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H. Lark Hall presents the first comprehensive biography of Vernon Louis Parrington (1871-1929). The recipient of the 1928 Pulitzer Prize in history for the first two volumes of his Main Currents in American Thought, Parrington remains one of the most influential literary and historical scholars of the early twentieth century.Parrington was a man in search of a personal myth. He found his self-image successively mirrored in Victorian novels, painting, poetry, populism, religion, the arts and crafts movement, American literature, and American history. These changes were also reflected in his teaching as a professor of English - at the College of Emporia, the University of Oklahoma, and the Uni...
The first full-length scholarly study of Peyton Place, Grace Metalious's classic story of New England indiscretion
John Hall Snow was professor of pastoral theology at the Episcopal Divinity School and considered preacher-in-residence at Christ Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts, for over eighteen years. In this previously unpublished manuscript, Snow outlines his critique of American culture building on America's adoption of Herbert Spencer's social theory known as "survival of the fittest." The unconscious acceptance of his theory has reduced us to "winners" and "losers," leading us to disfigure language and truth. Snow writes, "We lie to others, and ourselves, basically, because we believe that lies facilitate whatever it is that we want to do. The basic untruth of human existence is that we can control reality by making it over in the image that we want it to be by words. And since words are all we have to define reality, everything we do and think is touched by untruth. Even the best, as well as the worst of us do this. The best withhold the truth; the worst distort it. The overriding priority is the goal, not the truth. The idea seems to be that what we have built with words will become reality."
A sweeping environmental history of a quintessential American wilderness.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, rural New England society underwent a radical transformation as the traditional household economy gave way to an encroaching market culture. Drawing on a wide array of diaries, letters, and published writings by women in this society, Catherine E. Kelly describes their attempts to make sense of the changes in their world by elaborating values connected to rural life. In her hands, the narratives reveal the dramatic ways female lives were reshaped during the antebellum period and the women's own contribution to those developments. Equally important, she demonstrates how these writings afford a fuller understanding of the capitalist transformation o...
This Vast Book of Nature is a careful, engaging, accessible, and wide-ranging account of the ways in which the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire---and, by implication, other wild places---have been written into being by different visitors, residents, and developers from the post-Revolutionary era to the days of high tourism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Drawing on tourist brochures, travel accounts, pictorial representations, fiction and poetry, local histories, journals, and newspapers, Pavel Cenkl gauges how Americans have arranged space for political and economic purposes and identified it as having value beyond the economic. Starting with an exploration of Jeremy Belknapās 1784 expedition to Mount Washington, which Cenkl links to the origins of tourism in the White Mountains, to the transformation of touristic and residential relationships to landscape, This Vast Book of Nature explores the ways competing visions of the landscape have transformed the White Mountains culturally and physically, through settlement, development, and---most recently---preservation, a process that continues today.
An early 20th century case study of evolving grassroots notions of preservation and the role of women in the American conservation movement
The third in a four-volume series commemorating California's sesquicentennial, this volume brings together the best of the new scholarship on the social and cultural history of the Gold Rush, written in an accessible style and generously illustrated with with black and white and color photographs.
This is the story of the Rankins, a family that embodied the risk and ambition that transformed America. John Rankin arrived in the West chasing the adventure of gold mining but soon turned to ranching and building in the new town of Missoula. There he met Olive Pickering, who had left New Hampshire in 1878 to become a teacher and seek a husband on the American frontier. John and Olive's children continued to demonstrate their parent's ambition and nerve. Their son became one of the biggest landowners in the country, one of the first personal injury lawyers, and a crusader against railroads and mining. Jeannette became the first woman in a national legislature, voted against two world wars and led marches protesting the Vietnam War. As a dean, Harriet helped develop the modern co-educational university. Edna traveled the world advocating for birth control. The Rankins faced both national adulation and condemnation for the choices they made. Their family story concerns independence and education, activism, the boundaries created by gender, religious choices, and the changing meaning of the West.
This volume collects a wide-ranging sample of fresh analyses of Spider-Man. It traverses boundaries of medium, genre, epistemology and discipline in essays both insightful and passionate that move forward the study of one of the world's most beloved characters. The editors have crafted the book for fans, creators and academics alike. Foreword by Tom DeFalco, with poetry and an afterword by Gary Jackson (winner of the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize).