in four days was the product of important changes stimulated both by social changes and institutional reform. The 1st Infantry Division reflected benefits of those changes, despite its low priority for troops and material. The Division was not an elite formation, but rather excelled in the context of the Army as an institution.”

This book begins with a preface by Gordon R. Sullivan, General, USA, Retired. In twelve chapters, author Gregory Fontenot explains the history of the 1st infantry Division from 1970 to 1991. In doing so, his fast-paced narrative includes elements to expand the knowledge of non-military readers. These elements include a glossary, a key to abbreviations, maps, nearly two dozen photographs, and thorough bibliography.

The First infantry Division and the U.S. Army Transformed: Road to Victory in Desert Storm is published with support from the First Division Museum at Cantigny.
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First Ladies and the Press
The Unfinished Partnership of the Media Age
Maurine H. Beasley
Northwestern University Press, 2005
At her first press conference, Eleanor Roosevelt, uncertain of her role as hostess or leader, passed a box of candied grapefruit peel to the thirty-five women journalists. Nearly sixty years later, Hillary Clinton, an accomplished professional woman and lawyer, tried to mollify her critics by handing out her chocolate-chip cookie recipe. These exchanges tells us as much about the social—and political—roles of women in America as they do about the relation of the first lady to the press and the public. Looking at the personal interaction between each first lady from Martha Washington to Laura Bush and the mass media of her day, Maurine H. Beasley traces the growth of the institution of the first lady as a part of the American political system. Her work shows how media coverage of first ladies, often limited to stereotypical ideas about women, has not adequately reflected the importance of their role.
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First Lady from Plains
Rosalynn Carter
University of Arkansas Press, 1994
First Lady from Plains, first published in 1984, is Rosalynn’s Carter’s autobiography, covering her life from her childhood in Plains, Georgia, through her time as First Lady. It is “a readable, lively and revealing account of the Carters and their remarkable journey from rural Georgia to the White House in a span of ten years” (The New York Times).
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The First Lady of Olympic Track
The Life and Times of Betty Robinson
Joe Gergen
Northwestern University Press, 2014

The 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam were the first in which women—over the objections of many, including Pope Pius XI and the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin—were allowed to run in the marquee track events.

Equally remarkable is the story behind the first female gold medal winner in the 100-meter dash, sixteen-year-old American Betty Robinson. A prodigy running in just her fourth organized meet, Robinson stunned the world, earning special praise from the president of the 1928 American Olympic Committee, General Douglas MacArthur. But Robinson’s triumph soon became tragedy when in 1931 she was involved in a life-threatening plane crash. Unable to assume a sprinter’s crouch, she nevertheless joined fellow pioneer Jesse Owens at the infamous 1936 Berlin Olympics, and achieved further glory on the relay team. Journalist Joe Gergen’s The First Lady of Olympic Track rescues an exceptional figure from obscurity.

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First Lady of the Confederacy
Varina Davis’s Civil War
Joan E. Cashin
Harvard University Press, 2008

When Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederacy, his wife, Varina Howell Davis, reluctantly became the First Lady. For this highly intelligent, acutely observant woman, loyalty did not come easily: she spent long years struggling to reconcile her societal duties to her personal beliefs. Raised in Mississippi but educated in Philadelphia, and a long-time resident of Washington, D.C., Mrs. Davis never felt at ease in Richmond. During the war she nursed Union prisoners and secretly corresponded with friends in the North. Though she publicly supported the South, her term as First Lady was plagued by rumors of her disaffection.

After the war, Varina Davis endured financial woes and the loss of several children, but following her husband's death in 1889, she moved to New York and began a career in journalism. Here she advocated reconciliation between the North and South and became friends with Julia Grant, the widow of Ulysses S. Grant. She shocked many by declaring in a newspaper that it was God's will that the North won the war.

A century after Varina Davis's death in 1906, Joan E. Cashin has written a masterly work, the first definitive biography of this truly modern, but deeply conflicted, woman. Pro-slavery but also pro-Union, Varina Davis was inhibited by her role as Confederate First Lady and unable to reveal her true convictions. In this pathbreaking book, Cashin offers a splendid portrait of a fascinating woman who struggled with the constraints of her time and place.

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The First Liberty
America's Foundation in Religious Freedom, Expanded and Updated
William Lee Miller
Georgetown University Press, 2003

At a time when the concept of religion-based politics has taken on new and sometimes ominous tones—even within the United States—it is not only right, but also urgently necessary that William Lee Miller revisit his profound exploration of the place of religious liberty and church and state in America. For this revised edition of The First Liberty, Miller has written a pointed new introduction, discussing how religious liberty has taken on deeper dimensions in a post-9/11 world. With new material on recent Supreme Court cases involving church-state relations and a new concluding chapter on America's religious and political landscape, this volume is an eloquent and thorough interpretation of how religious faith and political freedom have blended and fused to form part of our collective history-and most importantly, how each concept must respect the boundaries of the other.

Though many claim the United States to be a "Christian Nation," Miller provides a fascinatingly vivid account of the philosophical skirmishes and political machinations that led to the "wall of separation" between church and state. That famous phrase is Jefferson's, though it does not appear in the Declaration of Independence nor in the Constitution. But Miller follows this seminal idea from three great standard-bearers of religious liberty: Jefferson, Madison, and Roger Williams. Jefferson, who wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the precursor of the First Amendment of the Constitution; James Madison, who was politically responsible for Virginia's acceptance of religious liberty and who, a few years later, helped draft the Bill of Rights; and the even earlier figure, the radical dissenter Roger Williams, who propounded the idea of religious freedom not as a rational secularist but out of a deeply held spiritual faith.

Miller re-creates the fierce and vibrant debate among the founding fathers over the means of establishing public virtue in the absence of established religion—a debate that still reverberates in today's passionate arguments about civil rights, school prayer, abortion, Christmas crèches, conscientious objection during warfare—and demonstrates how the right to hold any religious belief has dynamically shaped American political life.

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First Meal
Julie Green
Oregon State University Press, 2023

Wrongful convictions haunt the American criminal justice system, as revealed in recent years by DNA and other investigative tools. And every wrongfully convicted person who walks free, exonerated after years or decades, carries part of that story. From those facts, artist Julie Green posed a seemingly simple question: When you have been denied all choice, what do you choose to eat on the first day of freedom?

In the small details of life at such pivotal moments, a vast new landscape of the world can emerge, and that is the core concept of First Meal. Partnering with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, Green and her coauthor, award-winning journalist Kirk Johnson, have created a unique melding of art and narration in the portraits and stories of twenty-five people on the day of their release.

Food and punishment have long been intertwined. The tradition of offering a condemned person a final meal before execution, for example, has been explored by psychologists, filmmakers, and others—including Green herself in an earlier series of criminal-justice themed paintings, The Last Supper. First Meal takes on that issue from the other side: food as a symbol of autonomy in a life restored. Set against the backdrop of a flawed American legal system, First Meal describes beauty, pain, hope and redemption, all anchored around the idea—explored by writers from Marcel Proust to Michael Pollan—that food touches us deeply in memory and emotion.

In Green’s art, state birds and surreal lobsters soar over places where wrongful convictions unfolded, mistaken witnesses shout their errors, glow-in-the-dark skylines evoke homecoming. Johnson’s essays take us inside those moments—from the courtrooms where things went wrong to the pathways of faith and resilience that kept people sane through their years of injustice. First Meal seeks to inform and spread awareness, but also celebrate the humanity that unites us, and the idea that gratitude and euphoria—even as it mixes with grief and the awareness of loss—can emerge in places we least expect.

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First Peoples of Great Salt Lake
A Cultural Landscape from Nevada to Wyoming
Steven R. Simms
University of Utah Press, 2023

Great Salt Lake is a celebrated, world-recognized natural landmark. It, and the broader region bound to it, is also a thoroughly cultural landscape; generations of peoples made their lives there. In an eminently readable narrative, Steven Simms, one of the foremost archaeologists of the region, traces the scope of human history dating from the Pleistocene, when First Peoples interacted with the lapping waters of Lake Bonneville, to nearly the present day. Through vivid descriptions of how people lived, migrated, and mingled, with persistence and resilience, Simms honors the long human presence on the landscape.

First Peoples of Great Salt Lake takes a different approach to understanding the ancients than is typical of archaeology. De-emphasizing categories and labels, it traces changing environments, climates, and peoples through the notion of place. It challenges the "Pristine Myth," the cultural bias that Indigenous peoples were timeless, changeless, primitive, and the landscapes they lived in sparsely populated and perpetually pristine. First Peoples and their descendants modified the forests and understory vegetation, shaped wildlife populations, and adapted to long-term climate change. Native Americans of Great Salt Lake were very much part of their world, and the story here is one of long continuity through dramatic cultural change.


 
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The First Primary
New Hampshire's Outsize Role in Presidential Nominations
David W. Moore
University of New Hampshire Press, 2015
Since 1952, the primary election in a small, not very diverse New England state has had a disproportionate impact on the U.S. presidential nomination process and the ensuing general election. Although just a handful of delegates are at stake, the New Hampshire primary has become a massive media event and a reasonably reliable predictor of a campaign’s ultimate success or failure. In The First Primary, Moore and Smith offer a comprehensive history of the state’s primary, an analysis of its media coverage and impact, and a description of the New Hampshire electorate, along with a discussion of how that electorate reflects or diverges from national opinions on candidates and issues. A book for political scientists and political junkies, media and policy professionals, and all students of American government, The First Primary ably fills the gaps in our understanding of New Hampshire’s outsize role in the nomination process.
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First Son
The Biography of Richard M. Daley
Keith Koeneman
University of Chicago Press, 2013

"Mayor Richard M. Daley dropped the bomb at a routine news conference at City Hall on Tuesday. With no prelude or fanfare, Mr. Daley announced that he would not seek re-election when his term expires next year. 'Simply put, it's time,' he said." New York Times, September 7, 2010

With those four words, an era ended. After twenty-two years, the longest-serving and most powerful mayor in the history of Chicago—and, arguably, America—stepped down, leaving behind a city that was utterly transformed, and a complicated legacy we are only beginning to evaluate.

In First Son, Keith Koeneman chronicles the sometimes Shakespearean, sometimes Machiavellian life of an American political legend. Making deft use of unprecedented access to key players in the Daley administration, as well as Chicago's business and cultural leaders, Koeneman draws on more than one hundred interviews to tell an up-close, insider story of political triumph and personal evolution.

With Koeneman as our guide, we follow young Daley from his beginnings as an average Bridgeport kid thought to lack his father's talent and charisma to his unlikely transformation into an iron-fisted leader. Daley not only escaped the giant shadow of his father but also transformed Chicago from a gritty, post-industrial Midwestern capital into a beautiful, sophisticated global city widely recognized as a model for innovative metropolises throughout the world.

But in spite of his many accomplishments, Richard M. Daley's record is far from flawless. First Son sets the dramatic improvement of certain parts of the city against the persistent realities of crime, financial stress , failing public housing, and dysfunctional schools. And it reveals that while in many ways Daley broke with the machine politics of his father, he continued to reward loyalty with favors, use the resources of city government to overwhelm opponents, and tolerate political corruption.

A nuanced portrait of a complex man, First Son shows Daley to be sensitive yet tough, impatient yet persistent, a street-smart fighter and detail-driven policy expert who not only ran Chicago, but was Chicago.

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The First Texas News Barons
By Patrick Cox
University of Texas Press, 2005

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.

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First the Seed
The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology
Jack Ralph Kloppenburg, Jr.
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005
First the Seed spotlights the history of plant breeding and shows how efforts to control the seed have shaped the emergence of the agricultural biotechnology industry. This second edition of a classic work in the political economy of science includes an extensive, new chapter updating the analysis to include the most recent developments in the struggle over the direction of crop genetic engineering.

1988 Cloth, 1990 Paperback, Cambridge University Press
Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Award of the Agricultural History Society
Winner of the Robert K. Merton Award of the American Sociological Association
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The First Twenty-Five
An Oral History of the Desegregation of Little Rock’s Public Junior High Schools
LaVerne Bell-Tolliver
University of Arkansas Press, 2018

“It was one of those periods that you got through, as opposed to enjoyed. It wasn’t an environment that . . . was nurturing, so you shut it out. You just got through it. You just took it a day at a time. You excelled if you could. You did your best. You felt as though the eyes of the community were on you.”—Glenda Wilson, East Side Junior High

Much has been written about the historical desegregation of Little Rock Central High School by nine African American students in 1957. History has been silent, however, about the students who desegregated Little Rock’s five public junior high schools—East Side, Forest Heights, Pulaski Heights, Southwest, and West Side—in 1961 and 1962.

The First Twenty-Five gathers the personal stories of these students some fifty years later. They recall what it was like to break down long-standing racial barriers while in their early teens—a developmental stage that often brings emotional vulnerability. In their own words, these individuals share what they saw, heard, and felt as children on the front lines of the civil rights movement, providing insight about this important time in Little Rock, and how these often painful events from their childhoods affected the rest of their lives.

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The First Vietnam War
Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis
Mark Atwood Lawrence
Harvard University Press, 2007

How did the conflict between Vietnamese nationalists and French colonial rulers erupt into a major Cold War struggle between communism and Western liberalism? To understand the course of the Vietnam wars, it is essential to explore the connections between events within Vietnam and global geopolitical currents in the decade after the Second World War.

In this illuminating work, leading scholars examine various dimensions of the struggle between France and Vietnamese revolutionaries that began in 1945 and reached its climax at Dien Bien Phu. Several essays break new ground in the study of the Vietnamese revolution and the establishment of the political and military apparatus that successfully challenged both France and the United States. Other essays explore the roles of China, France, Great Britain, and the United States, all of which contributed to the transformation of the conflict from a colonial skirmish to a Cold War crisis.

Taken together, the essays enable us to understand the origins of the later American war in Indochina by positioning Vietnam at the center of the grand clash between East and West and North and South in the middle years of the twentieth century.

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The First Wall Street
Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, and the Birth of American Finance
Robert E. Wright
University of Chicago Press, 2005
When Americans think of investment and finance, they think of Wall Street—though this was not always the case. During the dawn of the Republic, Philadelphia was the center of American finance. The first stock exchange in the nation was founded there in 1790, and around it the bustling thoroughfare known as Chestnut Street was home to the nation's most powerful financial institutions.

The First Wall Street recounts the fascinating history of Chestnut Street and its forgotten role in the birth of American finance. According to Robert E. Wright, Philadelphia, known for its cultivation of liberty and freedom, blossomed into a financial epicenter during the nation's colonial period. The continent's most prodigious minds and talented financiers flocked to Philly in droves, and by the eve of the Revolution, the Quaker City was the most financially sophisticated region in North America. The First Wall Street reveals how the city played a leading role in the financing of the American Revolution and emerged from that titanic struggle with not just the wealth it forged in the crucible of war, but an invaluable amount of human capital as well.

This capital helped make Philadelphia home to the Bank of the United States, the U.S. Mint, an active securities exchange, and several banks and insurance companies—all clustered in or around Chestnut Street. But as the decades passed, financial institutions were lured to New York, and by the late 1820s only the powerful Second Bank of the United States upheld Philadelphia's financial stature. But when Andrew Jackson vetoed its charter, he sealed the fate of Chestnut Street forever—and of Wall Street too.

Finely nuanced and elegantly written, The First Wall Street will appeal to anyone interested in the history of the United States and the origins of its unrivaled economy.
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The First Woman in the Republic
A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child
Carolyn L. Karcher
Duke University Press, 1998
For half a century Lydia Maria Child was a household name in the United States. Hardly a sphere of nineteenth-century life can be found in which Lydia Maria Child did not figure prominently as a pathbreaker. Although best known today for having edited Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, she pioneered almost every department of nineteenth-century American letters—the historical novel, the short story, children’s literature, the domestic advice book, women’s history, antislavery fiction, journalism, and the literature of aging. Offering a panoramic view of a nation and culture in flux, this innovative cultural biography (originally published by Duke University Press in 1994) recreates the world as well as the life of a major nineteenth-figure whose career as a writer and social reformer encompassed issues central to American history.
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The First Year Out
Understanding American Teens after High School
Tim Clydesdale
University of Chicago Press, 2007

Wild parties, late nights, and lots of sex, drugs, and alcohol. Many assume these are the things that define an American teenager’s first year after high school. But the reality is really quite different. As Tim Clydesdale reports in The First Year Out, teenagers generally manage the increased responsibilities of everyday life immediately after graduation effectively. But, like many good things, this comes at a cost.

Tracking the daily lives of fifty young people making the transition to life after high school, Clydesdale reveals how teens settle into manageable patterns of substance use and sexual activity; how they meet the requirements of postsecondary education; and how they cope with new financial expectations. Most of them, we learn, handle the changes well because they make a priority of everyday life. But Clydesdale finds that teens also stow away their identities—religious, racial, political, or otherwise—during this period in exchange for acceptance into mainstream culture. This results in the absence of a long-range purpose for their lives and imposes limits on their desire to understand national politics and global issues, sometimes even affecting the ability to reconstruct their lives when tragedies occur.

The First Year Out is an invaluable resource for anyone caught up in the storm and stress of working with these young adults.

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First-Generation Faculty of Color
Reflections on Research, Teaching, and Service
Tracy Lachica Buenavista
Rutgers University Press, 2023
First-Generation Faculty of Color: Reflections on Research, Teaching, and Service is the first book to examine the experiences of racially minoritized faculty who were also the first in their families to graduate college in the United States. From contingent to tenured faculty who teach at community colleges, comprehensive, and research institutions, the book is a collection of critical narratives that collectively show the diversity of faculty of color, attentive to and beyond race. The book is organized into three major parts comprised of chapters in which faculty of color depict how first-generation college student identities continue to inform how minoritized people navigate academe well into their professional careers, and encourage them to reconceptualize research, teaching, and service responsibilities to better consider the families and communities that shaped their lives well before college.
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The First-Year Experience Cookbook
Raymond Pun
Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2017

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The Fiscal Crisis of the States
Lessons for the Future
Steven D. Gold, Editor
Georgetown University Press, 1995

As the federal government has cut back its support for domestic services, state governments increasingly have been forced to assume a leadership position. In this book, prominent experts describe and analyze how state governments in the 1990s have coped with fiscal stress through changes in tax and spending policies, as well as through attempts to "reinvent government" by abandoning long-established policies.

In an era when state budgets verge on the brink of deficit, state governments face the difficult task of reconciling the public's wish for low taxes with its desire for increased services—better schools, improved health systems, more prisons. This volume provides both a comparative overview of the fifty states as they try to meet conflicting needs and incisive case studies of six states with a reputation for being national leaders—California, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota. It explores how much substance there is to claims that states were successful in developing innovative policies.

The Fiscal Crisis of the States draws upon research to analyze what is really happening in the state capitols. Boiling down the diverse experiences of various states into a number of important lessons, this book will be a valuable resource for academics, policymakers, and public administrators, as well as the general reader, to understand the reality of state fiscal policies.

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Fiscal Federalism
Quantitative Studies
Edited by Harvey S. Rosen
University of Chicago Press, 1988
We often think of fiscal decisions as being made by a single government, but in the United States the reality is that an astounding number of entities have the power to tax and spend. State, local, and federal governments all play crucial roles in the U.S. fiscal system, and the interrelation has been the source of continuing controversy. This fact is the focus of the seven papers and commentaries presented in this volume, the result of a conference sponsored by the NBER. The contributors use various quantitative tools to study policy issues, obtaining results that will interest policymakers and researchers working in the areas of taxation and public finance.

The first three papers study the distribution of power and responsibilities among the various levels of government. John Joseph Wallis and Wallace E. Oates look at the extend and evolution of decentralization in the state and local sector; Robert P. Inman examines the growth of federal grants and the structure of congressional decision making; and Jeffrey S. Zax investigates the effects of the number of government jurisdictions on aggregate local public debt and expenditures. The next three papers look at the deductibility of state and local taxes on federal tax returns. Using an econometric analysis, Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Harvey S. Rosen examine the effects of deductibility on revenue sources and level of expenditures. Lawrence B. Lindsey looks at how deductibility affects the level and type of taxation. George R. Zodrow uses a two-sector general equilibrium model to investigate revenue effects of deductibility. Finally, Charles R. Hulten and Robert M. Schwab analyze the problem of developing an accurate estimate of income for the state and local sector, finding that conventional accounting procedures have underestimated the income generated by a startling $100 billion.
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Fiscal Policy after the Financial Crisis
Edited by Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi
University of Chicago Press, 2013
The recent recession has brought fiscal policy back to the forefront, with economists and policy makers struggling to reach a consensus on highly political issues like tax rates and government spending. At the heart of the debate are fiscal multipliers, whose size and sensitivity determine the power of such policies to influence economic growth.

Fiscal Policy after the Financial Crisis focuses on the effects of fiscal stimuli and increased government spending, with contributions that consider the measurement of the multiplier effect and its size. In the face of uncertainty over the sustainability of recent economic policies, further contributions to this volume discuss the merits of alternate means of debt reduction through decreased government spending or increased taxes. A final section examines how the short-term political forces driving fiscal policy might be balanced with aspects of the long-term planning governing monetary policy.

A direct intervention in timely debates, Fiscal Policy after the Financial Crisis offers invaluable insights about various responses to the recent financial crisis.

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The Fishermen, the Horse, and the Sea
Barbara Joosse
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2021
Young Lester Smith is part of a fishing family on Lake Michigan. He loves playing on the beach with his little sister, helping Mama with chores, and watching the neighbor’s big horse pull Papa’s fishing boat onto shore. But Lester understands that the lake can be “soft as a kitten one day and terrible as a sea monster the next.” On the autumn equinox of 1895, a wicked storm rolls into Port Washington, damaging a schooner on the lake and putting the lives of its two crewmen in danger. Will Lester, his family, and the horse save the day?

This beautifully illustrated children’s book based on a true story recounts a dramatic rescue on Lake Michigan and introduces young readers to Lester Smith and his family, who founded Port Washington’s long-running and beloved Smith Bros. Fish Shanty. Educational materials including definitions, an illustrated map of Lake Michigan, and short biographies of the story’s featured characters supplement this engaging story for elementary-age readers.
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Fishers At Work, Workers At Sea
Puerto Rican Journey Thru Labor & Refuge
David Griffith and Manuel Valdés Pizzini
Temple University Press, 2002
Small-scale fishing, a house-hold based enterprise in Puerto Rico, rarely provides sufficient income for a family, but it anchors their culture and sense of themselves within that culture. Even when family members must engage in wage work to supplement house-hold income, they think of themselves as fishers. Liche typifies these wage workers: "When he was quite young, he left the island to struggle in other lands, to work, to raise a family, to send home the money he earned. Ten, twenty, thirty years passed...during which he did not once fish or even see the ocean. But in a boat-building factory in New Jersey, in a bakery in the Bronx, on the production line of a chemical factory, on dozens of construction sites, every single day he made a mental review of the waters, the isles and cays ...and entertained no thought that was not related to his return."

Fishers at Work, Workers at Sea describes Puerto Rican fishing families as they negotiate homeland and diaspora. It considers how wage work affects their livelihoods and identities at home and how these independent producers move in and out of global commodity markets. Drawing on some 100 life histories and years of fieldwork, David Griffith and Manuel Valdés Pizzini have developed a complex, often moving portrait of the men and women who fiercely struggle to hang onto the coastal landscapes and cultural heritage tied to the Caribbean Sea.
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Fishes of the Great Basin
A Natural History
John W. Sigler
University of Nevada Press, 2014
Naturalists and recreational anglers will welcome the paperback edition of this comprehensive volume, first published in 1986, which describes every species in the lakes and streams of the Great Basin. Includes an updated checklist of established species, discussion of threatened and endangered species, glossary, bibliography, and index.
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Fishing by Obstinate Isles
Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers
Keith Tuma
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Fishing by Obstinate Isles explores the relations of recent British and American poetries, challenging American views of a British poetry dominated by antimodernism while discussing the role of rhetorics of national identity on both sides of the Atlantic in the persistence of these views. Devoting its most extensive commentary to a collection of British modernist and postmodernist poets, it attacks the relegation of British poetry to the zones of the quaint, making a compelling case for renewed engagements with fields of British poetry deserving of attention.
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The Fishing Creek Confederacy
A Story of Civil War Draft Resistance
Richard A. Sauers and Peter Tomasak
University of Missouri Press, 2012
Media Kit
 
           One hundred fifty years after the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln is thought of as one of the best presidents of the United States. However, most Americans forget that he was elected with only 40 percent of the popular vote. Many Democratic newspapers across the North mistrusted Lincoln’s claim that he would not abolish slavery, and the lukewarm support evidenced by them collapsed after Lincoln announced his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in the fall of 1862. The advent of a national draft in the spring of 1863 only added fuel to the fire with anti-Lincoln Democrats arguing that it was illegal to draft civilians. Many newspaper editors advocated active resistance against the draft. 
 
            Governor Andrew Gregg Curtin of Pennsylvania was a staunch supporter of the Lincoln administration. The commonwealth supplied more than 360,000 white soldiers and 9,000 black soldiers during the conflict. However, there was sustained opposition to the war throughout the state, much of it fanned by the pens of Democratic newspaper editors. Though most opposition was disorganized and spontaneous, other aspects of the antiwar sentiment in the state occasionally erupted as major incidents. 

           
           In The Fishing Creek Confederacy, Richard A. Sauers and Peter Tomasak address the serious opposition to the draft in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, in 1864. Egged on by the anti-Lincoln newspaper editors, a number of men avoided the draft and formed ad hoc groups to protect themselves from arrest. The shooting of a Union lieutenant confronting draft evaders in July 1864 resulted in military intervention in the northern townships of the county. The troops arrested more than one hundred men, sending about half of them to a prison fort near Philadelphia. Some of these men were subjected to military trials in Harrisburg, the state capital, that fall and winter. The arrests led to bitter feelings that were slow to die. The military intervention eventually impacted a Pennsylvania gubernatorial election and led to a murder trial.
 
            Sauers and Tomasak describe the draft in Pennsylvania and consider how Columbia County fit into the overall draft process. Subsequent chapters take the reader through the events of the summer of 1864, including the interaction of soldiers and civilians in the county, the prison experiences of the men, and the trials. Later chapters cover the August 1865 Democratic rally at Nob Mountain and the effects of the draft episode after the war was over, including its influence on the 1872 election for governor, the 1891 murder trial, and the formation of the official Democratic version of the events, which has been used by historians ever since.
              The Fishing Creek Confederacy is the first book to address this episode and its aftermath in their entirety. Sauers and Tomasak present the story and try to disentangle the often contradictory nature of the sources and how both amateur and professional historians have used them.
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Fishing for Gold
The Story of Alabama's Catfish Industry
Karni R. Perez
University of Alabama Press, 2006

A captivating story of the industry's rise in Alabama.

With a wonderful ear for dialogue and in flowing narrative style, Karni Perez weaves together oral histories collected from early hatchery owners, catfish farmers, processors, and researchers to recount the important contributions made by Alabamians to the channel catfish industry. Perez describes the struggles and glories of fish culture from its early days as an experimental venture to the thriving present-day commercial enterprise that supplies warmwater fish for the American food industry.


As Perez states, "The catfish industry started out in Alabama as a do-it-yourself and figure-it out-yourself kind of enterprise." We hear how men who were mostly cattle farmers learned to nudge male and female fish into spawning in crudely constructed aquaria, how growers discovered the dissolved oxygen needs of their "herd" when big die-offs occurred, how Lenson Montz and Otis Breland designed the first paddle aerator to remedy the problem, how farmers eventually trained a bottomfeeding species to rise to the water surface to eat so their numbers could be better estimated. In one dramatic story, we learn how a man experimenting with the first skinning machine lost a piece of his hand in front of a crowd of horrified locals. (After it was retrieved from the skin basket, it was reattached by a town doctor and healed perfectly.) Ironically, the man was a representative of the engineering firm tasked with designing the machine; he had never before seen a catfish in his life. The machine was modified and became an essential component of modern fish processing.

In addition to telling the remarkable stories of individual contributions by farmers and researchers, Perez explains the positive effects played by improved public infrastructure, continued biological research, state legislation, and federal recognition of aquaculture as agriculture.
 
From Chapter Three:
"You're crazy," the bank officer declared with a friendly chuckle. "Why,
the Warrior River is full of catfish for anyone who wants them. There are
more in there than people will ever eat. And you think you're going to go
sell them when folks can go get them for nothing? That's just a bunch of
dreams!"
 
From Chapter Two:
“A crop duster's error, a visit by a curious feed company researcher, a
fluke of the weather, a coincidental encounter at a gas station. . . . How
could the three men, or anyone else for that matter, guess that these
chance circumstances would play into the birth of an industry that would
mushroom over the next forty or so years into one of the largest
contributors to the state's economy and that of the entire southeastern
United States?”
 
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Fishing Grounds
Defining A New Era For American Fisheries Management
The H. John Heinz III Center for Science
Island Press, 2000

Fisheries management today is highly contentious. The interests of fishers and fish processors, coastal communities, the government, and environmental organizations are often different and can even be mutually incompatible.

Fishing Grounds offers a comprehensive assessment of the legal, social, economic and biological context of marine fisheries management in the United States. Drawing on interviews with stakeholders from all sides of the issue, the authors seek common ground -- and points of unresolved controversy -- among the diversity of interests and viewpoints involved. Chapters examine:

  • history and background
  • status of marine fisheries
  • fishery productivity from biological, social, and economic perspectives
  • ownership of fishery resources
  • management structures and incentives
  • the roles of science and evaluation
Each chapter begins with legal, technical, and conceptual background to help readers understand the sets of issues involved and follows that with a balanced presentation of stakeholder views.

Fishing Grounds presents a useful overview of fisheries management options and positions regarding those options, providing valuable insight into the opinions and concerns of stakeholders and the sets of incentives to which those stakeholders respond. It is an important work for fisheries management professionals in industry, government agencies, and nongovernmental organizations, as well as for students and researchers involved with fisheries and fisheries management.

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The Fishing Line
A History of the Grand Rapids & Indiana Railroad
Graydon M. Meints
Michigan State University Press, 2018
With roots in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the Grand Rapids & Indiana Railroad—nicknamed “The Fishing Line” for its connections to attractive Michigan tourist areas—was organized in the mid–nineteenth century to take advantage of the lucrative logging business of the vast forests of the northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan and other potential freight traffic. Once built into northern Michigan, it had an important role in developing the region’s tourist industry. Financed and built by officials of the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad system, the GR&I eventually was merged into that company. Using a plethora of newspapers, public documents, and other primary source materials, Meints has crafted an engaging narrative that is easily accessible to the lay reader as well as specialists in railroad and local history. Tracing a thorough corporate history of a fascinating but little-known regional line from its beginning through the early twentieth century, The Fishing Line: A History of the Grand Rapids & Indiana Railroad is a must-read.

 
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Fishy Business
Rik Scarce
Temple University Press, 2000
Leaping waterfalls, struggling through rocky shallows, only the strongest salmon survive to spawn a new generation. These remarkable fish seem to be pure nature, unfathomable, all instinct. But are they? For more than a century biologists have tried to unlock the mystery of salmon we know. For sociologist Rik Scarce, salmon represent an opportunity to probe the relationship of science, society, and nature.

About Pacific salmon -- a game fish and food source that is protected and manages for economic and environmental  abundance -- Scarce writes, "What other living thing receives such extensive attention from science and society, is used in so many ways, yet retains so much of what we would like  to think is its 'wild' character?" He shows how political, bureaucratic, and economic forces have directed salmon science for their own purposes and how control remains a central feature in salmon biology.

Identifying a countertrend rooted in environmental activism, Scarce also argues that an ecocentric perspective is gaining ground even as pressures mount simultaneously to save endangered salmon populations and to bring every last salmon to market. Thus, while external forces control much of the biologists' work, a movement is underway to free biology from political and economic pressures. In rich, ethnographic detail, Scarce develops this portrait of a science struggling with nature and itself. The old-line "fisheries biologists" tell how they work under immense pressure to unravel the unknowns of salmon existence to fulfill objectives of politically-motivated funding agencies. In contrast, the new breed of "conservation biology" researchers struggles to maintain the genetic diversity of salmon populations while minimizing the ways humans determine the fate of the salmon.

Fishy Business provides new ways for regarding about human interactions with other species, from appealing ones like wolves, whales, and redwood tress to less popular ones like snail darters and kangaroo rats. Society struggles to decide what parts of nature matter and why. Ultimately, Scarce argues, nature is a social product: what shall we make of it?
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The Fissured Workplace
Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It
David Weil
Harvard University Press, 2014

For much of the twentieth century, large companies employing many workers formed the bedrock of the U.S. economy. Today, as David Weil’s groundbreaking analysis shows, large corporations have shed their role as direct employers of the people responsible for their products, in favor of outsourcing work to small companies that compete fiercely with one another. The result has been declining wages, eroding benefits, inadequate health and safety conditions, and ever-widening income inequality.

“Authoritative…[The Fissured Workplace] shed[s] important new light on the resurgence of the power of finance and its connection to the debasement of work and income distribution.”
—Robert Kuttner, New York Review of Books

“The kinds of workplace fissuring discussed here—subcontracting, franchising, and global supply chains—have been the subjects of a number of studies detailing the employment effects that Weil describes. The Fissured Workplace is unusual in bringing this research together into an integrated, detailed, and decidedly policy-oriented analysis…It makes a convincing case that the better regulation of fissured workplaces is a first step towards reversing the erosion of pay and conditions at the bottom of the labor market.”
—Virginia Doellgast, Times Higher Education

[more]

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Fit Nation
The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
University of Chicago Press, 2022
How is it that Americans are more obsessed with exercise than ever, and yet also unhealthier? Fit Nation explains how we got here and imagines how we might create a more inclusive, stronger future.

If a shared American creed still exists, it’s a belief that exercise is integral to a life well lived. A century ago, working out was the activity of a strange subculture, but today, it’s almost impossible to avoid exhortations to exercise: Walk 5K to cure cancer! Awaken your inner sex kitten at pole-dancing class! Sweat like (or even with) a celebrity in spin class! Exercise is everywhere.

Yet the United States is hardly a “fit nation.” Only 20 percent of Americans work out consistently, over half of gym members don’t even use the facilities they pay for, and fewer than 30 percent of high school students get an hour of exercise a day. So how did fitness become both inescapable and inaccessible?

Spanning more than a century of American history, Fit Nation answers these questions and more through original interviews, archival research, and a rich cultural narrative. As a leading political and intellectual historian and a certified fitness instructor, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is uniquely qualified to confront the complex and far-reaching implications of how our contemporary exercise culture took shape. She explores the work of working out not just as consumers have experienced it, but as it was created by performers, physical educators, trainers, instructors, and many others.

For Petrzela, fitness is a social justice issue. She argues that the fight for a more equitable exercise culture will be won only by revolutionizing fitness culture at its core, making it truly inclusive for all bodies in a way it has never been. Examining venues from the stage of the World’s Fair and Muscle Beach to fat farms, feminist health clinics, radical and evangelical college campuses, yoga retreats, gleaming health clubs, school gymnasiums, and many more, Fit Nation is a revealing history that shows fitness to be not just a matter of physical health but of what it means to be an American.
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Fit to Be Tied
Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950-1980
Kluchin, Rebecca M
Rutgers University Press, 2011
The 1960s revolutionized American contraceptive practice. Diaphragms, jellies, and condoms with high failure rates gave way to newer choices of the Pill, IUD, and sterilization. Fit to Be Tied provides a history of sterilization and what would prove to become, at once, socially divisive and a popular form of birth control.

During the first half of the twentieth century, sterilization (tubal ligation and vasectomy) was a tool of eugenics. Individuals who endorsed crude notions of biological determinism sought to control the reproductive decisions of women they considered "unfit" by nature of race or class, and used surgery to do so. Incorporating first-person narratives, court cases, and official records, Rebecca M. Kluchin examines the evolution of forced sterilization of poor women, especially women of color, in the second half of the century and contrasts it with demands for contraceptive sterilization made by white women and men. She chronicles public acceptance during an era of reproductive and sexual freedom, and the subsequent replacement of the eugenics movement with "neo-eugenic" standards that continued to influence American medical practice, family planning, public policy, and popular sentiment.

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Fitness in American Culture
Images of Health, Sport, and the Body, 1830-1940
Kathryn Grover
University of Massachusetts Press, 1989
The quest for physical health and fitness has a long history in the United States. From spinach to shredded wheat to patent medicines, from calisthenics to bicycling to organized sports, Americans have searched vigorously and with great imagination for health, vitality, and physical perfection. Focusing on the period from 1830 to 1940, this collection of essays by six distinguished historians explores Americans' fascination with health and sport, a preoccupation that continues even today in the current diet and fitness craze. In his introduction, Harvey Green discusses one of the major ironies of this period: that the "progress" and achievements Americans sought in the economic and technological spheres were in fact endangering their health and weakening the entire body politic. The rapid technological changes taking place in the world forced many people to alter fundamentally their thinking about the importance of health and physical fitness not just for themselves as individuals but also for the good of society. Other topics explored include changing attitudes toward fitness and wellness, how advertising reflected health concerns, iron as a symbol of vitality and strength, the increasing specialization of foods, and the advent of organized and competitive sports.
[more]

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Fitter, Happier
The Eugenic Strain in Twentieth-Century Cancer Rhetoric
Lois Peters Agnew
University of Alabama Press

Fitter, Happier: The Eugenic Strain in Twentieth-Century Cancer Rhetoric is a thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between cancer rhetoric, American ideals, and eugenic influences in the twentieth century. This groundbreaking work delves into the paradoxical interplay between acknowledging the genuine threat of cancer and the ingrained American ethos of confidence and control.

Agnew’s meticulous research traces the topic’s historical context, unveiling how cancer discourses evolved from a hushed personal concern to a public issue thanks to the rise of cancer research centers and advocacy organizations. However, she unearths a troubling dimension to these discussions—subtle yet persistent eugenic ideologies that taint cancer arguments and advocacy groups. By dissecting prevailing cancer narratives, Agnew brings into focus how ideals rooted in eliminating imperfections and embracing progress converge with concerns for safeguarding societal fitness.

Fitter, Happier scrutinizes the military origins and metaphors that permeate government policies and medical research, the transformation of cancer’s association with melancholy into a rallying cry for a positive outlook, and the nuanced implications of prevention-focused dialogues. Reflecting on the varied experiences of actual cancer patients, Agnew resists the neat assimilation of these stories into a eugenic framework. Agnew’s insights prompt readers to contemplate the societal meanings of disease and disability as well as how language constructs our shared reality.

 

 

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Fitzgerald's Mentors
Edmund Wilson, H. L. Mencken, and Gerald Murphy
Ronald Berman
University of Alabama Press, 2012
A fresh and compelling study of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s intellectual friendship with Edmund Wilson, H. L. Mencken, and Gerald Murphy
 
Fitzgerald was shaped through his engagements with key literary and artistic figures in the 1920s. This book is about their influence— and also about the ways that Fitzgerald defended his own ideas about writing. Influence was always secondary to independence.
 
Fitzgerald’s education began at Princeton with Edmund Wilson. There Wilson imparted to Fitzgerald many ideas about education and literary values, among them respect for the classics and an acute awareness of literary tradition.
 
In New York H. L. Mencken impressed upon Fitzgerald his belief in the stifling effect of public morality on writers. Furthermore, Mencken’s The American Language changed Fitzgerald’s thinking about the power of everyday language.
 
After moving to France in 1924, Fitzgerald’s intellectual life took a very different turn. Gerald Murphy exposed him to the visual arts— including the work of Fernand Leger, Pablo Picasso, and Man Ray—and to people deeply interested in the perception of art in daily life. Equally important, Fitzgerald had many discussions about artistic values with both Gerald and Sara Murphy.
 
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Fitzgerald-Wilson-Hemingway
Language and Experience
Ronald Berman
University of Alabama Press, 2003

In this study, Ronald Berman examines the work of the critic/novelist Edmund Wilson and the art of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway as they wrestled with the problems of language, experience, perception and reality in the "age of jazz." By focusing specifically on aesthetics—the ways these writers translated everyday reality into language—Berman challenges and redefines many routinely accepted ideas concerning the legacy of these authors.

Fitzgerald is generally thought of as a romantic, but Berman shows that we need to expand the idea of Romanticism to include its philosophy. Hemingway, widely viewed as a stylist who captured experience by simplifying language, is revealed as consciously demonstrating reality's resistance to language. Between these two renowned writers stands Wilson, who is critically influenced by Alfred North Whitehead, as well as Dewey, James, Santayana, and Freud.

By patiently mapping the correctness of these philosophers, historians, literary critics and writers, Berman aims to open a gateway into the era. This work should be of interest to scholars of American literature, philosophy and aesthetics; to academic libraries; to students of intellectual history; and to general readers interested in Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Wilson.


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Five Days in October
The Lost Battalion of World War I
Robert H. Ferrell
University of Missouri Press, 2005
During American participation in World War I, many events caught the public’s attention, but none so much as the plight of the Lost Battalion. Comprising some five hundred men of the Seventy-seventh Division, the so-called battalion was entrapped on the side of a ravine in the Argonne Forest by German forces from October 2 to 7, 1918. The men’s courage under siege in the midst of rifle, machine-gun, mortar, and artillery fire (coming both day and night), with nothing to eat after the morning of the first day save grass and roots, and with water dangerous to obtain, has gone down in American history as comparable in heroism to the defense of the Alamo and the stand at the Little Big Horn of the troops of General George A. Custer.

Now, in Five Days in October, historian Robert H. Ferrell presents new material—previously unavailable—about what really happened during those days in the forest. Despite the description of them as a lost battalion, the men were neither lost nor a battalion. The name was coined by a New York newspaper editor who, upon learning that a sizable body of troops had been surrounded, thought up the notion of a Lost Battalion—it possessed a ring sure to catch the attention of readers.

The trapped men actually belonged to companies from two battalions of the Seventy-seventh, and their exact placement was well known, reported by runners at the outset of the action and by six carrier pigeons released by their commander, Major Charles W. Whittlesey, during the five days his men were there. The causes of the entrapment were several, including command failures and tactical errors. The men had been sent ahead of the main division line without attention to flanks, and because of that failure, they were surrounded. Thus began a siege that took the lives of many men, leading to the collapse of the colonel of the 308th Infantry Regiment and, many believe, to the suicide of Major Whittlesey three years later.

This book grew out of Ferrell’s discovery of new material in the U.S. Army Military History Institute at the Army War College from the papers of General Hugh A. Drum and in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The Drum papers contain the court-martial record of the lieutenant of a machine-gun unit attached to the battalions, who advised Major Whittlesey to surrender, while the Seventy-seventh Division files contain full accounts of the taut relations between the Lost Battalion’s brigade commander and the Seventy-seventh’s division commander. By including this material, Ferrell gives a new accounting of this intriguing affair. Five Days in October will be welcomed by all those interested in a fuller understanding of the story of the Lost Battalion.
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Five Forks
Waterloo of the Confederacy
Robert Alexander
Michigan State University Press, 2003

The Battle of Five Forks was one of the the last battles of the American Civil War. A week later, Lee surrendered. Two weeks later, Lincoln was dead. In this meditation on that battle, Alexander juxtaposes the story of the battle, which he tells through narrative, letters, and journal entries, with his own impressions, viewing the South through Northern eyes. In addition, he views contemporary American society through the story of the Civil War and specifically through the story of Five Forks. If it is true that we meet our past coming to us out of the future, then, Alexander posits, America is still grappling with issues unresolved by the Civil War. Those issues are not just the obvious ones of race and class, or of North vs. South, but also the more ephemeral issues surrounding the mythos Americans live by.
     Alexander is not a historian, and this is much more a literary work than a battle story. However, the immediacy with which Alexander tells his tale leads the reader to experience Five Forks—the land, the smells, the cries—as if present there in 1865. Thus, he does not just describe a battle; he captures the spirit of all battles, all wars.

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Five Four Whiskey
A Memory of War
Robert Sweatmon
Westholme Publishing, 2014
A Personal Reflection of a Frontline Soldier in Vietnam and Cambodia During the Cultural Maelstrom of the 1960s  
In late 1969, twenty-year-old Robert Sweatmon received a letter informing him that he had ten days to report to the United States Army. Like thousands of others, he had been drafted. Assigned as a rifleman with a mechanized unit, the author began a year-long odyssey in the Southeast Asian wilderness that would change his and his fellow soldiers’ lives forever.
Taking its title from the nighttime radio code call and response between base camp and those on ambush patrol, Five Four Whiskey: A Memory of War is a moving account of life as a combat soldier in the Vietnam War. Set mostly in the sprawling woods and rubber plantations northwest of Saigon, the author explains what his unit was asked to do and what obstacles they faced, including an elusive but deadly enemy, multiple kinds of booby traps, and antitank mines. The author, a notable television personality following the war, does not sensationalize his account; rather, his book allows a new generation to understand the emotional and physical pressures of the times. Coming of age in the maelstrom of civil rights and the free love culture, the author and his fellow soldiers saw their idealism quickly vaporize in the face of the grim realities of war. Here they learned to compartmentalize their lives as a way to survive, but it was their strong bonds that ultimately kept them from succumbing to the madness that surrounded them. Kept in the field for almost the entire time of his tour, the author was in a unit selected to conduct a clandestine reconnaissance in Cambodia and then lead the 1970 invasion, where he was wounded. Following his convalescence, he was sent to Nui Ba Den, the fabled ghost mountain haunted by the spirit of a Vietnamese princess, until he received his papers that he had completed his combat service. At that moment, his year-long mental wall between soldier and civilian fell away as he counted the last terrifying hours before he was safely out of Vietnam. A tour-de-force of military memoir, written in an objective and often literary prose, Five Four Whiskey perfectly captures how ordinary civilian-soldiers survived an ordeal set in one of the most turbulent times in American history.
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The Five Life Decisions
How Economic Principles and 18 Million Millennials Can Guide Your Thinking
Robert T. Michael
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Choices matter. And in your teens and twenties, some of the biggest life decisions come about when you feel the least prepared to tackle them.

Economist Robert T. Michael won’t tell you what to choose. Instead, he’ll show you how to make smarter choices. Michael focuses on five critical decisions we all face about college, career, partners, health, and parenting. He uses these to demonstrate how the science of scarcity and choice—concepts used to guide major business decisions and shape national legislation—can offer a solid foundation for our own lives. Employing comparative advantage can have a big payoff when picking a job. Knowing how to work the marketplace can minimize uncertainty when choosing a partner. And understanding externalities—the ripple of results from our actions—can clarify the if and when of having children.

Michael also brings in data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a scientific sample of 18 million millennials in the United States that tracks more than a decade of young adult choices and consequences. As the survey’s longtime principal investigator and project director, Michael shows that the aggregate decisions can help us understand what might lie ahead along many possible paths—offering readers insights about how their own choices may turn out.

There’s no singular formula for always making the right choice. But the adaptable framework and rich data at the heart of The Five Life Decisions will help you feel confident in whatever you decide.
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Five Lives at Harvard
Personality Change During College
Stanley H. King
Harvard University Press, 1973

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Five Old Men of Yellowstone
The Rise of Interpretation in the First National
Stephen Biddulph
University of Utah Press, 2013
Yellowstone has undergone a number of transitions in the 140 years since its national park designation in 1872. The period from the late 1930s through the early 1970s marked one of the most significant as the Park Service shifted focus from public recreation to interpretation and education. The vast wilderness and numerous awe-inspiring natural spectacles of the park became less objects of passive enjoyment and more subjects to be engaged, interpreted, and understood by visitors. The park was transformed from a playground into a classroom where active learning processes could take place. Charged with instituting these interpretive interactions were five remarkable ranger naturalists who served as both protectors and educators. Stephen Biddulph tells the story of the five men, his own father amongst them, tasked with inspiring a generation of visitors to the park.

Biddulph’s masterfully woven narrative—part biography, part historical narrative—offers both fascinating factual details about Yellowstone and charming colloquial story telling. The interpretive initiatives of the rangers—nature walks, campfire programs, game stalks, and auto caravans—are enlivened by the colorful personalities of the five men who conducted them. Historians will find that Five Old Men of Yellowstone provides a missing link in the park’s extensive literature, while its humor and sentiment make for an accessible book that will be enjoyed by park history buffs and curious visitors alike.
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Five Rings
The Super Bowl History of the New England Patriots (So Far)
Jerry Thornton
University Press of New England, 2018
Since 2001 the Patriots have played in eight Super Bowl championships and won five, a run of excellence unparalleled in all of professional sports. In a league designed to ensure that no one franchise can dominate over time, New England won for over a decade and a half. A dynasty that began with an improbable run to a championship in 2001 has rebuilt, rebooted, and retooled several times over, winning most recently in 2017. But during those years, no other franchise reached the same level of controversy, drama, and turmoil—or even came close. Jerry Thornton, bestselling author of From Darkness to Dynasty, provides an all-access pass to the Patriots’ years of unparalleled greatness from the unique perspective of an observant, obsessive, utterly dedicated fan.
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Five Stars
Missouri's Most Famous Generals
James F. Muench
University of Missouri Press, 2006
Missouri’s history is replete with strong and adventurous leaders, from Lewis and Clark to Harry S. Truman. It is no surprise, then, that the Show-Me State has produced a great number of military men and women, including thirty who attained the rank of general. In this clearly written and richly illustrated book, James F. Muench has profiled five of the best-known figures: Alexander William Doniphan, Sterling Price, Ulysses S. Grant, John J. Pershing, and Omar Bradley. These men represent a number of historical eras–from the Mexican-American War through World War II–and a variety of social and cultural backgrounds.
            Doniphan, who served in the Mexican-American War, and Price, who served in the Civil War on the Confederate side, were citizen soldiers who rose through the ranks of their local militias. Grant, who served in the Civil War on the Union side; Pershing, who served in World War I; and Bradley, who served in World War II, were professional soldiers who represented the trend in the modern army as general as manager and graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point. While noting the diversity among the generals, Muench also is careful to emphasize the connections and commonalities among them.
            Five Stars: Missouri’s Most Famous Generals dedicates one chapter to each general. With lively, clear language, Muench gives readers an effective and entertaining primer on the lives and times of Missouri’s celebrated generals and their roles in American history, focusing in particular on their battlefield exploits. This book is sure to appeal to anyone interested in Missouri history, as well as those interested in military leadership.
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Five Steps of Outcome-Based Planning & Evaluation for Youth Services
Melissa Gross, Cindy Mediavilla, and Virginia A. Walter
American Library Association, 2022

Outcome-based planning and evaluation (OBPE), with its straightforward approach built on a flexible framework, is the perfect model to enable youth services professionals to deliver effective services regardless of uncertainties. An outcome-based approach can help youth services stay grounded in producing desired outcomes with and for youth through responsive programs, services, and processes that can adapt to changing conditions. Clarifying the relationship between planning, program development, and evaluation, the five simple steps outlined in this book will help youth services staff conduct solid community assessments and integrate OBPE into their work. Inside its pages you will learn

  • a short history of OBPE and its evolution;
  • why it is crucially important to involve youth in all stages of program development, with guidance on navigating challenges;
  • how to think about planning as the need to react quickly, whether due to natural or human-made disasters, changing demographics, or economic swings;
  • the five steps of OBPE, from gathering information about your community and determining the outcomes that will serve your community to crafting accurate outcome statements, developing an evaluation plan, and maximizing the results of successful outcome-based programs; 
  • how to visualize the steps needed to successfully plan, implement, and evaluate an outcome-based program, using the template included in the book;
  • ways to share your data to let people know the library’s important role in the community; and
  • additional useful tools to bolster your work, including environmental scan forms and ideas for creating relevant family storytimes.
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Five Strands of Fictionality
The Institutional Construction of Contemporary American Fiction
Daniel Punday
The Ohio State University Press, 2010
Fictions, we are so often told, are everywhere in America today. The extravagant claims of advertising are everywhere, much of the day’s news concerns “pseudo-events” like rallies or ceremonies staged so that they can be reported on, and philosophers doubt even the possibility of any knowledge being objective. Thus we seem less and less able to distinguish between the real and the invented.
 
In Five Strands of Fictionality: The Institutional Construction of Contemporary American Fiction, Daniel Punday examines the “postmodern” expansion of fictionality—the feeling today that the line between the real and the invented is harder to draw—and argues that this feeling reflects a struggle by different cultural groups to define how we tell and use “literary” stories. He discusses the literary texts of John Barth, Alice Walker, and Ishmael Reed; paraliterary forms like science fiction and electronic writing; and resolutely nonliterary texts, especially role-playing games, in terms of how each responds to the institution of literature through its definition of fictionality.
 
For too long, postmodernism has been described by easy generalizations—relativist, indeterminate, commercialized—that have rendered the term nearly worthless. Punday applies a more nuanced understanding of fictionality to a variety of contemporary narrative forms that occupy different locations within postmodern literary culture. Approaching postmodernism as a configuration of institutions that legitimize fictionality, he illuminates the nature of creative writing and the conflicts between different literary groups in America today.
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Five Tragic Hours
The Battle of Franklin
James Lee McDonough
University of Tennessee Press, 1984
On a November afternoon in 1864, the weary Gen. John Bell Hood surveyed the army waiting to attack the Federals at Franklin, Tennessee. He gave the signal almost at dusk, and the Confederates rushed forward to utter devastation. This book describes the events and causes of the five-hour battle in gripping detail, particularly focusing on the reasons for such slaughter at a time when the outcome of the war had already been decided.

The genesis of the senseless tragedy, according to McDonough and Connelly, lay in the appointment of Hood to command the Army of Tennessee. It was his decision to throw a total force of some 20,000 men into an ill-advised frontal assault against the Union troops. The Confederates made their approach, without substantial artillery support, on a level of some two miles. Why did Hood select such a catastrophic strategy? The authors analyze his reasoning in full. Their vivid and moving narrative, with statements from eyewitnesses to the battle, make compelling reading for all Civil War buffs and historians.
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Five Years After
The Long-Term Effects of Welfare-to-Work Programs
Daniel Friedlander
Russell Sage Foundation, 1995
Friedlander and Burtless teach us why welfare reform will not be easy. Their sobering assessment of job training programs willenlighten a debate too often dominated by wishful thinking and political rhetoric. Look for their findings to be cited for many years to come. —Douglas Besharov, American Enterprise Institute A methodologically astute study that sheds considerable light on the potential for and limits to raising the employment and earnings of welfare recipients and provides benchmarks against which the impacts of later programs can be compared. —Journal of Economic Literature With welfare reforms tested in almost every state and plans for a comprehensive federal overall on the horizon, it is increasingly important for Americans to understand how policy changes are likely to affect the lives of welfare recipients. Five Years After tells the story of what happened to the welfare recipients who participated in the influential welfare-to-work experiments conducted by several states in the mid-1980s.The authors review the distinctive goals and procedures of evaluations performed in Arkansas, Baltimore, San Diego, and Virginia, and then examine five years of follow-up data to determine whether the initial positive impact on employment, earnings, and welfare costs held up over time. The results were surprisingly consistent. Low-cost programs that saved money by getting individuals into jobs quickly did little to reduce poverty in the long run. Only higher-cost educational programs enabled welfare recipients to hold down jobs successfully and stay off welfare. Five Years After ends speculation about the viability of the first generation of employment programs for welfare recipients, delineates the hard choices that must be made among competing approaches, and provides a well-documented foundation for building more comprehensive programs for the next generation. A sobering tale for welfare reformers of all political persuasions, this book poses a serious challenge to anyone who promises to end welfare dependency by cutting welfare budgets.
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The Fixer
Visa Lottery Chronicles
Charles Piot with Kodjo Nicolas Batema
Duke University Press, 2019
In the West African nation of Togo, applying for the U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery is a national obsession, with hundreds of thousands of Togolese entering each year. From the street frenzy of the lottery sign-up period and the scramble to raise money for the embassy interview to the gamesmanship of those adding spouses and dependents to their dossiers, the application process is complicated, expensive, and unpredictable. In The Fixer Charles Piot follows Kodjo Nicolas Batema, a Togolese visa broker—known as a “fixer”—as he shepherds his clients through the application and interview process. Relaying the experiences of the fixer, his clients, and embassy officials, Piot captures the ever-evolving cat-and-mouse game between the embassy and the hopeful Togolese as well as the disappointments and successes of lottery winners in the United States. These detailed and compelling stories uniquely illustrate the desire and savviness of migrants as they work to find what they hope will be a better life.
[more]

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The Fixers
Devolution, Development, and Civil Society in Newark, 1960-1990
Julia Rabig
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Stories of Newark’s postwar decline are easy to find. But in The Fixers, Julia Rabig supplements these tales of misery with the story of the many imaginative challenges to the city’s decline mounted by Newark’s residents and suburban neighbors. In these pages, we meet the black nationalists whose dynamic organizing elected African American candidates in unprecedented numbers. There are tenants who mounted a historic rent strike to transform public housing and renegade white Catholic priests who joined black laywomen to pioneer the construction of low-income housing and influence housing policy. These are just a few of the “fixers” we meet—people who devised ways to work with limited resources and pull together the threads of a patchwork welfare state.

Rabig argues that fixers play dual roles. They support resistance, but also mediation; they fight for reform, but also more radical and far-reaching alternatives; they rally others to a collective cause, but sometimes they broker factions. Fixers reflect longer traditions of organizing while responding to the demands of their times. In so doing, they end up fixing (like a fixative) a new and enduring pattern of activist strategies, reforms, and institutional expectations—a pattern we continue to see today.
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Fixin to Git
One Fan's Love Affair with NASCAR's Winston Cup
Jim Wright
Duke University Press, 2002
In the past twenty years, big-time stock-car racing has become America’s fastest growing spectator sport. Winston Cup races draw larger audiences—at the tracks and on television—than any other sport, and drivers like Dale Jarrett, Jeff Gordon, and Mark Martin have become cultural icons whose endorsements command millions. What accounts for NASCAR’s surging popularity?
For years a “closeted” NASCAR fan, Professor Jim Wright took advantage of a sabbatical in 1999 to attend stock-car races at seven of the Winston Cup’s legendary venues: Daytona, Indianapolis, Darlington, Charlotte, Richmond, Atlanta, and Talladega. The “Fixin’ to Git Road Tour” resulted in this book—not just a travelogue of Wright’s year at the races, but a fan’s valentine to the spectacle, the pageantry, and the subculture of Winston Cup racing.
Wright busts the myth that NASCAR is a Southern sport and takes on critics who claim that there’s nothing to racing but “drive fast, turn left,” revealing the skill, mental acuity, and physical stamina required by drivers and their crews. Mostly, though, he captures the experience of loyal NASCAR fans like himself, describing the drama in the grandstands—and in the bars, restaurants, parking lots, juke joints, motels, and campgrounds where race fans congregate. He conveys the rich, erotic sensory overload—the sights, the sounds, the smells, the feel—of weekends at the Winston Cup race tracks.
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Fixing American Cybersecurity
Creating a Strategic Public-Private Partnership
Larry Clinton
Georgetown University Press, 2023

Advocates a cybersecurity “social contract” between government and business in seven key economic sectors

Cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the United States are extensive, affecting everything from national security and democratic elections to critical infrastructure and economy. In the past decade, the number of cyberattacks against American targets has increased exponentially, and their impact has been more costly than ever before. A successful cyber-defense can only be mounted with the cooperation of both the government and the private sector, and only when individual corporate leaders integrate cybersecurity strategy throughout their organizations.

A collaborative effort of the Board of Directors of the Internet Security Alliance, Fixing American Cybersecurity is divided into two parts. Part One analyzes why the US approach to cybersecurity has been inadequate and ineffective for decades and shows how it must be transformed to counter the heightened systemic risks that the nation faces today. Part Two explains in detail the cybersecurity strategies that should be pursued by each major sector of the American economy: health, defense, financial services, utilities and energy, retail, telecommunications, and information technology.

Fixing American Cybersecurity will benefit industry leaders, policymakers, and business students. This book is essential reading to prepare for the future of American cybersecurity.

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Fixing Illinois
Politics and Policy in the Prairie State
Jim Nowlan and J. Thomas Johnson
University of Illinois Press, 2014
In the 1950s, thriving commerce, strong leadership, and geographical good fortune made Illinois one of the most envied states in the nation. Today, persistent problems have left it the butt of jokes and threatened it with fiscal catastrophe. In Fixing Illinois, James D. Nowlan and J. Thomas Johnson use their four decades of experience as public servants, Springfield veterans, and government observers to present a comprehensive program of almost one hundred specific policy ideas aimed at rescuing the state from its long list of problems, including:
  • An overhaul of state pension systems that includes more reasonable benefits and raising of the retirement age, among other changes;
  • Broadening of the tax base to include services and reductions in rates;
  • Raising funds with capital construction bonds to update and integrate the antiquated information systems used by state agencies;
  • Uprooting the state's entrenched culture of corruption via public financing of elections, redistricting reform, and revolving door prohibitions for lawmakers

Pointed, honest, and pragmatic, Fixing Illinois is a plan for effective and honest government that seeks an even nobler end: restoring our faith in Illinois's institutions and reviving a sense of citizenship and state pride.

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Fixing Medical Prices
How Physicians Are Paid
Miriam J. Laugesen
Harvard University Press, 2016

Medical care prices in the United States are not only the most expensive in the world, but there are wide variations in what physicians are paid. Doctors at the frontlines of medical care who manage complex conditions argue that they receive disproportionately lower fees than physicians performing services such as minor surgeries and endoscopies. Fixing Medical Prices goes to the heart of the U.S. medical pricing process: to a largely unknown yet influential committee of medical organizations affiliated with the American Medical Association that advises Medicare. Medicare’s ready acceptance of this committee’s recommendations typically sets off a chain reaction across the entire American health care system.

For decades, the U.S. policymaking structure for pricing has reflected the influence of physician organizations. What Miriam Laugesen’s rich analysis shows is how these organizations navigate the arcane and complex work of this advisory committee. Contradicting the story of a profession in political decline, Fixing Medical Prices demonstrates that the power of physician organizations has simply become more subtle.

Laugesen’s investigation into the exorbitant cost of American medical care will be of interest to those who follow the politics of health care policy, the influence of interest groups on rate setting, and the medical profession’s past and future role in our health care system.

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The Flag on the Hilltop
Mary Tracy Earle
Southern Illinois University Press, 1989

Early in the Civil War, two young brothers boldly flew the Union flag from a tree atop a hill between Makanda and Cobden. This was a towering act of courage in an area teeming with Copperheads.

Theodore and Al Thompson, 18 and 20 years old at the time, raised the flag in defiance of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a secessionist group that operated throughout the Midwest. Controlling its membership through terror, this secret society condemned betrayers to death by torture. The Knights, whose goals included capturing a Union prison and liberating the rebels, triggered the Civil War riot in Charleston, instigated anti-draft movements, and aided Northern deserters.

Theodore Thompson, who later owned much of Makanda, Giant City, and the land that became Southern Illinois University describes the tree as a "tall tulip poplar between 3 and 4 feet in diameter at the trunk and some 60 feet to the first limbs. This noted tree could be seen in some directions 15 or 20 miles away."

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Flames after Midnight
Murder, Vengeance, and the Desolation of a Texas Community, Revised Edition
By Monte Akers
University of Texas Press, 2011

What happened in Kirven, Texas, in May 1922, has been forgotten by the outside world. It was a coworker's whispered words, "Kirven is where they burned the [Negroes]," that set Monte Akers to work at discovering the true story behind a young white woman's brutal murder and the burning alive of three black men who were almost certainly innocent of it. This was followed by a month-long reign of terror as white men killed blacks while local authorities concealed the real identity of the white probable murderers and allowed them to go free.

Writing nonfiction with the skill of a novelist, Akers paints a vivid portrait of a community desolated by race hatred and its own refusal to face hard truths. He sets this tragedy within the story of a region prospering from an oil boom but plagued by lawlessness, and traces the lynching's repercussions down the decades to the present day. In the new epilogue, Akers adds details that have come to light as a result of the book's publication, including an eyewitness account of the burnings from an elderly man who claimed to have castrated two of the men before they were lynched.

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Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and the Aesthetic of Revelation
John D. Sykes, Jr.
University of Missouri Press, 2007

With his mastery of modernist technique and his depictions of characters obsessed with the past, Nobel laureate William Faulkner raised the bar for southern fiction writers. But the work of two later authors shows that the aesthetic of memory is not enough: Confederate thunder fades as they turn to an explicitly religious source of meaning.

            According to John Sykes, the fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy provides occasions for divine revelation. He traces their work from its common roots in midcentury southern and Catholic intellectual life to show how the two adopted different theological emphases and rhetorical strategies—O’Connor building to climactic images, Percy striving for dialogue with the reader—as a means of uncovering the sacramental foundation of the created order.

            Sykes sets O’Connor and Percy against the background of the Southern Renaissance from which they emerged, showing not only how they shared a distinctly Christian notion of art that led them to see fiction as revelatory but also how their methods of revelation took them in different directions. Yet, despite their differences in strategy and emphasis, he argues that the two are united in their conception of the artist as “God’s sharp-eyed witness,” and he connects them with the philosophers and critics, both Christian and non-Christian, who had a meaningful influence on their work.

            Through sustained readings of key texts—particularly such O’Connor stories as “The Artificial Nigger” and “The Geranium” and Percy’s novels Love in the Ruins and The Second Coming—Sykes focuses on the intertwined themes of revelation, sacrament, and community. He views their work in relation to the theological difficulties that they were not able to overcome concerning community. For both writers, the question of community is further complicated by the changing nature of the South as the Lost Cause and segregation lose their holds and a new form of prosperity arises.

            By disclosing how O’Connor and Percy made aesthetic choices based on their Catholicism and their belief that fiction by its very nature is revelatory, Sykes demonstrates that their work cannot be seen as merely a continuation of the historical aesthetic that dominated southern literature for so long. Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and the Aesthetic of Revelation is theoretically sophisticated without being esoteric and is accessible to any reader with a serious interest in these writers, brimming with fresh insights about both that clarify their approaches to art and enrich our understanding of their work.

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Flash Effect
Science and the Rhetorical Origins of Cold War America
David J. Tietge
Ohio University Press, 2002

The ways science and technology are portrayed in advertising, in the news, in our politics, and in the culture at large inform the way we respond to these particular facts of life. The better we are at recognizing the rhetorical intentions of the purveyors of information and promoters of mass culture, the more adept we become at responding intelligently to them.

Flash Effect, a startling book by David J. Tietge, documents the manner in which those at the highest levels of our political and cultural institutions conflated the rhetoric of science and technology with the rhetorics of religion and patriotism to express their policies for governance at the onset of the Cold War and to explain them to the American public.

Professor Tietge details our cultural attitudes about science in the early years of the Cold War, when on the heels of a great technological victory Americans were faced with the possibility of destruction by the very weapons that had saved them.

In Flash Effect we learn how, by symbolizing the scientist as both a father figure and a savior—and by celebrating the technological objects of his labor—the campaign to promote science took hold in the American consciousness. The products of that attitude are with us today more than ever.

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The Flash Press
Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York
Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, in association with the American Antiquarian Society
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Obscene, libidinous, loathsome, lascivious. Those were just some of the ways critics described the nineteenth-century weeklies that covered and publicized New York City’s extensive sexual underworld. Publications like the Flash and the Whip—distinguished by a captivating brew of lowbrow humor and titillating gossip about prostitutes, theater denizens, and sporting events—were not the sort generally bound in leather for future reference, and despite their popularity with an enthusiastic readership, they quickly receded into almost complete obscurity. Recently, though, two sizable collections of these papers have resurfaced, and in The Flash Press three renowned scholars provide a landmark study of their significance as well as a wide selection of their ribald articles and illustrations.
 
Including short tales of urban life, editorials on prostitution, and moralizing rants against homosexuality, these selections epitomize a distinct form of urban journalism. Here, in addition to providing a thorough overview of this colorful reportage, its editors, and its audience, the authors examine nineteenth-century ideas of sexuality and freedom that mixed Tom Paine’s republicanism with elements of the Marquis de Sade’s sexual ideology. They also trace the evolution of censorship and obscenity law, showing how a string of legal battles ultimately led to the demise of the flash papers: editors were hauled into court, sentenced to jail for criminal obscenity and libel, and eventually pushed out of business. But not before they forever changed the debate over public sexuality and freedom of expression in America’s most important city.
[more]

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Flatlined
Resuscitating American Medicine
Clifton, Guy L
Rutgers University Press, 2008

Flatlined lifts the veil of secrecy on twenty-first century health care and delves into the realities of good people caught in a bad medical system. Dr. Guy L. Clifton, a practitioner as well as a policy advocate, reveals first-hand accounts of needless tragedy, such as the young man who died after a car wreck for lack of a bed in a qualified hospital and the surgeon who was dejected by the scarcity of resources needed to enable him to perform heart surgery on an uninsured man.

Arguing that a lack of coordinated care and quality medical practice benchmarks result in high levels of redundancy and ineffectiveness, Clifton proposes that the key to reducing health care costs, improving quality, and financially protecting the uninsured, is to reduce wastefulness, and offers a solution for achieving success.

Flatlined sounds the warning call: By 2018 Medicare and Medicaid will consume about one-third of the federal budget. American businesses now pay three times as much of their payroll for health care as global competitors, expected to worsen as health care grows at twice the rate of the U.S. economy. Based on his years of experience in policy and medicine, Clifton offers an attainable solution through the development of an American Medical Quality System.

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Flatlining on the Field of Dreams
Cultural Narratives in the Films of President Reagan's America
Nadel, Alan
Rutgers University Press, 1997
"Flatlining on the Field of Dreams takes a apart some of the most commercially successful films of the epoch, demonstrating how they reflected, debated, and played with the dominant ideology of the time. . . . cleverly and wittily written . . . . The book will work extremely well in the classroom."
-Film Quarterly

"From Back to the Future to Forrest Gump, Nadel shows not only how notions of cinematic time re-script political change but how our very conceptualizations of change are thematized by our experiences of watching movies. This is not simply film history, or film as history, but film affirming "history" in the same way that Ronald Reagan affirmed film narratives."
-Susan Jeffords, University of Washington

"Flatlining on the Field of Dreams brilliantly restages the cultural narratives associated with Reaganism within a neo-imperialist cinematic space and reveals the heretofore unexamined role class played in the reproduction of those narratives."
-Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College

Flatlining on the Field of Dreams demonstrates, with witty prose and careful analysis, how the overindulgent, image-conscious years of the Reagan administration are reflected in sundry aspects of American films produced during that era. Discussing dozens of films, including Home Alone, Beetlejuice, Ghost, The Little Mermaid, Working Girl, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Trading Places, Alan Nadel identifies narratives about credit, deregulation, gender, race, and masculinity that defined "President Reagan's America." Linking the way Hollywood films work to the stories they tell, he explains how the ideas and values of Reaganism became the symbolic food of a hyper-consumptive society. The book provides hard-to-ignore demonstrations of the extensive synergy between politics, history, and popular culture. 
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Flavor and Soul
Italian America at Its African American Edge
John Gennari
University of Chicago Press, 2017
In the United States, African American and Italian cultures have been intertwined for more than a hundred years. From as early as nineteenth-century African American opera star Thomas Bowers—“The Colored Mario”—all the way to hip-hop entrepreneur Puff Daddy dubbing himself “the Black Sinatra,” the affinity between black and Italian cultures runs deep and wide. Once you start looking, you’ll find these connections everywhere. Sinatra croons bel canto over the limousine swing of the Count Basie band. Snoop Dogg deftly tosses off the line “I’m Lucky Luciano ’bout to sing soprano.” Like the Brooklyn pizzeria and candy store in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever, or the basketball sidelines where Italian American coaches Rick Pitino and John Calipari mix it up with their African American players, black/Italian connections are a thing to behold—and to investigate.

In Flavor and Soul, John Gennari spotlights this affinity, calling it “the edge”—now smooth, sometimes serrated—between Italian American and African American culture. He argues that the edge is a space of mutual emulation and suspicion, a joyous cultural meeting sometimes darkened by violent collision. Through studies of music and sound, film and media, sports and foodways, Gennari shows how an Afro-Italian sensibility has nourished and vitalized American culture writ large, even as Italian Americans and African Americans have fought each other for urban space, recognition of overlapping histories of suffering and exclusion, and political and personal rispetto.

Thus, Flavor and Soul is a cultural contact zone—a piazza where people express deep feelings of joy and pleasure, wariness and distrust, amity and enmity. And it is only at such cultural edges, Gennari argues, that America can come to truly understand its racial and ethnic dynamics.
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Flavor of Wisconsin for Kids
A Feast of History, with Stories and Recipes Celebrating the Land and People of Our State
Terese Allen
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2012

What are some food favorites in Wisconsin, and why are they special to us? How have our landscape and the people who have inhabited it contributed to our food heritage? This unique blend of history book and cookbook gives kids a real taste for hands-on history by showing them how to create and sample foods that link us to the resources found in our state and the heritage of those who produce them.

Designed for kids and adults to use together, The Flavor of Wisconsin for Kids draws upon the same source material that makes The Flavor of Wisconsin by Harva Hachten and Terese Allen a fascinating and authoritative document of the history and traditions of food in our state, and presents it in a colorful, kid-friendly format that’s both instructional and fun. Mindful of the importance of teaching kids about where the foods they eat come from, each chapter examines a different food source—forests; waters; vegetable, meat, and dairy farms; gardens; and communities. The authors explore our state’s foodways, from their origins to how they have changed over the years, and then offer a selection of related recipes. The recipes are written for modern kitchens but use many traditional ingredients and techniques. Level of difficulty is clearly noted, as well as whether a recipe requires a heat source to prepare.

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Flawed System/Flawed Self
Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences
Ofer Sharone
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Today 4.7 million Americans have been unemployed for more than six months. In France more than ten percent of the working population is without work. In Israel it’s above seven percent. And in Greece and Spain, that number approaches thirty percent. Across the developed world, the experience of unemployment has become frighteningly common—and so are the seemingly endless tactics that job seekers employ in their quest for new work.

Flawed System/Flawed Self delves beneath these staggering numbers to explore the world of job searching and unemployment across class and nation. Through in-depth interviews and observations at job-search support organizations, Ofer Sharone reveals how different labor-market institutions give rise to job-search games like Israel’s résumé-based “spec games”—which are focused on presenting one’s skills to fit the job—and the “chemistry games” more common in the United States in which job seekers concentrate on presenting the person behind the résumé. By closely examining the specific day-to-day activities and strategies of searching for a job, Sharone develops a theory of the mechanisms that connect objective social structures and subjective experiences in this challenging environment and shows how these different structures can lead to very different experiences of unemployment.
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Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons
Literary Authority and American Fiction
Hershel Parker
Northwestern University Press, 1984
An evaluation of the importance of textual criticism in evaluation of important literary works, based on his study of important American literary works by authors such as James, Crane, and Mailer.
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Fleur de Lys and Calumet
Being the Penicaut Narrative of French Adventure in Louisiana
Edited by Richebourg McWilliams
University of Alabama Press, 1988

Andre Penicaut, a carpenter, sailed with Iberville to the French province of Louisiana in 1699 and did not return to France until 1721. The book he began in the province and finished upon his return to France is an eyewitness account of the first years of the French colony, which stretched along the Gulf Coast from Florida to Texas and in the Mississippi Valley from the Balize to the Illinois country. As a ship carpenter, Penicaut was chosen as a member of several important expeditions: he accompanied Le Sueur up the Mississippi River in 1700 to present-day Minnesota, and he went with Juchereau de St. Denis on the first journey from Mobile to the Red River and overland to the Rio Grande, to open trade with the Spaniards in Mexico. Penicaut helped to build the first post in Louisiana, at Old Biloxi, and the second post on the Mobile River.

Penicaut was at his best when describing the lives and social customs of the Indians of the region. He saw them in realistic terms, showing no prejudice toward their native habits. Neither were his French colleagues cast in heroic or villainous molds—though their accomplishments must strike modern readers as truly epic.

When first published, Fleur de Lys and Calumet was a major stimulus to scholarship in the field. This new edition will be welcomed by a new generation of scholars and readers interested in the colonial history of the Deep South and the Mississippi Valley.

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Flickers of Desire
Movie Stars of the 1910s
Bean, Jennifer M
Rutgers University Press, 2011
Today, we are so accustomed to consuming the amplified lives of film stars that the origins of the phenomenon may seem inevitable in retrospect. But the conjunction of the terms "movie" and "star" was inconceivable prior to the 1910s. Flickers of Desire explores the emergence of this mass cultural phenomenon, asking how and why a cinema that did not even run screen credits developed so quickly into a venue in which performers became the American film industry's most lucrative mode of product individuation. Contributors chart the rise of American cinema's first galaxy of stars through a variety of archival sources--newspaper columns, popular journals, fan magazines, cartoons, dolls, postcards, scrapbooks, personal letters, limericks, and dances. The iconic status of Charlie Chaplin's little tramp, Mary Pickford's golden curls, Pearl White's daring stunts, or Sessue Hayakawa's expressionless mask reflect the wild diversity of a public's desired ideals, while Theda Bara's seductive turn as the embodiment of feminine evil, George Beban's performance as a sympathetic Italian immigrant, or G. M. Anderson's creation of the heroic cowboy/outlaw character transformed the fantasies that shaped American filmmaking and its vital role in society.
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Flight Calls
Exploring Massachusetts through Birds
John R. Nelson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
The paths of different birds look like double helixes, flowing strands of hair, and migrating serpents, and they beckon with calls that have definite meanings. These mysterious creatures inspire growing numbers of birders in their passionate pursuit of new species, and writer John R. Nelson is no exception. In Flight Calls, he takes readers on explorations to watch, hear, and know Massachusetts's hummingbirds, hawks, and herons along the coasts and in the woodlands, meadows, and marshes of Cape Ann, Cape Cod, the Great Marsh, Mount Auburn Cemetery, the Quabbin wilderness, Mount Wachusett, and elsewhere.

With style, humor, and a sense of wonder, Nelson blends his field adventures with a history of the birding community; natural and cultural history; bird stories from authors such as Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and Mary Oliver; current scientific research; and observations about the fascinating habits of birds and their admirers. These essays are capped off with a plea for bird conservation, in Massachusetts and beyond.
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A Floating Chinaman
Fantasy and Failure across the Pacific
Hua Hsu
Harvard University Press, 2016

Who gets to speak for China? During the interwar years, when American condescension toward “barbarous” China yielded to a fascination with all things Chinese, a circle of writers sparked an unprecedented public conversation about American-Chinese relations. Hua Hsu tells the story of how they became ensnared in bitter rivalries over which one could claim the title of America’s leading China expert.

The rapturous reception that greeted The Good Earth—Pearl Buck’s novel about a Chinese peasant family—spawned a literary market for sympathetic writings about China. Stories of enterprising Americans making their way in a land with “four hundred million customers,” as Carl Crow said, found an eager audience as well. But on the margins—in Chinatowns, on Ellis Island, and inside FBI surveillance memos—a different conversation about the possibilities of a shared future was taking place.

A Floating Chinaman takes its title from a lost manuscript by H. T. Tsiang, an eccentric Chinese immigrant writer who self-published a series of visionary novels during this time. Tsiang discovered the American literary market to be far less accommodating to his more skeptical view of U.S.-China relations. His “floating Chinaman,” unmoored and in-between, imagines a critical vantage point from which to understand the new ideas of China circulating between the world wars—and today, as well.

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Floating Palaces of the Great Lakes
A History of Passenger Steamships on the Inland Seas
Joel Stone
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Through much of the nineteenth century, steam-powered ships provided one of the most reliable and comfortable transportation options in the United States, becoming a critical partner in railroad expansion and the heart of a thriving recreation industry. The aesthetic, structural, and commercial peak of the steamboat era occurred on the Great Lakes, where palatial ships created memories and livelihoods for millions while carrying passengers between the region’s major industrial ports of Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Toronto. By the mid-twentieth century, the industry was in steep decline, and today North America’s rich and entertaining steamboat heritage has been largely forgotten. In Floating Palaces of the Great Lakes, Joel Stone revisits this important era of maritime history, packed with elegance and adventure, politics and wealth, triumph and tragedy. This story of Great Lakes travelers and the beautiful floating palaces they engendered will engage historians and history buffs alike, as well as genealogists, regionalists, and researchers.
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The Floating University
Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge
Tamson Pietsch
University of Chicago Press, 2023
The Floating University sheds light on a story of optimism and imperialist ambition in the 1920s.

In 1926, New York University professor James E. Lough—an educational reformer with big dreams—embarked on a bold experiment he called the Floating University. Lough believed that taking five hundred American college students around the globe by ship would not only make them better citizens of the world but would demonstrate a model for responsible and productive education amid the unprecedented dangers, new technologies, and social upheavals of the post–World War I world. But the Floating University’s maiden voyage was also its last: when the ship and its passengers returned home, the project was branded a failure—the antics of students in hotel bars and port city back alleys that received worldwide press coverage were judged incompatible with educational attainment, and Lough was fired and even put under investigation by the State Department.
 
In her new book, Tamson Pietsch excavates a rich and meaningful picture of Lough’s grand ambition, its origins, and how it reveals an early-twentieth-century America increasingly defined both by its imperialism and the professionalization of its higher education system. As Pietsch argues, this voyage—powered by an internationalist worldview—traced the expanding tentacles of US power, even as it tried to model a new kind of experiential education. She shows that this apparent educational failure actually exposes a much larger contest over what kind of knowledge should underpin university authority, one in which direct personal experience came into conflict with academic expertise. After a journey that included stops at nearly fifty international ports and visits with figures ranging from Mussolini to Gandhi, what the students aboard the Floating University brought home was not so much knowledge of the greater world as a demonstration of their nation’s rapidly growing imperial power.
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Flood of Images
Media, Memory, and Hurricane Katrina
By Bernie Cook
University of Texas Press, 2015

Anyone who was not in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of the city experienced the disaster as a media event, a flood of images pouring across television and computer screens. The twenty-four-hour news cycle created a surplus of representation that overwhelmed viewers and complicated understandings of the storm, the flood, and the aftermath. As time passed, documentary and fictional filmmakers took up the challenge of explaining what had happened in New Orleans, reaching beyond news reports to portray the lived experiences of survivors of Katrina. But while these narratives presented alternative understandings and more opportunities for empathy than TV news, Katrina remained a mediated experience.

In Flood of Images, Bernie Cook offers the most in-depth, wide-ranging, and carefully argued analysis of the mediation and meanings of Katrina. He engages in innovative, close, and comparative visual readings of news coverage on CNN, Fox News, and NBC; documentaries including Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke and If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water, and Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Elie’s Faubourg Treme; and the HBO drama Treme. Cook examines the production practices that shaped Katrina-as-media-event, exploring how those choices structured the possible memories and meanings of Katrina and how the media’s memory-making has been contested. In Flood of Images, Cook intervenes in the ongoing process of remembering and understanding Katrina.

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Floodplain Management
A New Approach for a New Era
Bob Freitag, Susan Bolton, Frank Westerlund, J.L.S. Clark
Island Press, 2009
A flooding river is very hard to stop. Many residents of the United States have discovered this the hard way. Right now, over five million Americans hold flood insurance policies from the National Flood Insurance Program, which estimates that flooding causes at least six billion dollars in damages every year. Like rivers after a rainstorm, the financial costs are rising along with the toll on residents. And the worst is probably yet to come. Most scientists believe that global climate change will result in increases in flooding.

The authors of this book present a straightforward argument: the time to stop a flooding rivers is before is before it floods. Floodplain Management outlines a new paradigm for flood management, one that emphasizes cost-effective, long-term success by integrating physical, chemical, and biological systems with our societal capabilities. It describes our present flood management practices, which are often based on dam or levee projects that do not incorporate the latest understandings about river processes. And it suggests that a better solution is to work with the natural tendencies of the river: retreat from the floodplain by preventing future development (and sometimes even removing existing structures); accommodate the effects of floodwaters with building practices; and protect assets with nonstructural measures if possible, and with large structural projects only if absolutely necessary.
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The Floor in Congressional Life
Andrew J. Taylor
University of Michigan Press, 2013

The House and the Senate floors are the only legislative forums where all members of the U.S. Congress participate and each has a vote. Andrew J. Taylor explores why floor power and floor rights in the House are more restricted than in the Senate and how these restrictions affect the legislative process. After tracing the historical development of floor rules, Taylor assesses how well they facilitate a democratic legislative process---that is, how well they facilitate deliberation, transparency, and widespread participation.

Taylor not only compares floor proceedings between the Senate and the House in recent decades; he also compares recent congressional proceedings with antebellum proceedings. This unique, systematic analysis reveals that the Senate is generally more democratic than the House---a somewhat surprising result, given that the House is usually considered the more representative and responsive of the two. Taylor concludes with recommendations for practical reforms designed to make floor debates more robust and foster representative democracy.

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Florida and the Mariel Boatlift of 1980
The First Twenty Days
Kate Dupes Hawk, Ron Villella, and Adolfo Leyva de Varona, with Kristen Cifers
University of Alabama Press, 2014
Winner of the Florida Historical Society's 2015 Stetson Kennedy Award

The 1980 Mariel Boatlift was a profound episode in twentieth-century American history, impacting not just Florida, but the entire country. During the first twenty days of the boatlift, with little support from the federal government, the state of Florida coordinated and responded to the sudden arrival in Key West of more than thirty thousand Cuban refugees, the first wave of immigrants who became known as “Marielitos.”
 
Kathleen Dupes Hawk, Ron Villella, Adolfo Leyva de Varona, and Kristen Cifers combine the insights of expert observers with the experiences of actual participants. The authors organize and present a wealth of primary sources, first-hand accounts, archival research, government records, and interviews with policy-makers, volunteers, and refugees that bring into focus the many far-reaching human, political, and cultural outcomes of the Mariel Boatlift that continue to influence Florida, the United States, and Cuba today.
 
Emerging from these key records and accounts is a grand narrative of high human drama. Castro’s haphazard and temporary opening of Cuba spurred many thousands of Cubans to depart in calamitously rushed, unprepared, and dangerous conditions. The book tells the stories of these Cuban citizens, most legitimately seeking political asylum but also including subversive agents, convicted criminals, and the mentally ill, who began arriving in the US beginning in April 1980. It also recounts how local and state agencies and private volunteers with few directives or resources were left to improvise ways to provide the Marielitos food, shelter, and security as well as transportation away from Key West.
 
The book provides a definitive account of the political, legal, and administrative twists on the local, state, and federal levels in response to the crisis as well as of the often-dysfunctional attempts at collaboration between governmental and private institutions. Vivid and readable, Florida and the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 presents the significant details that illuminate and humanize this complex humanitarian, political, and logistical crisis. 
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Florida Place-Names of Indian Origin and Seminole Personal Names
William A. Read
University of Alabama Press, 2003

A compendium of Indian-derived names from the three languages of the Muskhogean family—Seminole, Hitchiti, and Choctaw.

The first Native peoples of what is now the United States who met and interacted with Europeans were the people of the lower Southeast. They were individuals of the larger Maskókî linguistic family who inhabited much of present-day Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and eastern portions of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Louisiana. Today, sixteen federally recognized tribes trace their heritage from these early Maskókî peoples, and many of them in both Florida and Oklahoma still speak and understand this root language.

The continuing vitality of this core language, and of Seminole culture and influence, makes this linguistic examination by William Read ever more valuable. A companion to his study of Indian Place Names in Alabama, this long out-of-print guide offers a new introduction from Patricia Wickman in which she provides current understandings of Seminole language and derivations and a brief analysis of Read's contribution to the preservation of the Native linguistic record.

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Flor's Journey to Independence
Barbara Vaille and Jennifer QuinnWilliams
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Flor's Journey to Independence begins as Flor and her four-year-old daughter, Betina, are unexpectedly abandoned by Flor's husband, Ricardo. Flor is suddenly faced with paying the bills and caring for Betina on her own, as she also struggles with limited English skills. Still, Flor's determination gets her through the hard times, and once she enrolls in an English class for adults and begins working, she finds that her new life brings her new friends and opportunities.

A modified version of this story is also available on our website, www.press.umich.edu/esl/stories.

The MICHIGAN Stories for Newcomers are original fiction written for adult English learners who wish to improve their reading and English skills
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The Flow of Illicit Funds
A Case Study Approach to Anti–Money Laundering Compliance
Georgetown University Press, 2022

High-profile case studies provide compliance professionals with a deep, holistic understanding of modern-day money laundering to better detect and deter it

Money laundering is a serious crime that presents a heightened, yet underrated, global threat. Although often thought of as a victimless crime, money laundering significantly impacts the global financial system, which leads to further crime, corruption, human exploitation, and environmental degradation and causes tremendous human suffering, especially in the most impoverished populations. Recent advances in technology, communications, and globalization mean there are more illicit funds in circulation today than ever before. In order to catch these criminals and expose their underground networks, compliance professionals must learn to navigate an increasingly complex web of criminal activity.

In The Flow of Illicit Funds, Ola M. Tucker goes beyond the implementation of anti–money laundering compliance programs offered by most guides and provides professionals with a holistic understanding of the modern money laundering system. Using recent case studies, Tucker explains some of the most common money laundering techniques used by criminals today, describes the key role of the financial system in the disguise and transfer of illicit funds, and offers valuable insight into how financial institutions can protect themselves from being used as conduits for the movement of dirty money. The book concludes by offering suggestions to help compliance professionals better detect and deter money laundering.

Through this unique perspective, compliance professionals and students will gain a broader overall understanding of the process of money laundering and the techniques criminals commonly use, including valuable insight into how criminals find legal loopholes and manipulate the financial system.

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Flow
The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River
Beth Kephart
Temple University Press, 2014
The Schuylkill River-the name in Dutch means "hidden creek"-courses many miles, turning through Philadelphia before it yields to the Delaware. "I am this wide. I am this deep. A tad voluptuous, but only in places," writes Beth Kephart, capturing the voice of this natural resource in Flow.
An award-winning author, Kephart's elegant, impressionistic story of the Schuylkill navigates the beating heart of this magnificent water source. Readers are invited to flow through time-from the colonial era and Ben Franklin's death through episodes of Yellow Fever and the Winter of 1872, when the river froze over-to the present day. Readers will feel the silt of the Schuylkill's banks, swim with its perch and catfish, and cruise-or scull-downstream, from Reading to Valley Forge to the Water Works outside center city.
Flow's lush narrative is peppered with lovely, black and white photographs and illustrations depicting the river's history, its people, and its gorgeous vistas. Written with wisdom and with awe for one of the oldest friends of all Philadelphians, Flow is a perfect book for reading while the ice melts, and for slipping in your bag for your own visit to the Schuylkill.
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"Flowering Judas"
Katherine Anne Porter
Carr, Virginia S
Rutgers University Press, 1993

Katherine Anne Porter often spoke of her story "Flowering Judas" as the tale she liked best of all her stories because it came the nearest to what she meant it to be. It is the story of Laura, an idealistic woman, who travels to Mexico from Arizona at the age of twenty-two to assist the Obreg-n Revolution.

This casebook on "Flowering Judas" addresses Porter's ambivalence surrounding her roles as woman and artist and also attests to the profound influence of Mexico upon her work. Readers of this early tale will not be surprised to learn that although Porter was a practicing feminist in her life and her work, she actually eschewed the feminist label.

Virginia Spencer Carr brings her own sharply focused biographer's eye to the introduction, further illuminating the story and the superb critical essays that it provokes. The casebook includes the authoritative text of the story itself, Porter's own statement regarding the genesis of this highly acclaimed work, an important interview, a collection of significant essays on "Flowering Judas" and the historical, cultural, and personal milieu from which the tale evolved, a bibliography, and a chronology of Porter's life and work.

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Flowering of the Cumberland
Harriette Simpson Arnow
Michigan State University Press, 2013
Harriette Arnow’s search for truth as early American settlers knew it began as a child—the old songs, handed-down stories, and proverbs that colored her world compelled her on a journey that informs her depiction of the Cumberland River Valley in Kentucky and Tennessee. Arnow drew from court records, wills, inventories, early newspapers, and unpublished manuscripts to write Seedtime on the Cumberland, which chronicles the movement of settlers away from the coast, as well as their continual refinement of the “art of pioneering.” A companion piece, this evocative history covers the same era, 1780–1803, from the first settlement in what was known as “Middle Tennessee” to the Louisiana Purchase. When Middle Tennessee was the American frontier, the men and women who settled there struggled for survival, land, and human dignity. The society they built in their new home reflected these accomplishments, vulnerabilities, and ambitions, at a time when America was experiencing great political, industrial, and social upheaval.
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Flowers, Guns, and Money
Joel Roberts Poinsett and the Paradoxes of American Patriotism
Lindsay Schakenbach Regele
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A fascinating historical account of a largely forgotten statesman, who pioneered a form of patriotism that left an indelible mark on the early United States.

Joel Roberts Poinsett’s (17791851) brand of self-interested patriotism illuminates the paradoxes of the antebellum United States.  He was a South Carolina investor and enslaver, a confidant of Andrew Jackson, and a secret agent in South America who fought surreptitiously in Chile’s War for Independence. He was an ambitious Congressman and Secretary of War who oversaw the ignominy of the Trail of Tears and orchestrated America’s longest and costliest war against Native Americans, yet also helped found the Smithsonian. In addition, he was a naturalist, after whom the poinsettia—which he appropriated while he was serving as the first US ambassador to Mexico—is now named.
 
As Lindsay Schakenbach Regele shows in Flowers, Guns, and Money, Poinsett personified a type of patriotism that emerged following the American Revolution, one in which statesmen served the nation by serving themselves, securing economic prosperity and military security while often prioritizing their own ambitions and financial interests. Whether waging war, opposing states’ rights yet supporting slavery, or pushing for agricultural and infrastructural improvements in his native South Carolina, Poinsett consistently acted in his own self-interest. By examining the man and his actions, Schakenbach Regele reveals an America defined by opportunity and violence, freedom and slavery, and nationalism and self-interest.
 
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Flowers, Guns, and Money
Joel Roberts Poinsett and the Paradoxes of American Patriotism
Lindsay Schakenbach Regele
University of Chicago Press, 2023
This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

A fascinating historical account of a largely forgotten statesman, who pioneered a form of patriotism that left an indelible mark on the early United States.


Joel Roberts Poinsett’s (17791851) brand of self-interested patriotism illuminates the paradoxes of the antebellum United States.  He was a South Carolina investor and enslaver, a confidant of Andrew Jackson, and a secret agent in South America who fought surreptitiously in Chile’s War for Independence. He was an ambitious Congressman and Secretary of War who oversaw the ignominy of the Trail of Tears and orchestrated America’s longest and costliest war against Native Americans, yet also helped found the Smithsonian. In addition, he was a naturalist, after whom the poinsettia—which he appropriated while he was serving as the first US ambassador to Mexico—is now named.
 
As Lindsay Schakenbach Regele shows in Flowers, Guns, and Money, Poinsett personified a type of patriotism that emerged following the American Revolution, one in which statesmen served the nation by serving themselves, securing economic prosperity and military security while often prioritizing their own ambitions and financial interests. Whether waging war, opposing states’ rights yet supporting slavery, or pushing for agricultural and infrastructural improvements in his native South Carolina, Poinsett consistently acted in his own self-interest. By examining the man and his actions, Schakenbach Regele reveals an America defined by opportunity and violence, freedom and slavery, and nationalism and self-interest.
 
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Flowing Through Time
A History of the Lower Chattahoochee River
Lynn Willoughby
University of Alabama Press, 1998
This handsome, illustrated book chronicles the history of the Lower Chattahoochee River and the people who lived along its banks from prehistoric Indian settlement to the present day.
 
In highly accessible, energetic prose, Lynn Willoughby takes readers down the Lower Chattahoochee River and through the centuries. On this journey, the author begins by examining the first encounters between Native Americans and European explorers and the international contest for control of the region in the 17th and 19th centuries.Throughout the book pays particular attention to the Chattahoochee's crucial role in the economic development of the area. In the early to mid-nineteenth century--the beginning of the age of the steamboat and a period of rapid growth for towns along the river--the river was a major waterway for the cotton trade. The centrality of the river to commerce is exemplified by the Confederacy's efforts to protect it from Federal forces during the Civil War. Once railroads and highways took the place of river travel, the economic importance of the river shifted to the building of dams and power plants. This subsequently led to the expansion of the textile industry. In the last three decades, the river has been the focus of environmental concerns and the subject of "water wars" because of the rapid growth of Atlanta. Written for the armchair historian and the scholar, the book provides the first comprehensive social, economic, and environmental history of this important Alabama-Georgia-Florida river. Historic photographs and maps help bring the river's fascinating story to life.
  
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The Fluency of Light
Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
University of Iowa Press, 2013
In these intertwined essays on art, music, and identity, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, the daughter of African American and Italian American parents, examines the experience of her mixed-race identity. Embracing the far-ranging stimuli of her media-obsessed upbringing, she grasps at news clippings, visual fragments, and lyrics from past and present in order to weave together a world of sense.
Art in all forms guides the author toward understanding concepts like blackness, jazz, mortality, riots, space, time, self, and other without falling prey to the myth that all things must exist within a system of binaries. Recalling her awkward attempts at coolness during her childhood, Sabatini Sloan evokes Thelonious Monk’s stage persona as a metaphor for blackness. Through the conceptual art of Adrian Piper, the author is able to understand what is so quietly menacing about the sharp, clean lines of an art gallery where she works as an assistant. The result is a compelling meditation on identity and representation. 
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Fluid Geographies
Water, Science, and Settler Colonialism in New Mexico
K. Maria D. Lane
University of Chicago Press, 2024
An unprecedented analysis of the origin story of New Mexico’s modern water management system.
 
Maria Lane’s Fluid Geographies traces New Mexico’s transition from a community-based to an expert-led system of water management during the pre-statehood era. To understand this major shift, Lane carefully examines the primary conflict of the time, which pitted Indigenous and Nuevomexicano communities, with their long-established systems of irrigation management, against Anglo-American settlers, who benefitted from centralized bureaucratic management of water. The newcomers’ system eventually became settled law, but water disputes have continued throughout the district courts of New Mexico’s Rio Grande watershed ever since.
 
Using a fine-grained analysis of legislative texts and nearly two hundred district court cases, Lane analyzes evolving cultural patterns and attitudes toward water use and management in a pivotal time in New Mexico’s history. Illuminating complex themes for a general audience, Fluid Geographies helps readers understand how settler colonialism constructed a racialized understanding of scientific expertise and legitimized the dispossession of nonwhite communities in New Mexico.
 
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Fluid New York
Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination
May Joseph
Duke University Press, 2013
Hurricane Sandy was a fierce demonstration of the ecological vulnerability of New York, a city of islands. Yet the storm also revealed the resilience of a metropolis that has started during the past decade to reckon with its aqueous topography. In Fluid New York, May Joseph describes the many ways that New York, and New Yorkers, have begun to incorporate the city's archipelago ecology into plans for a livable and sustainable future. For instance, by cleaning its tidal marshes, the municipality has turned a previously dilapidated waterfront into a space for public leisure and rejuvenation.

Joseph considers New York's relation to the water that surrounds and defines it. Her reflections reach back to the city's heyday as a world-class port—a past embodied in a Dutch East India Company cannon recently unearthed from the rubble at the World Trade Center site—and they encompass the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. They suggest that New York's future lies in the reclamation of its great water resources—for artistic creativity, civic engagement, and ecological sustainability.

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Flunking Democracy
Schools, Courts, and Civic Participation
Michael A. Rebell
University of Chicago Press, 2018
The 2016 presidential election campaign and its aftermath have underscored worrisome trends in the present state of our democracy: the extreme polarization of the electorate, the dismissal of people with opposing views, and the widespread acceptance and circulation of one-sided and factually erroneous information. Only a small proportion of those who are eligible actually vote, and a declining number of citizens actively participate in local community activities.

In Flunking Democracy, Michael A. Rebell makes the case that this is not a recent problem, but rather that for generations now, America’s schools have systematically failed to prepare students to be capable citizens. Rebell analyzes the causes of this failure, provides a detailed analysis of what we know about how to prepare students for productive citizenship, and considers examples of best practices. Rebell further argues that this civic decline is also a legal failure—a gross violation of both federal and state constitutions that can only be addressed by the courts. Flunking Democracy concludes with specific recommendations for how the courts can and should address this deficiency, and is essential reading for anyone interested in education, the law, and democratic society.
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Fluorspar Mining
Photos from Illinois and Kentucky, 1905-1995
Herbert K. Russell
Southern Illinois University Press, 2019
Winner, ISHS Best of Illinois History Award, 2019

This first-ever pictorial record of the people and methods of the Illinois-Kentucky Fluorspar District from the 1900s to the 1990s covers early and modern means of extracting, hoisting, processing, and transporting the mineral from mine mouth to end user. Nearly one hundred images carefully selected by author Herbert K. Russell show early pick-and-shovel extraction and open-flame lighting as well as primitive drilling methods and transportation by barrels, buckets, barges, mule teams, and trams, in addition to the use of modern equipment and sophisticated refinement procedures such as froth flotation. Russell also provides an overview of the many industrial uses of fluorspar, from metal work by ancient Romans to the processing of uranium by scientists seeking to perfect the atomic bomb. Preserving what is known about the industry by miners, managers, and museums, this detailed and fascinating pictorial history looks both above and below ground at fluorspar mining.
 
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Fly in the Buttermilk
The Life Story of Cecil Reed
Cecil A. Reed
University of Iowa Press, 1993
Born in 1913 in Collinsville, Illinois, Cecil Reed has lived all his life in the Midwest as a black man among whites. This self-styled fly in the buttermilk worked among whites with such skill and grace that they were barely aware of his existence—unless he wanted to get a bank loan or move into their neighborhood. Now, in his lively and optimistic autobiography, he speaks of his resilience throughout a life spent working peacefully but passionately for equality.
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Flyboy 2
The Greg Tate Reader
Greg Tate
Duke University Press, 2016
Since launching his career at the Village Voice in the early 1980s Greg Tate has been one of the premiere critical voices on contemporary Black music, art, literature, film, and politics. Flyboy 2 provides a panoramic view of the past thirty years of Tate's influential work. Whether interviewing Miles Davis or Ice Cube, reviewing an Azealia Banks mixtape or Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog, discussing visual artist Kara Walker or writer Clarence Major, or analyzing the ties between Afro-futurism, Black feminism, and social movements, Tate's resounding critical insights illustrate how race, gender, and class become manifest in American popular culture. Above all, Tate demonstrates through his signature mix of vernacular poetics and cultural theory and criticism why visionary Black artists, intellectuals, aesthetics, philosophies, and politics matter to twenty-first-century America. 
 
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Flying for the Air Service
The Hughes Brothers in World War I
David K. Vaughan
University of Wisconsin Press, 1998
Flying for the Air Service provides a realistic picture of the typical flying experiences of the pilots who flew for the fledgling American Air Service during World War I. The narrative describes two brothers from Boston, George and Gerard Hughes, as they progress from apprentice pilots to flight instructors and combat pilots. After completing their pilot training program together, both were assigned as instructors. Then George was sent to France with the 12th Aero Squadrom, where he flew two-place observation aircraft over the front lines. Gerard, meanwhile, remained in America, instructing students in Texas. Eventually Gerard joined his brother's squadron in France as the war ended. Through the detailed letters and narrative comments of these two pilots, we can see clearly the hazards and challenges that were faced by those who flew in the early years of American aviation.
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Flying Saucers Rock 'n' Roll
Conversations with Unjustly Obscure Rock 'n' Soul Eccentrics
Jake Austen, ed.
Duke University Press, 2011
For nearly twenty years, the much-beloved music magazine Roctober has featured work by some of the best underground cartoonists, exhaustive examinations of made-up genres such as “robot rock,” and an ongoing exploration of everything Sammy Davis Jr. ever sang, said, or did. But the heart of the magazine has always been the lengthy conversations with overlooked or forgotten artists. Flying Saucers Rock ’n’ Roll gathers the most compelling of these interviews. Eccentric, important artists—including the rockabilly icon Billy Lee Riley, the jazz musician and activist Oscar Brown Jr., the “Outlaw Country” singer David Allan Coe, and the pioneer rock ’n’ roll group the Treniers—give the most in-depth interviews of their lengthy careers. Obscure musicians, such as the Armenian-language novelty artist Guy Chookoorian and the frustrated interstellar glam act Zolar X, reveal fascinating lives lived at rock’s margins. Roctober’s legendarily dedicated writers convey telling anecdotes in the fervent, captivating prose that has long been appreciated by music enthusiasts. Along with the entertaining interviews, Flying Saucers Rock ’n’ Roll features more than sixty images from the pages of Roctober and ten illustrations created for the book by the underground rock ’n’ roll artist King Merinuk.

Contributors
Steve Albini
Ben Austen
Jake Austen
John Battles
Bosco
Ken Burke
Mike Maltese
King Merinuk
Ken Mottet
Jonathan Poletti
James Porter
"Colonel" Dan Sorenson
Jacqueline Stewart

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Flying with the Fifteenth Air Force
A B-24 Pilot's Missions from Italy during World War II
Tom Faulkner
University of North Texas Press, 2018

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Foggy Mountain Troubadour
The Life and Music of Curly Seckler
Penny Parsons
University of Illinois Press, 2016
With his trademark mandolin style and unequaled tenor harmonies, Curly Seckler has carved out a seventy-seven-year career in bluegrass and country music. His foundational work in Flatt and Scruggs's Foggy Mountain Boys secured him a place in bluegrass history, while his role in The Nashville Grass made him an essential part of the music's triumphant 1970s revival.

Written in close collaboration with Mr. Seckler and those who know him, Foggy Mountain Troubadour is the first full-length biography of an American original. Penny Parsons follows a journey from North Carolina schoolhouses to the Grand Ole Opry stage and the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, from boarding houses to radio studios and traveling five to a car on two-lane roads to make the next show. Throughout, she captures the warm humor, hard choices, and vivid details of a brilliant artist's life as he criss-crosses a nation and a century making music.

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Folded Selves
Colonial New England Writing in the World System
Michelle Burnham
Dartmouth College Press, 2014
Folded Selves radically refigures traditional portraits of seventeenth-century New England literature and culture by situating colonial writing within the spatial, transnational, and economic contexts that characterized the early-modern “world system” theorized by Immanuel Wallerstein and others. Michelle Burnham rethinks American literary history and the politics of colonial dissent, and her book breaks new ground in making the economic relations of investment, credit, and trade central to this new framework for early American literary and cultural study. Transcontinental colonialism and mercantile capitalism underwrote not just the emerging world system but New World writing—suggesting that early modern literary aesthetics and the early modern economy helped to sponsor each other. Burnham locates in New England’s literature of dissent—from Ma-re Mount to the Salem witchcraft trials – a persistent use of economic language, as well as competing economies of style. The brilliance of Burnham’s study is that it exposes the transoceanic material and commercial concerns of colonial America’s literature and culture of dissent.
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Folding Paper Cranes
An Atomic Memoir
Leonard Bird
University of Utah Press, 2005
 Between 1951 and 1962 the Atomic Energy Commission triggered some one hundred atmospheric detonations of nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site. U.S. military troops who participated in these tests were exposed to high doses of radiation. Among them was a young Marine named Leonard Bird. In Folding Paper Cranes Bird juxtaposes his devastating experience of those atomic exercises with three visits over his lifetime—one in the 1950s before his Nevada assignment, one in 1981, and one in the early 1990s—to the International Park for World Peace in Hiroshima.

Among the monuments to tragedy and hope in Hiroshima’s Peace Park stands a statue of Sadako Sasaki holding a crane in her outstretched arms. Sadako was two years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on her city; she was diagnosed with leukemia ten years later. According to popular Japanese belief, folding a thousand paper cranes brings good fortune. Sadako spent the last months of her young life folding hundreds of paper cranes. She folded 644 before she died.

As he journeys from the Geiger counters, radioactive dust, and mushroom clouds of the Nevada desert to the bronze and ivory memorials for the dead in Japan, Bird—himself a survivor of radiation-induced cancer—seeks to make peace with his past and with a future shadowed by nuclear proliferation. His paper cranes are the poetry and prose of this haunting memoir.
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Folk Groups And Folklore Genres
An Introduction
edited by Elliott Oring
Utah State University Press, 1986

Oring's introductory folklore text consists of a series of essays by leading scholars that give the student a solid sense of major folklore topics and interpretive techniques. Since 1986, when it was first published, this book has met the need for good instructional material at a time of tremendous growth in folklore programs and introductory courses in colleges and universities around the world.

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