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"Noted literary critic Harold Bloom thinks Mason & Dixon is Pynchon's best book, but that's just a start. Not only does it contain all of the writer's typical density and erudition, it's arguably his most humane depiction of relationships. The title pair are rendered caringly and movingly, and with a lot of humor. The book is a buddy movie, and it's warm and full of earnestness and narratively propulsive once you immerse yourself in its use of 18th-century language. And it is this narrative device-a full immersion in 18th-century language, history, and culture-paired with Pynchon's typical breadth of vocabulary and knowledge that demands a companion. In A Mason & Dixon Companion, Brett Biebel offers contextual maps and photographs, episode-by-episode summaries, and page-by-page annotations explaining allusions, defining obscure vocabulary, and illuminating the book's major themes. The goal is to help readers work their way through a difficult yet remarkably rewarding novel from one of American literature's most significant writers. A Mason & Dixon Companion is so full of friendship, humor, and life, and Pynchon's use of history and language is so carefully chosen that, by the end of the novel, the 18th-century feels closer than ever. Or, at least it should. All of the book's archaic vocabulary and obscure references, its unexplained name-drops and sudden scene-shifts, it's all there to constantly remind us of the importance of paying attention. This Companion aims to help readers in their quest to pay attention"--
Explores the meaning behind the love between girls and horses. Jean O'Malley Halley examines how popular culture, including the ""pony book"" genre, uses horses to encourage conformity to gender norms but also insists that the loving relationship between a girl and a horse fundamentally challenges sexist and mainstream ideas of girlhood.
A collection of prose poems about seventies soul singer Donny Hathaway that presents a complex view of a gifted artist through imagined conversations and interviews that convey the voices, surroundings, and clashing dimensions of Hathaway's life.
Liberating today's chicken from cartoons, fast food, and other demeaning associations, The Chicken Book at once celebrates and explains this noble fowl. As it traces the rise and fall of Gallus domesticus, this astounding book passes along a trove of knowledge about everything from the chicken's biology to its place in legend and mythology.
Offers a bold perspective on the power of feelings to move us away from ecological and cultural degradation toward sound, future-focused policy and action. This book acknowledges the powerlessness of the intellect without the heart, and, like Thoreau before him, he rejects the Cartesian notion of mind-body separation.
This volume reveals how an ordinary American couple, Cimbaline and Henry Fike, wrote their way through struggles that challenged the survival of both their nation and marriage. Drawing on hundreds of letters exchanged between 1862 and 1865, A Union Tested details the lives of an Illinois homemaker and a quartermaster in the Union army and reveals how Civil War correspondence sustained relationships disrupted by war. In his research Jeremy Neely found that such letters became an epistolary bridge that sustained families--wives and husbands, parents and children, brothers and sisters--across the years and miles that stretched between them during the tumult of war. The Fikes' years-long correspondence shows how a fully formed marriage reconstituted itself within the handwritten lines the couple cast across hundreds of miles. Amid the extraordinary circumstances of wartime, writing to one another prompted a remarkable degree of self-reflection and provided for each the space to learn anew about their partners, their country, and themselves.
This volume reveals how an ordinary American couple, Cimbaline and Henry Fike, wrote their way through struggles that challenged the survival of both their nation and marriage. Drawing on hundreds of letters exchanged between 1862 and 1865, A Union Tested details the lives of an Illinois homemaker and a quartermaster in the Union army and reveals how Civil War correspondence sustained relationships disrupted by war. In his research Jeremy Neely found that such letters became an epistolary bridge that sustained families--wives and husbands, parents and children, brothers and sisters--across the years and miles that stretched between them during the tumult of war. The Fikes' years-long correspondence shows how a fully formed marriage reconstituted itself within the handwritten lines the couple cast across hundreds of miles. Amid the extraordinary circumstances of wartime, writing to one another prompted a remarkable degree of self-reflection and provided for each the space to learn anew about their partners, their country, and themselves.
"The Decade of Letting Things Go is a book of linked essays containing still-relevant experiences that take place after the age of becoming socially and/or professionally invisible, as the author searches for the elusive serenity of self-acceptance among a growing list of losses. The decade contains many of life's expected losses: of pets, parents, old mentors, and symbols of enduring natural places; plus the loss of identities: child, student, partner, "successful" author. Some of late life's experiences aren't so easily categorized: having a mentally ill neighbor try to get you to come outside and fight; unpacking the complicity in 30-year-old #MeToo incidents; "hooking up" with a "boy" from your teenaged past; struggling to accept that lifelong sexual dysfunction will never wane; realizing a deeply trusted mentor from 45 years ago might be declining into dementia when he claims 6-year-old girls are being forced to run races to put condoms on erect penises; plus a lifelong attachment to a childhood wound of having a "preferred child" as a sibling. And there's the apparent loss of hope: for ever finding contentment in the mark one makes in the world or for ever forming an identity that brings contentment. Except that these latter two have no expiration date, and the exhausted author, at the end, is ready to keep looking"--
Why did Thomas Jefferson write that he would be happy if all dogs went extinct? What economic opportunity did attorney John Lord Hayes envision for the newly emancipated during Reconstruction? What American workers were mocked by Theodore Roosevelt as "morose, melancholy men"? What problems with revenue collection did Congressman James Beauchamp Clark mention when proposing an income tax? Why did Harley O. Gable of Armour & Company recommend that his meat-packing business manufacture violin strings? Why was Senator Lyndon Johnson angry at the Army and Navy Munitions Board at the start of the Korean War? The answers to all these questions involve sheep. From the colonial era through the mid-twentieth century, America's flocks played a key role in the nation's development. Furthermore, much consternation centered around the sheep the United States lacked, so that dependency on foreign wool--a headache in times of peace--became a full-blown crisis in wartime. But more than just providers of wool, sheep were valued for their meat, for their byproducts after slaughter, and even for their efficiency at lawn maintenance. Here is the story of the complex and fascinating relationship between Americans and their sheep. Brett Bannor explains how sheep cultivation has significantly impacted the broader growth and development of the United States. The history of America's sheep encompasses topics that touch on many cornerstones of the American experience, such as enslavement, warfare, western expansion, industrialization, taxation, feminism, conservation, and labor relations, among others.
These eight brutally beautiful stories are struck full of fragmented dreams, with highly developed thieves, misadventurers, and displaced characters all heaving through a human struggle to anchor themselves in a new home or sometimes a new reality. This book is about young Nigerian immigrants who bilocate, trek through the desert, become temporary Mormons, sneak through Russia, and yearn for new life in strange new territories that force them to confront what it means to search for a connection far from home. Japa and Other Stories came out of a struggle Iheoma Nwachukwu faced when trying to orient himself in the United States of 2017 to 2021, when attitudes toward immigrants suddenly shifted. The Japa characters explored in this book are immigrants who have no plans to return to their home country--for voluntary reasons--although they retain a strong connection to home.
The three medieval texts that make up Jankyn's Book of Wikked Wyves have formed a vital part of Chaucerian research for more than half a century. Integrated here for the first time, these texts now form a cornerstone volume of the Chaucer Library series. Near the end of her prologue, Chaucer's Wife of Bath tells how her fifth husband, Jankyn, a clerk of Oxford, taunted her by reading from a collection of antifeminist tracts. The contents of Jankyn's book include three texts that enjoyed wide distribution in the later Middle Ages: Walter Map's "Dissuasio Valerii," Theophrastus's "De Nuptiis," and Jerome's "Adversus Jovinianum." The first two are reproduced in their entirety in this volume, with selections from the third. The editors examine Jankyn's book from many angles, including the extensive manuscript sources from which it may be reconstructed, background information for its literary appreciation, and Chaucer's use of the materials. The publication of this volume, the fourth in the Chaucer Library, represents a major event for medievalists.
"Great journalism relies on a narrative arc to engage and inform the reader. Stories Can Save Us looks at how the best reporters and writers craft narrative literary journalism. Journalist Matt Tullis uses the material he gathered in the more than seventy-five interviews he conducted with the best narrative and literary journalists in the country through his podcast, Gangrey: The Podcast, to show how these professionals conceive and write such compelling stories. Through his podcast, Tullis interviewed Pulitzer Prizewinners, National Magazine Award winners, and many authors of books of narrative journalism, including New York Times best-selling authors. He also spoke with reporters of different races and backgrounds, styles and strengths-journalists who have been published in the most prestigious newspapers and magazines-to ask: How do they find story ideas? How do they reach out to potential story subjects? What are their interview strategies? How do they conduct other information gathering? How do they come up with their amazing and enticing leads? How do they develop story structure? How does the story change in the revision process? How do they make their stories great and make them into the types of stories that people read and talk about for years? Through Tullis's conversations with these top-tier journalists, we are offered a window into their methods and practices as well as the motivations behind great journalism and how it speaks to the cultural climate of its time. Tullis's goal was to expand the power and potential of what amazing reporting and narrative writing can do, believing that it can literally change a reader's mood and, possibly, a reader's life"--
"Beginning in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, a new generation of LGBT students in California began to organize publicly on college and university campuses, inspired by contemporaneous social movements and informed by California's rich history of LGBT community formation and political engagement. Here Are My People documents how a trailblazing group of queer student activists in California made their mark on the history of the modern LGBTQ movement and paved the way for generations of organizers who followed. Rooted in extensive archival research and original oral histories, Here Are My People explores how this organizing unfolded, comparing different regions, types of campuses, and diverse student populations. Through campus-based organizations and within women's studies programs, and despite various forms of reactionary resistance, student organizers promoted LGBT-themed educational programming and changes to curriculum, provided peer support like counseling and hotlines, and sponsored events showcasing queer creative practices including poetry, theater, and film. Collaborating across various campuses, they formed regional and statewide alliances. And, importantly, LGBT student organizers engaged California's vibrant gay liberation and lesbian feminist political communities, forging new and important relationships in the movement which enhanced both on and off-campus LGBT organizing"--
"The Good Forest tells a story of the possibilities and plans for colonization in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and argues that the German Salzburger community at Ebenezer, Georgia, was a 'successful' effort at colonization during the Trustee era. The relative success of the Ebenezer settlement, furthermore, challenges the inherent environmental, cultural and economic determinism that has dominated Georgia history. That well-worn narrative often implies (or even explicitly states) that only a slave-based plantation economy - as implemented after the Trustee era - could 'succeed.' More than just telling a Georgia story, though, Karen Auman's study also illuminates the ways that some continental Germans were financially and socially committed to the success of the British colony"--
"Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess is a literary and cultural history of the Gullah Geechee Coast, a four-state area that is one of only a handful of places that can truly be said to be the "cradle of Black culture" in the United States. An African American ethnic group who predominantly live in the lowcountry region of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida within the coastal plain and the Sea Islands, the Gullah people have preserved a significant influence of Africanisms because of their unique geographic isolation. This book seeks to fill a significant cultural gap in Gullah history. While there is a veritable industry of books on literary Charleston and on the lowcountry-along with a plenitude of Gullah-inspired studies in history, anthropology, linguistics, folklore, and religion- there has never been a comprehensive study of the region's literary influence, particularly in the years of the Great Migration and the Harlem (and Charleston) Renaissance. By giving voice to artists and culture makers on both sides of the color line, uncovering buried histories, and revealing secret cross-racial connections amid official practices of Jim Crow, Kendra Y. Hamilton sheds new light on an incomplete cultural history. A labor of love by a Charleston insider, the book imparts a lively and accessible overview of its subject in a manner that will satisfy the book lover and the scholar"--
"My Withered Legs and Other Essays is a collection of personal essays by Sandra Gail Lambert which reflect upon her experience becoming a writer alongside discussions of disability, queerness, and aging. A seventy-year history of disability is threaded throughout these essays and intertwined with writing that celebrates lesbian love, explores the slapstick moments of life, and shares the obstacles and triumphs of becoming a writer later in life. The essays chronicle times of interruption and then adaptation as the disability skill of always just figuring it out becomes tested with age and with illness. Throughout the book, Lambert engages with topics of ageism and ableism through storytelling rich with wit and contemplation. From childhood Lambert believed she was "ice flow material" and now, in a pandemic, she ticks off the additional comorbidities-age, fatness, cancer, a heart attack-that groups her with the expendable. In the essay "Gimp Humor," she is threatened with a ticket for not coming to a full stop while strolling along in her wheelchair. Underpinning the humor is an analysis of whiteness and the wariness that can be lodged, or not, in a body. Other essays reimagine the meaning of Old Lady Dabbler, include kayaking among a hundred alligators, and tell the romantic, laden with power dynamics, tale of two lesbians in their sixties who fall in love. Another essay explores the family story, truth embellished with fiction, of Lambert's mother finding an unexploded bomb nestled in her parents' bed. This tale of the London Blitz delves into the increasingly common experience of "emergence" after a disaster and the necessity of becoming, especially for marginalized communities, our own first responders"--
Following emancipation, African Americans continued their quest for an education by constructing schools and colleges for Black students, mainly in the U.S. South, to acquire the tools of literacy, but beyond this, to enroll in courses in the Greek and Latin classics, then the major curriculum at American liberal arts colleges and universities. Classically trained African Americans from the time of the early U.S. republic had made a link between North Africa and the classical world; therefore, from almost the beginning of their quest for a formal education, many African Americans believed that the classics were their rightful legacy. The Classics in Black and White is based extensively on the study of course catalogs of colleges founded for Black people after the Civil War by Black churches, largely White missionary societies and White philanthropic organizations. Kenneth W. Goings and Eugene O'Connor uncover the full extent of the colleges' classics curriculums and showcase the careers of prominent African American classicists, male and female, and their ultimately unsuccessful struggle to protect the liberal arts from being replaced by Black conservatives and White power brokers with vocational instruction such as woodworking for men and domestic science for women. This move to eliminate classics was in large part motivated by the very success of the colleges' classics programs. As Goings and O'Connor's survey of Black colleges' curriculums and texts reveals, the lessons they taught were about more than declensions and conjugations--they imparted the tools of self-formation and self-affirmation.
Describing 114 species of salamanders occurring in the eastern U.S., this volume includes more than 400 color photographs, over 80 distribution maps, and sections on biology, worldwide diversity, identification, taxonomy, habitats, and conservation.
"Backcountry Democracy and the Whiskey Insurrection examines the legal context in which the Whiskey Rebellion was situated, with an eye towards how it was constructed both in the jurisprudence of the courts and in the vernacular ideology of popular dissent. The rationale for such a study lies in the connection between the 1790s and today and the prospect that the innovative experiment represented by U. S. democracy might die, which made the insurrection a crucible for testing the new nation's Constitution and laws and the government they established.?Extending its understanding of legal culture beyond established courts, the study expands materials treating the rebel contribution to legal culture by examining assembly speeches, petitions, and popular courts as well as street politics and propaganda to allow us to balance rebel, government, and judicial perspectives"--
"This book shows how middle-class women, both white and Black, harnessed the nineteenth-century "culture of sentiment" to generate political action in the Progressive Era. Sentimentalism marched right alongside women's step into the public sphere of political action. The concerns over infant mortality and the "fall" of young women interconnected with sentimentalism to elicit public action in the formation of the American welfare state. Elements of the associational state were built by the voluntary and paid work of female reformers working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Women saw a need, filled it, and cobbled together a network of voluntary organizations that tapped state funding and support when available. Their work provided safeguards for women and children and created a network of female-oriented programs that policed and aided women of child-bearing age at the turn of the twentieth century. This book demonstrates the strength of the connection between the nineteenth century sentimental culture and female political action, defined as government support for infant and maternal welfare, in the twentieth century"--
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