Cowboy, judge, federal official, then business executive, Wilson McCarthy mirrored change and growth in the twentieth-century West. Leading the Denver & Rio Grande back from the brink saved a vital link in the national transportation system. The D&RGW ran over and through the scenic Rockies, developing mineral resources, fighting corporate wars, and helping build communities. The Depression brought it to its knees. Accepting federal assignment to save the line, McCarthy turned it into a paragon of mid-century railroading, represented by the streamlined, Vista-Domed California Zephyr, although success hauling freight was of more economic importance. Prior to that, McCarthy’s life had taken him from driving livestock in Canada to trying to drive the national economy as a director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the first line of federal attack on the Depression. Always a Cowboy positions McCarthy’s story in a rich historical panorama..
Will Bagley is the author of Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows
Great Basin National Park is in large part a high-alpine park, but it sits in one of America’s driest, least populated, and most isolated deserts. That contrast is one facet of the diversity that characterizes this region. Within and outside the park are phenomenal landscape features, biotic wonders, unique environments, varied historic sites, and the local colors of isolated towns and ranches. Vast Snake and Spring Valleys, bracketing the national park, are also subjects of one of the West's most divisive environment contests, over what on the surface seems most absent but underground is abundant enough for sprawling Las Vegas to covet it—water.
Mexican Americans make up the largest minority in Idaho, yet they seemingly live in a different world from the dominant Anglo population, and because of pervasive stereotypes and exclusive policies, their participation in the community's social, economic, and political life is continually impeded.
This unique ethnographic study of a small Idaho community with a large Hispanic population examines many dimensions of the impact race relations have on everyday life for rural Mexican Americans.
Across north-central New Mexico and Arizona, along the line of Route 66, now Interstate 40, there first ran a little-known wagon trail called Beale's Wagon Road, after Edward F. Beale, who surveyed it for the War Department in 1857. This survey became famous for employing camels. Not so well known is the fate of the first emigrants who the next year attempted to follow its tracks. The government considered the 1857 exploration a success and the road it opened a promising alternative route to California but expected such things as military posts and developed water supplies to be needed before it was ready for regular travel. Army representatives in New Mexico were more enthusiastic.
In 1858 there was a need for an alternative. Emigrants avoided the main California Trail because of a U.S. Army expedition to subdue Mormons in Utah. The Southern Route ran through Apache territory, was difficult for the army to guard, and was long. When a party of Missouri and Iowa emigrants known as the Rose-Baley wagon train arrived in Albuquerque, they were encouraged to be the first to try the new Beale road. Their journey became a rolling disaster. Beale's trail was more difficult to follow than expected; water sources and feed for livestock harder to find. Indians along the way had been described as peaceful, but the Hualapais persistently harassed the emigrants and shot their stock, and when the wagon train finally reached the Colorado River, a large party of Mojaves attacked them. Several of the emigrants were killed, and the remainder began a difficult retreat to Albuquerque. Their flight, with wounded companions and reduced supplies, became ever more arduous. Along the way they met other emigrant parties and convinced them to join the increasingly disorderly and distressed return journey.
Charles Baley tells this dramatic story and discusses its aftermath, for the emigrants, for Beale's Wagon Road, and for the Mojaves, against whom some of the emigrants pressed legal claims with the federal government.
In Upsetting Composition Commonplaces, Ian Barnard argues that composition still retains the bulk of instructional practices that were used in the decades before poststructuralist theory discredited them. While acknowledging that some of the foundational insights of poststructuralist theory can be difficult to translate to the classroom, Barnard upends several especially intransigent tenets that continue to influence the teaching of writing and how students are encouraged to understand writing.
Using six major principles of writing classrooms and textbooks—clarity, intent, voice, ethnography, audience, and objectivity—Barnard looks at the implications of poststructuralist theory for pedagogy. While suggesting some evocative poststructuralist pedagogical practices, the author focuses on diagnosing the fault lines of composition's refusal of poststructuralism rather than on providing "solutions” in the form of teaching templates.
Upsetting Composition Commonplaces addresses the need to more effectively engage in poststructuralist concepts in composition in an accessible and engaging voice that will advance the conversation about relations between the theory and teaching of writing.
Composition research consistently demonstrates that the social context of writing determines the majority of conventions any writer must observe. Still, most universities organize the required first-year composition course as if there were an intuitive set of general writing "skills" usable across academic and work-world settings.
In College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction, Anne Beaufort reports on a longitudinal study comparing one student’s experience in FYC, in history, in engineering, and in his post-college writing. Her data illuminate the struggle of college students to transfer what they learn about "general writing" from one context to another. Her findings suggest ultimately not that we must abolish FYC, but that we must go beyond even genre theory in reconceiving it.
Accordingly, Beaufort would argue that the FYC course should abandon its hope to teach a sort of general academic discourse, and instead should systematically teach strategies of responding to contextual elements that impinge on the writing situation. Her data urge attention to issues of learning transfer, and to developmentally sound linkages in writing instruction within and across disciplines. Beaufort advocates special attention to discourse community theory, for its power to help students perceive and understand the context of writing.
In the rational modern world, belief in the supernatural seemingly has been consigned to the worlds of entertainment and fantasy. Yet belief in other worldly phenomena, from poltergeists to telepathy, remains strong, as Gillian Bennett's research shows. Especially common is belief in continuing contact with, or the continuing presence of, dead family members. Bennett interviewed women in Manchester, England, asking them questions about ghosts and other aspects of the supernatural. (Her discussion of how her research methods and interview techniques evolved is in itself valuable.) She first published the results of the study in the well-received Traditions of Belief: Women and the Supernatural, which has been widely used in folklore and women's studies courses. "Alas, Poor Ghost!" extensively revises and expands that work. In addition to a fuller presentation and analysis of the original field research and other added material, the author, assisted by Kate Bennett, a gerontological psychologist, presents and discusses new research with a group of women in Leicester, England.
Bennett is interested in more than measuring the extent of belief in other worldly manifestations. Her work explores the relationship between narrative and belief. She anticipated that her questions would elicit from her interviewees not just yes or no replies but stories about their experiences that confirmed or denied notions of the supernatural. The more controversial the subject matter, the more likely individuals were to tell stories, especially if their answers to questions of belief were positive. These were most commonly individualized narratives of personal experience, but they contained many of the traditional motifs and other content, including belief in the supernatural, of legends. Bennett calls them memorates and discusses the cultural processes, including ideas of what is a "proper" experience of the supernatural and a "proper" telling of the story, that make them communal as well as individual. These memorates provide direct and vivid examples of what the storytellers actually believe and disbelieve. In a final section, Bennett places her work in historical context through a discussion of case studies in the history of supernatural belief.
The practice of polygamy occupies a unique place in North American history and has had a profound effect on its legal and social development. The Polygamy Question explores the ways in which indigenous and immigrant polygamy have shaped the lives of individuals, communities, and the broader societies that have engaged with it. The book also considers how polygamy challenges our traditional notions of gender and marriage and how it might be effectively regulated to comport with contemporary notions of justice.
The contributors to this volume—scholars of law, anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, and religious studies—disentangle diverse forms of polygamy and polyamory practiced among a range of religious and national backgrounds including Mormon and Muslim. They chart the harms and benefits these models have on practicing women, children, and men, whether they are independent families or members of coherent religious groups. Contributors also address the complexities of evaluating this form of marriage and the ethical and legal issues surrounding regulation of the practice, including the pros and cons of legalization.
Plural marriage is the next frontier of North American marriage law and possibly the next civil rights battlefield. Students and scholars interested in polygamy, marriage, and family will find much of interest in The Polygamy Question.
Contributors include Kerry Abrams, Martha Bailey, Lori Beaman, Janet Bennion, Jonathan Cowden, Shoshana Grossbard, Melanie Heath, Debra Majeed, Rose McDermott, Sarah Song, and Maura Irene Strassberg.
In May 1855 twenty-seven men set out from the young Mormon settlements in Utah to establish the northernmost colony of the Kingdom of God, "the Northern Mission to the Remnants of the House of Jacob"-American Indians. More colonists, including families, would join them later. Building a fort in the Limhi Valley, four hundred miles to the north and at the foot of the pass by which Lewis and Clark had crossed the Continental Divide, they began to proselyte among Sacagawea's Shoshone relatives as well as members of the Bannock, Nez Percé, and other tribes. Three years later, some of their expected and actual Indian converts violently drove the colonists out and destroyed Fort Limhi.
In Fort Limhi: The Mormon Adventure in Oregon Territory, 1855-1858, David Bigler shows that the colony, known as the Salmon River Mission, played a pivotal role in the Utah War of 1857-1858 and that the catastrophic end of the mission was critical in keeping that conflict from becoming an all out war between Mormon Utah and the United States. In the process, he uses a multitude of primary sources, many newly uncovered or previously overlooked, to reconstruct a dramatic and compelling story involving stalwart Mormon frontiersmen, Brigham Young, a variety of Native American individuals and groups, the U. S. Army, and "mountaineers," as the surviving fur trade veterans now commonly known as "mountain men" called themselves.
The teacher-student conference is standard in the repertoire of teachers at all levels. Because it's a one-to-one encounter, teachers work hard to make it comfortable; but because it's a pedagogical moment, they hope that learning occurs in the encounter, too. The literature in this area often suggests that a conference is a conversation, but this doesn't account for a teacher's need to use it pedagogically. Laurel Johnson Black's new book explores the conflicting meanings and relations embedded in conferencing and offers a new theoretical understanding of the conference along with practical approaches to conferencing more effectively with students.
Analyzing taped conferences of several different teachers and students, Black considers the influence that power, gender, and culture can have on a conference. She draws on sociolinguistic theory, as well as critical theory in composition and rhetoric, to build an understanding of the writing conference as an encounter somewhere between conversation and the classroom. She finds neither the conversation model nor versions of the master-apprentice model satisfactory. Her approach is humane, student-centered, and progressive, but it does not ignore the valid pedagogical purposes a teacher might have in conferencing. Between Talk and Teaching will be a valuable addition to the professional library of writing teachers and writing program administrators.
In 2011, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) turned one hundred years old. But our profession is endlessly beginning, constantly transforming itself and its purpose as new voices and identities claim their rights in our classrooms and in our country. The recognition of such claims, however, does not occur without a struggle, without collective work.
Listening to our Elders attempts to capture the history of those collective moments where teachers across grade levels and institutions of higher education organized to insure that the voices, heritages, and traditions of their students and colleagues were recognized within our professional organizations as a vital part of our classrooms and our discipline. In doing so, Listening to Our Elders demonstrates this recognition was not always easily given. Instead, whether the issue was race, sexuality, class, or disability, committed activist organizations have often had to push against the existing limits of our field and its organizations to insure a broader sense of common responsibility and humanity was recognized.
Listening to Our Elders features interviews with Malea Powell (Native American Caucus), Joyce Rain Anderson (Native American Caucus), Jeffery Paul Chan (Asian/Asian American), James Hill (Black Caucus), James Dolmage (Committee for Disability Issue in College Composition), Geneva Smitherman (Language Policy Commitee), Carlota Cárdenas de Dwyer (Latino/a Caucus), Victor Villanueva (Latino/a Caucus), Louise Dunlap (Progressive Caucus), Karen Hollis (Progressive Caucus), Louie Crew (Queer Caucus), William Thelin (Working Class Culture and Pedagogy SIG), Bill Macauley (Working Class Culture and Pedagogy SIG).
Smart phones, tablets, Facebook, Twitter, and wireless Internet connections are the latest technologies to have become entrenched in our culture. Although traditionalists have argued that computer-mediated communication and cyberspace are incongruent with the study of folklore, Trevor J. Blank sees the digital world as fully capable of generating, transmitting, performing, and archiving vernacular culture. Folklore in the Digital Age documents the emergent cultural scenes and expressive folkloric communications made possible by digital “new media” technologies.
New media is changing the ways in which people learn, share, participate, and engage with others as they adopt technologies to complement and supplement traditional means of vernacular expression. But behavioral and structural overlap in many folkloric forms exists between on- and offline, and emerging patterns in digital rhetoric mimic the dynamics of previously documented folkloric forms, invoking familiar social or behavior customs, linguistic inflections, and symbolic gestures.
Folklore in the Digital Age provides insights and perspectives on the myriad ways in which folk culture manifests in the digital age and contributes to our greater understanding of vernacular expression in our ever-changing technological world.
A pioneering examination of the folkloric qualities of the World Wide Web, e-mail, and related digital media. These stuidies show that folk culture, sustained by a new and evolving vernacular, has been a key, since the Internet's beginnings, to language, practice, and interaction online. Users of many sorts continue to develop the Internet as a significant medium for generating, transmitting, documenting, and preserving folklore.
In a set of new, insightful essays, contributors Trevor J. Blank, Simon J. Bronner, Robert Dobler, Russell Frank, Gregory Hansen, Robert Glenn Howard, Lynne S. McNeill, Elizabeth Tucker, and William Westerman showcase ways the Internet both shapes and is shaped by folklore
His memoir, My Many Selves, is both an incisive self-examination and a creative approach to retelling his life. Writing his autobiography became a quest to harmonize the diverse, discordant parts of his identity and resolve the conflicts in what he thought and believed. To see himself clearly and whole, he broke his self down, personified the fragments, uncovered their roots in his life, and engaged his multiple identities and experiences in dialogue. Basic to his story and to its lifelong concerns with ethics and rhetoric was his youth in rural Utah. He valued that background, while acknowledging its ambiguous influence on him, and continued to identify himself as Mormon, though he renounced most Latter-day Saint doctrines.
Wayne Booth died in October 2005, soon after completing work on his autobiography.
In Noise from the Writing Center, Boquet develops a theory of "noise" and excess as an important element of difference between the pedagogy of writing centers and the academy in general. Addressing administrative issues, Boquet strains against the bean-counting anxiety that seems to drive so much of writing center administration. Pedagogically, she urges a more courageous practice, developed via metaphors of music and improvisation, and argues for "noise," excess, and performance as uniquely appropriate to the education of writers and tutors in the center.
Personal, even irreverent in style, Boquet is also theoretically sophisticated, and she draws from an eclectic range of work in academic and popular culture-from Foucault to Attali to Jimi Hendrix. She includes, as well, the voices of writing center tutors with whom she conducted research, and she finds some of her most inspiring moments in the words and work of those tutors.
The creative traditions and expressive culture of students' families, neighborhoods, towns, religious communities, and peer groups provide opportunities to extend classrooms, sustain learning beyond school buildings, and better connect students and schools with their communities. Folklorists and educators have long worked together to expand curricula through engagement with local knowledge and informal cultural arts-folk arts in education is a familiar rubric for these programs-but the unrealized potential here, for both the folklore scholar and the teacher, is large. The value folklorists "place on the local, the vernacular, and the aesthetics of daily life does not reverberate" throughout public education, even though, in the words of Paddy Bowman and Lynne Hamer, "connecting young people to family and community members and helping them to develop self-identity are vital to civic well-being and to school success."
Through the Schoolhouse Door offers a collection of experiences from exemplary school programs and the analysis of an expert group of folklorists and educators who are dedicated not only to getting students out the door and into their communities to learn about the folk culture all around them but also to honoring the culture teachers and students bring to the classroom.
In 1923, America paid close attention, via special radio broadcasts, newspaper headlines, and cover stories in popular magazines, as a government party descended the Colorado to survey Grand Canyon. Fifty years after John Wesley Powell's journey, the canyon still had an aura of mystery and extreme danger. At one point, the party was thought lost in a flood.
Something important besides adventure was going on. Led by Claude Birdseye and including colorful characters such as early river-runner Emery Kolb, popular writer Lewis Freeman, and hydraulic engineer Eugene La Rue, the expedition not only made the first accurate survey of the river gorge but sought to decide the canyon's fate. The primary goal was to determine the best places to dam the Grand. With Boulder Dam not yet built, the USGS, especially La Rue, contested with the Bureau of Reclamation over how best to develop the Colorado River. The survey party played a major role in what was known and thought about Grand Canyon.
The authors weave a narrative from the party's firsthand accounts and frame it with a thorough history of water politics and development and the Colorado River. The recommended dams were not built, but the survey both provided base data that stood the test of time and helped define Grand Canyon in the popular imagination.
The Beautiful Lesson of the I is a collection of finely made poems by an accomplished poet. It will reward the scholar and the student of poetry, as well as the reader looking for the simple pleasures of poetic insight authentically felt. Winner of the Swenson Poetry Award 2005. Now in paperback.
Programs in technical writing, technical communication, and/or professional communication have recently grown in enrollment as the demand among employers for formally prepared technical writers and editors has grown. In response, scholarly treatments of the subject and the teaching of technical writing are also burgeoning, and the body of research and theory being published in this field is many times larger and more accessible than it was even a decade ago.
Although many theoretical and disciplinary perspectives can potentially inform technical communication teaching, administration, and curriculum development, the actual influences on the field's canonical texts have traditionally come from a rather limited range of disciplines. Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication brings together a wide range of scholars/teachers to expand the existing canon.
What We Really Value traces the origins of traditional rubrics within the theoretical and historical circumstances out of which they emerged, then holds rubrics up for critical scrutiny in the context of contemporary developments in the field. As an alternative to the generic character and decontextualized function of scoring guides, he offers dynamic criteria mapping, a form of qualitative inquiry by which writing programs (as well as individual instructors) can portray their rhetorical values with more ethical integrity and more pedagogical utility than rubrics allow.
To illustrate the complex and indispensable insights this method can provide, Broad details findings from his study of eighty-nine distinct and substantial criteria for evaluation at work in the introductory composition program at "City University." These chapters are filled with the voices of composition instructors debating and reflecting on the nature, interplay, and relative importance of the many criteria by which they judged students' texts. Broad concludes his book with specific strategies that can help writing instructors and programs to discover, negotiate, map, and express a more robust truth about what they value in their students' rhetorical performances.
Following Tradition is an expansive examination of the history of tradition—"one of the most common as well as most contested terms in English language usage"—in Americans' thinking and discourse about culture. Tradition in use becomes problematic because of "its multiple meanings and its conceptual softness." As a term and a concept, it has been important in the development of all scholarly fields that study American culture. Folklore, history, American studies, anthropology, cultural studies, and others assign different value and meaning to tradition. It is a frequent point of reference in popular discourse concerning everything from politics to lifestyles to sports and entertainment. Politicians and social advocates appeal to it as prima facie evidence of the worth of their causes. Entertainment and other media mass produce it, or at least a facsimile of it. In a society that frequently seeks to reinvent itself, tradition as a cultural anchor to be reverenced or rejected is an essential, if elusive, concept. Simon Bronner's wide net captures the historical, rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological dimensions of tradition. As he notes, he has written a book "about an American tradition—arguing about it." His elucidation of those arguments makes fascinating and thoughtful reading. An essential text for folklorists, Following Tradition will be a valuable reference as well for historians and anthropologists; students of American studies, popular culture, and cultural studies; and anyone interested in the continuing place of tradition in American culture.
This classic biography is now in its fourth USU Press printing. It is unparalleled in providing a thorough and accurate account of John D. Lee's involvement in the tragic 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre.
Tutoring Second Language Writers, a complete update of Bruce and Rafoth’s 2009 ESL Writers, is a guide for writing center tutors that addresses the growing need for tutors who are better prepared to work with the increasingly international population of students seeking guidance at the writing center.
Drawing upon philosopher John Dewey’s belief in reflective thinking as a way to help build new knowledge, the book is divided into four parts. Part 1: Actions and Identities is about creating a proactive stance toward language difference, thinking critically about labels, and the mixed feelings students may have about learning English. Part 2: Research Opportunities demonstrates writing center research projects and illustrates methods tutors can use to investigate their questions about writing center work. Part 3: Words and Passages offers four personal stories of inquiry and discovery, and Part 4: Academic Expectations describes some of the challenges tutors face when they try to help writers meet readers’ specific expectations.
Advancing the conversations tutors have with one another and their directors about tutoring second language writers and writing, Tutoring Second Language Writers engages readers with current ideas and issues that highlight the excitement and challenge of working with those who speak English as a second or additional language.
Contributors include Jocelyn Amevuvor, Rebecca Day Babcock, Valerie M. Balester, Shanti Bruce, Frankie Condon, Michelle Cox, Jennifer Craig, Kevin Dvorak, Paula Gillespie, Glenn Hutchinson, Pei-Hsun Emma Liu, Bobbi Olson, Pimyupa W. Praphan, Ben Rafoth, Jose L. Reyes Medina, Guiboke Seong, and Elizabeth (Adelay) Witherite.
The central issue Bush finds in these works is how their authors have dealt with the authority of Mormon Church leaders. As she puts it in her preface, "I use the phrase 'faithful transgression' to describe moments in the texts when each writer, explicitly or implicitly, commits herself in writing to trust her own ideas and authority over official religious authority while also conceiving of and depicting herself to be a 'faithful' member of the Church." Bush recognizes her book as her own act of faithful transgression. Writing it involved wrestling, she states, "with my own deeply ingrained religious beliefs and my equally compelling education in feminist theories that mean to liberate and empower women."
Faithful Transgressions examines a remarkable group of authors and their highly readable and entertaining books. In producing the first significant book-length study of Mormon women's autobiographical writing, Bush rides a wave of memoir publishing and academic interest in autobiography and other life narratives. As she elucidates these works in relation to the religious tradition that played a major role in shaping them, she not only positions them in relation to feminist theory and current work on women's life writings but ties them to the long literary tradition of spiritual autobiography.
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