Naked Lunch was banned, castigated, and recognized as a work of genius on its first publication in 1959, and fifty years later it has lost nothing of its power to astonish, shock, and inspire. A lacerating satire, an exorcism of demons, a grotesque cabinet of horrors, it is the Black Book of the Beat Generation, the forerunner of the psychedelic counterculture, and a progenitor of postmodernism and the digital age. A work of excoriating laughter, linguistic derangement, and transcendent beauty, it remains both influential and inimitable.
This is the first book devoted in its entirety to William Burroughs’ masterpiece, bringing together an international array of scholars, artists, musicians, and academics from many fields to explore the origins, writing, reception, and complex meanings of Naked Lunch. Tracking the legendary book from Texas and Mexico to New York, Tangier, and Paris, Naked Lunch@50 significantly advances our understanding and appreciation of this most elusive and uncanny of texts.
Contributors:
Contributors:
Keith Albarn
Eric Andersen
Gail-Nina Anderson
Théophile Aries
Jed Birmingham
Shaun de Waal
Richard Doyle
Loren Glass
Oliver Harris
Kurt Hemmer
Allen Hibbard
Rob Holton
Andrew Hussey
Rob Johnson
Jean-Jacques Lebel
Ian MacFadyen
Polina Mackay
Jonas Mekas
Barry Miles
R. B. Morris
Timothy S. Murphy
Jurgen Ploog
Davis Schneiderman
Jennie Skerl
DJ Spooky
Philip Taaffe
In Names above Houses, Oliver de la Pazuses both prose and verse poems to create the magical realm of Fidelito Recto—a boy who wants to fly—and his family of Filipino immigrants. Fidelito’s mother, Maria Elena, tries to keep her son grounded while struggling with her own moorings. Meanwhile, Domingo, Fidelito's fisherman father, is always at sea, even when among them. From the archipelago of the Philippines to San Francisco, horizontal and vertical movements shape moments of displacement and belonging for this marginalized family. Fidelito approaches life with a sense of wonder, finding magic in the mundane and becoming increasingly uncertain whether he is in the sky or whether his feet are planted firmly on the ground.
Jerome A. Popp examines the role of Dewey-based pragmatism in the past, present, and future of philosophy of education. He insists that even though Marx-ian utopian thought subjugated Dewey’s ideas during the 1970s, Dewey’s epistemological arguments are directly relevant to contemporary philosophy. He contends that not only are Dewey’s arguments related to how we think about philosophy of education; they actually improve the thinking reflected in the literature. Dewey’s arguments, he demonstrates, provide the basis for both a rejuvenated account of conceptual analysis and a criticism of the utopian relativism currently dominating the literature.
Popp notes that empiricism, manifested in the philosophy of education as analytic philosophy, holds that scientific findings, especially from psychology, have no place in philosophy. But contemporary writers in the philosophy of science contend that to justify the methods of science we must consider what is known about intelligence and cognitive processes. These arguments are relevant to the ways in which we justify claims about proper education.
Naturalizing epistemology (using the results of science in philosophic theories) leads to an enhanced account of Dewey’s instrumental approach to normative inquiry and strengthens attempts to justify educational practices. Dewey’s critique of utopian approaches to social theory is bolstered by contemporary arguments in epistemology and the philosophy of science. These arguments reject the attempt by some in philosophy of education to solve value questions through an appeal to utopian thinking. Popp agrees with Dewey’s view that the proper goals of education cannot be stated in these terms.
In 1926, the new NBC networks established an advisory board of prominent citizens to help it make program decisions as well as to deflect concerns over NBC’s dominance over radio. The council, which advised NBC on program development—especially cultural broadcasts and those aimed at rural audiences—influenced not only NBC’s policies but also decisions other radio organizations made, decisions that resonate in today’s electronic media
The council’s rulings had wide-ranging impact on society and the radio industry, addressing such issues as radio’s operation in the public interest; access of religious groups to the airwaves; personal attacks on individuals, especially the clergy; and coverage of controversial issues of public importance. Principles adopted in these decrees kept undesirable shows off the air, and other networks, stations, and professional broadcast groups used the council’s decisions in establishing their own organizational guidelines.
Benjamin documents how these decrees had influence well after the council’s demise. Beginning in the early 1930s, the council denied use of NBC to birth control advocates. This refusal revealed a pointed clash between traditional and modernistic elements in American society and laid down principles for broadcasting controversial issues. This policy resonated throughout the next five decades with the implementation of the Fairness Doctrine.
The NBC Advisory Council and Radio Programming, 1926–1945 offers the first in-depth examination of the council, which reflected and shaped American society during the interwar period. Author Louise M. Benjamin tracks the council from its inception until it was quietly disbanded in 1945, insightfully critiquing the council’s influence on broadcast policies, analyzing early attempts at using the medium of radio to achieve political goals, and illustrating the council’s role in the development of program genres, including news, sitcoms, crime drama, soap operas, quiz shows, and variety programs.
With this collection of essays, Jack Kamerman presents the first sustained examination of one of the underpinnings of the operation of the criminal justice system: the issue of responsibility for actions and, as a consequence, the issue of accountability.
Unique in the breadth of its approach, this volume examines the issue of responsibility from the perspectives of criminal justice professionals, sociologists, philosophers, and public administrators from four countries. Attacking the problem on various levels, the essayists look first at the assumptions made by criminal justice institutions regarding offender responsibility, then turn to the views of offenders on the causes of their own actions and to the consequences of offenders either to accept or deny responsibility.
These scholars also examine the social and psychological circumstances under which people in general accept or deny responsibility for what they do, thus providing the basis for understanding the process of social distance as a major precondition for people to commit atrocities without seeing themselves as responsible. Understanding the circumstances under which people either distance themselves from or embrace responsibility enables criminologists to make grounded recommendations for reordering responsibility in the criminal justice system and, more generally, for restoring a sense of responsibility to organizations, occupations, and society.
Aside from Kamerman, the contributors are William C. Collins, Charles Fethe, Gilbert Geis, Robert J. Kelly, Alison Liebling, Jess Maghan, Mark Harrison Moore, Paul Neurath, John Rakis, William Rentzmann, and José E. Sánchez.
In this fourth and final installment in the Aquatic and Standing Water Plants of the Central Midwest series, veteran botanist Robert H. Mohlenbrock identifies aquatic and wetland plants in eight central Midwestern states, which include Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Kentucky (excluding the Cumberland Mountain region), Missouri, and Nebraska.
Nelumbonaceae to Vitaceae: Water Lotuses to Grapes contains 346 highly informative and technically accurate illustrations as well as ecological information, nomenclature, and keys for plants in the aforementioned families, including white water lily, fireweed, smartweed, mild water pepper, hawthorn, and wild strawberry. Mohlenbrock identifies and describes each plant in concise and readable prose and indicates its usual habitats and the states in which it occurs.
As with previous volumes, Mohlenbrock organizes each species into three groups: truly aquatic plants, which spend their entire life with their vegetative parts either completely submerged or floating on the water’s surface; emergents, which are usually rooted under water with their vegetative parts standing above the water’s surface; and wetland plants, which live most or all of their lives out of water.
With Nelumbonaceae to Vitaceae, Mohlenbrock completes the four-volume series organizing and identifying wetland plants in the central Midwest. The botanical series will aid many, from teachers and students to state and federal employees, focused on conservation efforts and mitigation issues.
Extraordinary advances in neurochemistry are both transforming our understanding of human nature and creating an urgent problem. Much is now known about the ways that neurotransmitters influence normal social behavior, mental illness, and deviance. What are these discoveries about the workings of the human brain? How can they best be integrated into our legal system?
These explosive issues are best understood by focusing on a single neurotransmitter like serotonin, which is associated with such diverse behaviors as dominance and leadership, seasonal depression, suicide, alcoholism, impulsive homicide, and arson. This book brings together revised papers from a conference on this theme organized by the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research, supplemented with articles by leading scholars who did not attend. Contributors include psychiatrists, neurologists, social scientists, and legal scholars.
The Neurotransmitter Revolution presents a unique survey of the scientific and legal implications of research on the way serotonin combines with other factors to shape human behavior. The findings are quite different from what might have been expected even a decade ago.
The neurochemistry of behavior is not the same thing as genetic determinism. On the contrary, the activity of serotonin varies from one individual to another for many reasons, including the individual’s life experience, social status, personality, and diet. And there are a number of major neurotransmitter systems, each of which interacts with the other. Behavior, culture, and the social environment can influence neurochemistry along with inheritance. Nature and nurture interact—and these interactions can be understood from a vigorously scientific point of view.
The fact that our actions are heavily influenced by neurotransmitters like serotonin is bound to be disquieting. A sophisticated understanding of law and human social behavior will be needed if our society is to respond adequately to these rapid advances in our knowledge. This book is an essential step in that direction, providing the first comprehensive survey of the biochemical, social, and legal considerations arising from research on the behavioral effects of serotonin and related neurotransmitters.
A diverse repertoire of art songs for piano and voice
The art song—a delicate and inspiring blend of music and poetry—has been performed by singers and pianists and appreciated by audiences around the world for more than two hundred years. While collections of art songs abound, this welcome volume and its accompanying compact discs make readily available the contributions of contemporary African American composers to the popular genre. Including thirty-nine pieces for voice and piano created since 1968 by eighteen artists, ANew Anthology of Art Songs by African American Composers navigates a varied musical terrain from classical European traditions to jazz and spirituals. With nearly half of the featured songs composed by women and with others by lesser-known and emerging composers, this important collection offers a diverse, representative sampling of African American art songs and works to secure the places of these songs and artists in the canon of contemporary American music.
Selected by Jeanine Wagner and Margaret R. Simmons, prolific and celebrated performers who have presented recitals throughout the world featuring the art songs of African American composers, this dazzling new repertoire of twentieth-century music is cogently framed by a thorough introduction and substantial biographies of each composer. The compact discs feature piano tracks of all thirty-nine compositions.
The featured composers are H. Leslie Adams, Mable Bailey, Charles S. Brown, Wallace McClain Cheatham, Adolphus Hailstork, Jacqueline B. Hairston, William H. Henderson, Jeraldine Saunders Herbison, Betty Jackson King, William Foster
McDaniel, Undine Smith Moore, Byron Motley, Barbara Sherrill, Robert Owens, Nadine Shanti, Frederick Tillis, Dolores White, and Julius P. Williams.
In New Perspectiveson the Irish Diaspora, Charles Fanning incorporates eighteen fresh perspectives on the Irish diaspora over three centuries and around the globe. He enlists scholarly tools from the disciplines of history, sociology, literary criticism, folklore, and culture studies to present a collection of writings about the Irish diaspora of great variety and depth.
This collection of twenty-nine essays represents a summation of Kostelanetz’s thoughts on poetry since the publication of his earlier work The Old Poetries and the New.
In sections on “The New Poetries,” “Some Old,” and “Autobiographical Addenda,” the essays range from sketches of Kenneth Burke, John Berryman, and Northrop Frye through considerations of the latest sound-text poetry to Kostelanetz’s justification of his own work. These pieces reflect Kostelanetz’s ongoing commitment to the esthetics he ascribes to high modernism—innovation, abstraction, intelligence, and complexity in all the arts.
Poetry today holds mainstream attention as never before. From community workshops to reading groups, from coffee house poetry slams to small press lit mags, from universities to web 'zines, the world of poetry has become part of our everyday lives. Demonstrating the range and vitality of the new generation of American writers, The New Young American Poets features the work of forty poets born since 1960.
Scientists who specialize in the study of Mississippi Valley earthquakes say that the region is overdue for a powerful tremor that will cause major damage and undoubtedly some casualties.
The inevitability of a future quake and the lack of preparation by both individuals and communities provided the impetus for this book. Atkinson brings together applicable information from many disciplines: history, geology and seismology, engineering, zoology, politics and community planning, economics, environmental science, sociology, and psychology and mental health to provide the most comprehensive perspective to date of the myriad impacts of a major earthquake on the Mississippi Valley.
Atkinson addresses such basic questions as "What, actually, are earthquakes? How do they occur? Where are they likely to occur? Can they be predicted, perhaps even prevented?" He also addresses those steps that individuals can take to improve their chances for survival both during and after an earthquake.
Told from the point of view of a young boy, this account shows how a family “faced the 1930s head on and lived to tell the story.” It is the story of growing up in southern Illinois, specifically the Marion, area during the Great Depression. But when it was first published in 1972 the book proved to be more than one writer’s memories of depression-era southern Illinois.
“People started writing me from all over the country,” Hastings notes. “And all said much the same: ‘You were writing about my family, as much as your own. That’s how I remember the 1930s, too.’”
As he proves time and again in this book, Hastings is a natural storyteller who can touch upon the detail that makes the tale both poignant and universal. He brings to life a period that marked every man, woman, and child who lived through it even as that national experience fades into the past.
Johnson argues that nineteenth-century rhetoric was primarily synthetic, derived from the combination of classical elements and eighteenth-century belletristic and epistemological approaches to theory and practice. She reveals that nineteenth-century rhetoric supported several rhetorical arts, each conceived systematically from a similar theoretical foundation.
Winifred Bryan Horner argues that an understanding of the changes that occurred in the content of nineteenth-century courses in logic, rhetoric, and belles lettres taught in Scottish universities provides important critical insight into the development of the twentieth-century American composition course, as well as courses in English literature and critical theory.
Because of the inaccessibility of primary materials documenting the changes in courses taught at Scottish universities, the impression remains that the nineteenth century represents a break with the traditional school curriculum rather than a logical transition to a new focus of study. Horner has discovered that the notes of students who attended these classes—meticulously transcribed records of the lectures that professors dictated in lieu of printed texts—provide reliable documentation of the content of courses taught during the period. Using these records, Horner traces the evolution of current traditional composition, developed in the United States in the first part of the twentieth century, from courses taught in nineteenth-century, northern Scottish universities. She locates the beginning of courses in English literature and belletristic composition in the southern schools, particularly Edinburgh.
Horner’s study opens new vistas for the study of the evolution of university curricula, especially the never before acknowledged influence of belletristric rhetoric on the development of the North American composition course.
Just as women changed the direction and agenda of the peace movement when they became progressively more involved in an all-male club, black women altered a cause that had previously lacked racial diversity when they were first granted admission to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1915. As Joyce Blackwell illustrates in this first study of collective black peace activism, the increased presence of black women in the WILPF over the next sixty years brought to the movement historical experiences shaped by societal racism.
No Peace Without Freedom: Race and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915–1975 explores how black women, fueled by the desire to eradicate racial injustice, compelled the white leadership of the WILPF to revisit its own conceptions of peace and freedom. Blackwell offers a renewed examination of peace movements in American history, one that points out the implications of black women’s participation for the study of social activism, African American history, and women’s history. This new perspective on interracial and black female global activism helps redefine the often-covert systemic violence necessary to maintain systems of social and economic hierarchy, moving peace and war discourse away from its narrow focus on European and European-American issues.
Blackwell looks closely at the reasons why white women organized their own peace group at the start of World War I and assesses several bold steps taken by these groups in their first ten years. Addressing white peace activists’ continuous search for the “perfect” African American woman, Blackwell considers when and why black women joined the WILPF, why so few of them were interested in the organization, and what the small number who did join had in common with their white counterparts. She also shows how the WILPF, frustrated at its inability to successfully appeal to black women, established a controversial interracial committee to deal with the dilemma of recruiting black women while attempting to maintain all of its white members.
Tracing the black activists’ peace reform activities on an international level from World War I to the end of the Vietnam War, No Peace Without Freedom examines the links black activists established within the African American community as well as the connections they made with peoples of the black Diaspora and later with colonized people irrespective of race. The volume is complemented by eighteen illustrations.
Writers have created fictions of social perfection at least since Plato’s Republic. Sir Thomas More gave this thread of intellectual history a name when he called his contribution to it Utopia, Greek for noplace.
With each subsequent author cognizant of his predecessors and subject to altered real-world conditions which suggest ever-new causes for hope and alarm, “no place” changed. The fourteen essays presented in this book critically assess man’s fascination with and seeking for “no place.”
“In discussing these central fictions, the contributors see ‘no place’ from diverse perspectives: the sociological, the psychological, the political, the aesthetic. In revealing the roots of these works, the contributors cast back along the whole length of utopian thought. Each essay stands alone; together, the essays make clear what ‘no place’ means today. While it may be true that ‘no place’ has always seemed elsewhere or elsewhen, in fact all utopian fiction whirls contemporary actors through a costume dance no place else but here.”—from the Preface
The contributors are Eric S. Rabkin, B. G. Knepper, Thomas J.Remington, Gorman Beauchamp, William Matter, Ken Davis, Kenneth M. Roemer, William Steinhoff, Howard Segal, Jack Zipes, Kathleen Woodward, Merritt Abrash, and James W. Bittner.
Basing this compelling war memoir on his original World War II diary, Pfc. Richard D. Courtney tells what it was like to be a combat infantryman in the greatest and most destructive war in history.
Northern Arcadia is a comparative study of the accounts of foreign visitors to the Nordic lands during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Before the late eighteenth century, few foreigners ventured as far as Scandinavia. The region seemed a cold hyperborean wilderness and a voyage there a daring adventure. From the mid-1760s on, however, foreigners arrived in the Nordic lands in increasing numbers, leaving numerous accounts that became increasingly popular, satisfying a growing curiosity about regions beyond the traditional grand tour.
The pre-Romantic mood of the period—with its predilection for untamed nature and for peoples uncorrupted by overrefined civilization—further stimulated fascination with the North. European titerati discovered the Nordic sagas, finding them exhilarating, passionate, imaginative, and original. The French Revolution and the ensuing European wars effectively closed off much of the Continent to foreign travel, turning attention to the still neutral northern kingdoms.
Travel literature about Scandinavia thus illuminates the shift in the European intellectual climate from the enlightened rationalism and utilitarianism of the earlier travelers in this period to the pre-Romantic sensibility of those who followed them. In a Europe torn by war and revolution, sensitive souls could find their new Arcadia in the North—at least until the Scandinavian kingdoms themselves became engulfed by the Napoleonic wars after 1805.
The first scholar to examine as a whole the travel literature dealing with Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and the Færø Islands, H. Arnold Barton discusses accounts left by both the celebrated and the obscure. Well-known travelers include Vittorio Alfieri, Francisco de Miranda, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Malthus, and Aaron Burr. Literary travelers of the day included Nathanael Wraxall, William Coxe, Charles Gottlob Küttner, Edward Daniel Clarke, and John Carr.
Northern Arcadia brings out contrasts: among the various Nordic lands and regions; among the reactions of travelers of differing nationality; between the earlier as opposed to the later travelers of the time; between native Scandinavian and foreign perceptions of the North; between conditions in Scandinavia and those in other parts of the Western world; between then and now. It incorporates continuity and change, reality and mentality.
This third edition of Jon Ericson’s Notes and Comments on Robert’s Rules updates all references and page numbers to the tenth edition of Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised, published in 2000. Ericson’s guide to the authoritative parliamentary resource clarifies many of the concepts and rules that intimidate or confuse the members of organizations who use it, stressing that they have a choice in—and may, in fact, modify—the rules by which they are bound.
Ericson begins with the Order of Precedence, which he defines as the key concept in understanding and utilizing parliamentary procedure. He then uses a question-and-answer format in which a logical progression of essential parliamentary questions is explicitly answered, with a rationale for each rule. Throughout, he provides specific page references to Robert’s Rules. Through these three elements, he makes classic doctrine intelligible and workable, leading the reader step-by-step through the rules and their applications and, in the process, encouraging people to feel more positive about parliamentary procedure and their ability to use it.
“Far too many members, armed—or more accurately disarmed—with a misconception of parliamentary procedure, choose to spend a lifetime wondering what is going on and lamenting or blaming others when things fail to go their way,” writes Ericson in the Introduction. “Understanding parliamentary procedure also allows a person to have more fun—not just the fun of socializing outside the business meeting—but the fun of performing in the public arena.”
A popular, concise, and clear handbook, Notes and Comments on Robert’s Rules emphasizes the simple machinery of the system, relates its concepts to the procedures most commonly used in meetings and conventions, and encourages members to obtain and study, rather than shy away from Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised. This new edition also expands the number of question-and-answer sections and surveys the research in and commentary on the field since 1991. A laminated, removable card featuring simplified charts of parliamentary motions serves as an additional resource and is included with the volume.
While Robert’s Rules of Order has long been the standard guide to parliamentary procedure, many readers find the manual too daunting and complex to utilize its full potential. In Notes and Comments on "Robert’s Rules", fourth edition, authors Jim Slaughter, Gaut Ragsdale, and Jon Ericson skillfully guide users through the intricate pathways of the latest edition of Robert’s Rules, transforming the often intimidating parliamentary guidebook into an easy-to-use tool. Notes and Comments explains in simple terms the individual motions found in Robert’s Rules, presents extensive tips and suggestions regarding possible modifications to Robert’s practices; allows readers to witness the vigorous debate about the rules within the notes section; and compares major parliamentary authorities. A reader-friendly question-and-answer format provides immediate solutions to the most common quandaries that arise during the meeting process, and a card featuring simplified charts of parliamentary motions is available for the user’s quick reference.
An essential volume for members of nonprofits, voluntary associations, unions, condo and homeowner associations, student organizations, and government bodies, Notes and Comments on “Robert’s Rules” makes parliamentary procedure accessible to meeting participants as never before. Each section of this authoritative, straightforward guide is designed to empower participants with the confidence and knowledge necessary to navigate any meeting, large or small, with the utmost efficiency.
2013 Winner of the Phifer Award from the National Communication Association
In this compelling and often startling account, Robert Werman chronicles his experiences as an Israeli citizen living in Jerusalem during the Gulf War. On January 19, 1991, he began writing daily reports on his computer, sending them to friends and a few computer networks that dealt with Jewish culture and the politics of the Middle East. To Werman’s surprise, he received numerous electronic responses to his entries, sometimes as many as one hundred a day. As a result, his "war diary" was born, a diary that he continued until February 22, 1991, when, near the end of the war, he was hospitalized for a heart condition.
In the early entries, Werman notes each Iraqi Scud attack, describing in detail the sealed room in which he and his family sought shelter during the expected chemical attacks. "Sitting in the antigas room, members of the family try to put on a brave face, make jokes. . . . Only the dog, a rather stately collie, sits quietly and does not appear at all excited. We pity the dog, for he is the only one without a mask. But then we remember that—without a mask—he is our canary in the coal mine." Futilely, Werman seeks patterns to the attacks, attempting to predict when they might occur. He writes of the nation’s response to war: joggers running with their gas masks in hand, schools temporarily disbanded while children meet in small groups to continue their education, city streets emptied by six o'clock each evening as people wait in their homes for the sound of the sirens that herald an assault. He discusses the varying opinions concerning retaliation against Iraq, the fluctuating morale of the country, the damage produced by Iraqi missiles, and the widespread speculation of Israeli citizens concerning their country’s survival. Yet Werman’s daily reports, digressions, and explanations not only include his observations and impressions; they also poignantly reveal his own personal story and political, religious, and philosophical views.
Werman’s journal gives a singular view of a country under siege, recounting in detail the pressures, conflicts, and dangers existing during a war. It is a distinctive book, a fascinating personal and political account of a man, his family, their nation, and a war.
It has long been recognized that affect (that is, the noncognitive aspect of mental activity) plays a large role in writing and in learning to write. According to Susan H. McLeod, however, the model that has been most used for empirical research on the writing process is based on cognitive psychology and does not take into account affective phenomena. Nor does the social constructionist view of the writing process acknowledge the affective realm except in a very general way. To understand the complete picture, McLeod insists, we need to explore how cognitive, affective, and social elements interact as people write.
In this book, McLeod follows a group of students through a semester of writing assignments, tracking the students’ progress and examining the affective elements relevant to their writing. To facilitate future discussion of these phenomena, McLeod also provides suggested definitions for terms in the affective domain.
In a very real sense, this book is the result of a collaboration of three Susans: Susan McLeod, who researched and wrote the book; Sue Hallett, an instructor in Washington State University’s composition program whose classes McLeod observed and who helped provide much of the data; and Susan Parker, a graduate student who observed Hallett’s class and who ran a tutorial connected to that class. To provide a narrative structure, McLeod and her two collaborators have constructed a simulated semester, conflating the year and a half of the study into one semester and creating a class that is a composite drawn from seven classrooms over three semesters.
Although philosophers have had much to say about the affective domain, Notes on the Heart is based for the most part on research from the social sciences. Discussions of pedagogy, while meant to have practical value, are suggestive rather than prescriptive. The goal is to help teachers see their practice in new way.
Teachers will be particularly interested in McLeod’s discussion of teacher affect/effect. This section examines both the issue of the "Pygmalion effect" (students becoming better because the teacher believes they are) and perhaps the more common opposite, the "golem effect" (students becoming less capable because their teachers view them that way).
A dynamic figure in the pages of history, Major General William “Bull” Nelson played a formative role in the Union’s success in Kentucky and the Western theater of the Civil War. Now, Donald A. Clark presents a long-overdue examination of this irascible officer, his numerous accomplishments, and his grim fate. More popularly known for his temper than his intrepid endeavors on behalf of the North, Nelson nevertheless dedicated much of his life to his nation and the preservation of the Union.
The child of a privileged family, Nelson was one of the first officers to graduate from the newly formed U.S. Naval Academy. His years in the Navy imbued in him the qualities of bravery, loyalty, and fortitude; however, his term of service also seemed to breed an intolerance of others for which he became infamous, and that ultimately led to his violent downfall. Clark sheds new light upon Nelson’s pre–Civil War years as a naval officer, when he became a hardened veteran of battle, fighting at the siege of Veracruz and the capture of Tabasco during the Mexican War in the 1840s. On the basis of Nelson’s military experience, in 1861 President Lincoln sent him to Kentucky—which was considering secession—and Nelson rallied loyalists and helped the Union prepare to maintain control of the state during the next several years of war.
Nelson went on to prove instrumental in blocking Confederate attempts to subdue Kentucky and the West, serving important roles in the battle of Shiloh, General Henry W. Halleck’s advance against Corinth, and Brigadier General Don Carlos Buell’s movement toward Chattanooga. But while some viewed his bold maneuvers as the saving of the state, many others, including such notables as Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, argued that Nelson’s actions merited no praise. Unfortunately for the general, the question of his value to the Union abruptly became moot, as his achievements were shortly overshadowed by ignominious rumors of scandal and abuse.
His involvement in the defense of Louisville gave Nelson a chance to redeem himself and restore his military reputation, but the general’s famous temper soon robbed him of any potential glory. During September of 1862, in a crime that was never prosecuted, fellow Union general Jefferson C. Davis shot and killed Nelson after an argument. Clark explores this remarkable exception in military law, arguing that while the fact of the murder was indisputable, many considered Davis a hero for having dispatched the so-called tyrant. Although Nelson eventually received many posthumous honors for his indispensable role in the war, justice was never sought for his murder.
A comprehensive study of this well-known, yet misunderstood American figure, The Notorious “Bull” Nelson: Murdered Civil War General is an illuminating addition to the history of the Civil War. Through Clark’s impeccable research and richly layered narrative, William “Bull” Nelson springs from the pages as large and volatile as he was in life.
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