BiblioVault - Books by Brown, Richard

Blackland Prairies of the Gulf Coastal Plain

Nature, Culture, and Sustainability

Edited by Evan Peacock and Timothy Schauwecker

University of Alabama Press, 2003

Underscores the relevance of archaeological research in understanding long-term cultural change

Taking a holistic approach, this compilation gathers ecological, historical, and archaeological research written on the distinctive region of the Southeast called the Gulf coast blackland prairie. Ranging from the last glacial period to the present day, the case studies provide a broad picture of how the area has changed through time and been modified by humans, first with nomadic bands of Indians trailing the grazing animals and then by Euro-American settlers who farmed the rich agricultural area. Contemporary impacts include industrialization, aquaculture, population growth, land reclamation, and wildlife management.

It is believed that the Black Belt and the Great Plains were contiguous in the past and shared the same prairie vegetation, insects, and large fauna, such as bison. Swaths and patches of limestone-based soils still weave a biological corridor through what is now Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. In analyzing this distinct grassland ecosystem, the essays compare both the mega and minute flora and fauna sustained by the land in the past and present; reveal what foods were harvested by early inhabitants, their gathering techniques, and diet changes over the 10,000-year period of native occupancy; survey the documents of early explorers for descriptions of the landform, its use, and the lives of inhabitants at the time of contact; and look at contemporary efforts to halt abuse and reverse damage to this unique and shrinking biome.

This book demonstrates that the blackland prairie has always been an important refuge for a teeming array of biological species, including humans. It will have wide scholarly appeal as well as general interest and will be welcomed by archaeologists, biologists, botanists, ecologists, historians, librarians, politicians, land managers, and national, state, and local administrators.

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The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler

A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America

Irene Quenzler Brown and Richard D. Brown

Harvard University Press, 2003

In 1806 an anxious crowd of thousands descended upon Lenox, Massachusetts, for the public hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, condemned for the rape of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Betsy. Not all witnesses believed justice had triumphed. The death penalty had become controversial; no one had been executed for rape in Massachusetts in more than a quarter century. Wheeler maintained his innocence. Over one hundred local citizens petitioned for his pardon--including, most remarkably, Betsy and her mother.

Impoverished, illiterate, a failed farmer who married into a mixed-race family and clashed routinely with his wife, Wheeler existed on the margins of society. Using the trial report to reconstruct the tragic crime and drawing on Wheeler's jailhouse autobiography to unravel his troubled family history, Irene Quenzler Brown and Richard D. Brown illuminate a rarely seen slice of early America. They imaginatively and sensitively explore issues of family violence, poverty, gender, race and class, religion, and capital punishment, revealing similarities between death penalty politics in America today and two hundred years ago.

Beautifully crafted, engagingly written, this unforgettable story probes deeply held beliefs about morality and about the nature of justice.

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Massachusetts

A Concise History

Richard D. Brown

University of Massachusetts Press, 2000

From the moment the first English colonists landed on the shores of Plymouth Bay, the experiences of the people of Massachusetts have been emblematic of larger themes in American history. The story of the first Pilgrim thanksgiving is commemorated as a national holiday, while the Boston Tea Party and Paul Revere's ride have passed into the national mythology. Even the grimmer aspects of the American experience—Indian warfare and the conquest of an ever expanding frontier—were part of the early history of Massachusetts. In this book, Richard D. Brown and Jack Tager survey the rich heritage of this distinctive, and distinctly American, place, showing how it has long exerted an influence disproportionate to its size. A seedbed of revolt against British colonial rule, Massachusetts has supplied the nation with a long line of political leaders—from Samuel and John Adams to William Lloyd Garrison and Lucy Stone to John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy. Its early textile mills helped shape the industrial revolution, while its experiences with urbanization, immigration, ethnic conflict, and labor strife reflected the growth of the national economy. In the twentieth century, the state continued to lead the country through a series of wrenching economic changes as it moved from the production of goods to the provision of services, eventually becoming a center of the high-tech revolution in telecommunications. If there is one common theme in the Bay State's history, Brown and Tager make clear, it is the capacity to adapt to change. In part this trait can be attributed to the state's unique blend of resources, including its many distinguished colleges and universities. But it can also be credited to the people themselves, who have created a singular sense of place by reconciling claims of tradition with the possibilities of innovation. This book tells their story.

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A Poetic for Sociology

Toward a Logic of Discovery for the Human Sciences

Richard Harvey Brown

University of Chicago Press, 1989

For too long, argues Richard Harvey Brown, social scientists have felt forced to choose between imitating science's empirical methodology and impersonating a romantic notion of art, the methods of which are seen as primarily a matter of intuition, interpretation, and opinion. Developing the idea of a "cognitive aesthetic," Brown shows how both science and art—as well as the human studies that stand between them—depend on metaphoric thinking as their "logic of discovery" and may be assessed in terms of such aesthetic criteria of adequacy as economy, elegance, originality, scope, congruence, and form.

By recognizing this "aesthetic" common ground between science and art, Brown demonstrates that a fusion can be achieved within the human sciences of these two principal ideals of knowledge—the scientific or positivist one and the artistic or intuitive one. A path, then, is opened for creating a knowledge of ourselves and society which is at once objective and subjective, at once valid scientifically and significantly humane.

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Politics Of Selfhood

Bodies And Identities In Global Capitalism

Richard Harvey Brown

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

Looks at the ways social change is expressed through debates over identities and bodies. In bodies and selves, we can see politics, economics, and culture play out, and the tensions and crises of society made visible. The women's movement, lobbies for the elderly, pro-choice and pro-life movements, AIDS research and education, pedophilia and repressed memory, global sports spectacles, organ donor networks, campaigns for safe sex, chastity, or preventive medicine--all are aspects of the contemporary politics of bodies and identities touched on in this book. Three broad themes run through the collection: how the body is constructed in various ways for different purposes, how the electronic media and its uses shape selves and sensualities and contribute to civic discourse, and how global capitalism acts as a direct force in these processes. By taking a distinctly cross-cultural and comparative approach, this volume explores more fully than ever the political, economic, institutional, and cultural settings of corporeality, identity, and representation. Contributors: Antonella Fabri, Eva Illouz, Philip W. Jenks, Lauren Langman, Timothy W. Luke, Timothy McGettigan, Margaret J. Tally.

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Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts

The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772-1774

Richard D. Brown

Harvard University Press, 1970

More than a century and a half ago, John Adams urged scholars investigate the communications of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, the most radical and important of the revolutionary committees of correspondence. Such a study, Adams suggested, would reveal the underlying impetus of the revolutionary movement. Now, for the first time, Richard D. Brown has made an exhaustive and systematic analysis of the committee that set a pattern for America and for the world by keeping alive the revolutionary spirit at a time when the issues were cloudy and public interest was dormant.

The Boston committee, organized to arouse the people of Massachusetts and to inform them of their rights, initiated the use of local committees of correspondence and went on to become a major revolutionary institution which helped bring about fundamental changes in Massachusetts politics. Mr. Brown's book focuses on the years 1772 to 1774, when the inhabitants of Massachusetts moved from quiet accommodation with the British imperial system to massive rebellion against it. His investigations of the records of the Boston committee and of voluminous town records never before studied have resulted in a revision of previous interpretations regarding the interaction between leaders in Boston and the people in the towns.

The author's findings indicate that the Boston committee did not control Massachusetts political action, manipulating the political behavior of the towns, as earlier theorists have suggested. Though Boston was a leader, the towns generally acted independently, and government by consent developed effectively on the local level. The letters which passed between the capital and the countryside reveal an expanding political consciousness and an ever-increasing political sophistication at the grass-roots level. They articulate an essentially radical view of politics based on popular sovereignty.

As an account of the process of political integration among a colonial people engaged in an independence movement, this book will appeal not only to historians but also to political scientists concerned with the emerging nations of the twentieth century.

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Social Science as Civic Discourse

Essays on the Invention, Legitimation, and Uses of Social Theory

Richard Harvey Brown

University of Chicago Press, 1989

Richard Harvey Brown's pioneering explorations in the philosophy of social science and the theory of rhetoric reach a culmination in Social Science as Civic Discourse. In his earlier works, he argued for a logic of discovery and explanation in social science by showing that science and art both depend on metaphoric thinking, and he has applied that logic to society as a narrative text in which significant action by moral agents is possible. This new work is at once a philosophical critique of social theory and a social-theoretical critique of politics. Brown proposes to redirect the language and the mission of the social sciences toward a new discourse for a humane civic practice.

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Society as Text

Essays on Rhetoric, Reason, and Reality

Richard Harvey Brown

University of Chicago Press, 1987

Brown makes elegant use of sociological theory and of insights from language philosophy, literary criticism, and rhetoric to articulate a new theory of the human sciences, using the powerful metaphor of society as text.

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This Is Not For You

An Activist's Journey of Resistance and Resilience

Richard Brown

Oregon State University Press, 2021

This Is Not For You tells the story of activist and photographer Richard Brown, a Black Portlander who has spent decades working to bridge the divide between police and the Black community. His memoir brings readers with him into the streets with fellow activists, into squad cars with the rank-and-file, and to regular meetings with mayors and police chiefs. There are very few people doing the kind of work Richard Brown has done. And that, as he sees it, is a big problem.

The book finds Brown approaching his eightieth birthday and reflecting on his life. As he recalls his childhood in 1940s Harlem, his radicalization in the newly desegregated Air Force, and his decades of activism in one of America’s whitest cities, he questions how much longer he’ll do this work, and he wonders who, if anyone, will take his place.

This is a book about how and why to become an engaged, activist citizen, and how activists can stay grounded, no matter how deeply they immerse themselves in the work. It also offers an intimate, firsthand look at policing: what policing is and could be, how civilians can have a say, and how police can and should be responsive to and inclusive of civilian voices. This Is Not For You speaks on every page about being Black in America: about Black pride; Black history, art, and culture; and the experience of resisting white supremacy. It also stands as a much-needed counternarrative to Portlandia, telling a different story about the city and who has shaped it.

Over fifty percent of royalties earned on this book will be donated to organizations working on behalf of Black Portlanders.

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