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In the past twenty years the Adirondacks have inspired a resident population of writers who have gained regional and national prominence using the Adirondack region as their primary setting and subject matter—or at least as a significant point of departure. Rooted in Rock is the first collection of its kind in more than twenty years, since Paul Jamieson's Adirondack Reader. What makes the volume unique, though, is the number of contributors who not only make the Adirondacks their subject, but who make their homes in these mountains. The works in this volume include contemporary essays, literary nonfiction, poetry, short fiction, and excerpted fiction and are a mix of new and previously published writings by forty-three authors, established as well as emerging, including Bill McKibben, Sue Halpern, Russell Banks, Alex Schoumatoff, Chase Twichell, Curt Stager, Amy Godine, and Jim Gould, to name a few.
The Black Woods chronicles the history of Black pioneers in New York's northern wilderness. From the late 1840s into the 1860s, they migrated to the Adirondacks to build farms and to vote. On their new-worked land, they could meet the $250 property requirement New York's constitution imposed on Black voters in 1821, and claim the rights of citizenship. Three thousand Black New Yorkers were gifted with 120,000 acres of Adirondack land by Gerrit Smith, an upstate abolitionist and heir to an immense land fortune. Smith's suffrage-seeking plan was endorsed by Frederick Douglass and most leading Black abolitionists. The antislavery reformer John Brown was such an advocate that in 1849 he moved hi...
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Daughters of the Great Depression is a reinterpretation of more than fifty well-known and rediscovered works of Depression-era fiction that illuminate one of the decade's central conflicts: whether to include women in the hard-pressed workforce or relegate them to a literal or figurative home sphere. Laura Hapke argues that working women, from industrial wage earners to business professionals, were the literary and cultural scapegoats of the 1930s. In locating these key texts in the "don't steal a job from a man" furor of the time, she draws on a wealth of material not usually considered by literary scholars, including articles on gender and the job controversy; Labor Department Women's Bure...
A Hudson Valley Reckoning tells the long-ignored story of slavery's history in upstate New York through Debra Bruno's absorbing chronicle that uncovers her Dutch ancestors' slave-holding past and leads to a deep connection with the descendants of the enslaved people her family owned. Bruno, who grew up in New York's Hudson Valley knowing little about her Dutch heritage, was shaken when a historian told her that her Dutch ancestors were almost certainly slaveholders. Driven by this knowledge, Bruno began to unearth her family's past. In the last will and testament of her ancestor, she found the first evidence: human beings bequeathed to his family along with animals and furniture. The more sh...
"Hapke's book, remarkable in scope and inclusiveness, offers those concerned with American working people a mine of information about and analysis of the 'rich lived history of American laborers' as that has been represented in fictions of every kind. She provides an invaluable foundation for understanding the dirtiest of America's dirty big secrets: the pervasivness of class differences, class discrimination, indeed of class conflict in this, the wealthiest nation in history. Hers is an indispensable guided tour through more than a century and a half of literary representations of 'hands' at their looms, pikets on the line, agitators on their soapboxes, ordinary working women, men, and chil...
North Star Country is the story of the remarkable transformation of Upstate New York's famous 'Burned over District;' where the flames of religious revival sparked an abolitionist movement that eventually burst into the conflagration of the Civil War. Milton C. Sernett details the regional presence of African Americans from the pre-Revolutionary War era through the Civil War, both as champions of liberty and as beneficiaries of a humanitarian spirit generated from evangelical impulses. He includes in his narrative the struggles of great abolitionists—among them Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, Beriah Green, Jermain Loguen, and Samuel May—and of many lesser-known characters who rescued fugitives from slave hunters, maintained safe houses along the Underground Railroad, and otherwise furthered the cause of freedom both regionally and in the nation as a whole. Sernett concludes with a compelling examination of the moral choices made during the Civil War by upstate New Yorkers—both black and white—and of the post-Appomattox campaign to secure freedom for the newly emancipated.
Front cover -- title page -- copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Genesis -- 2. Revelation -- 3. Master and Slave Relations -- 4. The Shakeup -- 5. Making the Break -- 6. The Escape -- 7. Still in Philadelphia -- 8. Farmed Out -- 9. Family Pays a Heavy Price -- 10. Meteors -- 11. Hooking Up -- 12. Caught -- 13. Busting Out -- 14. Rescue -- 15. Aftermath -- 16. The War Hits Home in Culpeper, 1861-65 -- 17. Moving On -- 18. The Search for Charles Nalle -- Appendix -- Notes -- Index -- Illustrations.
Read the story of the Battle of Antietam from the African American perspective. The African American community around Sharpsburg, Maryland witnessed John Brown's raid, wartime skirmishes, the Battle of South Mountain, and the aftermath of the bloodiest day in American history. Read stories of encounters with Abraham Lincoln and Union and Confederate generals, and of Black civilian suffering and sacrifice in the cause of freedom. Their experiences during four years of Civil War come to life in vivid detail, often in their own words. Award-winning historian Emilie Amt recounts the personal stories of African Americans, both enslaved and free, who lived on the battlefield and who worked in the armies who clashed there.
Lively and engaging essays on aspects of the writer's craft from an acclaimed novelist