Bøger udgivet af University of Massachusetts Press

Established in 1935, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) sent over 6,500 unemployed historians, teachers, writers, and librarians out to document America's past and present in the midst of the Great Depression. The English poet W. H. Auden referred to this New Deal program as "one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by any state."Featuring original work by scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives, this edited collection provides fresh insights into how this extraordinary program helped transform American culture. In addition to examining some of the major twentieth-century writers whose careers the FWP helped to launch--including Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Margaret Walker--Rewriting America presents new perspectives on the role of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and women on the project. Essays also address how the project's goals continue to resonate with contemporary realities in the midst of major economic and cultural upheaval.Along with the volume editor, contributors include Adam Arenson, Sue Rubenstein DeMasi, Racheal Harris, Jerrold Hirsch, Kathi King, Maiko Mine, Deborah Mutnick, Diane Noreen Rivera, Greg Robinson, Robert Singer, James Sun, and David A. Taylor.

Engagingly written, with colourful portraits of local characters and landmarks, this study illustrates how the residents of Monson, Maine have remade their town by integrating (and resisting) external influences.

Examining a time of transition and decline in Maine's forest economy, Andrew Egan traces pathways for understanding the challenges that have faced Maine's logging community and, by extension, the state's forestry sector, from the postwar period to today.

Works of genre fiction are a source of enjoyment, read during cherished leisure time and in incidental moments of relaxation. This original book takes readers inside popular genres of fiction, including crime, fantasy, and romance, to reveal how personal tastes, social connections, and industry knowledge shape genre worlds.

Tells the important, but largely forgotten, story of Samuel Wilbert Tucker and a group of Black citizens who agitated for change in the terms and conditions of their lives by employing the combined strategies of direct-action public protest, nonviolent civil disobedience, and municipal litigation.

Taking up case studies of four poets who began writing during the 1950s and 1960s, M.C. Kinniburgh shows that the postwar American poet's library should not just be understood according to individual books within their collection but rather as an archival resource that reveals how poets managed knowledge in a growing era of information overload.

Provides the first account of the growth and development of historical museums created by white evangelical Christians in the US. Devin Manzullo-Thomas illustrates how these sites enabled religious leaders to develop a coherent identity for their fractious religious movement and to claim the centrality of evangelicalism to American history.

Under this new 'science of work' that emerged in Britain between 1870 and 1939 fatigue was seen as the ultimate pathology of the working-class body, reducing workers' capacity to perform continued physical or mental labour. As Steffan Blayney shows, the equation between health and efficiency did not go unchallenged.

Journalist, activist, popular historian, and public intellectual, Lerone Bennett Jr left an indelible mark on twentieth-century American history and culture. This biography travels with him from his childhood in Jim Crow Mississippi and his time at Morehouse College to his participation in a range of Black intellectual and activist endeavours.

After a chance meeting in 1924, scholar and activist F.O. Matthiessen and artist Russell Cheney fell in love and remained inseparable until Cheney's death in 1945. Situating the couple's private correspondence alongside other sources, Scott Bane tells the remarkable story of their relationship in the context of shifting social dynamics in the US.

After years of studying piano as a young woman, Emily Dickinson curated her music book, a common practice at the time. Now part of the Dickinson Collection in the Houghton Library of Harvard University, this bound volume of 107 pieces of published sheet music includes the poet's favorite instrumental piano music and vocal music.

Through the thwarted plotlines, genealogical interruptions, and terminated ideas of Poe's Dupin trilogy and Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance, these authors consider new concepts around race, reproduction, and American exceptionalism.

In the spring of 1871, Ralph Waldo Emerson took month-and-a-half-long tour of California - an interlude that became one of the highlights of his life. Engaging and compelling, this travelogue makes it clear that Emerson was still capable of wonder, surprise, and friendship, debunking the presumed darkness of his last decade.

Susan Muaddi Darraj's short story collection about the inhabitants of a Palestinian West Bank village, Tel al-Hilou, spans generations and continents to explore ideas of memory, belonging, connection, and, ultimately, the deepest and richest meaning of home. A Curious Land gives voice to the experiences of Palestinians in the last century.

When Stephen Clingman was two, he underwent an operation to remove a birthmark under his right eye. The operation failed, and the birthmark returned, but in somewhat altered form. In this captivating book, Clingman takes the fact of that mark - its appearance, disappearance, and return - as a guiding motif of memory.

Explores the dynamics of the law and illiberal quests for power, examining the anti-liberalism of neoliberalism; the weaponization of 'free speech'; the role of the administrative state in crises of liberal democracy; the broad assault on facts, truth, and reality; and the rise of conspiracism leading up to the US Capitol insurrection.

Offers a collection of essays from public policy experts that address Massachusetts' noteworthy contributions to American political history. This is a much-needed volume for Massachusetts policymakers, journalists, and community leaders, as well as those learning about political power at the state level.

Explores the dynamics of the law and illiberal quests for power, examining the anti-liberalism of neoliberalism; the weaponization of 'free speech'; the role of the administrative state in crises of liberal democracy; the broad assault on facts, truth, and reality; and the rise of conspiracism leading up to the US Capitol insurrection.

Offers a collection of essays from public policy experts that address Massachusetts' noteworthy contributions to American political history. This is a much-needed volume for Massachusetts policymakers, journalists, and community leaders, as well as those learning about political power at the state level.

Chronicling the untold stories of marginalized veterans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Service Denied uncovers the generational divides, cultural stigmas, and discriminatory policies that affected veterans during and after their military service.