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The Cybernetic Brain
Sketches of Another Future
Andrew Pickering
University of Chicago Press, 2010
Cybernetics is often thought of as a grim military or industrial science of control. But as Andrew Pickering reveals in this beguiling book, a much more lively and experimental strain of cybernetics can be traced from the 1940s to the present.

The Cybernetic Brain explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the sixties counterculture all come into play as Pickering follows the history of cybernetics’ impact on the world, from contemporary robotics and complexity theory to the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering contends, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging. And thus, Pickering avers, the history of cybernetics provides us with an imaginative model of open-ended experimentation in stark opposition to the modern urge to achieve domination over nature and each other.
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Distant Voices
Sketches of a Swedenborgian World View
JOHN S. HALLER
Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2017
The legacy of the Enlightenment philosopher, scientist, and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) permeated widely throughout nineteenth-century literature, art, and social reform movements. In Distant Voices: Sketches of a Swedenborgian World View, John S. Haller takes us from the mid-nineteenth-century worlds of Henry James Sr., Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Charles Fourier through to the 1960s era of counterculture shaped by D. T. Suzuki. Each chapter can be read as a self-contained essay: biographical and critical appraisals (and reappraisals) in which the subjects are linked together by their use of Swedenborg, their interest in Eastern culture, and their desire for the betterment of society. The complete list of essays includes Henry James Sr., Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Fourier, Albert Brisbane, Thomas Lake Harris, J. J. G. Wilkinson, James Tyler Kent, Charles Bonney, The World's Parliament of Religions, Paul Carus, Herman Vetterling, Ralph Waldo Trine, and D. T. Suzuki.
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Frontier Ways
Sketches of Life in the Old West
By Edward Everett Dale
University of Texas Press, 1959

Edward Everett Dale gives a first-hand account of the way pioneer families and cowboys of the frontier lived. Dr. Dale has lived in a sod house, and he once rode the range as cook to a group of cowboys. In this book he draws on his varied experiences to describe all aspects of frontier life—the building of a home, the problems of finding wood and water, the procuring and cooking of food, medical practices, and the cultural, social, and religious life of pioneer families.

This edition is a digital facsimile of the 1959 edition.

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The Integrated Life
Essays, Sketches and Poems
Thomas P. Beyer
University of Minnesota Press, 1948

The Integrated Life was first published in 1948. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This volume of essays and poems is representative of the work and life of their author, a professor of English at Hamline University and for any years chairman of the department.

Of the essays, some are personal, others works of literary appreciation, and still others discuss the profession of teaching, in particular the teaching of English; all reveal the man who wrote them.

At Hamlin Dr. Beyer and reading have been almost synonymous. He proposed the general reading course in 1921 and directed it for twelve years. Students alert to this form of inspiration found existing delight not only in the outside reading but in the discussions with faculty members which followed. Colleagues and off-campus friends also came under provocative influence of Dr. Beyer, and his guidance has been frequently and freely acknowledged.

When Dr. Beyer was honored in 1947 for his long fruitful association with Hamline University, a publication fund was established. It was unanimously agreed that a collection of Dr. Beyer's own essays, poems, and sketches should be the first venture. The Integrated Life is that volume. No attempt has been made to bring the material up to date. The collection appears as it was written—full of the flavor and wisdom of a truly honorable teacher and friend.

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Lanford Wilson
Early Stories, Sketches, and Poems
David Crespy
University of Missouri Press, 2017
Before Lanford Wilson became a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, with such celebrated productions as The Hot l Baltimore, Fifth of July, Talley’s Folly, and Burn This, he wrote dozens of short stories and poems, many of which take place in the 1950s, small-town Missouri where he grew up. This selection of Wilson’s early work, written between 1955 and 1967 when he was between the ages of 18 and 30, provides a rare look at a young writer developing his style. The stories explore many of the themes Wilson later took up in the theater, such as sexual identity and the rupture of societies and families. These never-before-published works—part of the manuscript collection donated by Wilson to the University of Missouri—shed light on the roots of some of America’s best-loved plays and are accomplished and evocative works in their own right.
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Loyalty on the Frontier
Sketches of Union Men of the South-West with Incidents and Adventures in Rebellion on the Border
A.W. Bishop
University of Arkansas Press, 2003

First published in 1863, this book has the immediacy, passion, and intimacy of its wartime context. It tells the remarkable story of Albert Webb Bishop, a New York lawyer turned Union soldier, who in 1862 accepted a commission as lieutenant colonel in a regiment of Ozark mountaineers. While maintaining Union control of northwest Arkansas, he collected stories of the social coercion, political secession, and brutal terrorism that scarred the region.

His larger goal, however, was to popularize and inspire sympathy for the South’s Unionists and to chronicle the triumph of Unionism in a Confederate state. His account points to the complex and divisive nature of Confederate society and in doing so provides a perspective that has long been absent from discussions of the Civil War

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Michigan and the Cleveland Era
Sketches of University of Michigan Staff Members and Alumni Who Served the Cleveland Administrations 1885-89, 1893-97
Edited by Earl D. Babst and Lewis G. Vander Velde
University of Michigan Press, 1948
This is a four-year labor of love by a group of alumni of the University of Michigan. It depicts the contribution by the University to the public life of the country at a turning point in our national history. Our country has for more than three hundred years been engaged in developing an educational system, culminating in the colleges and universities, public and private. The success of such a program is properly measured by the degree to which it contributes enlightened leadership to the communities, large and small, which provide its support. The present volume shows how one institution, at one period in American history, provided from among its graduates and faculty members a generous measure of leadership in a variety of important public functions. The collected result provides further evidence that American higher education justifies by its output the effort that has gone into its establishment and continued support.
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Midday with Buñuel
Memories and Sketches, 1973-1983
Claudio Isaac
Swan Isle Press, 2007
Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel (1900–83), known for his surrealist themes and unflinching social criticism, was an artist defined by intellectual ambition and controversy. An exile who produced some of his most famous work in Mexico and France during Franco’s dictatorship, he left a complicated imprint on the creative landscape of the twentieth century and on generations of younger filmmakers—including his Mexican friend Claudio Isaac. Drawn from Isaac’s personal papers, Midday with Buñuel: Memories and Sketches, 1973–1983 is an intimate and unconventional portrait of this cinematic icon—and memoir of Isaac’s own artistic development.

The text includes sketches, vignettes, and anecdotes from Isaac’s notebooks, revealing his perspective first as a precocious boy and then as a young man. Isaac reflects on Buñuel’s presence among a community of exiles, artists, actors, writers, and intellectuals in Mexico City. These are at once touching, perceptive, and critical glimpses into Buñuel’s roles as husband and father, friend and colleague, surrealist, philosopher, and iconoclast during his last years. Throughout, Isaac’s words reveal his deep admiration and affection for an older friend full of contradictions. Intimate photographs from the Isaac family archive complement the writing, and Bryan Thomas Scoular’s careful translation makes this text available for the first time in English.

Part biography, part memoir, Midday with Buñuel brings to life the creative milieu of Mexico City and gives readers a privileged view of the relationship between these two filmmakers.
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My Kitchen Table
Sketches from My Life
Pilar Pobil
University of Utah Press, 2007
Pilar Pobil was born on the island of Mallorca, off the Mediterranean coast of Spain, and it was there that she first learned to love the colors that suffuse her art. The tales contained here are those she later related to her own children around the kitchen table; many of them describe her childhood and young adulthood in Mallorca, filled with mystery and excitement, privilege and deprivation, and always a fierce will to face life on her own terms.

Other stories describe her meeting in Mallorca with the Utah man who would become her husband, her journey to a faraway country, the birth of her children, and her discovery of her artistic impulses and abilities. All are woven with the threads of color and culture of her two homes. Filled with wit and insight, My Kitchen Table reveals foremost the voice of a woman determined to be true to herself and to her art.

Accompanying the narrative are some fifty color reproductions of the paintings and sculptures for which Pilar Pobil has become known. This is a volume that art lovers everywhere will treasure.

"Like her paintings, Pilar’s stories overflow their pages. They fold us into their embrace, so we feel and see her dancing in and out of our minds, a curious and mischievous child, a young woman in love coming to a foreign land with a foreign culture and tongue, the heartbreak of her losses, and the continual renewals that have ripened her art. Pilar’s book, like her house, is a magic kingdom and she is the fairy princess who presides. She paints her shoes for social engagements. The seats of her chairs beam faces. Her electrical wiring metamorphoses into fantastic snakes. The garden that leads to her studio is Salt Lake City’s Giverny. Paintings are everywhere and talk to each other with glittering non sequiturs. At the center of it all is her kitchen table, the place from which she serves the voices and visions of her life. The subtleties of her telling, like the bold clarity of her judgments, are those of an artist whose inspirations are a feast she graciously invites us to share."
— from the Foreword by Robert D. Newman, Dean of the College of Humanities, University of Utah

A finalist for the Utah Book Award in Nonfiction.
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Rebels in Paradise
Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists
Bruce Laurie
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
Long ago dubbed the "Paradise of America," Northampton, Massachusetts, is also known as the home of visionaries—from the Reverend Jonathan Edwards, father of the First Great Awakening, to George W. Benson, brother-in-law of William Lloyd Garrison and a founder of the utopian Northampton Association for Education and Industry. During the mid-nineteenth century the town became a center of political abolitionism and a hub in the Underground Railroad. In this book, Bruce Laurie profiles five rebellious figures who launched Northampton's abolitionist movement—Sylvester Judd Jr., John Payson Williston, David Ruggles, Henry Sherwood Gere, and Erastus Hopkins. Through their individual stories he traces the evolution of the antislavery movement in western Massachusetts and links it to broader developments in economics, civil life, and political affairs.

Northampton's abolitionists were a heterodox group, yet most were intrepid devotees of democracy and racial equality, idealists who enjoyed genuine friendships and political alliances with African Americans. Several even took the bold step of hiring African Americans in their businesses. They avoided the doctrinal rivalries that sometimes troubled the antislavery movement in other places, skillfully steering clear of the xenophobic nativism that infected Massachusetts politics in the mid–1850s and divided the Republican Party at large. Although a prohibitionist faction disrupted the Northampton abolitionist movement for a time, the leaders prevailed on the strength of their personal prestige and political experience, making the seat of Hampshire County what one of them called an abolitionist "stronghold."
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Sketches of Alabama
Mary Duffee, edited by Jane Porter Nabers and Virginia Pounds Brown
University of Alabama Press, 1970

Mary Gordon Duffee's father, Matthew Duffee was born in Ireland and immigrated to Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1823. In Tuscaloosa he operated a popular tavern, and he later bought a resort hotel at Blount Springs. Mary Duffee was born in Alabama in 1840 and spent many summers with her family at the resort. It was the journey to and from Blount Springs that inspired Duffee's best-known work, Sketches of Alabama, which originally appeared as fifty-nine articles in the Birmingham Weekly Iron Age in 1886 and 1887. She also contributed articles to several out-of-state newspapers, wrote guide books, advertising copy, and poetry. She died in 1920. This collection contains typescripts of some of Mary Gordon Duffee's Iron Age columns "Sketches of Alabama," manuscripts of seven of Duffee's poems, a typed biographical sketch of Duffee, undated, and Duffee's obituary from the Birmingham Age-Herald.

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Sketches of Early Texas and Louisiana
By Frédéric Gaillardet
University of Texas Press, 1966

A lively report of travels in early nineteenth-century Texas and Louisiana and a fascinating account of the discovery, exploration, and settlement of those areas is presented in the work of this ebullient young French dramatist and journalist who traveled to Louisiana in 1837 and to Texas in 1839.

Frédéric Gaillardet, an alert and talented writer of the romantic school, was lured away for a decade from a successful career in Paris to satisfy his wanderlust and to seek inspiration on the American frontier. During that time he visited the American Southwest, and he talked with many personages there—men like Sam Houston, Mirabeau B. Lamar, and Achille Murat. His character sketches of these men add zest to the book, as do the facets of Gaillardet's own personality and life displayed in these pages.

Gaillardet's reports of his travels were published in various French-language newspapers of the time; a few were incorporated into the author's posthumous memoirs. His opinions, as recorded in his writings, exerted undeniable influence in the French decision to recognize Texas; one of his theses was that the Republic of Texas might become a curb, rather than a stepping stone, to an expanding United States. Despite Gaillardet's historical importance, however, none of these chapters has ever appeared before in English translation.

This collection was gathered from several sources: the Journal des Débats, the Constitutionnel, the Courrier des États-Unis, and Gaillardet's memoirs, entitled L'Aristocratie en Amérique.

The latter chapters concentrate on the career of a prominent Louisiana lawyer, politician, and diplomat, Pierre Soulé, whose much maligned name Gaillardet repeatedly and stoutly defended. A less favorable treatment of Soulé, contained in Fanny Calderón de la Barca's Attaché in Madrid, is reprinted in the appendix to aid the reader in judging the accuracy of Gaillardet's analysis of this arresting figure.

Copious footnotes to clarify the text have been added by the translator. His introduction presents a biographical sketch of Gaillardet, together with a careful analysis of the book, which has been translated lucidly and vividly.

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Sketches of Slave Life and From and From Slave Cabin to the Pulpit
Peter Randolph
West Virginia University Press, 2016

This book is the first anthology of the autobiographical writings of Peter Randolph, a prominent nineteenth-century former slave who became a black abolitionist, pastor, and community leader.

Randolph’s story is unique because he was freed and relocated from Virginia to Boston, along with his entire plantation cohort. A lawsuit launched by Randolph against his former master’s estate left legal documents that corroborate his autobiographies.

Randolph's writings give us a window into a different experience of slavery and freedom than other narratives currently available and will be of interest to students and scholars of African American literature, history, and religious studies, as well as those with an interest in Virginia history and mid-Atlantic slavery. 

 
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The Souls of Black Folk
Essays and Sketches
W.E.B. Du Bois
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
In honor of the 150th anniversary of W.E. B. Du Bois's birth in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the University of Massachusetts Library has prepared a new edition of Du Bois's classic, The Souls of Black Folk. Originally published in 1903, Souls introduced a number of now-canonical terms into the American conversation about race, among them double-consciousness, and it sounded the ominous warning that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." In a new introduction, Shawn Leigh Alexander outlines the historical context of this critical work and provides rare documents from the special collections archive at the Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Unlike Du Bois's more scholarly work, Souls blends narrative and autobiographical essays, and it continues to reach a wide domestic and international readership. This moving homage to black life and culture and its sharp economic and historical critique are more important than ever, resonating with today's unequivocal demand that Black Lives Matter in the twenty-first century.
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Tales and Sketches, vol. 1
1831-1842
Edgar Allan Poe
University of Illinois Press, 1978
Esteemed as a literary critic and poet, Edgar Allan Poe was most highly acclaimed for his tales and sketches. He transformed the short story from anecdote to art, virtually created the detective story, and perfected the psychological thriller. This volume is the first of two, edited by the consummate Poe scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott, collecting all the tales of this master of the uncanny, the unnerving, and the terrifying.
 
Poe's stories reflect his professed method of "writing as if the author were firmly impressed with the truth, yet astonished at the immensity of the wonders he related." Marrying grotesque inventiveness with superb plot construction, Poe's strikingly original tales often use only one main character and one main incident. In many of them, horror and suspense, revenge and torture, are laced with hilarious satire. Each volume is enriched with Mabbott's detailed and authoritative notes on sources, the history and collation of all known texts authorized by Poe, and variants of Poe's "final" version.
 
Volume 1 includes Poe's earliest parodies, beginning in 1831, and gathers his gothic tales written through 1842. The stories collected in this volume include "Ms. Found in a Bottle," the horrific "Berenice," "Ligeia" (which Poe considered his finest tale), "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and one of his most famous stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher."
 
Promising spine-tingling delights and sleepless nights, this annotated edition of Tales and Sketches is a treasure trove for scholars and general readers alike, confirming Poe's status as one of literary art's "most brilliant but erratic stars."
 
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Tales and Sketches, vol. 2
1843-1849
Edgar Allan Poe
University of Illinois Press, 1978
Esteemed as a literary critic and poet, Edgar Allan Poe was most highly acclaimed for his tales and sketches. He transformed the short story from anecdote to art, virtually created the detective story, and perfected the psychological thriller. This volume is the second of two, edited by the consummate Poe scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott, collecting all the tales of this master of the uncanny, the unnerving, and the terrifying.
 
Poe's stories reflect his professed method of "writing as if the author were firmly impressed with the truth, yet astonished at the immensity of the wonders he related." Marrying grotesque inventiveness with superb plot construction, Poe's strikingly original tales often use only one main character and one main incident. In many of them, horror and suspense, revenge and torture, are laced with hilarious satire. Each volume is enriched with Mabbott's detailed and authoritative notes on sources, the history and collation of all known texts authorized by Poe, and variants of Poe's "final" version.
 
Volume 2 contains stories written between 1843 and Poe's death, including "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Purloined Letter," and "The Cask of Amontillado."
 
Promising spine-tingling delights and sleepless nights, this annotated edition of Tales and Sketches is a treasure trove for scholars and general readers alike, confirming Poe's status as one of literary art's "most brilliant but erratic stars."
 
 
 
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