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This is a collection of 52 of the best poems, stories, memories, novel excerpts, and creative non-fiction by writers who have called the tiny state of Delaware their home.
Votes for Delaware Women is the first book-length study of the woman suffrage struggle in Delaware, placing it within the rich historical scholarship of the national story. It looks especially at why, despite decades of suffrage organizing and an epic struggle in Dover, in the spring of 1920, the legislature refused to make Delaware the final state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. The book traces how, starting in the 1890s, white and African American women organized and advocated for "votes for women," first by revising the state constitution and then through a federal amendment. Within the state's two major suffrage organizations, the Delaware Equal Suffrage Association (DESA), an affiliate of the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and the Delaware branch of the National Woman's Party (NWP), divisions over strategy and tactics widened into fissures, especially during the Great War, making it difficult to unite in a common endeavor. Delaware was unusual as a border state that was segregated but did not disfranchise African Americans. In the end, the book argues, a combination of racial and class issues doomed the ratification effort.
Victorine Elizabeth du Pont, the first child of Eleuthère Irénée du Pont and his wife Sophie, was seven years old when her family emigrated to America, where her father established the humble beginnings of what would become a corporate giant. Through correspondence with friends and relatives from the ages of eight to sixty-eight, Victorine unwittingly chronicled the first sixty years of the du Pont saga in America. As she recovered from personal tragedy, she became first tutor of her siblings and relations. This biography makes the case that Victorine has had the broadest—and most enduring—influence within the entire du Pont family of any family member. The intellectual heir of her venerable grandfather, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, although Victorine grew up in an age where women's opportunities were limited, her pioneering efforts in education, medicine, and religion transformed an entire millworkers’ community.
The Woods Are On Fire is Fleda Brown’s deeply human and intensely felt poetic explorations of her life and world. Her account includes her brain-damaged brother, a rickety family cottage, a puzzling and sometimes frightening father, a timid mother, and the adult life that follows with its loves, divorces, and serious illnesses. Visually and emotionally rich, Brown’s poems call on Einstein, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Law and Order, Elvis, and Beethoven. They stand before the Venus de Milo as well as the moon, as they measure distances between what we make as art and who we are as humans. In wide-ranging forms—from the sestina to prose poems—they focus on the natural world as well as the Delaware legislature and the inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton. The Woods Are On Fire includes nearly fifty new poems, along with poems selected from seven previous books, showcasing an influential American poet’s work over the last few decades.
All our lives are made of moments, both simple and sublime, all of which in some way partake of the cultural moment. Fleda Brown is that rare writer who, in narrating the incidents and observations of her life, turns her story, by wit and insight and a poet?s gift, into something more. Thisøis an unconventional memoir. A series of lyrical essays about life in a maddeningly complex family during the even more maddeningly complex fifties and sixties, it adds up to one woman?s story while simultaneously reflecting the story of her times. ø A strange and erratic father, a resigned and helpless mother, a mentally disabled brother, a sister with a brain tumor: folded into Brown?s reflections are the intimacies and ambivalences of family and marriage, girlhood and adolescence, identity and self-knowledge. Whether reflecting on the automobile industry or a wrenching parting from beloved pets or the process of aging, Brown?s telling rings with great humor, profound perception, and a lyricism that makes even the most commonplace moment uncommonly good reading.
Short stories have enjoyed a long and popular history, with many famous writers attempting the craft at some point or another. Here, Lee assembles a variety of writers who comment on the form itself and its many meanings and manifestations. Concentrating on the features and challenges of the short story, contributors from Amiri Baraka to Richard Ford and Jayne Anne Phillips to Janette Turner Hospital discuss their own writing, the writing of others, the short story form, gender, politics, and other issues concerning the writing of short fiction. Readers will come away with a fuller understanding and appreciation of the craft of the short story writer. Taking a populist approach to the subject, Writers on Writing focuses on relaying to readers the truth about short story writing. Writers from around the globe reveal the secrets of the form and their own approaches to it, as well as criticism of other writers and their output. Challenging some of the traditional views of past and current critics about short fiction, they present a new outlook on the short story that speaks to both the short story writer and the short story reader.
A Delaware Album, 1900-1930 contains over 300 postcard photographs from the entire state taken during the period from 1900 to 1930. Arranged by subjects—City and Town Views; Delaware Beaches; Amusements; Industry and Agriculture; Signs of the Times; Trains, Trolleys, and Automobiles; Water Transportation; Schools; Religion; Businesses; Hotels and Motels—each photo has a caption ranging from a sentence or two to several paragraphs. The book's introduction detail how the cards were produced, analyzes the subject matter depicted on the cards, documents the history of several of the most prominent local photographers in the state whose work is found almost only on postcards, and traces the evolution and popularization of postcard photography.
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Twenty years ago, Margaret Mulrooney's history of the community of Irish immigrant workers at the du Pont powder yards, Black Powder, White Lace, was published to wide acclaim. Now, as much of the materials Mulrooney used in her research are now electronically available to the public, and as debates about immigration continue to rage, a new edition of the book is being published to remind readers of the rich materials available on the du Pont workers, and of Mulrooney's powerful conclusions about immigrant communities in America. Explosives work was dangerous, but the du Ponts provided a host of benefits to their workers. As a result, the Irish remained loyal to their employers, convinced by their everyday experiences that their interests and the du Ponts' were one and the same. Employing a wide array of sources, Mulrooney turns away from the worksite and toward the domestic sphere, revealing that powder mill families asserted their distinctive ethno-religious heritage at the same time as they embraced what U.S. capitalism had to offer.