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Concord, Massachusetts, has long been heralded as the birthplace of American liberty and American letters. It was here that the first military engagement of the Revolutionary War was fought and here that Thoreau came to "live deliberately" on the shores of Walden Pond. Between the Revolution and the settlement of the little cabin with the bean rows, however, Walden Woods was home to several generations of freed slaves and their children. Living on the fringes of society, they attempted to pursue lives of freedom, promised by the rhetoric of the Revolution, and yet withheld by the practice of racism. Thoreau was all but alone in his attempt "to conjure up the former occupants of these woods."...
Based on more than one hundred interviews with participants and accompanied by nearly forty photographs and maps, Battle Green Vietnam tells the story of the 1971 antiwar protest by Vietnam veterans that resulted in the largest mass arrest in Massachusetts history.
The nine essays gathered here pursue the provocative implications of Toni Morrison's claim that no early American writer was more important than Poe in shaping a concept of "American Africanism," an image of racialized blackness destined to haunt the Euro-American imagination. As contributors to this volume reveal, Poe's response to the "shadow" of blackness--like his participation in the cultural construction of whiteness--was both problematic and revealing. Born in Boston but raised mostly in Richmond, surrounded by the practices of slaveholding culture, Poe seems to have shared notions of racial hierarchy and Anglo-Saxon supremacy pervasive on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. That he p...
In the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, as the question of black political rights was debated more and more vociferously, descriptions and pictorial representations of whites coupling with blacks proliferated in the North. Novelists, short-story writers, poets, journalists, and political cartoonists imagined that political equality would be followed by widespread inter-racial sex and marriage. Legally possible yet socially unthinkable, this "amalgamation" of the races would manifest itself in the perverse union of "whites" with "blacks," the latter figured as ugly, animal-like, and foul-smelling. In Miscegenation, Elise Lemire reads these literary and visual depictions for wha...
This interdisciplinary collection of essays advances the study of anagnorisis («recognition»), a quintessential concept in Aristotelian poetics. This book explores narrative structure and epistemology by examining how anagnorisis works in narrative fiction, music, and film. Contributors hail from the fields of cinema; opera; religion; medieval and modern English, German, and French literatures; comparative literature; and Indian (Sanskrit) and Islamic (Arabic) literatures, both classical and modern.
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A Publishers Weekly and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by The Millions and Literary Hub “Thoroughly absorbing.… A beautiful synthesis of diverse women’s experiences, combining history with memoir and a call to action.” —Jill Watts, New York Times Book Review An award-winning historian shows how girls who found self-understanding in the natural world became women who changed America. Harriet Tubman, forced to labor outdoors on a Maryland plantation, learned from the land a terrain for escape. Louisa May Alcott ran wild, eluding gendered expectations in New England. The Indigenous ...
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From popular historian and author of the “marvelous” (The New York Times Book Review) The Last American Aristocrat comes the fascinating story of how in 1854, a new law—the Kansas-Nebraska Act—unexpectedly became the greatest miscalculation in American history, dividing North and South, creating the Republican party, and paving the way for the Civil War. The history of the United States includes a series of sectional compromises—the Constitutional Convention, the Missouri Compromise in 1820, and the Compromise of 1850. While these accords created an imperfect republic, or “a house divided,” as Lincoln put it, the country remained united. But then in 1854, this three-generations...
Encompassing a wide range of topics, periods, and genres, this series presents an expansive, forward looking approach American literary and cultural history, emphasizing venturesome scholarship, critical sophistication, and engaging research. Book jacket.
In his 1837 speech "The American Scholar," Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, "life is our dictionary," encapsulating a body of work that reached well beyond the American 19th century. This comprehensive study explores Emerson as a preacher, poet, philosopher, lecturer, essayist and editor. There are nearly 100 entries on individual texts and their personal, historical and literary contexts. Emerson's work is placed within his relationships with family members, fellow Transcendentalists and transatlantic friends, and his commitment to ethics, self-culture and social change. This book provides the fullest possible exploration of Emerson's writing and philosophy. Far ahead of his own time, the man enthusiastically questioned institutions, communities, friendships, history, individuality and contemporaneous approaches to environmental stewardship.