A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY499 start with O start with O
This volume introduces readers to eastern North America’s Indigenous ceremonial stone landscapes (CSLs)—sacred sites whose principal identifying characteristics are built stone structures that cluster within specific physical landscapes. Our Hidden Landscapes presents these often unrecognized sites as significant cultural landscapes in need of protection and preservation.
In this book, Native American authors provide perspectives on the cultural meaning and significance of CSLs and their characteristics, while professional archaeologists and anthropologists provide a variety of approaches for better understanding, protecting, and preserving them. The chapters present overwhelming evidence in the form of oral tradition, historic documentation, ethnographies, and archaeological research that these important sites created and used by Indigenous peoples are deserving of protection.
This work enables archaeologists, historians, conservationists, foresters, and members of the general public to recognize these important ritual sites.
Contributors
Nohham Rolf Cachat-Schilling
Robert DeFosses
James Gage
Mary Gage
Doug Harris
Julia A. King
Lucianne Lavin
Johannes (Jannie) H. N. Loubser
Frederick W. Martin
Norman Muller
Charity Moore Norton
Paul A. Robinson
Laurie W. Rush
Scott M. Strickland
Elaine Thomas
Kathleen Patricia Thrane
Matthew Victor Weiss
Journalist, activist, popular historian, and public intellectual, Lerone Bennett Jr. left an indelible mark on twentieth-century American history and culture. Rooted in his role as senior editor of Ebony magazine, but stretching far beyond the boundaries of the Johnson Publishing headquarters in Chicago, Bennett’s work and activism positioned him as a prominent advocate for Black America and a scholar whose writing reached an unparalleled number of African American readers.
This critical biography—the first in-depth study of Bennett’s life—travels with him from his childhood experiences in Jim Crow Mississippi and his time at Morehouse College in Atlanta to his later participation in a dizzying range of Black intellectual and activist endeavors. Drawing extensively on Bennett’s previously inaccessible archival collections at Emory University and Chicago State, as well as interviews with close relatives, colleagues, and confidantes, Our Kind of Historian celebrates his enormous influence within and unique connection to African American communities across more than half a century of struggle.
Even before the publication of Progress and Poverty in 1879, San Francisco political economist and publisher Henry George (1839-1897) had written extensively about what he considered to be the causes for worldwide economic inequity—land monopolization and speculation by wealthy entrepreneurs and corrupt politicians. But his attacks on these evils were coupled with a plan for a possible brighter future, for a world in which disparities between people of different classes could be adjusted. By the time he died in 1897, his assessments of liberal 19th-century economic theory were critically acclaimed in Europe and the United States.
Michigan State University Press's new edition of Our Land and Land Policy includes the texts of speeches George delivered and essays he published during three decades of political activism. These pieces were chosen originally in 1901 by George's son, Henry George, Jr., to portray the expansiveness and depth of his father's philosophy and the sincerity with which the elder George struggled throughout his life for social justice.
America’s goals in Afghanistan were lofty to begin with: dismantle al Qaeda, remove the Taliban from power, remake the country into a democracy. But not only did the mission come completely unmoored from reality, the United States wasted billions of dollars, and thousands of lives were lost. Our Latest Longest War is a chronicle of how, why, and in what ways the war in Afghanistan failed. Edited by historian and Marine lieutenant colonel Aaron B. O’Connell, the essays collected here represent nine different perspectives on the war—all from veterans of the conflict, both American and Afghan. Together, they paint a picture of a war in which problems of culture and an unbridgeable rural-urban divide derailed nearly every field of endeavor. The authors also draw troubling parallels to the Vietnam War, arguing that deep-running ideological currents in American life explain why the US government has repeatedly used armed nation-building to try to transform failing states into modern, liberal democracies. In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, this created a dramatic mismatch of means and ends that neither money, technology, nor the force of arms could overcome.
The war in Afghanistan has been the longest in US history, and in many ways, the most confounding. Few who fought in it think it has been worthwhile. These are difficult topics for any American or Afghan to consider, especially those who lost friends or family in it. This sobering history—written by the very people who have been fighting the war—is impossible to ignore.
Our Movie Heritage should be read by anyone interested in motion picture history. Without film preservation, there can be no valid film history. Documents, autobiographies, oral histories, and secondary sources are of importance, but viewing the actual films preserved or restored to a state comparable to the way they were originally viewed is of inestimable importance.Rudy Behlmer, film historian and author of Memo from David O. Selznick
Our Movie Heritage is an enticing, up to the minute account of the complex National Film preservation effort, and should be read by anyone interested in our rich cinematic heritage.Mary Lea Bandy, chief curator, The Museum of Modern Art
Imagine an America without any images of itself no Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz, no Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, and no Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca. Movies are an extraordinary personal and collective history of the American people. Unfortunately, over 90 percent of America's silent films are already lost to us, and more than half of the American feature films made before 1950 no longer exist. Whether it is a piece of cellulose nitrate exposed in 1910 or a strip of Eastman Color acetate stock produced in the 1970s all film self-destructs. Rapidly.
Our Movie Heritage is a highly readable and informative view of the world of film preservation, showing the work being done to save our national treasure trove of film history. Full of tales of discovery and rescue, the book is an urgent plea for preservation. Our Movie Heritage describes the race against time currently under way both in the public and private sectors in order to salvage what is left in vaults, theaters, and private collections. The book explains the basics of film preservation, covering the who, what, when, where, and how of the field, with top archivists and film restoration experts expressing their concerns and hopes for the future of movies. This beautifully produced book, with over one hundred pictures of top stars, directors, and film people, is itself a treasure that showcases the importance of this legacy.
Rettie agrees, as many critics have claimed, that the system is in disarray; he proposes in detail stronger management operations, clearer and more stringent measures of personnel performance, and training of park rangers to help them become professionals knowledgeable about the scientific management and protection of resources.
For a concerned public as well as for policy-makers and students of government, this comprehensive analysis and outline may provide hope--and a future--for the invaluable legacy that is our national park system.
The book, long out of print, was originally published in 1901, its ten essays having previously appeared as articles in the Atlantic Monthly. Muir wrote them with a single purpose—to entice people, by his descriptions, to come to the parks, to see and enjoy them. If enough people did so, reasoned Muir, they would surely love the wilderness as he did, and the parks would be preserved.
Muir carried out his public relations mission with remarkable success. Every page of this book carries his unbridled and irresistible enthusiasm. Our National Parks is part reminiscence, part philosophy, and mostly enticing description. It is all vintage Muir.
Although the book treats Yellowstone, Sequoia, General Grant, and other national parks of the Western U.S., Muir devotes the bulk of the work to his first love—Yosemite, settled into the heart of the Sierra Nevada. Indeed, six of the book’s chapters are devoted to Yosemite, treating the forests, wild gardens, fountains and streams, animals, and birds of the park. The concluding essay is an impassioned plea to save American forests.
All visitors to the great western national parks—and all who will one day visit them—will be captivated by Muir’s descriptions. The grandeur of this wilderness is reflected in the very spirit of John Muir. Both shine through every page of this remarkable book.
"Yosemite Valley in July of 1967 would have had to be seen to be believed. There was never an empty campsite in the valley; you had to create a space for yourself in a sea of cars, tents, and humanity.... The camp next to ours had fifty people in it, with rugs hung between the trees, incense burning, and a stereo set going full volume."
Scenes such as this will probably never be repeated in Yosemite or any other national park, yet the urgent problem remains of balancing the public's desire to visit the parks with the parks' need to be protected from too many people and cars and too much development. In this book, longtime park visitor and professional geographer Bob O'Brien explores the National Park Service's attempt to achieve "sustainability"—a balance that allows as many people as possible to visit a park that is kept in as natural a state as possible.
O'Brien details methods the NPS has used to walk the line between those who would preserve vast tracts of land for "no use" and those who would tap the Yellowstone geysers to generate electricity. His case studies of six western "crown jewel" parks show how rangers and other NPS employees are coping with issues that impact these cherished public landscapes, including visitation, development, and recreational use.
Reinhold Kulle seemed like the perfect school employee. But in 1982, as his retirement neared, his long-concealed secret came to light. The chief custodian at Oak Park and River Forest High School outside Chicago had been a Nazi, a member of the SS, and a guard at a brutal slave labor camp during World War II.
Similar revelations stunned communities across the country. Hundreds of Reinhold Kulles were gradually discovered: men who had patrolled concentration camps, selected Jews for execution, and participated in mass shootings—and who were now living ordinary suburban lives. As the Office of Special Investigations raced to uncover Hitler’s men in the United States, neighbors had to reconcile horrific accusations with the helpful, kind, and soft-spoken neighbors they thought they knew. Though Nazis loomed in the American consciousness as evil epitomized, in Oak Park—a Chicago suburb renowned for its liberalism—people rose to defend Reinhold Kulle, a war criminal.
Drawing on archival research and insider interviews, Oak Park and River Forest High School teacher Michael Soffer digs into his community’s tumultuous response to the Kulle affair. He explores the uncomfortable truths of how and why onetime Nazis found allies in American communities after their gruesome pasts were uncovered.
What are the odds of finding Minnesota's tiniest orchid? Why take a Breathalyzer test to study frogs? How does ice fishing warm the heart? Who would live in such a cold, lean region? Our Neck of the Woods takes on these and other urgent (and sometimes quirky) questions, showcasing writers' own experiences in the best-loved places in Minnesota, including the North Shore, Lake Bemidji, the western prairies and grasslands, the Boundary Waters, and the Mesabi Iron Range.
The outdoor experiences described here range from sweeping natural history observations to adventurous tales of coming-of-age camping and hunting trips. We follow notable writers and conservationists Sigurd F. Olson, Paul Gruchow, Bill Holm, Jan Zita Grover, Greg Breining, Laurie Allmann, and many others as they descend a frozen river toward Lake Superior, explore a crystalline palace at minus 20 degrees, and trace a family's history along the Mississippi River. Writing on such themes as embracing winter, making camp, and finding wildness even amid development, these authors tell of hunting, fishing, birding, canoeing, and other great outdoor activities that help define what it means to be Minnesotan.
Drawn from the pages of Minnesota Conservation Volunteer magazine-published by the Department of Natural Resources since 1940-these writings evoke a strong sense of place and suggest that the outdoor experiences we share with others come to mean the most to us. With rich observations and spirited tales, Our Neck of the Woods beckons Minnesotans to work, play, and explore in the natural places close to their homes and hearts.
Passionate and pragmatic, extraordinarily well read and eloquent, Freyfogle details a host of forces that have produced our self-defeating ethos of human exceptionalism. It is this outlook, he argues, not a lack of scientific knowledge or inadequate technology, that is the primary cause of our ecological predicament. Seeking to comprehend both the multifaceted complexity of contemporary environmental problems and the zeitgeist as it unfolds, Freyfogle explores such diverse topics as morality, the nature of reality (and the reality of nature), animal welfare, social justice movements, and market politics. The result is a learned and inspiring rallying cry to achieve balance, a call to use our knowledge to more accurately identify the dividing line between living in and on the world and destruction. “To use nature,” Freyfogle writes, “but not to abuse it.”
From its establishment as a frontier village, Pittsburgh evolved on a cultural path divergent from that of both the Northeast and the towns developing farther west. The city entered the war with close economic ties to the East, West, and South, yet also stood apart from them—too small to assume the political positions of cities like New York or Philadelphia that represented greater ethnic and class conflict and much greater tension over secession—yet large enough to manifest the complex institutions and systems of an urban center.
This book represents a significant contribution to the scholarship of both the Civil War and the city of Pittsburgh, adding to the growing historiography of regional and community studies of the war. With abundant illustrations of local people and places, research on Pittsburgh’s geographic importance and extensive industrial output, this book also provides compelling details on Black citizens’ efforts to oppose slavery, ultimately through their service in the Union Army. Civil War Pittsburgh was unique: its distinctive geography, politics, and economy set the conditions for ordinary citizens to directly participate in the war in myriad ways that connected the experiences of the battlefield and the home front.
Our People, Our Journey is a landmark history of the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, a Michigan tribe that has survived to the present day despite the expansionist and assimilationist policies that nearly robbed it of an identity in the late nineteenth century.
In his thoroughly researched chronicle, McClurken documents in words and images every major lineage and family of the Little River Ottawas. He describes the Band's struggles to find land to call its own over several centuries, including the hardships that began with European exploration of what is now the upper Midwest. Although the Little River Ottawas were successful at integrating their economic and cultural practices with those of Europeans, they were forced to cede land in the face of American settlements.
McClurken explains how the Little River Band was forced, in 1858, onto a reservation on the Pere Marquette and Manistee Rivers where they settled with a number of other Ottawa bands. However, the very treaty intended to provide the Grand River Ottawas with a permanent reservation "homeland" eventually allowed non-Indians to acquire title to nearly two-thirds of the land within the reservation by 1880.
In Our Politics Kane reflects on his nearly fifty years of active engagement in state and local politics. In a series of essays, he seeks to understand the forces, motivations, incentives and technologies that shape our politics and produce the consequences that we live with every day. He describes how candidates and officeholders deal with the fundamental contradictions inherent in the democratic process, and how and why the political power structure has changed. He also explores the personal experience of being a legislator, from deciding how to vote to building relationships with party leaders, fellow legislators, the governor, and the voters in the district. Kane concludes by considering the possibility of change, how it might happen, and the steps that candidates, political parties, activists and others might take to better our politics with results more to our liking.
While many journalists record politics from the outside, and numerous political memoirs focus on personalities and what happened to whom and when, this book gives an insider’s view of politics at the level of state government. This book is not about those politicians but about our politics, which together we have created and together we must deal with.
American culture has long had a conflicted relationship with assistance to the poor. Cotton Mather and John Winthrop were staunch proponents of Christian charity as fundamental to colonial American society, while transcendentalists harbored deep skepticism towards benevolence in favor of Emersonian self-reliance and Thoreau’s insistence on an ascetic life. Women in the 19th century, as these essays show, approached issues of benevolence far differently than their male counterparts, consistently promoting assistance to the impoverished, in both their acts and their writings.
Since the birth of the nation, we have turned to stories about the American South to narrate the rapid ascendency of the United States on the world stage. The idea of a cohesive South, different from yet integral to the United States, arose with the very formation of the nation itself. Its semitropical climate, plantation production, and heterogeneous population once defined the New World from the perspective of Europe. By founding U.S. literature through opposition to the South, writers boldly asserted their nation to stand apart from the imperial world order.
Our South tracks the nation/South juxtaposition in U.S. literature from the founding to the turn of the twentieth century, through genres including travel writing, gothic and romance novels, geography textbooks, transcendentalist prose, and abolitionist address. Even as the southern states became peripheral to U.S. politics and economy, Jennifer Rae Greeson demonstrates that in literature the South remained central to the expanding and evolving idea of the nation.
Claiming the South as our deviant and recalcitrant “other,” Americans have projected an anti-imperial imperative of domesticating and civilizing, administering and integrating underdeveloped regions both within our borders and beyond. Our South has been a primal site for thinking about geography and power in the United States.
No other book on the Southern Appalachians is more widely known or cited.
"Awonderful book. I like it especially for its color and anecdotes. It is a classic, not only for its accuracy and breadth of insights into the people of the region, but because these people themselves are so interesting and strong."
—Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Drawing on newspaper accounts, prisoner narratives, and government records, David J. Dzurec III explores how stories of American captivity in North America, Europe, and Africa played a critical role in the development of American political culture, adding a new layer to our understanding of foreign relations and domestic politics in the early American republic.
Those decades of strife, however, also gave the Lower East Side something unusual: a radical movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting in a way never before seen in the United States. Ours to Lose tells the oral history of that movement through a close look at a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters who occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, fought to keep them for decades, and eventually began a long, complicated process to turn their illegal occupancy into legal cooperative ownership. Amy Starecheski here not only tells a little-known New York story, she also shows how property shapes our sense of ourselves as social beings and explores the ethics of homeownership and debt in post-recession America.
Out and Running is the first systematic analysis of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) political representation that explores the dynamics of state legislative campaigns and the influence of lesbian and gay legislators in the state policymaking process. By examining state legislative elections from 1992 to 2006 and state policymaking from 1992 to 2009, Donald Haider-Markel suggests that the LGBT community can overcome hurdles and win elections; and, once in office, these officials can play a critical role in the policy representation of the community.
However, he also discovers that there are limits to where and when LGBT candidates can run for office and that, while their presence in office often enhances policy representation, it can also create backlash. But even with some of these negative consequences, Out and Running provides compelling evidence that gays and lesbians are more likely to see beneficial legislation pass by increasing the number of LGBT state legislators. Indeed, grassroots politics in the states may allow the LGBT community its best opportunity for achieving its policy goals.
Uniquely accessible, Out in Culture presents such popular writers as B. Ruby Rich, Essex Hemphill, and Michael Musto as well as influential critics such as Richard Dyer, Chris Straayer, and Julia Lesage, on topics ranging from the queer careers of Agnes Moorehead and Pee Wee Herman to the cultural politics of gay drag, lesbian style, the visualization of AIDS, and the black snap! queen experience. Of particular interest are two "dossiers," the first linking essays on the queer content of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, and the second on the production and reception of popular music within gay and lesbian communities. The volume concludes with an extensive bibliography—the most comprehensive currently available—of sources in gay, lesbian, and queer media criticism.
Out in Culture explores the distinctive and original ways in which gays, lesbians, and queers have experienced, appropriated, and resisted the images and artifacts of popular culture. This eclectic anthology will be of interest to a broad audience of general readers and scholars interested in gay and lesbian issues; students of film, media, gender, and cultural studies; and those interested in the emerging field of queer theory.
Contributors. Sabrina Barton, Edith Becker, Rhona J. Berenstein, Nayland Blake, Michelle Citron, Danae Clark, Corey K. Creekmur, Alexander Doty, Richard Dyer, Heather Findlay, Jan Zita Grover, Essex Hemphill, John Hepworth, Jeffrey Hilbert, Lucretia Knapp, Bruce La Bruce, Al LaValley, Julia Lesage, Michael Moon, Michael Musto, B. Ruby Rich, Marlon Riggs, Arlene Stein, Chris Straayer, Anthony Thomas, Mark Thompson, Valerie Traub, Thomas Waugh, Patricia White, Robin Wood
Both sides base their views on assumptions about the consequences of integration. Even defenders of the ban grudgingly acknowledge that homosexuals are fully capable of serving with distinction. Few question gay service members' abilities or patriotism; justifications for the ban are now predicated on heterosexuals' negative reactions.
Out in Force refutes the notions that homosexuality is incompatible with military service and that gay personnel would undermine order and discipline. Leading social science scholars of sexual orientation and the military offer reasoned and comprehensive discussions about military organizations, human sexuality, and attitudes toward individuals and groups. They demonstrate forcefully that the debate is really about the military as an institution, and how that institution will adapt to larger social changes. The contributors show that the ban could be successfully eliminated, and set forth a program for implementation. In sorting opinion from fact, myth from reality, Out in Force stands as an invaluable guide for the military, lawmakers, and the courts as they continue to grapple with this question of institutional and societal change.
A diverse group of contributors interweaves personal experience with writing center theory and critical race theory, as well as theories on the politics and performance of identity. In doing so, Out in the Center extends upon the writing center corpus to disrupt and reimagine conventional approaches to writing center theory and practice. Out in the Center proposes that practitioners benefit from engaging in dialogue about identity to better navigate writing center work—work that informs the local and carries forth a social and cultural impact that stretches well beyond academic institutions.
Contributors:
Allia Abdullah-Matta, Nancy Alvarez, Hadi Banat, Tammy S. Conard-Salvo, Michele Eodice, Rochell Isaac, Sami Korgan, Ella Leviyeva, Alexandria Lockett, Talisha Haltiwanger Morrison, Anna Rita Napoleone, Beth A. Towle, Elizabeth Weaver, Tim Zmudka
Out in the Union tells the continuous story of queer American workers from the mid-1960s through 2013. Miriam Frank shrewdly chronicles the evolution of labor politics with queer activism and identity formation, showing how unions began affirming the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender workers in the 1970s and 1980s. She documents coming out on the job and in the union as well as issues of discrimination and harassment, and the creation of alliances between unions and LGBT communities.
Featuring in-depth interviews with LGBT and labor activists, Frank provides an inclusive history of the convergence of labor and LGBT interests. She carefully details how queer caucuses in local unions introduced domestic partner benefits and union-based AIDS education for health care workers-innovations that have been influential across the U.S. workforce. Out in the Union also examines organizing drives at queer workplaces, campaigns for marriage equality, and other gay civil rights issues to show the enduring power of LGBT workers.
“Stan Isaacs is directly responsible for my television career--and much of how I approached what I’ve said and whom I’ve said it about.” --Keith Olbermann
Iconoclastic and irreverent, Stan Isaacs was part of a generation that bucked the sports establishment with a skepticism for authority, an appreciation for absurdity, and a gift for placing athletes and events within the context of their tumultuous times. Isaacs draws on his trademark wink-and-a-grin approach to tell the story of the long-ago Brooklyn that formed him and a career that placed him amidst the major sporting events of his era. Mixing reminiscences with column excerpts, Isaacs recalls antics like stealing a Brooklyn Dodgers pennant after the team moved to Los Angeles and his many writings on Paul Revere’s horse. But Isaacs also reveals the crusading and humanist instincts that gave Black athletes like Muhammad Ali a rare forum to express their views and celebrated the oddball, unsung Mets over the straitlaced Yankees.
Insightful and hilarious, Out of Left Field is the long-awaited memoir of the influential sportswriter and his adventures in the era of Jim Brown, Arthur Ashe, and the Amazin’ Mets.
Bearing traces of Baruch Spinoza, John Dewey, and Saul Alinsky, Obama’s progressivism embraces the ideas of mutual reliance and collective responsibility, and adopts an interconnected view of the individual and the state. So, while Obama might emphasize difference, he rejects identity politics, which can create permanent minorities and diminish individual agency. Analyzing Obama’s major legislative victories—financial regulation, health care, and the stimulus package—O’Brien shows how they reflect a stakeholder society that neither regulates in the manner of the New Deal nor deregulates. Instead, Obama focuses on negotiated rule making and allows executive branch agencies to fill in the details when dealing with a deadlocked Congress. Similarly, his commitment to difference and his resistance to universal mandates underlies his reluctance to advocate for human rights as much as many on the Democratic left had hoped.
By surveying the present predicament and the current grassroots impulse toward reconsidering the meaning of the continent, Out of One, Many Africas gives shape and momentum to a crucial dialogue aimed at transforming the study of Africa
What makes a pink-haired queer raise his hand to enlist in the military just as the nation is charging into war? In his memoir, Out of Step, Anthony Moll tells the story of a working-class bisexual boy running off to join the army in the midst of two wars and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era. Set against the backdrop of hypermasculinity and sexual secrecy, Moll weaves a queer coming-of-age story.
Out of Step traces Moll’s development through his military service, recounting how the army both breaks and builds relationships, and what it was like to explore his queer identity while also coming to terms with his role in the nation’s ugly foreign policy. From a punk, nerdy, left-leaning, poor boy in Nevada leaving home for the first time to an adult returning to civilian life and forced to address a world more complicated than he was raised to believe, Moll’s journey isn’t a classic flag-waving memoir or war story—it’s a tale of finding one’s identity in the face of war and changing ideals.
In Out of the Attic, Briann G. Greenfield traces the transformation of antiques from family keepsakes to valuable artistic objects, examining the role of collectors, dealers, and museum makers in the construction of a new tradition based on the aesthetic qualities of early American furnishings. While recognizing the significance of antiques as symbols of an enduring American culture, Greenfield also delves behind popular rhetoric to examine the development of a retail structure specifically designed to facilitate the buying and selling of old wares. With antique shops proliferating all over New England, pickers going door-to-door in search of "finds," and forgers taking illicit advantage of growing demand, antique owners and collectors found themselves trying to navigate a retail market characterized by escalating prices and high stakes purchases. In this sense, antiques functioned as more than remnants of a treasured past; they became modern consumer goods.
The book is divided into a series of case studies, each intended to illuminate some aspect of "the dynamic of consumer history." One chapter examines the role of Jewish dealers in promoting American antiques; another profiles Jessie Baker Gardner, a small-time collector and would-be museum maker from Providence, Rhode Island. Greenfield also looks at the institutionalization of antiques, with chapters focusing on Henry Flynt of Deerfield, Massachusetts, who embraced the "aestheticization of antiques" in the 1940s and 1950s, and on Smithsonian curator C. Malcolm Watkins, who challenged the decorative art market during the 1950s and 1960s by purchasing old tools and crude furniture for the nation's museum.
Effie Marquess Carmack (1885-1974) grew up in the tobacco-growing region of southern Kentucky known as the Black Patch. As an adult she moved to Utah, back to Kentucky, to Arizona, and finally to California. Economic necessity primarily motivated Effie and her husband's moves, but her conversion to the Mormon Church in youth also was a factor. Throughout her life, she was committed to preserving the rural, southern folkways she had experienced as a child. She and other members of her family were folk musicians, at times professionally, and she also became a folk poet and artist, teaching herself to paint. In the 1940s she began writing her autobiography and eventually also completed a verse adaptation of it and an unpublished novel about life in the Black Patch.
Out of the Closets and into the Courts explores both the promise and the limits of using legal mobilization to effect social change. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, Ellen Andersen draws on the accumulated knowledge of political science, law, and sociology to explain the origins and outcomes of gay rights litigation. The resulting book is essential reading for anyone interested in gay rights, legal change, and social movements.
Susan Wells combines studies of medical genres, such as the patient history or the diagnostic conversation, with discussions of individual writers. The women she discusses include Ann Preston, the first woman dean of a medical college; Hannah Longshore, a successful practitioner who combined conventional and homeopathic medicine; Rebecca Crumpler, the first African American woman physician to publish a medical book; and Mary Putnam Jacobi, writer of more than 180 medical articles and several important books. Wells shows how these women learned to write, what they wrote, and how these texts were read.
Out of the Dead House also documents the ways that women doctors influenced medical discourse during the formation of the modern profession. They invented forms and strategies for medical research and writing, including methods of using survey information, taking patient histories, and telling case histories. Out of the Dead House adds a critical episode to the developing story of women as producers and critics of culture, including scientific culture.
Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night is a spirited, offbeat collection of stories, elongated riffs on that thing we call …love. All manner of love stories: thwarted love stories, imaginary love stories, love stories offhand and obsessive, philosophical love stories, erudite and amusing love stories.
“People don't meet because they both like Burmese food,” says one character, “or because someone's sister has a friend who's single and new in town, or because Billy's nose happened to crook just slightly to the left at an angle that made me want to weep…People don't fall in love with each other …they just fall into love.”
Everyone does it: women of fierce independence, men of thin character, rambling Deadheads, gay teenage girls, despondent Peace Corps volunteers, anorexic Broadway theatre dancers, the eager, the grieving, the uncommunicative. Even the confused do it. And they don't just fall in love with each other—they fall in love with certain moments and familiar places, with things as ephemeral as gestures and as evanescent as sunlight.
Quirky, real, idealistic, deluded, bohemian, and true, these are people who can—and often do—fall in love with a pair of ears, August afternoons, saucers of vitamins, New Age carpenters, and dead bumblebees. And if there's something they can teach us, it's how to conceive of alternative worlds and the terror and the exhilaration of venturing outside the confines of the lives we know and making our way into a dark, glittering unknown.
Winner, A Choice Outstanding Academic Book
When the Oakland, California, school board called African American English "Ebonics" and claimed that it "is not a black dialect or any dialect of English," they reignited a debate over language, race, and culture that reaches back to the era of slavery in the United States. In this book, John Baugh, an authority on African American English, sets new parameters for the debate by dissecting and challenging many of the prevailing myths about African American language and its place in American society.
Baugh's inquiry ranges from the origins of African American English among slaves and their descendants to its recent adoption by standard English speakers of various races. Some of the topics he considers include practices and malpractices for educating language minority students, linguistic discrimination in the administration of justice, cross-cultural communication between Blacks and whites, and specific linguistic aspects of African American English. This detailed overview of the main points of debate about African American language will be important reading for both scholars and the concerned public.
Every American has heard of the lumberjack hero Paul Bunyan and his big blue ox. For 100 years his exploits filled cartoons, magazines, short stories, and children's books, and his name advertised everything from pancake breakfasts to construction supplies. By 1950 Bunyan was a ubiquitous icon of America's strength and ingenuity. Until now, no one knew where he came from—and the extent to which this mythical hero is rooted in Wisconsin.
This contributed volume explores the functions of belief and supernatural experience within an array of cultures, as well as the stance of academe toward the study of belief and the supernatural. The essays in this volume call into question the idea that supernatural experience is extraordinary.
Among the contributors are Shelley Adler, David Hufford, Barre Toelken, and Gillian Bennett.
follows Abraham Lincoln from his birth and chronicles his thirst for education,
his achievements as a lawyer and congressman, his presidency, and his
assassination.
Hanchett gives readers a deeper understanding of how Lincoln's self-directed
study and clear thinking offset his lack of a formal education, enabling
him to become a respected and successful attorney. He also shows how Lincoln's
uncanny leadership helped him to end slavery and still keep the divided
North sufficiently united to win the Civil War. By focusing on a variety
of roles and settings, Hanchett invites readers to get to know Lincoln
as a president, as well as a lover, husband, father, and friend.
"Excellent! Hanchett is a fine writer, and his biography of Lincoln
is succinct and thought-provoking."
-- Frank J. Williams, president, Abraham Lincoln Association
Vron Ware and Les Back look at key points in recent American and British culture where the "color line" has been blurred. Through probing accounts of racial masquerades in popular literature, the growth of the white power music scene on the Internet, the meteoric rise of big band jazz during the Second World War, and the pivotal role of white session players in crafting rhythm and blues classics by black artists, Ware and Back upset the idea of race as a symbol of inherent human attributes. Their book gives us a timely reckoning of the forces that continue to make people "white," and reveals to us the polyglot potential of identities and cultures.
“It is a seminal work and is ‘must reading’ for anyone seriously interested in the early interpretation of the Great Smoky Mountains.”—Arthur McDade, author of The Natural Arches of the Big South Fork
First published in a limited edition in 1975 by the author’s widow and now available in paperback for the first time, Out Under the Sky of the Great Smokies brings together the personal journals of a great environmentalist and nature writer.
The book combines descriptions of Broome’s innumerable hikes in the Great Smoky Mountains with extended meditations on the meaning of the mountains to the region as a whole. It is at once a historical document, preserving a perspective on the Smokies before full-scale development of the national park, and a work whose message about the importance of the environment is even more timely today than when it first appeared.
In a foreword written especially for this edition, the noted environmental writer Michael Frome describes the book as “a timeless work,” adding, “Here we find Harvey, the wilderness apostle on his home turf. He reveals himself exactly as I knew and loved him: a gentle spirit, sensitive to the needs of nature and humankind, always with tolerance and good humor.”
The Author: Harvey Broome (1902–1968) was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and discovered the Great Smoky Mountain at an early age. An attorney, he helped found the Wilderness Society and served as president of the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club. He was the author of two other posthumously published books, Faces of the Wilderness and Harvey Broome: Earth Man.
Glionna’s interest in Nevada’s rugged, isolated landscape and the people who choose to live in this often-harsh environment was born of his own wanderings into the “outback.” Through his stories, he shares intimate portraits of rural and small-town lifestyles not many understand. Readers meet men with names like Flash and Mr. Cool; will listen to a cowboy minister preach the word of God to his parishioners; will walk with an antiques dealer from Genoa as he hunts for denim in Nevada’s abandoned nineteenth-century mine shafts; and will learn from an ex-paramedic– turned–coffee-shop–owner who provides Boulder City with a true sense of community. Full of humor, eccentricities, and compassion, these stories reveal the state’s true nature and extend an invitation to get lost “somewhere out there” in the real Nevada.
With Outbreak, Timothy D. Lytton provides an up-to-date history and analysis of the US food safety system. He pays particular attention to important but frequently overlooked elements of the system, including private audits and liability insurance.
Lytton chronicles efforts dating back to the 1800s to combat widespread contamination by pathogens such as E. coli and salmonella that have become frighteningly familiar to consumers. Over time, deadly foodborne illness outbreaks caused by infected milk, poison hamburgers, and tainted spinach have spurred steady scientific and technological advances in food safety. Nevertheless, problems persist. Inadequate agency budgets restrict the reach of government regulation. Pressure from consumers to keep prices down constrains industry investments in safety. The limits of scientific knowledge leave experts unable to assess policies’ effectiveness and whether measures designed to reduce contamination have actually improved public health. Outbreak offers practical reforms that will strengthen the food safety system’s capacity to learn from its mistakes and identify cost-effective food safety efforts capable of producing measurable public health benefits.
In the only book to date to explore the period between the 1859 publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species and the discovery in 1900 of Gregor Mendel’s experiments in genetics, John S. Haller, Jr., shows the relationship between scientific "conviction" and public policy. He focuses on the numerous liberally educated American scientists who were caught up in the triumph of evolutionary ideas and who sought to apply those ideas to comparative morality, health, and the physiognomy of nonwhite races.
During this period, the natural and social scientists of the day not only accepted without question the genetic and cultural superiority of the Caucasian; they also asserted that the Caucasian race held a monopoly on evolutionary progress, arguing that "inferior races" were no more than evolutionary survivors doomed by their genetic legacy to remain outcasts from evolution.
Hereditarians and evolutionists believed that "less fit" human races were perishing from the rigors of civilization’s struggle and competition. Indeed, racial inferiority lay at the very foundation of the evolutionary framework and, remaining there, rose to the pinnacle of "truth" with the myth of scientific certainty.
The WPA Outcomes Statement is important because it represents a working consensus among composition scholars about what college students should learn and do in a composition program. But as a single-page document, the statement cannot convey the kind of reflective process that a writing program must undertake to address the learning outcomes described.
The Outcomes Book relates the fuller process by exploring the matrix of concerns that surrounded the developing Statement itself, and by presenting the experience of many who have since employed it in their own settings.
Exceptionally rare and valued by book collectors, Otto A. Rothert’s riveting saga of the outlaws and scoundrels of Cave-in-Rock chronicles the adventures of an audacious cast of river pirates and highwaymen who operated in and around the famous Ohio River cavern from 1795 through 1820 (adventures featured in Disney’s Davy Crockett and the film How the West Was Won). Once sporting the enticing sign "Liquor Vault and House for Entertainment," this beautiful cavern location decoyed the unsuspecting by offering a venue for food, drink, and rest.
Compellingly lively, The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock is nonetheless the work of a scholar, a historian who documents his findings and leaves a detailed bibliographical trail. Presenting many eyewitness accounts, Rothert supplies the lore and legend of the colorful villains of Cave-in-Rock. Always maintaining the difference between stories he tells with historical authority and those that are pure speculation, Rothert provides both a fascinating narrative and a valuable regional history.
The art works in Outliers and American Vanguard Art come from three distinct periods when the intersections between mainstream and outlier artists were most dynamic and productive, ushering in exhibitions of art based on various degrees of co-existence, inclusion, and assimilation. Works by such diverse artists as Charles Sheeler, Christina Ramberg, and Matt Mullican are set in conversation with a range of works by such self-taught artists as Horace Pippin, Janet Sobel, and Henry Darger. Cooke also examines a recent increase of radically expressive work that challenges what it means to be an outlier today. She reveals how these distinctions have been freighted with a particularly American point of view as she investigates our assumptions about creativity, artistic practice, and the role of the artist in contemporary culture.
Outliers and American Vanguard Art is the most comprehensive show ever to examine outliers in dialogue with their established peers. It is sure to inspire vigorous conversation about how artists and the work they make are represented.
Heavy rains turned the mountainous terrain around Outpost Kelly into shin-deep mud and muck. At the height of the fighting, Siewert was able to bring to bear the guns of only one of his five tanks against the enemy. Forced to abandon traditional tank warfare doctrine, he improvised. Allowing members of the 15th Infantry to retake Outpost Kelly, Siewert offers an excellent analysis of how theory and experience come together in a point-of-the-spear military situation.
Outpost Kelly also paints a fascinating picture of the type of fighting, often overlooked, that characterized the second and third years of the Korean War. With truce talks proceeding in Panmunjom, both sides fought to claim incremental pieces of real estate along the demarcation line between North and South.
Outside Agitator tells the dramatic, largely forgotten storybehind the 1965 killing of civil rights worker Jonathan Myrick "Jon" Daniels in Lowndes County, Alabama, detailing the lives of the killer and the victim. A white Episcopal seminary student from New Hampshire, Jon Daniels helped organize blacks in Selma during the events that led to the Selma-to-Montgomery march. In August 1965 he was fatally shot in neighboring Lowndes County by Tom Coleman, a highway department engineer and steadfast segregationist, who was later acquitted by an all-white jury.
Lowndes County was a bastion of white minority dominance. For half a century, no black had voted or served on a jury there. Known for the violence used by whites to maintain their control, "bloody" Lowndes presented Daniels and other civil rights workers with almost insurmountable obstacles. Tom Coleman, a Lowndes County native, represented the consensus among local whites that violent resistance to racial change was justified. To defend his community and to prevent change, he resorted to violence against "outside agitators."
Following the deaths of a score of other civil rights workers, the killing of Jon Daniels was in many ways the last atrocity of the first, southern, nonviolent phase of the Civil Rights movement. This exploration of how Daniels and Coleman came to be at opposite ends of a shotgun outside a county store captures the mechanics and emotions of forces promoting and resisting change in southern race relations. Charles Eagles reminds us that however representative Daniels and Coleman may have been of larger forces, they were nevertheless real individuals with distinctive personalities caught up in specific circumstances.
This striking contribution to Black literary studies examines the practices of Black writers in the mid-twentieth century to revise our understanding of the institutionalization of literary studies in America. Andy Hines uncovers a vibrant history of interpretive resistance to university-based New Criticism by Black writers of the American left. These include well-known figures such as Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry as well as still underappreciated writers like Melvin B. Tolson and Doxey Wilkerson. In their critical practice, these and other Black writers levied their critique from “outside” venues: behind the closed doors of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in the classroom at a communist labor school under FBI surveillance, and in a host of journals. From these vantages, Black writers not only called out the racist assumptions of the New Criticism, but also defined Black literary and interpretive practices to support communist and other radical world-making efforts in the mid-twentieth century. Hines’s book thus offers a number of urgent contributions to literary studies: it spotlights a canon of Black literary texts that belong to an important era of anti-racist struggle, and it fills in the pre-history of the rise of Black studies and of ongoing Black dissent against the neoliberal university.
Philip Raisor was on the losing side in two of the most storied basketball games ever played. He started at guard for the Muncie Central Bearcats, who fell in the 1954 Indiana state final to tiny Milan, the David-over-Goliath event that inspired the movie Hoosiers. On a basketball scholarship to the University of Kansas, he watched his Wilt Chamberlain–led Jayhawks lose the 1957 NCAA championship in triple overtime to North Carolina. In Outside Shooter, Raisor recounts the hard knocks and hard-won triumphs of a basketball odyssey across 1950s America, from Indiana to Kansas to Louisiana, and from adolescence to adulthood.
This was an era in which a racially divided society was taking halting steps toward integration, and few places held more tension than the sports arena. Raisor saw firsthand the toll of racism in the inner rage and sorrow of Muncie’s star player, John Casterlow, whose life followed a trajectory from playing the legendary Oscar Robertson to a draw—almost—to death in the streets of Detroit at age twenty-three. Later, at Louisiana State University after having transferred from Kansas, Raisor, spurred by the memory of Casterlow, would join in hazardous early attempts to integrate the LSU campus. From Indiana to Louisiana, he sees the ordeal of racism reveal character—including his own—at depths beyond the illumination even of competitive sport.
Devoted though Raisor was to basketball, Outside Shooter captures the period of his life in which he gradually stopped defining himself in terms of the game. As the rise and fall of his fortunes on the basketball court become overshadowed by the shifting patterns of his larger life—the competing measures of acceptance and expectation from his family and companions; the courage and challenge offered by a young woman equally bent on accomplishment; his struggles with failure and doubt juxtaposed with his awakening intellect and conscience—he discovers the sense of purpose that will carry him beyond his playing days and into adulthood as a budding writer.
For nearly a decade Hillary L. Chute has been sitting down for extensive interviews with the leading figures in comics, and with Outside the Box she offers fans a chance to share her ringside seat. Chute’s in-depth discussions with twelve of the most prominent and accomplished artists and writers in comics today reveal a creative community that is richly interconnected yet fiercely independent, its members sharing many interests and approaches while working with wildly different styles and themes. Chute’s subjects run the gamut of contemporary comics practice, from underground pioneers like Art Spiegelman and Lynda Barry, to the analytic work of Scott McCloud, the journalism of Joe Sacco, and the extended narratives of Alison Bechdel, Charles Burns, and more. They reflect on their experience and innovations, the influence of peers and mentors, the reception of their art and the growth of critical attention, and the crucial place of print amid the encroachment of the digital age.
Beautifully illustrated in full-color, and featuring three never-before-published interviews—including the first published conversation between Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware—Outside the Box will be a landmark volume, a close-up account of the rise of graphic storytelling and a testament to its vibrant creativity.
Born under the shadow of the bomb, with little security but the cold comfort of duck-and-cover, the postwar generations lived through—and led—some of the most momentous changes in all of American history. Hales explores those decades through perceptive accounts of a succession of resonant moments, spaces, and artifacts of everyday life—drawing unexpected connections and tracing the intertwined undercurrents of promise and peril. From sharp analyses of newsreels of the first atomic bomb tests and the invention of a new ideal American life in Levittown; from the music emerging from the Brill Building and the Beach Boys, and a brilliant account of Bob Dylan’s transformations; from the painful failures of communes and the breathtaking utopian potential of the early days of the digital age, Hales reveals a nation, and a dream, in transition, as a new generation began to make its mark on the world it was inheriting.
Full of richly drawn set-pieces and countless stories of unforgettable moments, Outside the Gates of Eden is the most comprehensive account yet of the baby boomers, their parents, and their children, as seen through the places they built, the music and movies and shows they loved, and the battles they fought to define their nation, their culture, and their place in what remains a fragile and dangerous world.
---Bernard Cooper, author of Maps to Anywhere
Editor Christopher Hennessy gathers interviews with some of the most significant figures in contemporary American poetry. While each poet is gay, these encompassing, craft-centered interviews reflect the diversity of their respective arts and serve as a testament to the impact gay poets have had and will continue to have on contemporary poetics.
The book includes twelve frank, intense interviews with some of America's best-known and loved poets, who have not only enjoyed wide critical acclaim but who have had lasting impact on both the gay tradition and the contemporary canon writ large, for example, Frank Bidart, the late Thom Gunn, and J. D. McClatchy. Some of the most honored and respected poets, still in the middle of their careers, are also included, for example, Mark Doty, Carl Phillips, and Reginald Shepherd. Each interview explores the poet's complete work to date, often illuminating the poet's technical evolution and emotional growth, probing shifts in theme, and even investigating links between verse and sexuality.
In addition to a selected bibliography of works by established poets, the book also includes a list of works by newer and emerging poets who are well on their way to becoming important voices of the new millennium.
Outside the Paint takes readers back to the Chinese Playground of San Francisco in the 1930s and 1940s, the only public outdoor space in Chinatown. It was a place where young Chinese American men and women developed a new approach to the game of basketbal—with fast breaks, intricate passing and aggressive defense—that was ahead of its time.
Drawing on interviews with players and coaches, Kathleen Yep recounts some surprising stories. From the success of the Hong Wah Kues, a professional barnstorming men's basketball team and the Mei Wahs, a championship women’s amateur team, to Woo Wong, the first Chinese athlete to play in Madison Square Garden, and his extraordinarily talented sister Helen Wong, who is compared to Babe Didrikson.
Outside the Paint chronicles the efforts of these highly accomplished athletes who developed a unique playing style that capitalized on their physical attributes, challenged the prevailing racial hierarchy, and enabled them, for a time, to leave the confines of their segregated world. As they learned to dribble, shoot, and steal, they made basketball a source of individual achievement and Chinese American community pride.
In The Outsider, veteran journalist and best-selling author Dan Rottenberg deftly chronicles the astonishing rises, falls, and countless reinventions of this savvy businessman. Greenfield's power allowed him to cross social, religious, and ethnic boundaries with impunity. He alarmed Philadelphia's conservative business and social leaders-Christians and Jews alike-some of whom plotted his downfall.
In this engaging account of Greenfield's fascinating life, Rottenberg demonstrates the extent to which one uniquely brilliant and energetic man pushed the boundaries of society's limitations on individual potential. The Outsider provides a microcosmic look at three twentieth-century upheavals: the rise of Jews as a crucial American business force, the decline of America's Protestant establishment, and the transformation of American cities.
As communities grew in population, early activists found common ground in a desire to protect women and children, and make their towns more hospitable to religious values. Protestants, Catholics, and Jews worked together to transform communities. Together they introduced public and private schools, health care institutions, libraries and orphanages, and lobbied for the prohibition of alcohol.
Beginning in the 1930s, religious activism played a crucial role in the emerging culture wars between liberals and conservatives. Liberals rallied around the protection of civil rights and the building of social safety nets, while conservatives decried the rise of secularism, liberalism, and communism. Today, religious activists of many faiths are deeply engaged in matters related to women’s and gay rights, foreign policy, and environmental protection.
Outsiders in a Promised Land is a meticulously researched, comprehensive treatment of religion in Pacific Northwest public life from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. The first book of its kind, it is destined to be an essential reference for scholars, activists, and religious leaders of all faiths.
Francaviglia looks anew at the geographical-historical context of the driving of the golden spike in May 1869. He gazes outward from the site of the transcontinental railroad's completion—the summit of a remote mountain range that extends south into the Great Salt Lake. The transportation corridor that for the first time linked America's coasts gave this distinctive region significance, but it anchored two centuries of human activity linked to the area's landscape.
Francaviglia brings to that larger story a geographer's perspective on place and society, a railroad enthusiast's knowledge of trains, a cartographic historian's understanding of the knowledge and experience embedded in maps, and a desert lover's appreciation of the striking basin-and-range landscape that borders the Great Salt Lake.
Over the Rim is the first book about an important but little-known expedition sent by Brigham Young to explore southern Utah. Led by Mormon apostle Parley P. Pratt, the party traveled from Salt Lake City south across the rim of the Great Basin to the Virgin River near future St. George. They brought back to Mormon leaders their first detailed portrait of the country to the south that the church planned to settle.
Contributors
Donna Alvah
Chris Ames
Jeff Bennett
Maria Höhn
Seungsook Moon
Christopher Nelson
Robin Riley
Michiko Takeuchi
The wagon trail between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles is one of the most important and least-known elements of nineteenth-century Western migration. Known as the Southern Route, it included the western half of the Old Spanish Trail and was favored because it could be used for travel and freighting year-round. It was, however, likely the most difficult route that pioneers traveled with any consistency, following not rivers but leading from one--sometimes dubious--desert watering place to the next and offering few havens for the sick, weary, or unfortunate. Historian Edward Leo Lyman has provided the first history of the complete Southern Route and of the people who developed and used it. Based on extensive research in primary sources--including many early travelers’ accounts--and on Lyman’s own investigation of the route and its branches, the book discusses the exploration and development of the Old Spanish Trail, its horse thieves and traders, including Jed Smith and Kit Carson, along with government explorere John C. Frémont. Developing the old pack mule trail as a wagon road between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, miners heading for the California gold fields first used the route extensively. Mormon missionaries and the colonizers of San Bernardino and other communities also traveled that way, as did a wide array of mail carriers, soldiers and world travelers. Later, a steady stream of Anglo-American emigrants seeking new homes or fortunes in California shared the road with a surprising number of freight wagon operators. The trail passed through the territories of numerous Native American peoples, and contacts with them--both friendly and hostile--played a significant role in the experiences of travelers and in the fates of Native American cultures in this region. Lyman’s discussions of Mormon-Indian relations and of the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre offer fresh and important analyses of these vital aspects of the westward movement.
In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a fair number of Americans thought the idea was crazy. Now everyone, except a few die-hards, thinks it was. So what was going through the minds of the talented and experienced men and women who planned and initiated the war? What were their assumptions? Overreach aims to recover those presuppositions.
Michael MacDonald examines the standard hypotheses for the decision to attack, showing them to be either wrong or of secondary importance: the personality of President George W. Bush, including his relationship with his father; Republican electoral considerations; the oil lobby; the Israeli lobby. He also undermines the argument that the war failed because of the Bush administration’s incompetence.
The more fundamental reasons for the Iraq War and its failure, MacDonald argues, are located in basic axioms of American foreign policy, which equate America’s ideals with its interests (distorting both in the process) and project those ideals as universally applicable. Believing that democratic principles would bring order to Iraq naturally and spontaneously, regardless of the region’s history and culture or what Iraqis themselves wanted, neoconservative thinkers, with support from many on the left, advocated breaking the back of state power under Saddam Hussein. They maintained that by bringing about radical regime change, the United States was promoting liberalism, capitalism, and democracy in Iraq. But what it did instead was unleash chaos.
This powerful book lets us in on the conversations of low-income mothers from Appalachian Ohio as they talk about the welfare bureaucracy and its remarkably advanced surveillance system. In their struggle to care for their families, these women are monitored and assessed through a vast network of supercomputers, caseworkers, fraud control agents, and even grocers and neighbors.
In-depth interviews show that these women focus less on the right to privacy than on a critique of surveillance that lays bare the personal and political conflicts with which they live. And, while they have little interest in conventional forms of politics, we see widespread patterns of everyday resistance as they subvert the surveillance regime when they feel it prevents them from being good parents. Ultimately, Overseers of the Poor demonstrates the need to reconceive not just our understanding of the surveillance-privacy debate but also the broader realms of language, participation, and the politics of rights.
We all know that our lives are being watched more than ever before. As we struggle to understand and confront this new order, Gilliom argues, we need to spend less time talking about privacy rights, legislatures, and courts of law and more time talking about power, domination, and the ongoing struggles of everyday people.
Impelled by a demand for increasing American strength in the new global economy, many educators, public officials, business leaders, and parents argue that school computers and Internet access will improve academic learning and prepare students for an information-based workplace.
But just how valid is this argument? In Oversold and Underused, one of the most respected voices in American education argues that when teachers are not given a say in how the technology might reshape schools, computers are merely souped-up typewriters and classrooms continue to run much as they did a generation ago. In his studies of early childhood, high school, and university classrooms in Silicon Valley, Larry Cuban found that students and teachers use the new technologies far less in the classroom than they do at home, and that teachers who use computers for instruction do so infrequently and unimaginatively.
Cuban points out that historical and organizational economic contexts influence how teachers use technical innovations. Computers can be useful when teachers sufficiently understand the technology themselves, believe it will enhance learning, and have the power to shape their own curricula. But these conditions can't be met without a broader and deeper commitment to public education beyond preparing workers. More attention, Cuban says, needs to be paid to the civic and social goals of schooling, goals that make the question of how many computers are in classrooms trivial.
This young adult biography introduces middle school readers to a remarkable woman who founded the Women’s Army Corps, served as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, and ran a media empire that included the Houston Post newspaper and radio and TV stations.
Winner, Gold Medal for Biography, Military Writers Society of America, 2015
Oveta Culp Hobby (1905–1995) had a lifetime of stellar achievement. During World War II, she was asked to build a women’s army from scratch—and did. Hobby became Director of the Women’s Army Corps and the first Army woman to earn the rank of colonel. President Eisenhower chose her as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, making her the second woman in history to be appointed to a president’s cabinet. When she wasn’t serving in the government, Hobby worked with her husband, former Texas governor William P. Hobby, to lead a media empire that included the Houston Post newspaper and radio and TV stations. She also supported the Houston community in many ways, from advocating for civil rights for African Americans to donating generously to the Houston Symphony and the Museum of Fine Arts.
Oveta Culp Hobby is the first biography of this important woman. Written for middle school readers, it traces her life from her childhood in Killeen to her remarkable achievements in Washington, DC, and Houston. Debra Winegarten provides the background to help young adult readers understand the times in which Hobby lived and the challenges she faced as a woman in nontraditional jobs. She shows how Hobby opened doors for women to serve in the military and in other professions that still benefit women today. Most of all, Oveta Culp Hobby will inspire young adults to follow their own dreams and turn them into tangible reality.
Owen Lovejoy and the Coalition for Equality examines how these three distinct groups merged their agendas into a single antislavery, religious, political campaign for equality with Lovejoy at the helm. Combining scholarly biography, historiography, and primary source material, Jane Ann Moore and William F. Moore demonstrate Lovejoy's crucial role in nineteenth-century politics, the rise of antislavery sentiment in religious spaces, and the emerging congressional commitment to end slavery. Their compelling account explores how the immorality of slavery became a touchstone of political and religious action in the United States through the efforts of a synergetic coalition led by an essential abolitionist figure.
Owning a Piece of the Minors is by and about a man who lived his dream and acquired a baseball team. When Jerry Klinkowitz joined the group that ran the Waterloo, Iowa, Diamonds in the 1970s, ownership of a minor league baseball franchise conferred little mystique. Neglected for a half century, minor league baseball was at best obscure. Yet in the purchase of fantasy, what difference if your desire is out of style?
Klinkowitz continued his work with the Diamonds through the 1980s and much of the 1990s. In Owning a Piece of the Minors, he maps out his personal journey through baseball and probes his fluctuating fortunes and those of his team as he evolves from a fan to a team executive and, most important, to a writer writing about baseball. This baseball story begins with a nine-year-old Klinkowitz who is elated when Milwaukee lures the Braves from Boston; this story of a love affair with baseball might have died—and in fact suffered a ten-year hiatus—when the apostate Braves fled to Atlanta in 1965.
Klinkowitz rediscovered the joy of being at the baseball park when, as a middle-aged professor, he took his own children to the Waterloo Diamonds games. Gradually his involvement with the Diamonds grew deeper until he owned the team. His immersion into team activities was complete, from shagging batting practice and working the beer bar to struggling with the Cleveland Indians and then the San Diego Padres as minor league affiliates to accommodate baseball's resurgence.
Klinkowitz writes of loss—first the Braves and later the Diamonds; of writing baseball fiction; of attending the 1982 World Series back in Milwaukee; of the great old ballparks around the country, including Wrigley, Fenway, and old Comiskey Park; of fictional and factual accounts of how the Diamonds franchise was lost; of friendships among season ticket holders in "Box 28"; and of Mildred Boyenga, the club president and Baseball Woman of the Year. A first-rate stylist, Klinkowitz shows the problems and perks and, most rewarding, the priceless relationships made possible in the world of baseball.
Owning and Managing Forests is both an accessible overview of the privileges, rights, and obligations that accompany forest ownership and a guidebook to help active forest owners and managers use laws to their advantage and avoid the pitfalls of expensive and exhausting litigation. The book is a revised, expanded, and updated edition of Legal Aspects of Owning and Managing Woodlands, published in 1998 by Island Press and named Best Forestry Book of the Year by the National Woodland Owners Association.
This edition provides current information on recent changes in property, environmental, and tax laws, while also discussing new directions in forest management. It offers expanded treatment of topics including private property, searching property records, easements, estate planning, timber sale contracts, working with forestry professionals, and how to pass woodlands intact to future generations. The book also describes the many different facets of trusts, changes in forestland taxation methods, and new licensing and certification options. Included, too, is a section on avoiding disputes and how to use alternative dispute resolution methods to avoid costly, troubling, and time-consuming court battles.
Owning and Managing Forests provides clear and concise descriptions of often confusing concepts and difficult subjects, and addresses issues in a competent yet conversational tone. Anyone involved with owning or managing forestland will find the book an essential guide and reference.
Listen Up! When the New York-born Tito Puente composed "Oye Como Va!" in the 1960s, his popular song was called "Latin" even though it was a fusion of Afro-Cuban and New York Latino musical influences. A decade later, Carlos Santana, a Mexican immigrant, blended Puente’s tune with rock and roll, which brought it to the attention of national audiences. Like Puente and Santana, Latino/a musicians have always blended musics from their homelands with other sounds in our multicultural society, challenging ideas of what "Latin" music is or ought to be. Waves of immigrants further complicate the picture as they continue to bring their distinctive musical styles to the U.S.—from merengue and bachata to cumbia and reggaeton.
In Oye Como Va!, Deborah Pacini Hernandez traces the trajectories of various U.S. Latino musical forms in a globalizing world, examining how the blending of Latin music reflects Latino/a American lives connecting across nations. Exploring the simultaneously powerful, vexing, and stimulating relationship between hybridity, music, and identity, Oye Como Va! asserts that this potent combination is a signature of the U.S. Latino/a experience.
Bonnie McCay now puts that doctrine in perspective by tracing the history of attempts to defend common resources against privatization. She tells of conflicts in New Jersey communities over the last two centuries: how fishermen dependent on common-use rights employed poaching, piracy, and test cases to protect their stake in tidal resources, and how oyster planters whose businesses depended on the enclosure of marine commons engineered test cases of their own to seek protection for their claims.
McCay presents some of the most significant cases relating to fishing and waterfront development, describing how the oyster wars were fought on the waters and in the court rooms—and how the public trust doctrine was sometimes reinterpreted to support private interests. She explores the events and people behind the proceedings and addresses the legal, social, and ecological issues these cases represent.
Oyster Wars and the Public Trust is an important study of contested property rights from an anthropological perspective that also addresses significant issues in political ecology, institutional economics, environmental history, and the evolution of law. It contributes to our understanding of how competing claims to resources have evolved in the United States and shows that making nature a commodity remains a moral problem even in a market-driven economy.
Published just days before America’s entry into World War II, Ozark Country is Otto Ernest Rayburn’s love letter to his adopted region. One of several chronicles of the Ozarks that garnered national attention during the Depression and war years, when many Americans craved stories about people and places seemingly untouched by the difficulties of the times, Rayburn’s colorful tour takes readers from the fictional village of Woodville into the backcountry of a region teeming with storytellers, ballad singers, superstitions, and home remedies.
Rayburn’s tales—fantastical, fun, and unapologetically romantic—portray a world that had already nearly disappeared by the time they were written. Yet Rayburn’s depiction of the Ozarks resonates with notions of the region that have persisted in the American consciousness ever since.
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